Chapter Ten
Cassian had never been inside a cinema before.
He’d seen them, of course, from the outside.
The Family’s supply runs into Emerald sometimes took them past the one on the main road, and he’d caught glimpses of the illuminated signs through the van window, the queues of people lined up as though they were waiting for communion.
The elders had explained that cinemas were temples to distraction, places where the outside world went to fill itself with noise so it wouldn’t have to sit with the silence of the Universe.
Cinema Nova was not what he’d pictured. It was smaller than a temple and louder than the Family of Light’s dining hall.
Lysander had tried to feed him something he’d called popcorn, that Cassian had later renamed to ‘abomination’ after getting a piece stuck between his molars.
The seats folded down when you sat on them and sprang back up when you stood, which Cassian had tested four times before Lysander had put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Cass. Sit down. People are looking.”
He stayed close to Lysander. The older omega moved through the crowd with a beer in one hand and his mobile in the other, chatting to Hamish’s sound engineer, Pete.
Lysander leaned in close and made a comment about Hamish’s nervous habit of shoving his glasses up his nose, then mimicked the strange jabby movement so accurately that it made Pete throw his head back and laugh so loudly that the couple nearest the bar turned around to look at them.
Cassian had been watching Lysander for weeks now, taking in the mechanics of how a male omega could occupy a room without shrinking into the nearest alpha’s shadow, and it still confounded him.
Lysander didn’t melt. He didn’t tip his chin up or let his voice go thin, or make himself a surface that invited touching.
He stood with his weight set equally on both feet, took up all the space that his body required, and when Hamish came over to check on him, Lysander kissed him on the mouth and called him a nerd for being nervous about his own film.
He wasn’t being sweet, or soft, but it worked on Hamish anyway.
Hamish found him before the screening started, pulling Cassian aside near the corridor that led to the auditorium.
“There’s going to be a Q&A after the film,” Hamish said.
“I know we’ve talked about this already, and you’ve said that you’d like to be involved.
But I still wanted to check in that you’re happy to go ahead with this.
Nobody’s expecting anything from you tonight.
You can sit in the audience and watch, you can wait in the foyer if it gets too much, or you can come up and answer questions with me.
All three of those options are fine. But the decision has to be yours, Cass. ”
Cassian had been turning this over in his head for three days. He’d asked Lysander what he should do on Wednesday, while they sat on the bench in Edinburgh Gardens watching the children running around, and Lysander had looked at him for a long moment before he’d said, “It’s not my call.”
“But what do you think I should do?”
“Doesn’t matter what I think.”
“It matters to me.”
“But it shouldn’t.” Lysander had crossed his arms and fixed his gaze on Cassian.
“You’ve spent your whole life doing what other people thought you should do.
If I tell you what I think, you’ll just do that instead, and we’ll have swapped one set of instructions for another.
So no. You’re deciding this one yourself. ”
Cassian had been furious about it for the rest of the afternoon. He’d gone to bed furious about it, woken up the next morning still furious, and by Thursday evening the fury had calcified into a grudging, teeth-gritting recognition that Lysander might have had a point.
Lysander had been forcing decisions back into Cassian’s hands.
He wouldn’t order for Cassian at cafés anymore, wouldn’t pick what they watched on the telly, or choose which direction they walked.
Each refusal left Cassian standing in a vacuum where someone else’s judgement used to be, and the emptiness of it was terrifying.
“I’ll do it,” Cassian told Hamish, in the corridor outside the auditorium. “I’ll answer questions.”
Hamish studied him for a moment, then squeezed his shoulder once and let go. “Good on you.”
The film was strange to watch. Cassian sat between Lysander and Hamish in the darkened auditorium with his hands folded in his lap, watching his old life projected three metres tall onto a wall.
He saw the compound in the Dandenongs, the vegetable gardens, the morning practice, the sunlit room where he’d sat in his white linen shirt and told Hamish that the Universe provided.
