Chapter 14 Words in the Dark #2
By the time zero-four-hundred rolled around, I'd finished three intercepts and started a fourth. My eyes burned. My neck ached from hunching. My leg had bounced so much I'd probably burned through a day's worth of calories in nervous energy alone.
But I'd survived. Made it through Noor's revelation and her warning and the fresh, visceral understanding of what waited for people like me.
Small victories.
The lake was frozen solid, a sheet of black glass reflecting the scattered stars above. Tom had found this spot, somehow. Had led me here after our shifts aligned for once, both of us free at the same hour with nowhere urgent to be.
“Brought supplies,” he said, producing two bottles of beer from inside his coat like a magician revealing doves. “Traded Morrison three cigarettes and a favour to be named later.”
“A favour to be named later sounds ominous.”
“Probably means I'll be covering his watch sometime next month when he wants to sneak into the village.” Tom shrugged, uncapping both bottles with a practised motion. “Worth it.”
He handed me one, and our fingers brushed in the exchange. I pretended not to notice. Pretended the brief contact did not send electricity up my arm and into my chest.
We settled on the bench beneath the old willow, its bare branches creating a canopy of sorts, skeletal fingers reaching toward the sky. The cold bit through my coat, but I did not care. The beer was bitter and slightly warm and utterly perfect.
Tom produced cigarettes next, lighting two and passing one to me without asking. We had developed rituals, these past weeks. Small intimacies that meant nothing and everything.
“Stars are bright tonight,” he said, tipping his head back. “You can actually see them for once. No cloud cover.”
I looked up. He was right. The sky was a vast expanse of black velvet scattered with diamonds, more stars visible than I had seen since before the war began. The blackout meant no light pollution, no glow from cities to dim the celestial display. One of the few gifts of wartime darkness.
“Do you know the constellations?” I asked.
“Some. Learned them for navigation, back in training. Ursa Major there there.” He pointed with his cigarette, ember tracing an arc. “And that bright one is Sirius. Dog star.”
“The Greeks believed Sirius caused the heat of summer. They called the hottest days the dog days because Sirius rose with the sun.”
“Trust you to know the history of stars.”
“Trust me to know the history of everything useless.” I took a drag from my cigarette, watched the smoke curl upward toward those ancient lights.
“My head is full of facts that serve no practical purpose. Did you know that the word disaster literally means bad star? From the Italian. Dis, meaning bad, and astro, meaning star. People used to believe that catastrophes were caused by unfavourable planetary alignments.”
Tom was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed, soft and genuine. “You're something else, Art. You know that?”
“I know I talk too much about etymology when I'm nervous.”
“Are you nervous?”
I considered lying. Decided against it. “Yes.”
“Why?”
Because you are sitting close enough that I can feel the warmth of you. Because you brought me beer and cigarettes and led me to this beautiful spot like it was a gift you wanted to give me. Because every moment with you feels stolen, borrowed, temporary.
“I do not know,” I said instead. “The dark, perhaps. It makes everything feel heightened.”
“Yeah.” Tom took a long pull from his beer. “It does.”
Silence settled between us, comfortable in a way that still surprised me.
I had never been good at silence with other people.
It always felt like pressure, like expectation, like a space I was supposed to fill with appropriate words I could never find.
But with Tom, silence was just silence. A shared pause. Room to breathe.
“It's quiet out here,” he said, breath misting in the cold air.
“That's why I like it.”
“Yeah.” He took a swig from the bottle and passed it to me. “I can see that.”
The beer was barely cold, which meant it was actually drinkable in this weather. I took a sip and handed it back, careful not to let our fingers brush. We had been doing that lately. Being careful. Maintaining small distances that felt enormous.
Above us, the stars were scattered thick across the sky. No moon tonight, which made them brighter, sharper. I found myself tracing constellations without meaning to, the old habit of looking for patterns asserting itself even here.
“What are you looking at?” Tom asked.
“Orion. There.” I pointed without thinking, and he leaned closer to follow the line of my arm. His shoulder pressed against mine, solid and warm through layers of wool. “The three stars in a row. That's his belt.”
“I see it.” He did not move away. “What's the bright one below?”
“Rigel. It's actually a blue supergiant, about seventy thousand times more luminous than the sun.”
“Seventy thousand times.” He whistled softly. “How do you know things like that?”
“I read a lot as a child. Stars were safer than people.”
He turned his head to look at me, and suddenly his face was very close. I could see the faint lines around his eyes, the slight roughness of stubble along his jaw. Could smell cigarette smoke and beer and something underneath that was just him.
“Safer how?” he asked.
“They don't expect anything from you. They just are what they are, and you can watch them without having to perform or explain yourself.” I swallowed.
“When I was young, I used to sneak out to the garden at night and lie on the grass and pretend I was somewhere else entirely. Somewhere the rules were different.”
“What rules?”
“All of them.”
Tom was quiet for a moment. Then he shifted slightly, and his thigh pressed against mine. Not moving away. Just settling.
“I used to do something similar,” he said. “Not stars. I wasn't that clever. But I'd go down to the river near our house and just sit. Watch the water. Let everything else go quiet for a bit.”
“That sounds nice.”
“It was. Until I had to go home.” He took another drink. “Home was loud. Lots of people, not much space. I loved them, but sometimes I just needed to not be there.”
I understood that. The need for silence, for solitude, for a break from the constant performance of being a person among other people. I had never met anyone else who seemed to understand it the same way.
“Do you miss it?” I asked. “The river?”
“Sometimes. Mostly I miss the feeling. That sense of being somewhere apart.” He glanced at me. “I get it here, actually. By the lake. It's similar.”
