The Quiet Algorithm of Us

23 Choosing in Daylight

“Jealousy,” he said, picking it up like a fruit at a market and checking for bruises. He turned it over and set it down. “I found a little today. It tried to show up when a cousin bragged about being in a room with you. I asked it to sit. I asked why, exactly. It said old habits think good things are scarce. I told it about soup. It behaved.”

“Pride,” she said, picking her own and displaying it with a little embarrassment. “Not the loud kind. The kind that makes your hands warm when you watch someone you love move cranes with sentences. Dangerous in excess; nice as a condiment.”

“Fear,” he offered, not to show off courage but as inventory. “The small kind that flickers when your phone is face-down and I want you to be playing, not fixing.”

“Desire,” she returned, enough of a grown-up to say the word without blinking. “For kisses that move beyond cheeks. Not tonight—” She held his eyes steady, gave him all the information and none of the pressure. “Soon. On purpose. With paperwork.” She said it with a smile because otherwise the ceiling might pass out.

His hand on the table tightened once and then remembered verbs. “We will schedule a scandal,” he said, marrying ridiculousness to tenderness as if people were instruments grownups finally learned how to tune.

“Scandal inside corridors,” she said. “We’re not animals.”

They sat awhile like that, adult enough to inventory their weather without importing a storm. Then he stood and the room stood with him. He offered a hand; she took it. They walked without a chaperone to the balcony because the courtyards of this house have as many rites as chapels do and deserve equal respect.

The city had the decency to keep its volume down while people recalibrate. The cedar did a tiny shrug that counts as applause. He leaned against the rail, and she stood close enough to move his shirt with her breath. The night touched their faces the way new policies touch budgets: carefully, expecting citizens to behave.

“Tell me one thing I don’t know from today,” he said.

She thought for exactly as long as truth requires. “I taped a sticky inside the secret frame that says love is now a job, pay it like taxes.”

He let his head tip, delighted with her way of dog-earing reality. “I added kiss to our verbs. It felt like a budget line.”

“It is,” she said. “We will overspend.”

He laughed and moved like a man positioning furniture with reverence. His thumb found that spot at the hinge of her jaw and asked before it acted. She nodded, brief and exact. He stepped forward the smallest distance known to urban planners and offered a kiss calibrated for daylight: unhurried, explicit permission, pressure that names and does not claim. Cheeks first, because precedent matters: left dimple, then right. A pause to let butterflies organize a quorum. Then his mouth leaned to the border above the outside of her upper lip where law remains king and desire earns its visa. He placed a promise there. He pulled back, took a breath, refiled the room.

“Lamp,” he whispered, which in this house has become a vow, a feast, a constitution.

“Lamp,” she answered, which is basically a signature with dimples.

At the study door, they did not play coy with history. The shelf practiced its wood, perfect as ever. The fan-that-never-had-a-childhood tuned itself. She turned at the threshold, put her palm at the center of his chest, and said it not as performance but as payroll: “I love you. We’ll keep, we’ll build, we’ll rest, we’ll laugh. We’ll kiss.” A small exhale. “We’ll choose in daylight.”

He bent, pressed his mouth to her palm the way one might kiss a treaty, and stepped back because restraint is a habit that lets all the other verbs keep their edges. “Go win small and ethically indecent sums,” he said. “Log butterflies. Bring them home.”

Inside, she sat and wrote her Play log’s last line with a grin that could purchase a small planet and has the manners not to. Play: kissed at border, butterflies 4.2, returns compounding. She added Audit Love: approved to the sticky and dragged the fan air into her ribs like an invoice paid.

He returned to the west building like a person who has started to trust bedtime. He lay down and sent the liturgy that had, by now, grown its own legs.

Jinchao: Lamp.
Miran: Lamp.
Jinchao: Keep, build, rest, laugh.
Miran: Ask, tell, touch, kiss.
Jinchao: I love you.
Miran: I love you.

Security’s log read doors unlocked by consent; laughter audible; uneventful and Luo Qiang did not draw a smiley because he didn’t need to, it was in the handwriting already. Zhou put an extra orange on the counter in case morning wanted ritual. Fang placed the Laugh Tax jar on a higher shelf because it was getting heavy. Dr. Zhao scribbled love = adherence on a sticky and stuck it to no one in particular. Aunt Meifang dreamed of a pasta that boiled precisely on time. Aunt Lihua tucked jasmine behind the word keep and told the ghosts the origin story is for family only, and they nodded, union-strong.

Capital, indestructible and vulgar about it, slept with its leaves furled like coins keeping the secret that money is only interesting when it’s boring. The cedar stood watch without being asked. The koi completed one final comma and did not perform a period.

Choosing is a daily verb. They chose. In daylight. And in rooms that once held only strategies, they let feelings keep their own ledgers.