Chapter Thirty-Two
From: dane@
To: lysander.huxley@
Subject: Re: Podcast interview — professional enquiry
sander
yeah sure why not. sounds like it could be a laugh
im in london most weeks. theres a coffee place on duke of york square that does a good flat white if you want to meet there. whenever works, not fussed
ill shout
d
? ? ?
Cassian had been awake since five.
Lysander knew this because the floorboards in the Ledbury Road house transmitted sound with the fidelity of a concert hall, and Cassian’s morning routine, which had evolved from screaming declarations at the Melbourne sky to a slightly quieter but no less committed programme of stretching, padding to the bathroom, padding back, opening and closing his suitcase six times, and then sitting on the edge of his bed waiting for the house to wake up, carried through the joists with punishing clarity.
By six fifteen, Lysander heard the stairs creak. By six twenty, a cupboard door opened and closed in the kitchen below. Then another. Then a third, opened with more force.
Lysander pressed his face into Hamish’s shoulder and willed himself back to sleep.
“He’s up,” Hamish murmured into the pillow without opening his eyes.
By the time Lysander made it downstairs, Cassian had laid waste to the kitchen.
Every cupboard at his eye level stood open.
A box of granola sat beside a rejected bowl of cornflakes, a half-eaten banana that had been abandoned after two bites, and a jar of Diwa’s homemade calamansi marmalade that Cassian had opened, sniffed, and evidently found inadequate as it had been shoved right to the end of the island.
He was in one of Hamish’s flannels and a pair of Lysander’s joggers, holding a box of muesli at arm’s length.
“This has got bits in it,” Cassian complained.
Lysander filled the kettle. “It’s muesli, Cass. Muesli is made entirely of bits.”
“My muesli doesn’t have bits. Hamish gets me the one from Coles with the little clusters, and it doesn’t have bits of—” he shook the box and peered into it, “—tree in it.”
“Those are almonds.”
“I don’t like almonds.”
“Pick them out, then.”
“And the jam is wrong.” Cassian set the muesli down and reached for the jar of marmalade, turning it so Lysander could see the label. “This tastes like someone put oranges in jail, and that made them sourer.”
On any other morning, that line would have made Lysander laugh.
He’d have filed it away to text Stephen.
He might even have walked to the Tesco Express on Westbourne Grove and found something sweeter, because he knew Cassian’s palate, and that anything citrus or bitter got rejected with theatrical horror.
But this wasn’t just any other morning. Tomorrow he was going to sit down across a table from Dane Nordgren for the first time since their breakup, and his notebook lay open on the table with a page of talking points that he’d rewritten four times since yesterday, each version worse than the last. His handwriting had tightened into a cramped script that barely resembled his own, and the page was covered in crossings-out.
Cassian appeared at his elbow with the offending bowl of muesli.
“Sander, do you think Diwa would have strawberry jam? Not marmalade. Because marmalade isn’t jam, it’s an entirely different category of—”
“Have you checked the fridge?”
“I checked the fridge. There’s raspberry, but raspberry jam has seeds in it, and the seeds get stuck between my—”
“Then eat the granola.”
“The granola’s got coconut flakes, and I don’t like that.”
“Cassian.” Lysander set his pen down. “It’s half six in the morning.
Nobody else is awake. I am trying to work, and you’ve gone through every single thing in this kitchen and found a problem with all of it.
” He could hear his own voice climbing, and the reasonable part of his brain was sending frantic signals for him to stop talking, but the words were already out and building momentum.
“This isn’t your kitchen; it’s Diwa’s. He’s been feeding a sick partner and a newborn on four hours’ sleep a night, and now you’re standing here at dawn whinging about jam. ”
Cassian’s mouth opened to respond, but Lysander didn’t let him get there.
“God, Cassian. You’re being rude, and you’re whinier than a one-month-old baby.”
The kitchen went quiet and the brightness drained out of Cassian’s expression. It smoothed out into a careful blankness that Lysander recognised at once as the mask: an expression that said I understand, I’ll be smaller, I’ll take up less space, please don’t hurt me for needing things.
