Alistair held the look. Held it and held it, the two of them sitting in a café in a city that neither of them actually belonged to, both of them understanding that the conversation had just moved from what they'd been pretending to have to what they were actually having.
"So do you," he said.
• • •
• • •
Week two had a different quality from week one.
Week one had been the unusual arrival — the assessment phase, the calibration, the systematic establishment of what was there and what it meant. Week one had the cool, focused like a person entering an unknown environment and conducting the necessary surveys.
Week two was different because the environment was no longer unknown.
He knew the apartment. He knew its morning quality and its evening quality and the usual sound it made when the heating came on and the dry creak of the third board from the left in the hallway that Alistair always stepped over, having identified it on day one, which told Tav something about how Alistair moved through spaces. He knew the routine — Alistair's five o'clock, his own six o'clock, the overlap in the kitchen that had established itself as a feature rather than a coincidence.
He knew the rings. The sequence. Left hand, smallest finger first, then the middle, then the ring finger.
Never varied. He'd watched it four times now.
He knew the sketchbooks but not their content.
He knew the coffee.
In week two, Tav began to notice that the distance he was maintaining required maintenance. In week one it had required no maintenance — it had been the natural distance of a person arriving in a new space with a professional focus and appropriate boundaries. In week two it was a practiced distance — different. Practiced distances were unstable. They required attention. They acknowledged, by their very practice, that the natural state was something else.
On Tuesday of week two, Alistair came home from an afternoon across the city with the tension that he had been in a different kind of environment and was recalibrating. Not distressed — recalibrated.
The reset of a person returning from one context to another.
He put his bag down and fixed on the kitchen.
"Have you eaten?" he said.
"No," Tav said, from the table.
"I'll make something." "You don't have to—"
"I'm making something anyway," Alistair said. He moved to the kitchen with the ease he always had in the kitchen — the unhurried ownership that he had decided the space was theirs to use. "I found a good butcher three streets north. They had lamb."
"You went to a butcher."
"I was in the area."
"You went out of your way to find a butcher."
Alistair held his gaze over the kitchen island. "Is that relevant?"
"It's observable," Tav said.
Something flickered in Alistair's expression. The brief movement of a person deciding how to respond to accurate observation.
"I like cooking," he said. "When there's time and good ingredients. It's one of the things that got compressed when I was—" He stopped. "When the operational context doesn't allow for it."
"What other things got compressed?" Tav said.
Alistair watched him.
The question had arrived before Tav had decided to ask it. This was the distance requiring maintenance: the questions that arrived without decision were the ones that came from below the professional layer. They were the questions of someone who was interested rather than someone who was conducting assessment.
