CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The storm arrived on the fourth night.
It came off the sea with the ambition of coastal winter weather — not dramatic thunder and spectacle but something more fundamental: sustained wind driving against the stone walls with an insistence that made the safe house feel very precisely positioned at the edge of something large and indifferent.
Rain against the windows. The particular sound of weather that had decided to stay.
Alistair had built a fire.
He'd done it with the unhurried competence of someone who had learned practical things in the course of having a professional life that required them, and it was burning well now — steady and amber, the room warm in a way that had warmth that came from making it rather than finding it.
They were on the low couch.
This had become a characteristic of their evenings in the safe house: the fire, the couch, some amount of contact that had stopped needing to be negotiated.
Tav's shoulder was healing — still limited, still a consideration, but on the right side of the arc.
Alistair's ribs were better. They had both, in the four days of the coast and the quiet, done something that Tav suspected neither of them had done in a long time: rested.
Actually rested. It was not sleep but was the absence of ongoing operational vigilance, the body allowed to release the sustained readiness it had been carrying.
It felt strange.
Not uncomfortable — strange in the way that unfamiliar good things felt before they became familiar.
Alistair was reading something, or had been, before the book had ended up on the table and been replaced by a state of looking at the fire and thinking. His feet were tucked up on the couch. He was wearing the blue jumper again, which appeared to have become his. Tav had made no objection to this.
He was aware — with the very attention he paid to things that mattered — of being in the same room as Alistair in this particular way. The warmth and the low light and the storm outside and the easy intimacy of two people who had stopped performing anything at all for each other.
Alistair turned.
"You're doing the looking thing," he said.
"I look at things."
"You look at me with a direct quality that's different from the way you look at the window or the fire."
"It's probably because you're more interesting than the window."
Alistair's mouth curved. "The fire?"
"Marginally."
He unfolded from his end of the couch and moved toward Tav with the deliberate ease that was, Tav had learned, what Alistair looked like when he'd decided something and wasn't performing the decision.
He settled against him — careful of the shoulder, always careful without making the care obvious — and Tav put his arm around him and they were quiet.
The fire. The storm. The warmth of the room.
"Can I ask you something?" Alistair said.
"Yes."
"In the apartment — the night with the medical kit, when you stitched me up the first time."
"You stayed close afterward. When I was still sitting there." He tilted his head up to look at Tav.
"Why?"
Tav considered.
"Because you looked like someone who had been touched carefully for the first time in a long time," he said, "and needed a moment before it was over."
"That's extremely perceptive," he said.
"I pay attention."
"I know." He was quiet longer. "You were right.
" He fixed on the fire. "I've spent a long time being in proximity to people without being—" "Without the contact meaning anything.
Professionally, socially. People touch you for reasons and you know the reasons and the touch is a transaction and that's—" He stopped. "That's just how it goes."
"Yes," Tav said.
"You don't touch like that."
"No."
Alistair found his face.
"I noticed on day two," he said. "When you handed the pan back. Your hands are very deliberate.
Like you've decided—"
"I've decided," Tav said.
The fire made its sounds. The storm continued against the windows.
Alistair turned toward him fully and put his hand on Tav's jaw — the same touch, two fingers against the pulse point that he'd been doing since the clinic, checking, confirming — and studied him with the honest amber eyes.
"How's the shoulder?" he said.
"Better." "Enough for—"
"Yes," Tav said.
Alistair held his gaze.
Then he kissed him.
· · ·
The storm provided its own rhythm — the sustained sound of wind and rain against stone, the fire's warmth and movement, the room settling into its own enclosed world entirely separate from weather and city and everything that had preceded this particular night.
Alistair was patient in the way of people who had decided that patience was itself a form of intensity.
He kissed Tav with the attentiveness of someone making an argument — thorough and deliberate and completely focused — and Tav held him and gave back equal measure, and neither of them was in any hurry.
"Still thinking," Alistair said, his mouth at Tav's jaw.
"Less than usual."
"Good." He pulled back and looked at him. "Shirt."