“Is that why you suggested we come out here?”
“Partly.” He did not elaborate, and I did not push.
We sat in comfortable silence for a while, passing the beer back and forth. The cold was seeping through my coat, but I did not want to move. Did not want to break whatever fragile bubble we had created around ourselves, this small pocket of peace in the middle of everything.
“Can I ask you something?” he said after a moment.
“You can ask. I reserve the right to deflect with sarcasm.”
His mouth twitched. “Fair enough.” He was quiet for a moment, watching the stars. “Do you ever think about what you'd be doing if there wasn't a war?”
“Constantly.” I pulled my scarf tighter. “I'd probably be teaching. Mathematics at some quiet university where the biggest crisis is a student forgetting their homework.”
“You'd be good at that. Teaching.”
“You think so?”
“You're patient. When you explain things, you don't make people feel stupid for not understanding.” He glanced at me. “That's rare.”
The compliment warmed me more than the beer. “What about you? What would you be doing?”
“Honestly? No idea.” He shrugged. “Never really thought about a future before the war. Just getting through each day, you know? Surviving.”
“And now?”
He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was softer. “Now I think about it all the time. What comes after. Whether there even is an after.”
“There will be. There has to be.”
“You sound very certain.”
“I'm not. But I choose to believe it anyway.” I looked at him, found him already watching me. “Hope is a choice, Tom. A stubborn, irrational choice to believe things can be better than they are.”
“Is that what you do? Choose hope?”
“Every single day. Even when it feels like lying to myself.” I smiled, though it felt fragile. “Especially then.”
I reached for the beer to give my hands something to do, and this time when our fingers touched, neither of us pulled away immediately. Just a moment of contact, palm against knuckles, the warmth of him bleeding through the cold.
“You make it sound easy,” he said quietly.
“It's not. It's the hardest thing I do. But the alternative is giving up, and I'm too stubborn for that.”
“Stubborn.” He laughed softly. “That's one word for it.”
“I prefer 'tenacious.' It sounds more dignified.”
“You would.” But he was smiling now, that rare full smile that transformed his face. “Art.”
“Yes?”
“I'm glad you're stubborn. Tenacious. Whatever you want to call it.” His thumb brushed across my knuckles, so light I might have imagined it. “I'm glad you haven't given up.”
“On what?”
“On any of it. The work. The hope.” He paused. “Me.”
The word hung between us, fragile and enormous. I didn't know what to say. Didn't know how to tell him that giving up on him had never been an option, that somewhere along the way he'd become the thing I was hoping for.
“You're not exactly easy to give up on,” I managed.
“No?”
“No. You're irritatingly persistent. You keep showing up, being decent, making me laugh when I've forgotten how.” I swallowed hard. “It's very inconvenient.”
“Sorry about that.”
“No you're not.”
“No,” he agreed. “I'm really not.”
We sat there, hands still touching, and the silence felt like a conversation all its own.
“Tom?”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever happens. After, I mean. Whatever the world looks like when this is over.” I took a breath. “I want you to know that this, right now, sitting here with you, this is the closest I've ever felt to happy. Real happy, not just absence of misery.”
He was quiet for so long I thought I'd said too much. Then his fingers tightened around mine, deliberate and warm.
“Same,” he said. “For what it's worth. Same.”
But he did not finish the thought. Just shook his head slightly and took the bottle back, and the moment passed like a cloud across the moon.
We stayed until the beer was gone and the cold had become genuinely uncomfortable. My fingers were numb, my nose running, my toes aching inside boots that were never quite warm enough. But I did not want to leave.
“We should head back,” Tom said finally, though he did not move.
“Probably.”
“Before we freeze to death out here.”
“That would be inconvenient.”
He laughed, a soft huff of breath in the darkness. “Inconvenient. That's one word for it.”
“I have others, but they're less polite.”
“Go on then. Let's hear them.”
“Catastrophic. Untimely. Deeply annoying.” I pretended to think. “Inconsiderate, given the amount of effort I've put into not dying so far.”
“Inconsiderate.” He was grinning now. “Freezing to death would be inconsiderate.”
“Extremely. Think of the paperwork.”
“Always practical, you.”
“Someone has to be.” I stood, stamping feeling back into my feet. “Come on. If I lose any toes to frostbite, I'm blaming you entirely.”
“Why me?”
“Because you suggested we stay outside in December with one bottle of beer and no blankets. This was clearly your fault from the beginning.”
“You agreed to come.”
“Under duress.”
“What duress? I asked and you said yes immediately.”
“Emotional duress. You looked at me with those eyes.”
“What's wrong with my eyes?”
“Nothing. That's the problem.” The words slipped out before I could stop them, and I felt heat flood my face despite the cold.
Tom was quiet for a moment. Then: “Art.”
“Forget I said that.”
“Not a chance.” He stood, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him even through layers of wool. “For the record, there's nothing wrong with your eyes either.”
“Tom.”
“Just stating facts.” He reached out, adjusted my scarf where it had slipped. His fingers brushed my jaw, lingered for just a moment. “Come on. Before you freeze and I have to explain to Finch why I let his best cryptanalyst turn into an icicle.”
“His best?”
“Don't fish for compliments. It's unbecoming.”
“I'm not fishing. I'm genuinely asking.”
“Yes, Art. His best. Everyone knows it. You're the only one who doesn't seem to believe it.” He started walking toward the estate, then looked back when I didn't follow. “Coming?”
I stood there for a moment, watching him, this man who'd somehow become the centre of everything without my noticing.
“Yeah,” I said. “I'm coming.”