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The problem, Liam decided, was not that they knew too much about each other. That, on its own, could be explained. Teammates spent an unreasonable amount of time together. They travelled on the same flights, waited through the same delays, sat through the same briefings and ate from the same catering trays. They learned each other’s routines by accident and their bad habits through prolonged exposure. No, the real problem was that neither of them could be trusted to conceal what they knew with anything resembling conviction.
He reached this conclusion outside the small studio VCARB used for social-media filming, where two chairs, a low table and an aggressively branded backdrop waited beneath lights bright enough to eliminate every forgiving shadow. The room had been assembled in one corner of the hospitality unit with the temporary neatness of a set expected to look permanent on camera. Someone had arranged two cans of Red Bull on the table with their labels turned precisely forward, and narrow strips of coloured tape marked the positions their chairs were not supposed to leave. A camera operator crouched behind the central lens while the producer adjusted one of the lights by fractions, stepping back after every change to study its effect with the concentration of an engineer correcting a balance problem. On the table, beside the drinks, lay two miniature whiteboards and a row of marker pens arranged by colour. Arvid could already picture the title appearing across the team’s accounts, capitalised and accompanied by enough exclamation marks to suggest that teammate compatibility was a matter of public emergency.
“We need rules,” Liam said.
He was standing beside Arvid in the corridor, one shoulder resting against the wall as though the conversation were casual. The effect was undermined by the way his attention kept flicking towards the crew inside. Arvid looked through the open doorway at the harmless whiteboards, then back at him.
“For a teammate quiz? You’re having a laugh.”
Liam shook his head softly, Arvid’s joke falling flat, “For not getting fired during a teammate quiz.”
Arvid took another look into the room. The producer was still occupied with the lights, but several members of the media team were close enough that lowering his voice seemed sensible. The corridor carried sound too easily; each snapped case and dragged cable inside the studio arrived sharpened by the bare walls. He leaned closer until Liam could hear him without anyone else being given the same opportunity.
“Mmm, I don’t think knowing your coffee order is a sackable offence.”
“It’s not the coffee order I’m worried about.” Liam met his eyes and held them for half a second too long. “Obviously.”
That was fair, Arvid mused. The coffee order was harmless. The precise temperature Liam preferred the room at night, the shirt he slept in when he was too tired to find anything else and the way he became quiet rather than angry when a race had gone badly were less easily explained by the amount of time teammates ordinarily spent together. Arvid knew which alarm Liam ignored and which one finally made him open his eyes. He knew that Liam complained about cold hotel sheets but always slept with one leg outside the duvet, that he always claimed not to be hungry after a late flight and then ate half of whatever Arvid ordered and that the quickest way to make him stop pretending to be awake was to run a hand slowly through his hair. He knew, too, that Liam could tell the difference between Arvid being silent because he wanted company and Arvid being silent because he needed to be left alone. Neither fact belonged on a whiteboard.
Their relationship had survived for months through careful scheduling, locked hotel-room doors and the useful assumption that any visible closeness between them was manufactured for team content. They had learned which service lifts attracted the least attention, which members of staff were likely to linger in hotel corridors and how long to wait before leaving the same room separately. They had developed an entire vocabulary of apparently meaningless remarks that really meant not here, later, someone is watching, or I’ll come to you when the floor is quiet. It was not a perfect system, but until now it had been good enough. Sitting side by side beneath studio lights and being invited to demonstrate how well they knew each other felt less like a harmless video than an audit conducted by people who did not yet realise they were investigators.
“We get some things wrong,” Liam continued. He shifted closer as somebody passed behind them, the outside of his arm brushing Arvid’s. “On purpose.”
Arvid snorted as quietly as he could, a teasing smirk lingered on his face, “You’ll manage that naturally.”
Liam’s mouth tightened around a smile. “Right. Good. Very supportive you are.”
“Well you know what they say: I’m known for it.”
“By who?”
“People.”
“Oh please, name one.”
Arvid ignored him. Liam glanced into the room again. One of the cameras had been turned towards the doorway, although its recording light remained dark.
