Tav kissed the edge of his jaw. Felt him stop talking.
He kissed down the line of his neck with the same deliberate attention he brought to things he intended to understand completely, and Alistair's head fell back against the cushions and his fingers tightened on Tav's arms and the sound he made was not the controlled warmth of his usual register but something deeper and less managed.
Good.
"Tav," Alistair said. His voice had the rough sound of someone choosing to say the true thing. "If you're going to stop—"
"I'm not," Tav said.
A brief silence.
"Good," Alistair said softly.
Tav found his face — at the disheveled warmth of him, at the honest wanting in his face, at the silver rings catching the lamplight and the old scar on his jaw and everything this person had been since the first morning.
Then he kissed him again, and this time it built slowly, with intent — Tav learning the shape of him the way he learned anything: completely, carefully, attending to every response and storing each one.
Alistair pulled him closer and gave back everything in equal measure, equally attentive, equally intent, and somewherein the middle of it the lamp was knocked sideways by Tav's out stretched arm and neither of them stopped.
The apartment was warm and dim and outside the city continued its patient work, and inside the couch was too narrow for two people and it didn't matter at all.
• • •
• • •
Sometime later Tav crossed back to his own room.
He did not analyse why. He lay in the dark and listened to the city and did not sleep.
The events ran through his mind with the thoroughness he brought to everything that mattered — the evidence for what was true. He had noted it in the observation document and then removed it from the observation document because an intelligence agency's monitoring infrastructure was not an appropriate repository for that particular document.
The evidence was internally consistent and sufficient. The conclusion it supported was clear.
He was in love with the person in the adjacent room.
He had not been in love with anyone since Marco. He had, for nine years, maintained the distance. He had learned that this kind of attachment cost more than he could survive twice. He had been correct about the cost and he had been wrong about the risk.
The cost was real. He had paid it. He understood its exact weight.
The risk was also real. But the risk was the risk of feeling something significant for another person — different from the risk he had been managing. The risk he had been managing fornine years was the risk of making a decision that would cause harm. That risk was always present.
Managing it by not caring about anyone was not management. It was avoidance.
He thought about this with the honesty that three in the morning required.
He thought: I have been avoiding for nine years and I am no longer avoiding.
He thought: the person in the adjacent room knows something is true between us. He has known since week two. He has been waiting for me to catch up.
He thought: I have caught up.
In the morning there would be a conversation. Not because conversations were required in this situation but because Tav had found that things that were true needed acknowledging, and the conversation would be the acknowledging.
For now: the dark apartment. The city outside. A space that had become genuinely inhabited.
He was, he found, not afraid.
He had expected to be afraid. He had been afraid, for nine years, of exactly this — of being in the position of someone who cared about another person and had therefore given the world a leverage it hadn't had before.
