"Nathan," I said.
"I'm aware it's not a rational—"
"Nathan."
"Yes."
"You're an idiot," I said, with a warmth that took the edge off it entirely.
Nathan looked down into his drink.
"Possibly," he said.
His ears were still slightly red, and the bar was loud around us and the team was twenty feet away and I didn't know what to do with any of it.
"Nathan," I said.
"Don't," he said. Not unkind. Just not now. Not here. Not like this.
I didn't.
So I drove him home.
Not to my apartment. To his, because that was the right call and I made it without being asked, and Nathan navigated the passenger seat with the careful movements of a man who was functional and knew it and was preserving it deliberately.
I got slightly lost leaving the bar because I'd been too busy watching Nathan navigate to the door to notice which exit we were using. Then I turned the wrong way out of the parking lot, and then I had to turn around, and Nathan watched all of this from the passenger seat.
"Do you know where my building is?" he asked after a while.
"I'm . . . figuring it out.”
"Take a left," he said.
I took a left.
"You should have taken that left four blocks ago," he said.
"I know that now."
We didn't talk much after that. The city did its thing outside the windows.
At his building I got him inside, and into the elevator. Nathan stood next to me in it with his eyes straight ahead and said nothing, and I stood next to him and said nothing, and it was the most comfortable elevator ride we'd ever had.
Leo was on the couch when we came in.
He looked at Nathan. He looked at me. He got up, stretched with the full commitment of a cat who had been asleep for hours, and walked over and sat on my feet.
"He likes you," Nathan said.
"Of course he does.”
Nathan looked at Leo on my feet with an expression that was—something. I didn't have a word for it yet.
I got him water. I made sure he drank it. I walked him to the bedroom the way you walked someone somewhere when you were being careful about it, not touching, just present and close, and Nathan moved through his own apartment like a man who was tired and knew it and was almost there.
He sat on the edge of the bed.
I looked at him.
