"I love you too," he said. "I've loved you since the burned butter. I've loved you in approximately seventeen different ways since the burned butter, each one more complicated than the last."
"Tell me one," Tav said.
"I love the way you think," Alistair said. "I love that you take things seriously — not solemnly, seriously. Like everything is worth understanding completely." "I love that you made the coffee good even when you were furious at me for being in the apartment. I love that you treat care as a standard rather than a performance." He met Tav's eyes. "I love that you said I don't leave and meant it completely."
Tav held his gaze.
"You're going to continue this list," he said.
"At some length," Alistair confirmed.
The countryside moved past the window. The morning continued its grey winter arrival. Tav's shoulder was a managed fact, and Alistair's ribs were a managed fact and the world beyond the ambulance was a different shape from the world that had existed forty-eight hours ago.
And in the clinical white interior of a vehicle moving north through flat countryside, two people had said the true things out loud in the register of people who had decided that the true things deserved saying.
"The safe house," Alistair said eventually.
"Yes."
"Four hours north."
"Yes."
"And then we stop," he said. "For a while. We actually stop." He held Tav's gaze. "Can you do that?
Actually stop?"
Tav considered.
"I've been stopping for weeks," he said. "In the mornings. When you make the coffee."
Alistair looked at him with the warm expression. "Yes," he said. "That's exactly what stopping looks like."
The ambulance moved north.
The countryside opened up into the wide flat light of winter morning.
• • •
• • •
Tav was awake and Alistair was awake and neither of them was sleeping, which they'd agreed was probably not going to happen and was fine.
"What do you know about the coast?" Tav said.
Alistair found his face. "In general?"
"Specifically the stretch north of the city. Where the safe house is."
Alistair considered. "Sandstone cliffs," he said. "The geology is interesting — the rock formation is very old, the kind that shows a long record of what happened in this particular part of the world. The erosion patterns are distinctive." "There's a path that runs along the cliff edge. Four kilometers north before it turns into inland." He fixed on the ceiling. "Lucien described it when he gave us the location."
"You want to walk it," Tav said.
"Yes." A pause. "Not immediately. When the shoulder is at a point the physician considers appropriate for extended coastal walking."
"Which will be—"
"Six to eight weeks," Alistair said. "We established this."
