He comes in a few minutes later, dressed, hair still damp, rucksack over one shoulder. He moves around the room without a word, opening the wardrobe, checking under the bed, clearing out what little is his. Efficient. Methodical. I sit on the edge of the freshly made bed and watch him work.
He stops at the dresser.
His hand rests on the third drawer for a moment. Then he glances at me, just once, before he pulls it open. The journals are exactly where I found them. He takes all three out and sets them in the bottom of the rucksack before anything else goes in on top.
He doesn't say anything.
Neither do I.
The whole drive, he barely speaks. I don't push it. I watch the countryside move past the passenger window, fields and hedgerows and the occasional farmhouse set back from the road, and I think about the journals at the bottom of that bag, packed first, before anything else. What it means to carry something like that. What it means to need to.
His hands on the wheel are steady. That's what I keep coming back to. I watched them shake for three days, watched him grip the edge of the sink just to stay upright, watched him press his palms flat against his thighs when the tremors got bad. Now they're still. He drives like he has somewhere to be and every intention of getting there.
He's pale still, dark circles carved under his eyes, but the shaking has stopped. He ate half a piece of toast this morning and kept it down. Progress. Small, measurable, real.
He pulls up outside a large Tesco on the edge of town and cuts the engine. The silence after the road noise is sudden.
"We need food." He reaches into the back seat and comes up with two black caps. "Safe house is about forty minutes out. We'll be there for a few days."
He holds one out. I reach for it. But instead of handing it across, he turns toward me in the seat, and before I understand what he's doing, he leans in and reaches across my body to unbuckle my seatbelt.
I don't move.
He's close enough that I can hear him breathe. Close enough that if I turned my head even slightly, we'd be face to face with nothing between us. The click of the buckle releasing is very loud in the quiet car. His arm brushes mine as he draws back, and he doesn't rush it. He's not in a hurry. He settles back into his seat and picks up the cap again, and I'm still not breathing properly.
He lifts it and leans across again and sets it on my head, taking his time adjusting the brim down. His fingers graze my temple. He's near enough that I can feel the warmth off him, smell the soap from this morning, and underneath it something that is just him, just William, and my body responds before my brain catches up.
I make myself look at him.
He's already looking at me. His eyes are dark and steady, and there is the smallest pull at the corner of his mouth. He knows exactly what he's doing.
He knows exactly what he's doing to me.
He holds my gaze for one long moment. Then he pulls back, settles his own cap on without so much as glancing in the mirror, and pops the glove compartment for a wad of cash like nothing happened at all.
"Come on," he says.
We move through the supermarket like any couple on a Tuesday afternoon. He pushes the cart. I put things in it. We don't talk much, but we don't need to. I reach past him for pasta, and he's already picking up a jar of sauce, and somewhere in the cereal aisle, he holds up two boxes with a look that says pick one, and I point left without breaking stride. At the checkout, the girl behind the till smiles at him, wide and slow, her eyes tracking up before she remembers herself. William doesn't notice, or pretends not to. He pays cash and looks at me instead.
Outside, loading bags into the trunk, I catch him watching me over the roof of the car.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing." He closes the trunk. "You're good at that."
"At what?"
"Looking normal."
I get into the passenger seat before he can see that lands as more of a compliment than he probably meant it.
The safe house is small. One bedroom, a sitting room, a kitchen just wide enough for one person to move around in comfortably. The air has that closed-up flatness to it, the kind that settles into a place when no one's opened a window in weeks. I've done a full inventory because that's what I do when I'm overwhelmed. I count things. I catalog.
A couch in a shade of beige that doesn't offend and doesn't interest. Two chairs that match. A table that seats four, even though it will never seat four here. Generic prints on the walls, the sort sold in bulk and hung without thought. Everything functional, everything unremarkable. A kitchen with the basics, the pots and plates stacked neatly in cupboards like a show home nobody's ever lived in.
Inside, William sets the bags on the floor and disappears to check the rest of the house. I start unpacking the shopping.
I'm stacking cans on the counter when he comes back. He doesn't say anything, just picks up a bag and starts taking things out. The kitchen is barely wide enough for one. With two of us, it becomes a problem of geometry. I'm standing at the counter with my back to him, reaching into the cupboard above, when he steps in behind me to get to the one beside it, and the warmth of him is right there at my back, and I go completely still for half a second before I make myself keep moving.