They undressed in the firelight, unhurried, Alistair careful of Tav's shoulder in the way he was always careful — attentive without making the care a statement — and Tav careful in return of the ribs that were still in the process of being ribs again.
They had learned each other's bodies in the apartment in those early weeks and the relearning now had returned to something rather than encountering it for the first time — familiar and warm.
Alistair put his hands on Tav's chest and held his gaze.
The fire behind him made amber of everything. The scar on his jaw. The silver rings. The careful eyes that were not performing anything.
"What?" Tav said.
"Nothing." He traced the line of the healing wound on Tav's shoulder with two careful fingers — not clinical, the way Tav might have done it, but as someone acknowledging a cost. "This keeps happening to you."
"I'm aware."
"You keep putting yourself between me and—"
"Yes," Tav said.
"I've told you I don't need—"
"I know," Tav said. He covered Alistair's hand with his. "I know you don't need it."
A pause.
"Then why?"
Tav watched him steadily.
"Because I want to," he said. "That's different from need."
Alistair looked at him.
Then he kissed him again, and this time the patience gave way to something that had more heat in it — Alistair's hands moving with the focused intent he had decided to be direct, and Tav responding with the reciprocal directness.
They moved to the low couch, then the rug in front of the fire, it was warmer and had the considerable advantage of more space.
The storm continued outside with cheerful indifference.
The fire was hot and the room had enclosed warmth that felt, to Tav, like a concept he had not previously had available to him.
He learned Alistair again in the firelight.
Found the things that made him quiet and the things that made him anything but, and attended to both with the same thorough focus, and Alistair attended to him in kind — equally specific, equally unhurried, with the pleasure of someone who had found something worth the attention.
He had always been precise. Here, precision meant attending to every response and using the information — the sharp intake of breath when his mouth found the line of Alistair's hip, the way his hands gripped when Tav took his time, the low broken sound he made when Tav's attention moved exactly where it needed to.
The sound was nothing like his public register. Raw and unmanaged and entirely honest.
Tav was methodical about producing it again.
"You're very—" Alistair said, at some point, his voice rough and low and not organized.
"Thorough," Tav said. "You've mentioned it."
"It bears—" He stopped. Tav kissed the hollow of his throat and he stopped making complete sentences for a while.
Afterward they lay in front of the fire.
Alistair was on his back with one arm over his eyes — the same position he'd taken, Tav recalled, in the apartment. The position of someone allowing themselves to simply be, without management. Tav was on his side looking at him.
The fire crackled softly. The storm was no less present but had acquired the sustained sound of weather that had made its point and continued making it. After a while Alistair moved his arm and looked at Tav.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," Tav said.
"How's the shoulder?"
"Still manageable."
"You'd say that if it was on fire."
"I'd manage it."
Alistair made the sound that was close to a laugh. He turned onto his side and they were face-to face in the firelight, close, and his expression had the honest version — no layers, nothing managed, just him.
"This," he said quietly.
"Yes," Tav said.
"This is the thing." He studied Tav with the amber eyes. "Not the Protocol and not Ablation and not—" "Just this. Is what I mean."
Tav found his face.
Then he reached out and touched his face — the scar, the jaw, the warmth of him — with the same deliberateness that Alistair had said he noticed. Because it was deliberate. Everything Tav did in this direction was deliberate, was chosen, was exactly as intended as it appeared.
"I know," Tav said. "Me too."
Alistair closed his eyes briefly. Opened them.
"Good," he said.
Outside, the storm continued its indifferent work.
Inside the fire burned low and warm. Two people lay on the floor of a stone safe house on the coast of somewhere quiet and looked at each other and were, for this particular hour, not operatives or protocol subjects or Ablation assets or anything at all except the particular thing they'd been since the burned butter morning, which was: each other's.
"We should go to bed," Alistair said eventually.
"Probably."
"In a minute."
"Yes." Neither of them moved.
· · ·
· · ·
On the fifth day, Alistair drew Tav on the cliff path.