“One wrong answer each,” Liam said. “Minimum.”
“Fine.”
“And nothing weirdly specific.”
Arvid folded his arms. “You’re the one who knows weird things.”
“I know normal things. You’ll make them weird by looking guilty and going ‘Awh, mate. You a stalker or something?’”
“I won’t look guilty. And, anyway, I do not sound like that.”
“You look incredibly guilty now.”
Before Arvid could point out the obvious flaw in that argument, the producer called them inside. They took their seats with the whiteboards balanced across their knees, Liam choosing a position just far enough away to look casual and close enough that the side of his shoe could reach Arvid’s beneath the table. The lights made the white surface of Arvid’s board gleam whenever he tilted it. Dry heat gathered across his face, and he had to resist the immediate urge to tug at the collar of his team shirt. A microphone was clipped inside it, the wire briefly cold against his skin before a crew member guided it out of sight beneath the fabric. Liam endured the same process with exaggerated patience, lifting his chin and watching Arvid over the crew member’s shoulder. The moment everyone stepped away, his foot found Arvid’s.
Arvid nudged it aside.
Liam returned it to exactly the same place.
Arvid looked at him. Liam was studying the marker pens with innocent concentration, as if he had no connection to the shoe currently pressing against Arvid’s. He had always treated being irritating as a form of affection. More inconveniently, Arvid had learned to recognise it as one.
The producer explained the format, although both of them had filmed enough of these videos to know it already. A question would be asked; each of them would write an answer; the boards would be revealed together for maximum dramatic effect. They were encouraged to argue, which seemed unnecessary, and reminded to hold their answers high enough for the camera to see. Liam nodded with the solemn attention of someone receiving race instructions. Arvid knew that expression well enough to recognise that he had stopped listening almost immediately.
“All good?” the producer asked.
“Perfect,” Liam said.
“What did she just say?” Arvid asked him.
Liam blinked once. “That we’re perfect.”
The producer laughed. “Close enough. Cameras ready?”
The first questions were safely impersonal. They agreed that Liam took longer to get ready, disagreed over who was more likely to miss a meeting and accused each other of being responsible for the mysterious disappearance of snacks from the team kitchen. The crew laughed in the expected places. Arvid began, gradually, to relax. Liam performed innocence badly enough to be entertaining, his eyebrows lifting whenever Arvid produced an answer he disliked, and the rhythm between them settled into something familiar without becoming dangerous. It was the version of themselves they had always been encouraged to show: competitive, fond beneath protest, quick enough with each other to make editing easy. Their knees knocked once beneath the table when they turned their boards at the same time, and Liam concealed his smile by pretending to inspect the producer’s score sheet.
“You’ve both written Arvid for ‘most likely to be late’,” the producer said. “So that’s a point each.”
“No,” Arvid said, tapping a finger to his whiteboard while shaking his head. “I wrote that Liam would cause me to be late.”
She peered at his board. Beneath Arvid, in much smaller letters, he had added because Liam can’t find anything for himself.
“Objection, irrelevant, that is a separate answer,” Liam objected.
“As if, It’s needed and necessary context.”
“It’s plain slander.” Liam scoffed into his mike.
“Awh mate, behave, you lost your pass this morning.”
Liam made eye-contact with the crew “He’s lying, I knew where it was.”
Arvid made a sound of annoyance, “You asked, like, four people to help you look for it.”
“Yes, and one of them found it. Efficient delegation.”
“Where was it?” the producer asked.
Arvid looked at Liam. Liam looked towards the camera with the expression of a man unfairly betrayed by the legal system.
“You want to tell them? Nah, actually you'd change the answer, In his pocket,” Arvid said.
By the time the laughter died down, even Liam was smiling. It was easy, then, to believe they had worried for nothing. They knew the boundaries. They had spent months learning them. All they had to do was remain on the safe side for twenty minutes.
Then the producer asked Arvid to write down Liam’s coffee order.
