'Does that mean...'
'It means he trusts you. Freddie doesn't lean on people he doesn't trust. He's selective.'
'Like his father.'
'His father doesn't lean.'
'His father's learning.'
'I've been looking at flats for him,' Rory said, quieter. 'For after. For when he's ready. I don't want him going into uni off my sofa.'
'You've been looking.'
'Quietly. You don't tell Kieran a thing is happening until the thing is a thing.'
When Neil remembered the package, he found it on the counter where he'd left it. Pulled the paper off.
A sketchbook. Small. Leather-bound. Good paper, the thick, toothy kind that took charcoal and pencil equally. On the inside cover, in Rory's slanted handwriting: _For the drawing you stopped doing. Start again., R_
He knew exactly which drawing it meant.
He stood in the kitchen holding the sketchbook and his chest cracked open. The slow crack, not the sharp one, of ice beginning to thaw. The sketchbook was the exact size of the one he'd had at fifteen. The one with Adam Kershaw's shoulders. The one Malcolm had found and dismissed and that had gone into a drawer and closed a door.
Rory had given him the door back.
'I can't...' Neil started.
'You can. You used to draw. You stopped because someone told you to stop. Nobody's telling you that anymore.'
Neil stared at the blank pages. The same terror as a blank wall. The same invitation.
He set it on the counter, next to the coffee.
Then he crossed the kitchen. Took the tea towel from Rory's hands. Folded it, edges aligned, Diane's inheritance, because some patterns you didn't shake, and placed it beside the kettle.
Then he kissed him. In his kitchen. In his flat. With his son asleep in the next room and the hall light on and the fridge covered in drawings and the sketchbook on the counter and the painting on the wall.
A kiss that was not desperate or hungry or first. A kiss that was domestic. That tasted of pizza and wine and a Saturday evening that had been ordinary in all the ways that mattered. The ring clicked against his lip. Rory's hands came to rest on his hips, light, careful, calibrated for thin walls and a sleeping child.
No one stopped them.
'Stay,' Neil said. Against Rory's mouth.
'Freddie...'
'We can't... I always keep my door open when Freddie is with me. But he'll wake up and find you here, and it'll be normal. I want it to be normal.'
'Are you sure?'
'I'm sure.'
Neil's bed. The mattress that had held only him. Four years of only him. It held two tonight. The sheets were clean. The room was dark except for the hall light through the gap, and the gap was four fingers wide, and the breathing on the other side was Freddie's and the breathing beside him was Rory's.
Rory's arm across his chest. The hall light through the four-finger gap.
15
FALLOUT
