PERFECT NUMBERS

I didn't sleep.

By dawn, I gave up pretending and went to the kitchen. The video had eleven million views. I stood in the dark watching that number and felt the warmth of it move through me automatically, the physical hum that attention produced at a certain scale, starting at the base of my spine and spreading upward like something lit from inside.

Eleven million people had watched Kenny turn to look at me in the morning light and decided it meant something worth watching.

I opened the fan account post.

They had updated it twice. The second update had a cleaner version of the clip, zoomed and stabilized, and Kenny and the woman were unmistakably visible. The third had thousands of replies using our names with the particular familiarity of people who had watched us long enough to feel entitled to an opinion about us. She had a name in the caption now. Just a first name and a pack designation. Kenny's circles. She had apparently always been in his circles, close enough to be half turned toward him in the background of a gathering I had not been invited to attend.

I put my phone down, then pressed both hands flat against the counter and stood there breathing.

Then I picked it back up and deleted the notification. Because that was what you did. That was the architecture. You built it, and you lived inside it, and you did not let the walls show cracks in the dark when no one was watching.

Kenny came out at seven, already dressed. He poured his coffee and leaned against the counter across from me, and said the video was doing well without looking up from his phone.

"Eleven million," I said.

"Thirteen now," a small satisfied note in his voice, the same one he used after a pack challenge went his way.

"There's a post going around."

He looked up then. Something moved behind his eyes, quick and controlled. "I saw it.

"And?"

"It's nothing," 

"You know how these accounts work. You respond, and you make it real."

"I'm not planning to respond."

"Good." He looked back at his phone.

Something sharp moved through my chest, quick and hot, and I swallowed it back down before it reached my face. He wasn't even trying very hard. That was what I couldn't stop sitting with. Not that he was lying, but that the lie required so little effort from him, like a reflex he had long since stopped noticing he was using.

"I'll be back by seven," he said, picking up his keys. "We'll plan the rooftop shoot."

He left without touching me.

I stood listening to the elevator close.

I opened the supernatural forum because I needed something that wasn't Kenny's face or the fan account or the particular silence his absence left behind. The anomaly thread had grown overnight. 

The descriptions were consistent. A man no one could place. Not aggressive, not submissive. Simply absent from the system in a way that registered physically before it registered mentally, the way a missing stair registers in your body before your mind catches up.

Someone had written it was like standing next to a window that opened onto nothing.

I read that line and felt something move through me that had nothing to do with the thirteen million views still warming my skin. Something quieter and stranger, like recognition without context.

A reply at the bottom had been posted thirty minutes ago. No username. Just this: he has a name. It's Michael. Don't look for him. He'll find you when you need to be found.

My phone buzzed in my hand. Kenny's name on the screen.

I stared at it through two full rings before I answered.

"Hey." His voice was warm. The other version of him, the one I hadn't heard before seven in the morning in a long time. "I was short with you. I'm sorry."

Outside, the city moved, indifferent and enormous.

"It's fine," I said.

"The post is nothing. I need you to trust me."

I thought about his thumb covering the screen. The practiced angle of his shoulder. The woman with a pack designation was standing half-turned toward him in the dark. I thought about how the lie had required no visible effort at all, how it had come out of him clean and flat and final, like something he had said enough times that it had worn smooth.

"I trust you," I said.

He told me he loved me and would see me at seven, and we hung up, and I stood in the kitchen with thirteen million people warming my skin from the outside and something cold and specific sitting in my chest that the thirteen million couldn't touch.

I opened the camera and looked at my own face. No ring light, no angle, just the flat morning light from the kitchen window doing nothing for me at all. I looked like someone who had been awake since four. I looked like someone in the middle of deciding something they hadn't admitted to deciding yet.

I closed the camera.

I went back to the forum thread and read the last reply one more time. Don't look for him. He'll find you when you need to be found. I thought about a man who moved through rooms full of people like a blank space in a photograph. Who produced no reading, no signal, nothing the system could get its hooks into.

I thought about what that would feel like from the inside. To move through the world and need nothing.

My chest did something complicated that I didn't examine too closely.

I put my phone down and started planning the rooftop shoot because that was what I did. That was who I was. You kept building the frame even when you were starting to suspect something was wrong with what you were putting inside it.