Arvid uncapped his pen and wrote without thinking: flat white, extra shot, no sugar. The answer arrived as naturally as his own name, produced by months of accepting cups from Liam’s hand and collecting replacements on mornings when Liam had been pulled into meetings before the hospitality staff opened. He had seen the order often enough to identify it from the way Liam carried the cup. He knew, moreover, that after a particularly early start Liam sometimes asked for two sugars and insisted this did not constitute a different order because “that’s medical.” Only after replacing the cap did Arvid remember the conversation in the corridor.
Across from him, Liam had noticed. His eyes dropped to the board and returned to Arvid’s face, a warning tucked beneath an expression so bland that anybody who did not know him would have missed it.
Arvid looked down again. There was no graceful way to undo the answer. He wiped it away with his sleeve, earning a startled noise from the producer. The ink left a grey smear across the cuff of his team shirt and a faint ghost of the correct words on the board, visible only when it caught the light. He considered several alternatives, selected the one most likely to offend Liam personally and wrote it in larger letters.
When they were told to reveal their boards, his now read CARAMEL ICED LATTE.
Liam stared at it. His expression passed from confusion to disbelief to genuine affront so rapidly that the camera operator made a small, strangled sound behind the lens.
“What is that?” Liam asked.
“Your coffee order.” Arvid angled the board more squarely towards the camera.
“No, it isn’t.”
“You’ve ordered one before.”
“That isn’t coffee.”
“You had one in Melbourne.”
“No, let's be honest here, I held yours while you tied your shoe.”
“Pretty sure I remember you drank some.”
“Because you took, like, ten minutes.”
“Oh so now you're allowed to slander me?”
Liam turned to the producer, apparently seeking an authority willing to restore order. “This cannot go online. People have standards.”
“So Arvid gets no point?” she asked through her laughter.
“Arvid should lose a point he already had.”
Arvid lowered his board, satisfied. He rubbed at the remaining ink with his thumb and tried not to look too pleased with himself. There was an underlying bliss in his eyes, which was probably why he didn't think,“I don't know why you're so pressed, you wanted me to get one wrong.”
The words escaped before he could stop them.
Liam’s expression froze for half a beat. It was almost nothing, no more than a brief stillness around the eyes, but Arvid saw it. The producer looked between them with mild curiosity. Beneath the table, Liam’s shoe pressed sharply against his – a warning delivered too late to be useful.
“Because he’s been unbearable so far,” Liam said, recovering. His voice remained smooth. He gestured towards the tally with his marker as though the explanation should have been obvious. “He needed taking down a bit.”
“Obviously,” Arvid said.
“Obviously,” Liam echoed, and the producer moved on.
The next question asked for Arvid’s favourite film. Liam bent over his board with unnecessary concentration, tapping the capped end of his marker against the frame as though confronted by a genuine intellectual challenge. Arvid knew he had answered this correctly months ago, during a delayed flight when they had exhausted every easier subject. The terminal had been nearly empty. Rain flattened itself against the tall windows, turning the runway lights into blurred red and white streaks, while Liam listened to Arvid explain in exacting detail why the final scene worked. He had interrupted repeatedly, mostly to object to words like structure and restraint, but he had listened. He had even watched the film afterwards and sent Arvid an unsolicited list of complaints about the ending, delivered one message at a time over forty minutes, only to admit — at nearly two in the morning — that he might have liked it.
There was no reason for him to hesitate now except performance. Arvid watched him add a final flourish, bite the inside of his cheek to suppress a smile and turn the board face down against his knee.
“Ready?” the producer asked.
“Very,” Liam said.
They turned their boards together.
Liam had written LA LA LAND.
Arvid looked at him. Liam maintained an expression of polite expectation, although the marker twitching between his fingers betrayed how pleased he was with the answer.
“You know I hate that film,” Arvid said.
“I don't know, I remember that you cried.”
“The ending annoyed me.”
“Oh yeah, that brings back memories, you were still annoyed in the car.”
“I think you’ll find I was criticising it.”
“You didn’t say anything.”
