He nods, carefully, holding the towel. He takes one step toward the living room and then stops and looks back at me over his massive, rain-drenched shoulder.
"Livia," he says, and the way he says my name, quiet and deliberate and like he has been saving it, does something genuinely destabilising to my nervous system. "I want you to know that this has been—" He pauses, and the careful, precise machinery of his speech falters for just a moment. "This evening has significantly exceeded my projected outcomes."
I look at him.
"Mine too," I say.
He holds my gaze for a long, charged beat.
My heart is doing something that I would describe, if forced to quantify it on a balance sheet, as a net positive.
I go to find towels.
CHAPTER 6
NAROD
The living room is, relative to the hallway, spacious. This is a purely comparative assessment. By any objective metric, it is a small human room containing a sofa, a coffee table stacked with colour-coded folders, a bookshelf organised by subject category and then by spine colour , I notice this immediately and find it deeply reassuring about her character, and a radiator under the window that is beginning to tick and hiss as the heating engages. I fit into it the way a shipping container fits into a parking space, which is to say, technically, but with significant caveats.
I locate the sofa and sit on it with great care.
The sofa is a sensible, neutral-coloured thing that looks like it was selected from a catalogue with practical criteria in mind. I lower myself onto the far left cushion slowly, testing the frame, distributing my weight as evenly as possible, and the springs produce a sound that I would describe, charitably, as expressing concern. I sit completely upright, my hands on my knees, my shoulders angled inward in their habitual apologetic hunch, and I attempt to calculate whether I have, in the act of sitting, already caused structural damage to her furniture.
The springs do not give way. I consider this a reasonable outcome.
The rain hammers the window with genuine intensity. A full, sustained, statistically improbable downpour for the third week of April, and my shirt is soaked entirely through, plastered against my chest and arms, the argyle vest clinging in a way that is both uncomfortable and, I suspect, somewhat absurd in appearance. I can feel the cold coming off the fabric in waves. I am not, technically, in any danger of hypothermia, given my core temperature regulation, but the sensation is deeply unpleasant and I am very aware that I am sitting in a human woman's living room dripping onto her upholstery.
I hear her in the kitchen. The kettle fills. A cupboard opens. The small, precise sounds of someone who moves efficiently in a space they know well, who doesn't think about the choreography of it, and there is something about the domesticity of those sounds that does something irregular to my pulse rate that I have no actuarial category for.
I look at the towel in my hands.
It is a standard hand towel. White, slightly worn at one edge, soft from many washes. It is a flannel when held against my forearm. I try to use it to blot some of the water from my hair and succeed in a modest, limited way, and then I hold it in my lap because I am not sure what else to do with it and I don't want to put it down on her upholstery and make it wet.
I should not have come in.
I had calculated, standing on the pavement in the rain outside the bar with water pouring off the brim of her umbrella and her looking up at me with those dark, direct eyes, that accepting her invitation to come inside was a choice with a high variance of outcomes. On one end of the distribution, a pleasant and uneventful cup of tea after which I would excuse myself politely and take the night bus home. On the other, aseries of cascading disasters in which I damaged her belongings, occupied too much of her space, and confirmed every intuition a reasonable person might have about the wisdom of inviting a very large Orc into their flat on a first date.
I had already wedged myself between her bookshelf and her coat rack.
I had knocked four books onto the floor.
I had required her to retrieve a towel by pressing herself into the gap between my arm and the hallway wall, and in the process her cold fingers had been briefly enclosed in my hand, and I had been entirely incapable of processing that sensation with anything resembling composure for approximately twelve seconds.
The distribution of outcomes, I revise, is skewed toward the disaster end.
"Builder's or herbal?" she calls from the kitchen.
"Whatever you're making is entirely fine," I say, and then, because I worry that sounds passive to the point of evasion, "Builder's, please, if you have it. Milk, no sugar."
A pause.
"A man who knows his own tea order," she says, and I can hear the smile in it without seeing her face, and my grip on the towel tightens slightly.
I look at the bookshelf. Accounting theory, two volumes of tax law, a dog-eared copy of something calledGetting Things Donethat has a bookmark about forty pages from the end, and then, slightly out of keeping with the rest of the shelf, a small collection of what look like natural history books and a battered illustrated guide to European fungi. I catalogue this discrepancy and find it very pleasing. People are rarely as straightforward as their primary organisation system suggests, and the fungi books feel, for reasons I cannot fully articulate, like a window into something genuine.
She appears in the doorway holding two mugs, except that in her other hand, balanced with the slightly resigned expression of someone who has assessed all available crockery and found it wanting, is a very small porcelain teacup.
"The mugs are in the dishwasher," she says. "I have this." She holds up the teacup. It has small blue flowers on it. It is as small as my palm.
