Languages are, in the end, inadequate.
There are words for what they were to each other professionally: colleagues, which covered the formal relationship; collaborators, which covered the actual work; peers, which covered the implied equality of their standing in the organisation. There were words for the negative space: not friends, because friends did not conduct themselves the way they conducted themselves, which was with an attention bordering on wariness, each aware of the other's precise location in any room they shared. Not romantic partners, because they had not touched and had not said and had not made any declaration either implicit or explicit. Not rivals, though something adjacent to rivalry existed, the particular tension of two people who are matched in relevant ways and know it.
The word they did not have was the one for the territory between all of these.
Her name was Elena. His was Carver. They worked in the same department for a company that built things, and over the course of two years they had developed a collaboration that their colleagues described as remarkable, their manager described as valuable, and that they themselves did not describe at all, because describing it would require the word they didn't have.
The avoidance had not been deliberate, initially. It was more like the natural maintenance of a safe operating distance — the way you stand back from something you're not certain about, partly from caution and partly because you want to preserve the uncertainty a little longer. Certainty collapses possibilities. She had been, without quite deciding to be, reluctant to collapse this particular one.
He had been equally reluctant. She knew this the way you know things that have not been said: from the cumulative evidence of the unsaid, which is its own form of testimony.
There had been a project eighteen months ago that had required them to work closely for six weeks. Evenings, sometimes. Late emails. The kind of iteration where you move beyond the professional surface because there isn't time for it, and you discover in each other capacities that the professional surface had been insufficient to reveal. She had discovered that he was funny in a way that required intelligence to access, and that he thought differently from how she had assumed he thought, and that he noticed things she had not expected him to notice, including her. He had discovered whatever he had discovered, which he had not told her and which she thought about more than was useful.
The project ended. The safe distance reasserted itself. The avoidance became, at this point, intentional.
The specific occasion of its ending was a conference, which is a sufficiently neutral setting to make what happened there feel almost inevitable rather than chosen.
They had been assigned to the same session, which required them to sit in adjacent chairs for ninety minutes. This had been, she thought, their longest sustained proximity in six months. The session was dull — a speaker delivering competent information in an uninspiring manner — and the dullness, paradoxically, created space. There was nothing to attend to except the ordinary experience of being in a room together, which was not ordinary.
He leaned slightly toward her at one point and wrote something on the margin of the printed agenda she was holding. She looked at it. He had written: We've been doing this for two years.
She considered this for a moment, then wrote beneath it: Doing what.
He took the paper back and wrote without hesitation: Not saying the thing.
She looked at the words. The speaker continued at the front of the room with their competent information. The room around them was full of people engaged with their own attentions. She wrote: There isn't a word for the thing.
He read it. He looked at the ceiling briefly in the manner of someone revising their approach. Then he wrote: I know. That's why I haven't said it.
The session ended. They moved with the crowd toward the lobby, which had a bar open despite the hour, which they both knew and neither of them proposed but both of them ended up at anyway.
Two drinks in, she said: "We're going to have to say it eventually."
"Or not say it and continue as we have been."
"That was going fine," she said. "Until today."
"Today was going to happen eventually." He turned his glass on the bar. "We've been moving toward it for two years."
"Carefully."
"Very carefully."
She thought about the word she did not have — the word for whatever was between them, which she had been turning over for two years with the same attention you give to an object you cannot identify, wondering what you would do with it if you named it. The problem with naming something was that naming it made it real and real things required decisions.
"What would you call it?" she asked. Not challenging. Genuinely asking.
He was quiet for a moment in the way he was quiet when he was thinking rather than when he was avoiding. "The most significant thing in my professional life that I have been afraid to look at directly," he said. "That's not a word. But it's what I'd call it."
She felt the weight of two years redistributing itself as she absorbed this. The careful distance, the maintained separation, the sustained attention that had required considerable energy and produced no reduction in the thing it was meant to manage: all of it settling into a different shape.
"That's also what I'd call it," she said.
He looked at her. She looked at him. The lobby moved around them, indifferent.
"So," he said.
"So," she said.
The word still did not exist. But in the absence of the word, they found each other anyway — as the unnamed thing it had always been, which turned out to be sufficient.