“I was criticising it internally.”
Liam turned to the camera. “He stared out the window and sighed.”
Arvid glanced towards the producer. She had lowered her notes and was watching them with open interest. “He has confused emotional devastation with critical disapproval.”
“Easy mistake,” Liam said, settling farther back in his chair. “They look identical on him.”
The producer asked what the correct answer was. Arvid waited for Liam to supply it, but Liam merely recapped his pen and crossed one ankle over the other with an expression of deliberate innocence.
“He doesn’t know,” Arvid said.
“I do.”
“Then say it.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
“You’ve been asked now.”
“By you. Different authority.”
Arvid narrowed his eyes. Liam smiled – small, pleased and private – before turning towards the producer for the next prompt. The exchange would look like competitive irritation once it was edited. Only Arvid understood that Liam was enjoying the opportunity to deny him something he knew perfectly well, holding the correct answer back for later. Even information could become a form of touch when they were required to keep their hands to themselves.
Their strategy deteriorated from there. Arvid correctly identified the cap Liam considered lucky, then claimed the reason was that Liam refused to wash it. Liam removed the cap in question and inspected it defensively while a member of the crew coughed something that sounded suspiciously like agreement. Liam named the snack Arvid kept in his driver room but added that Arvid guarded it with enough intensity to suggest “deep and unresolved problems around sharing.” Arvid accused him of theft. Liam reminded him that food left unattended in the team building legally belonged to the team.
“That is not a law,” Arvid said.
“It’s a team policy.”
“Whose policy?”
“Mine.”
The producer stopped trying to award points consistently. Instead, she filled the margins of the score sheet with question marks whenever one of them disputed the rules, which was often. Twice, filming had to pause because Liam made Arvid laugh at the wrong moment, not with anything especially clever but by continuing an argument long past the point where a reasonable person would have let it die. The second time, Arvid covered his mouth with the back of his hand and stared down at his board until the heat had left his face. When he looked up again, Liam was watching him with a softness that vanished the instant he noticed the camera turning towards him.
The dangerous question arrived disguised as another easy one.
“What song does your teammate play most often?” the producer asked, reading from the next card. “Title and artist, if you know both.”
“That feels incredibly ambitious,” Liam said.
“You can get half a point for one.”
“Half a point?” Arvid glanced at the score sheet. “There are points again?”
“There are now.”
“This is so corrupt,” Liam said, but he was already uncapping his pen.
Arvid looked down at his empty board. Liam listened to too much music for there to be one reasonable answer. He changed playlists according to his mood and denied any pattern whenever Arvid pointed it out. There were tracks he played before qualifying, louder and more restless than anything he chose outside the garage, and others reserved for late flights, when conversation had thinned and he allowed his shoulder to rest against Arvid’s only after checking that nobody nearby was awake. There was a ridiculous song he always put on while getting ready, claiming it improved concentration, and an older one he knew every word to but refused to sing in front of anyone else.
Then there were the quiet songs he played on difficult nights, always at low volume, usually after insisting he was not tired and did not need company. On those nights Liam would lie on his back with one hand beneath his head, staring at the ceiling as if the answers he wanted might be written there, and Arvid would pretend not to notice when the same track began again. He could have written it. He could have included the artist and the exact place in the second verse where Liam’s breathing usually began to slow. Instead, he chose something safe, current and popular enough that nobody could find meaning in it.
Across from him, Liam had no such hesitation. He wrote quickly, added something beneath the first line and underlined the final word before setting his marker down. His posture was relaxed, but the corner of his mouth had begun to lift.
Arvid stared at him. Liam lifted his eyebrows in a silent what?
Arvid glanced pointedly at the board.
Liam covered it with one hand.
“No cheating,” he said aloud.
“I wasn’t.”
“You were obviously trying to read it.”
“I was trying to see how much trouble you were about to cause.”
“Ready?” the producer cut in, unaware that this was a materially different question.
