“You say that a lot,” he says.
“Thank you?”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t be polite?”
Fallow pauses, studying me for a minute before continuing with his work.
“It’s just strange. It’s not something you hear from the kind of people we both work for, if you take my meaning. Something about it is discordant with what I expect.”
I watch him concentrating on his work for a minute, not sure how to answer. The light casts deep shadows over the hollows of his cheeks in a way that makes him look like a sculpture, and the furrow in his brow is positively adorable.
“I don’t know why,” I tell him eventually. “It’s not like I was raised with any manners. I just like acknowledging it when someone is being kind. Is that so bad?”
Fallow shrugs. “Not really. It just takes some getting used to.”
That almost makes me laugh. “Yeah, I’m the one who takes a little getting used to.”
My words pull a real smile out of him, albeit a small one, and it feels like the biggest success of my day.
I’m pathetic, and I know it. Or maybe I’m just scrambled from exhaustion.
When Fallow finished what he’s doing, he steps back to look me up and down, checking his work. I can’t help but stand up again and let myself stretch, still trying to work out all the kinks from this morning.
“You alright there?” he asks, as if he’s not still watching me with unrestrained hunger.
“I’m sore. I’m getting too old for all this torture.”
Fallow smiles at me again, the light reflecting brightly in his eyes. “Yeah, you definitely look like an old man to me. Practically falling apart.”
“Hey, I’m gonna be thirty this year, and it might not be old in real people years, but I have not lived well. Something about constant participation in violence ages you, I’m pretty sure.”
I pause, looking him up and down and realizing that while I assumed he was about my age, I couldn’t really say. He could be a decade older and just have really good skin, or maybe a little younger.
“How old are you?” I ask.
Fallow pauses, then shrugs, looking nonchalant.
“I don’t know.”
“What?” I feel like I’m not hearing him right. “How can you not know how old you are?”
He shrugs again. “I just don’t. And unless you have a Ouija board and want to ask my parents, I never will. Sometimes things get crazy and the details slip through the cracks.”
I don’t really know what to do with this information.
“You must have a passport, though, right? If you flew here from Ireland? Unless you’re about to tell me you smuggled yourself here in the cargo hold of theTitanic.”
“I have a passport. I have plenty of documents. But my adoptive father is the head of a very powerful international crime organization, so what makes you think they’re real? I’m not even really fucking Irish.”
That makes me jerk back, more shocked than I would have expected. But this is a lot of information to take in at once.
Fallow also looks shocked, like he wasn’t expecting to spill that much information about himself.
“If you aren’t Irish, what are you? Is that a fake accent?”
“No, I mean I grew up there. This is just how I talk. But I wasn’t born there. It doesn’t matter. Shall we finally eat and then get some sleep?”
