Tav closed his eyes. Opened them again.
He got out of bed.
• • •
The apartment was still largely dark when he stepped into the hallway, the skyline through the floor to ceiling windowsshowing the city in pre-dawn blues and silvers, the streets below reduced to moving headlights and the distant blink of building lights. He'd always found cities more legible at this hour.
Less noise obscuring the patterns.
The kitchen lights were on.
Alistair stood at the stove wearing grey sweatpants and nothing else, frowning down at a pan with the aggrieved expression of a man who considered himself above being defeated by cookware.
Smoke curled upward in a thin, optimistic spiral. He hadn't heard Tav come in.
Tav stopped in the doorway.
The problem — and it was a problem, practically speaking — was not that Alistair was attractive. That would have been manageable. Attractive people existed in the world and Tav had spent years learning not to let aesthetics interfere with threat assessment. The problem was that Alistair somehow looked effortlessly at home everywhere. He adapted to spaces in real time, occupied them as though they'd been shaped around him, moved through environments with the unconscious comfort of someone who had never seriously entertained the possibility of not belonging somewhere. Including, apparently, Tav's kitchen at five in the morning.
Alistair glanced over his shoulder. His expression didn't show any surprise.
"Oh good," he said. "You're awake."
Tav's gaze moved to the pan. "What are you doing?"
"Making breakfast."
"You're burning butter."
"I was in the process of noticing that," Alistair said, with the particular dignity. "I feel like you could have opened with good morning, but perhaps that's a personal preference."
Tav crossed the kitchen, reached past him, and turned the burner off.
The smell improved immediately. Alistair watched the whole sequence without moving, tracking Tav with the same sidelong attention he'd employed the night before — never quite direct, never quite absent. Like he was calibrating.
"You walk quietly," Alistair said.
"You don't."
"I wasn't trying to."
"That's obvious."
A beat of silence. Alistair turned from the defunct pan and leaned back against the counter with his arms folded, his posture settling into that particular arrangement of casual interest and careful distance that seemed to be his natural register. Tav reached around him to remove the ruined pan and run water over it.
"You cook," Alistair observed. Not a question.
"Yes."
"That explains the kitchen rule."
"It exists because of exactly this situation."
"I feel that's slightly unfair given it's only been twelve hours." But the corner of his mouth moved.
"There he is."
"Who?"