They turned their boards. Arvid had written his deliberately generic answer in compact, careful lettering. Liam’s board displayed the title of the song Arvid listened to when he could not sleep, including the artist’s name and the unnecessary detail of which live version he preferred.
The room became briefly quiet. Even the producer paused before checking the answer, her gaze travelling over the extra detail Liam had squeezed beneath the title.
Arvid stared at the board. “That is alarmingly specific.”
“You play it constantly.”
“I have played it near you twice.”
“You sure? It feels like more.”
“Your room was three floors below mine.” Arvid murmured in an attempt to warn Liam, his voice – however quiet he tried to make it – was heard by most people in the room.
Liam looked at him over the top edge of the board. There was a flicker of challenge in his expression now, as if he wanted to see how far Arvid could stretch the explanation before it broke. “You know how it is, hotel walls are thin nowadays.”
“Three floors, Liam.”
“You play it loudly.”
“I do not.”
“Maybe I’ve just got very good hearing.”
Arvid became aware that the producer was trying not to smile. One of the crew members had developed an intense interest in adjusting a cable that did not appear to require attention. Arvid looked back at the title, buying himself a second.
“You’ve remembered the wrong version,” he said, giving Liam another scapegoat.
“I haven’t.”
“You have.”
Liam tapped the final word with his marker. “This one has the piano at the beginning.”
There was no defensible reason for him to know that. It was the version Arvid played from his phone when he could not sleep, the opening notes quiet enough that Liam rarely woke before Arvid had already lowered the volume. Sometimes, in the dark, Liam would shift closer without opening his eyes. Once, after a particularly bad race, he had reached across the sheets and closed his hand loosely around Arvid’s wrist, asking him not to turn it off yet.
Arvid leaned forward and lowered Liam’s board before the camera could study it any more closely.
“He gets the point,” he said. “Can we move on?”
Liam allowed the board to be pushed down. Beneath the table, his foot pressed against Arvid’s again. This time Arvid let it remain. The contact was entirely hidden by the low table and the camera angle, but Liam’s shoulders loosened as soon as Arvid stopped pushing him away. It was barely anything – the pressure of one shoe against another, too slight to be called touch – and yet it steadied both of them.
The producer studied her next card. “All right. We’ll do a couple more.”
“Safer ones I hope.” Arvid whispered even quieter this time.
Liam smiled, “I thought that was safe.” and Arvid had to look away from him.
They returned to harmless accusations. Liam claimed Arvid’s most overused phrase was “That makes no sense,” then spent two full minutes proving the answer by deliberately misunderstanding everything Arvid said. Arvid wrote that Liam’s hidden talent was irritating people and refused to revise it when the producer pointed out that the talent was not especially hidden. Gradually, the room settled back into laughter. The cameras became ordinary objects again. Arvid almost convinced himself the worst of it had passed.
The final question came at the end of the round, introduced by the producer as an easy one to finish. Following a terrible race, who was the first person each of them called?
Arvid’s marker paused above the board.
The studio seemed to quiet around him, although he could still hear the electrical hum of the lights, the faint movement of people beyond the door and the squeak of Liam’s marker travelling across the board opposite. It should have been an uncomplicated question. There were several answers Arvid could give that would make immediate sense: a parent, an engineer, a friend outside the paddock. Liam had people who could plausibly occupy that position, and Arvid did too. Nobody would question either of them. Nobody would look twice.
But a bad race reduced the world to a much smaller place. In the first hot, miserable hour afterwards, when every explanation sounded like an excuse and every replay sharpened the thing he wanted to forget, there was only one person Arvid actually wanted to hear from. Liam understood what could be said and what needed to be left alone. He knew whether to offer analysis, distraction or silence, and he never asked Arvid to describe disappointment before he was ready. He simply appeared – sometimes with food, sometimes with a stupid video, sometimes with nothing at all – and stayed near enough that Arvid did not have to decide whether to ask him to stay.
On the worst nights, Liam did not try to make it better. That was the important part. He let it remain bad without treating the feeling as dangerous. He sat beside Arvid until the anger exhausted itself, then began talking about something ordinary in the same tone he used when the world had not ended. There were many people Arvid loved and trusted. Liam was simply the person he reached for before he had remembered how to be reasonable.
