We sat in comfortable silence while he read and I pretended to watch TV. But I wasn't really watching. I was too aware of him at the other end of the couch. The way he tucked his feet under himself. The way he frowned slightly when he hit a technical passage he didn't understand, how he occasionally mouthed words as if tasting them.
The first thing he'd done with his freedom was make dinner and fold napkins. Not escape, not panic, not self-destruction. He'd made a home out of my apartment. He'd even bought a plant.
He's going to leave eventually. When things settle down, when the media moves on, when he figures out what he actually wants.
I knew that. I'd known it from the beginning.
But watching him now, curled on my couch with my book, wearing my clothes, I found myself hoping "eventually" was a long time coming.
You're in trouble.
Yeah. I was.
Chapter 7
Tobias
I was starting to understand what wanting felt like.
Not wanting in the vague, academic sense I'd grown up with. Not the polite preferences of a Langford second son who understood his role was to want what he was supposed to want. But actual, visceral wanting. The kind that sat in your chest and hummed. The kind that made you think about something even when you should be thinking about something else.
I wanted things now. Real things. Specific things.
I wanted the worn paperback smell of Vance's bookshelf, the particular creak of the third floorboard from the bathroom,and the way morning light came through the window I cleaned yesterday, falling across the plant on the sill in golden bars.
I wanted cooking. The precision of it, the chemistry. The satisfaction of watching ingredients transform under heat and attention into something edible, something good. Yesterday's pasta had actually tasted like food someone would eat on purpose.
I wanted to draw again. Vance had an old legal pad shoved in a kitchen drawer, the kind with yellow lined paper. I'd found a pencil stub next to it. Yesterday morning, while he was at work, I sat by the window and sketched the roofline across the street. Just the way it intersected with the sky, the proportions, and the negative space between the chimney and the neighbor's oak tree. My hand remembered what to do even when my brain felt lost. Four years at Columbia, studying buildings and spaces and how people moved through them. For the first time since I'd run, those years felt like they belonged to me instead of my family.
Most of all, I wanted the moments when Vance came home.
He'd stop in the doorway, scanning the room as if surprised to find it changed. The grunt of acknowledgment that passed for hello in his vocabulary. The way he'd taste whatever I made, nodding slightly if it was good, saying nothing if it wasn't, which was somehow more honest than any elaborate compliment.
I wanted the evenings. The quiet hours on the couch while he watched TV and I read. The way our feet almost touched in themiddle, close enough to feel his warmth without actually making contact.
I wanted him to look at me the way he had last night, when he thought I wasn't watching. Like he was seeing something worth seeing.
That was the wanting that kept me up at night. The wanting I didn't know what to do with.
The cushion thing started as an offhand comment.
I had been sitting on the couch trying to read, but the lumpy frame kept digging into my back. The couch was a disaster of engineering, held together by hope and what appeared to be duct tape along one seam. The back support was nearly nonexistent. The cushions had long ago surrendered any pretense of shape.
"A cushion might help," I said when Vance came home that evening. I had been thinking about it all day. A proper cushion for my lower back would make the couch almost tolerable. "For back support."
He glanced at the couch as if he had never noticed anything wrong with it. "It works fine."
"It works terribly. I'm fairly certain there's a loose spring somewhere in the foundation."
"That spring has been loose for three years. It's stable."
"That's not what stable means."
"It means it hasn't gotten worse." He dropped onto the couch, settling into its contours with ease. "You're welcome to sit somewhere else."
I dropped it. Vance had a stubbornness that matched my own, and there were battles worth fighting and battles that weren't. Couch cushions fell firmly into the second category.
Besides, it wasn't like I was going to be here forever. Eventually, I'd have to figure out my life. Get a job. Find a place to live. Become a real person instead of a runaway heir hiding in a security officer's apartment.