Cassian’s hands came together in front of his body, one wrist folded over the other, his thumbs pressing into his own scars. His shoulders drew inward. He didn’t look at Lysander.
“I’m sorry,” Cassian said softly. “I won’t bother you again.”
He turned and walked out without another word.
Lysander stood at the table with his pen in his hand, his talking points blurring on the page. His pulse was hammering, and beneath it was the sick awareness of what he’d just done.
Cassian had been awake since five in a house he’d never slept in before, eight weeks before he was due to give evidence in an inquiry into the worst interlude of his life.
He hadn’t been whinging about jam. He’d been trying to find one familiar thing in a kitchen full of things that weren’t his, and Lysander had snapped at him for it.
He put his pen down and went upstairs.
? ? ?
The guest room door was closed but not locked. Lysander knocked twice, paused, and opened it.
Cassian was perched on the edge of the bed with his hands flat on his thighs, his back very straight. His suitcase was open on the floor beside him, half-unpacked, and the room smelled faintly of Hamish’s aftershave from the flannel he was wearing.
He didn’t look up when Lysander came in. “I shouldn’t have said that to you,” Lysander said as he crossed the room and joined him on the bed.
Cassian’s hands pressed harder into his thighs. “You don’t have to apologise. I was being bad.”
“You weren’t being bad, Cass.” Lysander leaned into him, pressing their shoulders together.
“That was all me. I blew up at you when I should have been doing my job and taking care of you.” He knocked his knee gently against Cassian’s.
“You’re jet-lagged, you’re out of Australia for the first time, and you’re trying to eat breakfast in a stranger’s kitchen. Of course you’re a bit aggro.”
Cassian peeked up at him from beneath his pale lashes, flinching, waiting to find out whether the person who’d snapped at him was about to do it again.
He hated that he’d earned that look and the careful distance Cassian had put between them on the mattress. Cassian’s thumbs were rubbing nervously into the scars on his wrist.
He leaned over and kissed Cassian’s cheek. “Get dressed. We’ll go get you a pastry.”
Cassian’s smile spread slowly. “Yeah?”
“Yup.” Lysander stood and held out his hand. “Just you and me, Cass.”
Portobello Road was a ten-minute walk from Ledbury Road, and Lysander kept his arm around Cassian’s shoulders for every step of it. Cassian had gone quiet, processing rather than sulking, his gaze tracking the shopfronts and the early-morning delivery vans.
The café Lysander chose was called Proving Ground, and it was all polished concrete and brushed steel, with floor-to-ceiling glass across the frontage. Its menu was chalked onto a slab of black slate that hung from the ceiling on industrial cable.
Behind the counter, an alpha was laying out Chelsea buns on a wire rack.
He was enormous, towering above Lysander and absolutely packed with functional muscle.
His dark hair was cropped short and he had a face assembled from features individually too strong: heavy brow, wide jaw, an off-centre nose.
Somehow they worked together into an aggressively handsome whole.
His forearms, visible beneath rolled sleeves dusted with flour, were thick enough that the veins stood out like cabling.
Cassian pressed into Lysander’s side so hard that his hip bone dug into Lysander’s thigh.
Hamish had talked him through this on the long calls from Melbourne, describing the methods he’d been using to guide Cassian through encounters with unfamiliar alphas.
The flinch was involuntary, a full-body recoil hardwired by years of doctrine that cast every alpha as either a divine instrument or a threat, with nothing in between.
The trick wasn’t to force Cassian past it, but to give him something concrete to do with his hands and his voice, so that the part of his brain running the old programme got overridden by the part that was learning to function in the real world.
Lysander dug into his back pocket, pulled out a fold of notes, and pressed them into Cassian’s palm.
“Right,” he said, keeping his voice light. “I want one of those mushroom and cheese croissants, and a latte. Get yourself whatever you like.” He squeezed Cassian’s shoulder once and let go. “You can order.”