Arvid wrote LIAM before caution could interfere.
The instant he saw the name on the board, he considered wiping it away. The marker hovered beside the first letter. Then the producer began the countdown, and changing it would look stranger than leaving it.
“Three, two, one.”
They raised their boards.
Liam had written ARVID.
For a moment neither of them looked towards the camera. Their eyes met over the table, and something in Liam’s expression opened before he could stop it: recognition first, then relief, then the quiet pleasure of seeing the feeling returned. It lasted no more than a second. It was still far too long.
The producer looked from one to the other. Her marker remained raised loosely in one hand, forgotten. “Really?”
“He’ll answer at any hour,” Liam said, too quickly. The honesty of it seemed to surprise him as much as anyone else. His gaze moved back to Arvid before returning to the camera. “Well. Usually. If he’s awake.”
“I’m always awake when you call.”
“Exactly.”
Arvid tried to make the truth sound ordinary. “We usually debrief.”
“Without the engineers?” the producer asked.
“They use way too many graphs. And make everything a life lesson.”
The producer smiled. “That might be the nicest thing either of you has said today.”
“It wasn’t nice,” Arvid said.
“No,” Liam agreed. “He charges by the minute.”
The crew laughed, the tension dissolved, and the producer called an end to filming. The red light above the central camera went dark. Almost at once the room changed character: shoulders dropped, people spoke over one another, and the set stopped being a set and became chairs and boards and cables again. Arvid placed his whiteboard on the table with more care than it required, aligning it with the markers while he waited for the awareness of being watched to leave his body. His pulse was still too high for somebody who had done nothing but sit in a chair.
Beside him, Liam stood and stretched as though they had not spent the previous twenty minutes narrowly avoiding the public collapse of their shared secret.
“That was good,” the producer told them, glancing down at her notes. “Possibly too good.”
Liam laughed. Arvid did not.
“In a content sense,” she added, either noticing his expression or taking pity on him. “You two make my job very easy.”
“Happy to help,” Liam said.
Arvid looked at him. Liam’s smile widened in warning: behave.
They waited until the equipment was being packed away before leaving. People moved around them carrying tripods and coiled cables, too preoccupied with clearing the room for the next piece of content to pay attention to where the drivers went. Arvid followed Liam into the corridor, let two members of staff pass in the opposite direction, then caught the back of his shirt and steered him towards a recessed doorway beyond the studio.
It was not fully private, but anyone approaching would be visible long before they reached them. The shallow space smelled faintly of dust and industrial cleaner. A laminated fire-safety notice hung at shoulder height, its bottom edge pressing against Liam when he leaned back against the wall.
“You’re terrible at this,” Arvid said. He kept his voice low, though the closed studio door had already muffled the crew behind them.
Liam settled his shoulders against the wall. His arms remained loose at his sides, and his expression held the lazy satisfaction of someone who believed all available evidence supported him. “I thought I was quite convincing.”
“You wrote down the live version.”
“It’s the one you listen to.”
“That wasn’t the point.”
“It was the question.”
“The point,” Arvid repeated, with exaggerated patience, “was not to prove that you know what I listen to in bed.”
Liam’s mouth twitched. “I didn’t write in bed.”
“You may as well have.”
“That would have been weirdly specific.”
“Yes. Exactly. Which was your rule.”
“Our rule.”
“Your rule. I never agreed it was a good one.”
Liam tipped his head to one side. “You also got my coffee order right.”
“I changed it.”
“To something offensive.”
“You said to get things wrong.”
“I didn’t say to damage my reputation.”
“I think the cap has already done that.”
Liam reached up automatically to touch the brim, then stopped when he realised Arvid had made him do it. “There is nothing wrong with the cap.”
“There may be new forms of life in the cap, when do you ever take it off?”
“You’re just bitter because it doesn't suit you.”
