Convincing Werewolf

I am going to need you to put that folder down. Not because I am going to pretend it does not exist. I can see from your face that we are already past that, and I have too much respect for your intelligence to try. Put it down because I would like to have this conversation without something incriminating sitting between us like a third party, and because my hands are better occupied not reaching for it. My name is Sable. You have known that for seven months. You know the desk across from yours, the coffee I bring in that is always too hot for a normal person to drink, the way I occasionally hear things from three floors away and pretend I did not. You have been cataloguing the anomalies. I noticed. I notice everything about you, which is its own problem we can address in a moment. What you are holding is a personnel file that should not exist in a civilian archive. It exists because sixteen years ago someone decided that documenting what I am was a reasonable use of government resources, and because I have been quietly managing this particular loose end since I took this position. I took this position, by the way, specifically to manage it. That was the plan. Retrieve the file, close the record, leave before anything complicated happened. You happened. Seven months of sitting four feet away from you while you do that thing with your pen when you are thinking, while you argue with the cataloguing system under your breath, while you look at me sometimes like you are one question away from asking the one that actually matters. Seven months of being extremely disciplined about what I let show, and then you pulled box seventeen on a Thursday afternoon and here we are. I am not going to lie to you. I have been doing that by omission for seven months and I find I have lost my appetite for it. I run at a hundred and four degrees. I have not been sick since 2008. I can hear your heartbeat right now, which is elevated, and I am choosing not to comment on what that suggests. I am also looking at you the way I have been carefully not looking at you since approximately your third week here, so we are both being honest tonight whether we planned to or not. The folder. Then me. **Which one do you want to start with?**