Cassian looked down at the money in his hand. His fingers closed around it, and he stood there for a moment, his weight shifting between his feet, before he lifted his chin and stepped up to be served.
The alpha glanced up from the Chelsea buns.
His nostrils flared in a quick, involuntary twitch that registered the scent of two male omegas in his space, and his gaze moved from Cassian to Lysander.
He didn’t stare or posture, or do anything remotely threatening.
But Cassian’s voice had already dropped into that low, tight register.
“Can I have a mushroom and cheese croissant, please,” Cassian said carefully. “And a latte.” His gaze slid sideways to the wire rack, where the Chelsea buns sat in a glistening row, their spirals glossy with sugar syrup. “And can I please have — what’s that?”
The alpha followed his gaze. “Chelsea bun,” he said. His voice was low and rough. “It’s got cinnamon, currants, and lemon zest. Glazed.”
“Yes,” Cassian said. “That, please.”
The alpha turned and began assembling their order. Lysander noticed the man’s limp when he crossed to the coffee machine, a hitch in his right leg that he didn’t bother disguising, his weight favouring the left with each step.
He set the espresso portafilter into the group head, tamped it, and twisted it into place. Then he leaned back towards the pass and bellowed, “Raf — front!” in a voice that carried clean through the café and rattled the chalk menu on its cables.
Cassian’s whole body flinched sideways into Lysander. His shoulder drove into Lysander’s arm, his hand finding his wrist and gripping it with fingertips that went immediately white.
The alpha caught the flinch. His mouth pressed shut, and he dropped his gaze.
“Sorry,” he muttered, already turning back to the machine. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
He hunched his shoulders forward as he worked, curling himself inward in a way that was clearly intended to make six-foot-something of packed muscle seem less imposing.
It didn’t work. The man was roughly twice Cassian’s width, and no amount of shoulder-rounding was going to change the fundamental geometry of the situation.
But the effort was there, and Lysander was grateful for it.
A young beta emerged from the back, took one look at the alpha’s face, and slid behind the counter without a word.
The alpha set their order in front of Cassian: the mushroom and cheese croissant wrapped in paper, the Chelsea bun on a small plate, and Lysander’s latte in a ceramic cup that was slightly too large for the saucer beneath it.
“Eight sixty,” he said, directing it at a point slightly to Cassian’s left rather than at Cassian himself.
Cassian reached into the fold of notes Lysander had given him and pulled out a fifty-pound note, laying it flat with both hands as though presenting a sacred document.
The alpha studied the note.
“Cass.” Lysander leaned in. “What’s a better note to use? Something closer to the price.”
Cassian’s brow furrowed. He retrieved the fifty carefully, smoothing it back into the fold, and thumbed through the remaining notes. His teeth caught his bottom lip as he selected a ten-pound note and slid it across the counter.
The alpha took it, opened the register, and counted out a small pile of coins, spacing them apart so each one was visible.
“Count the change, Cass,” Lysander said.
Cassian gathered the coins into his palm and held them close to his face, turning each one between his thumb and forefinger.
“Twenty cents,” Cassian said. “And twenty cents. That’s forty.”
“Pence,” Lysander said. “They call them pence here.”
Cassian looked up. “Why?”
Lysander shrugged, realising that he actually had no idea. “Just — because they do, Cass.”
“But why not cents?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what they’re called.”
Cassian turned to the alpha. “Why are they called pence instead of cents?”
The alpha’s hands stilled on the cloth he was wiping the counter with. “No idea,” he said.
Cassian picked up the next coin, a chunky gold-and-silver piece. “This is a dollar.”
“It’s a pound,” the alpha corrected.
“One pound forty.” Cassian’s chin lifted. “My change is one pound and forty pence.”
“Perfect,” Lysander said.
The alpha gave a single nod and Cassian smiled at him as he pocketed the coins.
Lysander carried the tray to a table in the far corner, away from the windows, where the concrete wall met the glass frontage at an angle that created a pocket of relative privacy.
Cassian slid into the seat against the wall, tucked his legs beneath him, and reached for the Chelsea bun before Lysander had even sat down.