Despite himself, Arvid laughed. It escaped quietly, more breath than sound, but Liam’s whole expression changed in response. He glanced towards the end of the corridor and waited while a member of the media team crossed the opening with a light stand balanced over one shoulder. Only when the footsteps had faded did he look back.
The performance slipped away from his face. Without the studio lights, the faint tiredness around his eyes was visible, along with the familiar warmth he had concealed beneath exaggerated offence throughout filming. It was the face Arvid knew from airports after midnight, from dark hotel rooms and empty engineering offices, from the few quiet minutes they stole whenever the schedule loosened its grip.
“You got my film wrong,” Arvid reminded him.
“No, I lied.”
“Same result.”
“Mmm, not really.”
Arvid unfolded one arm long enough to gesture impatiently. “Fine. What’s the right answer?”
Liam gave it immediately. He included the year it had been released and the name of the character Arvid had once admitted to liking most. When Arvid remained unimpressed, he repeated part of the argument Arvid had made in the airport about the final scene, his imitation inaccurate enough to be insulting but recognisable all the same.
“I don’t sound like that,” Arvid said.
“You did at one in the morning.”
“I have never said ‘the fundamental melancholy of the framing’ in my life.”
“You said something worse. I improved it.”
Without being asked, Liam corrected the snack answer next, then the question about Arvid’s worst habit, replacing his earlier joke with an uncomfortably accurate description of the way Arvid picked at the skin beside his thumbnail when he was nervous. Arvid tucked that hand into the opposite sleeve. Liam noticed, of course, but for once chose not to comment. He kept talking instead, correcting every false answer he had given until it became clear he had remembered all of them.
With each answer he moved a fraction closer. Perhaps neither of them did it consciously. By the time Liam finished, Arvid’s folded arms were the only space left between them. The toes of Liam’s shoes touched his, and the heat of him gathered in the narrow gap the way it always did when a room became private enough for them to stop pretending.
“You’ve made your point,” Arvid said.
“I haven’t corrected the last one.”
“You answered the last one correctly.”
“I know.”
Arvid looked past him towards the empty corridor. The building had settled again, leaving only the distant clatter of equipment behind the studio door. “That was the problem.”
For a moment, Liam said nothing. His expression had lost its amusement, though not its warmth. “Did you mean it?”
It was an absurd question, and both of them knew it. Arvid could have escaped through a joke. He could have said no, or only when nobody more useful answers, or don’t make this unbearable. Instead, because Liam had asked with more uncertainty than he would ever admit to feeling, Arvid looked back at him.
“You know I did.”
Liam’s shoulders loosened. “Yeah,” he said, quieter now. “I did too.”
His hand settled lightly against Arvid’s waist, concealed by the angle of the doorway. His fingers caught in the fabric of Arvid’s shirt without pulling him closer, merely resting there as a quiet refusal to be kept entirely at a distance.
“You wrote my name too,” Liam added after a moment.
“I panicked.”
“Very neat handwriting for panic.”
“I’ve had practice.”
“At writing my name?”
“At regretting things immediately.”
Liam smiled. His thumb moved once against the fabric, a touch so small Arvid might have imagined it. “Do you want me to apologise?”
“For which part?”
“Any of it.”
“No. I want you to learn self-control.”
“That sounds less realistic.”
“Then I want you to admit the quiz was a draw.”
“Absolutely not. I won.”
“There weren’t points by the end.”
“There are always points.”
“You don’t even know the score.”
“I know it was in my favour.”
Arvid unfolded his arms and caught Liam by the front of his shirt, ending the argument in the most efficient way available to him. Liam’s laugh disappeared against his mouth. The kiss lasted only a few seconds, careful despite the urgency that had built beneath the studio lights, and was interrupted by the faint sound of a door opening somewhere beyond the corridor. Liam used the few seconds fully, one hand tightening at Arvid’s waist while the other rose halfway towards his face before better judgement stopped it. When they separated, both of them listened.
No footsteps approached. A voice called something indistinct from inside the studio, followed by the scrape of another case being moved.
