It came off the sea with the ambition of coastal winter weather — not dramatic thunder and spectacle but something more fundamental: sustained wind driving against the stone walls with an insistence that made the safe house feel very precisely positioned at the edge of something large and indifferent.
Rain against the windows. The particular sound of weather that had decided to stay.
Alistair had built a fire.
He'd done it with the unhurried competence of someone who had learned practical things in the course of having a professional life that required them, and it was burning well now — steady and amber, the room warm in a way that had warmth that came from making it rather than finding it.
They were on the low couch.
This had become a characteristic of their evenings in the safe house: the fire, the couch, some amount of contact that had stopped needing to be negotiated. Tav's shoulder was healing — still limited, still a consideration, but on the right side of the arc. Alistair's ribs were better. They had both, in the four days of the coast and the quiet, done something that Tav suspected neither of them had done in a long time: rested. Actually rested. It wasnot sleep but was the absence of ongoing operational vigilance, the body allowed to release the sustained readiness it had been carrying.
It felt strange.
Not uncomfortable — strange in the way that unfamiliar good things felt before they became familiar.
Alistair was reading something, or had been, before the book had ended up on the table and been replaced by a state of looking at the fire and thinking. His feet were tucked up on the couch. He was wearing the blue jumper again, which appeared to have become his. Tav had made no objection to this.
He was aware — with the very attention he paid to things that mattered — of being in the same room as Alistair in this particular way. The warmth and the low light and the storm outside and the easy intimacy of two people who had stopped performing anything at all for each other.
Alistair turned.
"You're doing the looking thing," he said.
"I look at things."
"You look at me with a direct quality that's different from the way you look at the window or the fire."
"It's probably because you're more interesting than the window."
Alistair's mouth curved. "The fire?"
"Marginally."
He unfolded from his end of the couch and moved toward Tav with the deliberate ease that was, Tav had learned, what Alistair looked like when he'd decided something and wasn't performing the decision. He settled against him — careful of the shoulder, always careful without making the care obvious — and Tav put his arm around him and they were quiet.
The fire. The storm. The warmth of the room.
"Can I ask you something?" Alistair said.
"Yes."
"In the apartment — the night with the medical kit, when you stitched me up the first time."
"You stayed close afterward. When I was still sitting there." He tilted his head up to look at Tav.
"Why?"
Tav considered.
"Because you looked like someone who had been touched carefully for the first time in a long time," he said, "and needed a moment before it was over."
"That's extremely perceptive," he said.
"I pay attention."
"I know." He was quiet longer. "You were right." He fixed on the fire. "I've spent a long time being in proximity to people without being—" "Without the contact meaning anything. Professionally, socially. People touch you for reasons and you know the reasons and the touch is a transaction and that's—" He stopped. "That's just how it goes."
"Yes," Tav said.
