But the fear was not present.
What was present was a quality he had not felt in nine years — having arrived somewhere.
He lay in the dark and let the quality be what it was.
He lasted approximately fourteen minutes.
Then he got up.
Not impulsively — he did not do things impulsively. He lay there for fourteen minutes and ran the analysis and arrived at the conclusion that the analysis was not going to producea different result than the one he'd already reached, and that lying in the dark running the same analysis repeatedly was inefficiency he did not usually permit himself.
He crossed the hallway.
He did not knock. The door was open an inch — had been open an inch since the first week, a habit Alistair had developed that Tav had noticed and never addressed and now understood. An invitation that did not require articulation.
He pushed it open.
The room was dark in the way of rooms with heavy curtains in a city that was never fully dark — a residual ambient glow at the edges, enough to see by. Alistair was lying on his back with one arm behind his head and the amber eyes open, which meant he had not been asleep.
He looked at Tav in the doorway. Neither of them spoke.
Not because anything had been said. Because the silence itself had changed.
Tav crossed the room.
He sat on the edge of the bed — the deliberate choice of a man who was choosing each increment of this — and looked at Alistair.
"I've been thinking," Tav said.
"I know," Alistair said.
"I've been thinking for approximately fourteen minutes."
"I know that too." The warmth in his voice. "I've been thinking for considerably longer." "How long?"
"Week two," Alistair said. "Give or take."
Tav held this.
"You didn't say anything," he said.
"Neither did you." He shifted slightly — not away, a different closeness' in orientation, the adjustment of someone turning toward. "You're here now."
"Yes."
"So am I."
Tav studied him.
What he saw: Alistair Keaton at midnight, in his own room, with the management finally absent. The warmth that was not performed. The amber eyes with the assessment quality running and something underneath it that was patient with the weight of someone at the end of a long wait.
Tav reached out.
He touched Alistair's jaw — the right side, the deliberate side, with the back of two fingers the way you touched something you were trying to understand completely. Alistair went very still.
"You've been drawing me," Tav said.
"Yes."