Arvid stepped back. Liam looked considerably more pleased with himself than the situation justified.
“That wasn’t an admission,” Arvid said, smoothing the place where he had wrinkled Liam’s shirt.
“I’m counting it.”
“You would.”
“So that’s one point to me.”
“Go away.”
“We’re going to the same meeting.”
“Go there separately.”
Liam pushed away from the wall, still smiling. He waited until Arvid had checked the corridor before stepping out, then walked away without looking back. The sensible distance between them returned almost immediately. By the time they reached the end of the corridor they were teammates again, arguing about who had been responsible for making them late.
The video appeared online that evening beneath a caption announcing that the VCARB drivers knew each other suspiciously well. Arvid watched it from the sofa in his hotel room, where Liam had stretched out beside him with his feet occupying far more than half the available space. The room was dim except for a lamp beside the bed and the changing light of the television, which washed Liam’s face in brief flashes of white and blue. His shoes had been abandoned near the door. His room key lay untouched on the table, placed there with such confidence that Arvid suspected he had never intended to use it again that night.
“Move your legs,” Arvid said.
Liam shifted them by approximately two centimetres. “Done.”
“That’s worse.”
“You have more room now.”
“I can’t feel my foot.”
“That sounds unrelated.”
Arvid shoved at his shin. Liam allowed himself to be moved just far enough to suggest cooperation, then settled again with one ankle across Arvid’s lap. The edit continued on the television, brisk and brightly captioned. It preserved Liam’s horror at the invented coffee order, Arvid’s objection to La La Land and the moment they revealed each other’s names in matching handwriting. Someone had added a dramatic zoom. Worse, they had replayed Liam’s expression after the song question in slow motion, accompanying it with a suspiciously romantic piece of stock music before cutting to Arvid reaching across to lower the board.
Arvid stared at the screen. “They did that on purpose.”
“Did what?” Liam asked, with such obvious false innocence that the question barely qualified as speech
“The music.”
“Maybe they thought the moment just needed a bit of emotional support.”
“It needed cutting.”
“I thought it was quite sweet.”
“Of course you would.”
Comments were already appearing beneath the video faster than Arvid could read them. Some were about the coffee. An uncomfortable number consisted only of eye emojis, screenshots and theories assembled with the confidence of forensic analysis. Arvid scrolled past one frame-by-frame examination of the moment Liam’s foot had moved beneath the table and locked his phone.
“Nobody can see that,” Liam said.
“They can see everything.”
“They can see a shoe.”
“They’ve circled it.”
Liam leaned closer to inspect the screen. His shoulder settled against Arvid’s, warm and solid. “That’s good editing.”
“You’re enjoying this far too much.”
“I’m appreciating the content.”
Arvid’s phone vibrated in his hand.
He looked down. Liam had sent him the video, despite being close enough for their shoulders to touch. He continued facing the television after sending it, maintaining an expression of innocence that might have worked if Arvid had not felt him shift closer in anticipation.
Think they noticed?
Arvid turned his head. Liam kept watching the screen with exaggerated concentration, waiting for the reply. The corner of his mouth had already begun to curve, ruining the performance before Arvid had even opened the message.
You’re sleeping in your own room tonight, Arvid typed.
Liam’s phone lit in his hand. He read the reply and smiled without looking over. His feet remained on the sofa. His room key remained untouched on the table.
“Bit harsh,” he said.
“I mean it.”
“Of course.”
“I do.”
“Should I go now?”
Arvid let the silence stretch. On the television, the video began again from the opening title, accompanied by an unnecessarily cheerful sound effect. Liam made no movement towards his shoes. After a moment, Arvid picked up the remote, turned the volume down and rested his hand on Liam’s ankle where it lay across his lap.
“After this,” he said.
“Right.” Liam settled more comfortably against him. “After this.”
The video lasted five minutes and forty-two seconds. When it ended, neither of them moved. The screen returned to the beginning and the title flashed up once more, bright and incriminating in the dark room. Arvid let it play again.