"That is—" He stopped. His voice had the rough quality that came when he had given up managing his register. "That is a significant amount of attention." "You deserve a significant amount of attention." A pause.
"You can't just say things like that," Alistair said.
"I only say things that are true."
He could feel Alistair's laugh before he heard it — the warmth of it, the genuine undone of someone who had been told something that arrived at the exact place they needed it to arrive.
"I know," Alistair said. "That's the problem."
Later — much later, in the room at the depth of the night — they were still.
Alistair's breathing like someone who was awake but not thinking. Tav was on his back with Alistair's shoulder against his and the ceiling above him and the city outside reduced to its minimum, and he ran the inventory he always ran and found the following: shoulder present. Warmth present. He had been afraid of this.
Not of Alistair specifically — of the cost of it. The cost he'd been carrying since he was twenty-two, the knowledge of what it felt like when something that mattered was taken away. He had spent nine years not having anything to lose.
He had something to lose now.
He held that.
He held it with the honesty he brought to everything that was true and uncomfortable and waited to see what arrived alongside it.
What arrived was: yes. And also: worth it. And also, the clearest thought he'd had in nine years: this is what the last nine years were the absence of.
Alistair shifted slightly. The warm deliberate contact of someone choosing proximity even in sleep.
Tav did not move.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The apartment in the morning was different.
Not in any material way — the same kitchen, the same windows, the same amber light beginning to move through the glass as dawn progressed toward something with more commitment. The furniture occupied its familiar positions. The coffee machine sat on its counter. Everything that had been here the evening before was here now.
But the space had changed.
Tav noticed this from the doorway, standing in the kitchen in the stillness of someone taking inventory. He had been doing this since the first morning — the automatic environmental assessment, the check for change, the register of variables. He'd done it every day for seven weeks, calibrating his sense of the apartment's normal baseline so that deviation would register immediately. Today the baseline was different.
Not dangerous. Something that was the opposite of dangerous, in fact, its own variety of unusual.
He put the kettle on.
He was aware of two things with equal clarity: the quiet of the apartment, and Alistair's presence in it.
The first was a fact of acoustics. The second was not. He couldn't hear Alistair from the kitchen — the bedroom door was closed, and the apartment's walls were old construction, thickenough to be genuinely private. He couldn't hear him, couldn't see him, had no sensory information confirming his presence.
And yet: the apartment was entirely different from the way it had when Tav was alone in it.
He had been noting this for weeks without naming it.
He named it now, with the methodical honesty that was his most reliable tool: this was what it felt like when something that had been abstract became concrete. When you stopped operating in the future conditional — if this happened, then — and arrived at the simple indicative: this is.
The bedroom door opened.
Alistair appeared wearing yesterday's clothes with the unselfconscious ease of someone who had slept in them and found this unremarkable. His hair had achieved a variety of disorder. He was holding his phone in his left hand — checking the time or the news or the messages that arrived from unknown numbers — and he looked up when he heard the kitchen sounds.
They looked at each other.
Something happened in Alistair's expression that Tav watched carefully. It was complex: warmth and awareness and something that was neither of those things but sat between them, in the uneasy territory of a person who had arrived somewhere and was deciding what to do with the arrival.
