CHAPTER TWELVE #2
"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."
"Since week two."
"Yes." His voice had changed register. Lower. The warmth more present, less managed. "I draw things I'm trying to understand."
"And?"
"I haven't finished understanding," Alistair said. "I don't think I'm going to."
Tav moved his hand — from the jaw to the angle of his neck, the warmth of him — and Alistair's breath changed in a way that Tav took in with the full attention he brought to things that mattered.
"Tav," he said.
"Yes."
"I need you to be sure."
Tav looked at him.
"Im sure," he said. "I've been managing it for weeks. Those are different things."
Something broke, very briefly, in Alistair's expression — the careful professional surface giving way to something that was not managed at all. He reached up, his left hand finding the back of Tav's neck with the warm certainty he had been thinking about exactly this, and pulled him down.
The kiss was not tentative.
Tav had memorized many things about Alistair over seven weeks. The way he moved, the way he spoke, the way he held things. He had not been able to catalogue this because he had not had the data.
He had it now: Alistair kissed with the same precise attention he brought to everything — complete, present, the full weight of his focus applied to the person in front of him. There was nothing performed about it. This was entirely, devastatingly real.
Tav kissed him back.
He had not been close to someone like this in nine years and that absence made itself known in the first thirty seconds — not painfully, as information.
His body registering the relief of proximity that had been withheld for a long time.
Alistair's hands moving through his hair with the focused attention of someone learning the shape of a thing they had been considering from a distance.
"You're thinking," Alistair said, against his mouth.
"I'm always thinking."
"Think less."
Tav held his gaze — the close look of a man who was approximately four inches from someone's face.
"That's not—"
"I know." He pulled him back down. "Try anyway."
Alistair's hand found his hair and tightened and the sound he made was entirely unmanaged — low and rough and nothing like his public register — and Tav filed it in the category of things he intended to be reliable about.
He was thorough.
Alistair, when he recovered the ability, was not passive about returning the attention. His hands were specific and unhurried, learning in return with the focused quality he gave his drawings — the full weight of his attention applied to its subject, which was now Tav.
Alistair made a sound against his shoulder.
"What are you doing," he said.
"Paying attention," Tav said.
"Tav."
"Yes."
"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.