CHAPTER TWELVE
The apartment at midnight was different from the apartment in the morning.
There was a quality to it that Tav had been noticing for weeks without naming — a warmth that had nothing to do with temperature, a particular density of the air when the city outside was quiet and the rooms were lit only by the lamp near the couch.
He was out of excuses for further data.
Alistair was on the couch with his sketchbook when Tav closed his laptop.
He'd been drawing for the better part of an hour with the absorbed quiet he had stopped performing and was simply existing — one knee pulled up, the charcoal pencil working in confident short strokes, his profile lit by the lamp.
Tav had been watching him in peripheral vision for most of that hour and had been unable to stop.
"You're staring," Alistair said, without looking up.
"I'm thinking."
"You're staring while thinking." The pencil moved. "There's a specific quality to it." "Tell me."
"It's the one that means you've made a decision." He glanced up briefly. "The rest of the time you're still working toward it. When you've landed somewhere there's a different quality of attention." He looked back down. "You have that right now."
Tav closed the laptop.
Stood.
Crossed the apartment.
Alistair set the sketchbook down on the cushion as Tav reached the couch — set it down with the unhurried deliberateness that he had been expecting this and had decided, some time ago, how they felt about it.
He looked up at Tav with the warm, sharp eyes that never missed anything and the expression below those eyes that he'd stopped maintaining tonight.
Open. Waiting. Honest in the way of things that had been decided rather than performed.
Tav leaned down.
One hand on the back of the couch, one knee beside Alistair's leg, closing the distance between them with the methodical care he brought to everything that mattered — and then Alistair grabbed the front of his sweater with both hands and pulled.
They collided.
The kiss wasn't soft. It didn't have the gentle carefully managed first contact.
Two weeks of held tension had nowhere to go gently, and it didn't try — it broke open immediately, hot and decisive, Alistair's fists tight in Tav's sweater and Tav's hands finding Alistair's face and jaw and kissing him back with the single-minded intensity of something that had been accumulating far too long.
Alistair made a sound against his mouth.
Low. Wanting. He had been waiting for exactly this and found it better than anticipated.
Tav kissed him harder.
The sketchbook hit the floor. Neither of them noticed.
Alistair pulled him down — insistent, demanding, his hands releasing the sweater only to find his shoulders instead, pulling him onto the couch and over him with a directness that Tav matched without thought.
He settled his weight carefully — one knee between Alistair's, his hands braced on either side of his head — and felt Alistair exhale beneath him like something released.
"There he is," Alistair said breathlessly.
Tav looked down at him.
Alistair's hair was disordered from the cushions.
His mouth was flushed. His hands were at Tav's hips, possessive and warm through the fabric of his sweater, and he was looking up at Tav with dark amber eyes and the pure expression of someone who had wanted this for long enough that having it still surprised them.
"You talk too much," Tav said.
"You kiss like you're irritated about wanting to."
"I might be."
Alistair laughed — breathless and warm and completely real — and pulled him back down.
This time the kiss was slower. Intentional. Alistair's fingers found the hem of Tav's sweater and slipped beneath it and the touch of his hands against Tav's back was warm and deliberate and very direct, and
Tav felt it everywhere. He pressed in closer and Alistair arched into it and made the low wanting sound again, which was becoming a problem that Tav could not stop thinking about.
"Off," Alistair said, against his jaw.
"What?"
"The sweater." He was already pulling at it. "Off."
Tav sat back and stripped the sweater. Tossed it. Looked down at Alistair, who was looking up at him with the focused warmth of someone conducting an inventory and finding everything satisfactory.
"Your turn," Tav said.
Alistair sat up and pulled his own shirt over his head in one fluid motion, and Tav's hands were on him before he'd finished.
He ran his palms up the line of Alistair's ribs — carefully, checking, the medical knowledge registering and the warmth registering — and Alistair hissed and caught his breath.
"Shoulder," Tav said. Not a question.
"Old injury. Fine." His hands found Tav's arms. "Stop assessing me and—"
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 somewhere in 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 for nine 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.
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 produce a 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."