All of it blown up and backlit, consumed by a hundred strangers who rustled their popcorn boxes and shifted in their seats, with no idea that the boy on screen had run barefoot from a house in Bayswater towards the only person outside of the Family of Light that he knew.
At one point, the on-screen version of him spoke about trust and the Universe’s provision, and his delivery was so polished, and so seamlessly certain, that Cassian felt his stomach turn over.
When the lights came up again, the people started clapping and whooping for Hamish.
The stage was just two stools and two microphones set up in front of the screen, and Cassian’s legs felt strange beneath him as he followed Hamish up the side steps.
The audience was a dark mass of shapes beyond the first few rows, punctuated by the blue glow of mobile screens.
He perched on the edge of his stool and wrapped both hands around the microphone stand to keep them still.
The first questions were manageable. A woman in the third row asked about meals at the compound, and Cassian told her about the communal kitchen, the long wooden table where forty people sat together three times a day, the bread that was baked fresh each morning because buying bread from a shop was considered a concession to a world that had forgotten how to provide for itself.
A man near the back asked about sleeping arrangements, and Cassian explained the shared dormitories, the rotating roster of who slept beside whom so that no bond could form between two people that excluded the whole.
His voice came out steady, which surprised him. He’d expected it to shake, or to come out thin and breathy the way it did when he was talking to an alpha, but instead he was able to copy Lysander and keep his tone direct and clear, even when it was an alpha talking to him.
Then a woman in a burgundy cardigan raised her hand. “You were married during the film. Your husband, Charles Townsend — is he here tonight?”
“No,” Cassian said.
“Can you tell us about the marriage? And about your decision to leave the community?”
Cassian’s tongue pressed against the back of his teeth. The auditorium had gone very quiet. He could feel Hamish beside him, staying present as he gave Cassian the time to find his own answer.
“Charles is a generous man,” Cassian said. The words came automatically, polished smooth by years of repetition. “He’s contributed enormously to the Family of Light’s mission, and I was grateful for his support of the community.”
The audience waited for more.
“I haven’t left the Family,” Cassian added, and even as he said it he could feel the sentence pulling at its seams. “I’m just…
trying some things on my own. Because I’ve never had the chance to do that before.
” His grip on the microphone stand tightened.
“I’ve been staying in the outside world, and I’ve been exploring, really.
Trying things I haven’t tried before. I’ve been going to all of the cafés around the city with Hamish’s omega, and that’s been —” He searched for the word, and what came to him wasn’t a word at all but a series of pleasant sensations: the warmth of a pastry in his hand, and the feel of silky cream on his lip. “That’s been really lovely.”
An approving murmur rippled through the auditorium, and Cassian’s shoulders dropped an inch from where they’d climbed towards his ears.
A man in the fourth row leaned forward with a grin. “Question for Hamish — you and this omega of yours that’s been taking Cassian around, are you an item, then? Asking for a friend.”
Hamish leaned into his microphone with a slow grin. “My relationship status is not the subject of this documentary,” he said. “But I would like to acknowledge that I have a very hot date tonight.”
He looked out into the audience, found Lysander in the third row, and his grin widened. A hundred heads swivelled in unison towards the dark-haired omega sitting with his arms folded across his chest and one eyebrow raised, and someone let out a wolf whistle that set the whole auditorium off.
The applause followed them off the stage and into a foyer that had been transformed while they were inside.
Someone had set up a drinks table and a row of finger food platters, and the audience was already streaming through the double doors in chattering clusters, clutching their programmes and angling towards Hamish.
Cassian stayed close to Lysander.
He’d done it on purpose, gravitating to the omega instead of the alpha. Six weeks ago he’d have been pressed against Hamish’s side before the stage lights dimmed, his chin tilted up towards the taller alpha, seeking protection. Tonight, Lysander’s sharp edges felt more useful than Hamish’s warmth.
Lysander pressed a wine glass into his hand without asking whether he wanted one.
He looked at the wine. The liquid was pale gold, beaded with condensation, and it smelled sharp, like it would probably contaminate his spiritual vessel. He took a sip. It was tart, cold and faintly sweet. He took another.