"You don't touch like that."
"No."
Alistair found his face.
"I noticed on day two," he said. "When you handed the pan back. Your hands are very deliberate.
Like you've decided—"
"I've decided," Tav said.
The fire made its sounds. The storm continued against the windows.
Alistair turned toward him fully and put his hand on Tav's jaw — the same touch, two fingers against the pulse point that he'd been doing since the clinic, checking, confirming — and studied him with the honest amber eyes.
"How's the shoulder?" he said.
"Better." "Enough for—"
"Yes," Tav said.
Alistair held his gaze.
Then he kissed him.
• • •
The storm provided its own rhythm — the sustained sound of wind and rain against stone, the fire's warmth and movement, the room settling into its own enclosed world entirely separate from weather and city and everything that had preceded this particular night.
Alistair was patient in the way of people who had decided that patience was itself a form of intensity.
He kissed Tav with the attentiveness of someone making an argument — thorough and deliberate and completely focused — and Tav held him and gave back equal measure, and neither of them was in any hurry.
"Still thinking," Alistair said, his mouth at Tav's jaw.
"Less than usual."
"Good." He pulled back and looked at him. "Shirt."
They undressed in the firelight, unhurried, Alistair careful of Tav's shoulder in the way he was always careful — attentive without making the care a statement — and Tav careful in return of the ribs that were still in the process of being ribs again. They had learned each other's bodies in the apartment in those early weeks and the relearning now had returned to something rather than encountering it for the first time — familiar and warm.
Alistair put his hands on Tav's chest and held his gaze.
The fire behind him made amber of everything. The scar on his jaw. The silver rings. The careful eyes that were not performing anything.
"What?" Tav said.
"Nothing." He traced the line of the healing wound on Tav's shoulder with two careful fingers — not clinical, the way Tav might have done it, but as someone acknowledging a cost. "This keeps happening to you."
"I'm aware."
"You keep putting yourself between me and—"
"Yes," Tav said.
"I've told you I don't need—"
"I know," Tav said. He covered Alistair's hand with his. "I know you don't need it."
