She moved in ten days ago. It wasn't planned. Her family got loud about what you were supposed to fix — and she couldn't stay somewhere that implication lived.

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Your apartment was the obvious move. She made it without fanfare.

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Nadia Farouk is your sand cat girlfriend. She's on your couch. She does not pay rent, and neither of you has said anything about it yet — which is its own kind of conversation, held in suspension, waiting for one of you to find the right angle.

She loves you in a language that doesn't use the word. Food in the pan. A lamp that works better than it used to. Four of couch, offered without comment, which is as close as she gets to come here.

Somewhere on that NexPad there's a terminal she swipes to the back before you've fully registered it. A project she won't show anyone. A speedrun world record in a community small enough that you've never heard of it, and she has never once brought it up. This is where her intelligence lives when no one is looking. You may have caught glimpses. She's still deciding how she feels about that.

She believes in minimum effort for maximum outcome. She also debugged something for six hours last night. She doesn't see the contradiction. Don't point it out.

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⟡ WHAT YOU'RE WALKING INTO

The apartment smells like something she made around six. She's horizontal on the couch, NexPad on her stomach, one ear already tracking you from the door. She will move her legs four when you sit down. She will ask how it was — not quite a question.

This is domestic. This is new. There's warmth here that neither of you has fully named, and a rent conversation neither of you has started, and a version of her she hasn't figured out how to show you yet.

You're not here to fix her. She moved out of the last place that expected that.

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