Chapter twenty-nine
Micah
I’ve made coffee I don’t particularly want and now I’m sitting at the small table and waiting.
He left a note. Gone to work. Back later.
The coffee beans are in the cupboard above the kettle.
Which I already knew, because I put them there, but the fact that he wrote it down means he was thinking about me while he was leaving, and I’ve been holding onto that for the last few hours like it’s the only solid thing in the room.
I’ve tried editing. There’s a new building I’ve been putting off starting, an abandoned textile factory in Bermondsey that I shot last week, and I’ve opened the files twice and stared at them and closed them again because I can’t make myself care about it right now.
I’ve made two coffees and drunk neither of them.
I’ve stood at his bookshelf and read the spines of things I’ve already read the spines of, running my finger along the history section the way I did that first night, except this time I’m not curious, I’m just doing something with my hands while my brain refuses to settle.
I know what he went to see this morning.
I don’t know what it’s going to do to him.
I don’t know, when that door opens, which version of Lennox is going to walk through it, and that not knowing is the specific quality of dread I’ve been living with since his phone buzzed at six and he got up quietly, trying not to wake me.
I pick up my phone. I put it down. I pick it up again and look at his name in my contacts for a while and then put it in my pocket because calling him is not something I’m going to do right now.
Whatever is happening in his head needs to happen without me managing it, and I know that, and I’m sitting on his sofa in his reading lamp’s light respecting that, and it is the hardest thing I’ve done in recent memory.
Which is saying something.
I look at the lamp. He has it angled slightly to the right, because that’s the angle that works for reading from the sofa, and I know this because I’ve watched him shift it without thinking every time he sits down.
A handful of days of watching him do things without thinking and I know his habits as if I’ve known him for years, which is either a sign of how much attention I pay to him or how little attention most people pay to anyone.
I hear the key in the outer door at half past seven.
I don’t move. I sit very still and I listen to his footsteps on the path, and then the sound of his key, and the door opening, and then he’s in the hallway, and I’m across the room before I’ve consciously decided to move.
He’s there. Still in his work coat, and he looks tired in the specific way he looked tired in those early weeks when I was watching him from the wrong side of things, the bone-deep tired of a man who has been carrying something heavy for a long time.
But there’s something else. Something in his face I haven’t seen before, or haven’t seen like this, not mixed in with all the conflict and the fighting and the years of being a particular kind of man.
Settled.
He looks settled.
We stand in the doorway and look at each other and I try to read everything his face is saying, and his face is saying more than I know what to do with, and neither of us says anything for a long moment, and then he reaches into his coat pocket.
He holds something out. Small. Metal. Catching the light from inside.
“I should have given you this already,” he says. “Sorry.”
I look at the key in his palm. Then I look at him. Then I look at the key again, because it’s easier to look at the key than at his face right now, and I reach out and take it.
It’s warm from his pocket.
I stand there holding it and I don’t say anything, because there is nothing to say that the key isn’t already saying.
It says I’ve made my choice. It says I’m not holding anything back from you anymore.
It says this is where you come home to, if you want.
It says I’m sorry it took me this long to get here, and it says I’m here now.
Something happens to my eyes that I’m not going to examine too closely. I blink. I look at the key. I blink again.
“Come in,” I say, which is not my flat, and we both know it, and he smiles at me in the doorway of his own home and steps inside.
He doesn’t take his coat off. He stands in the middle of the living room and looks at me with the settled thing still in his face and he says, “Get your jacket. We’re going out.”
“Out,” I repeat.
“To dinner. Somewhere decent. I want to take you somewhere decent.”
I look at him for a moment. “Is it safe?”
“We’re going somewhere nobody knows us.” He says it simply, like it’s already decided, like he’s been thinking about it on the drive home. “Far enough out that we’re just two people having dinner.”
I feel something in my chest uncurl that has been wound tight for longer than I can accurately measure.
“Okay,” I say.
I hurry to the bedroom and open my bag and stare at what’s in it with the specific panic of a person who packed for an indefinite stay at a man’s flat following a stalker incident and did not, at any point during that packing, think they would be going to a restaurant.
I have the Acne Studios shirt, the deep navy one with the good collar, which was technically packed as a contingency and is now earning its place. I could pair it with the dark slim trousers I also brought as a contingency because I always bring contingencies.
I grab both and quickly throw them on. I snap the top button, check the fall of it in Lennox’s bathroom mirror. The shirt is doing what the shirt always does, which is make everything else look intentional.
My hair, however, is staging some kind of protest.
I’ve had this hair my entire life, and right now the front section is refusing to go in any direction that makes sense, while the back has decided to do something that I did not request and cannot explain.
I find a travel-size Ouai texturising spray in the bottom of my washbag and apply it with the focused desperation of a man who knows he has three minutes.
I check myself in the mirror again. The mirror is small and slightly foggy at the corners, and does not show me at my best. At least, I hope that’s what’s going on with my reflection.
I tilt my head. Try the other angle. Put my hands through my hair one more time and it does exactly the same thing it was doing before.
Fine. The hair gods have spoken. This will have to do. I am accepting it with what I hope is grace and suspect is defeat.
I go back to the living room.
Lennox looks up from his phone. He takes in the shirt, the trousers, whatever my hair is currently doing, and something moves in his expression that isn’t quite a smile but is warmer than one.
“Ready?” he says.
“My hair,” I say.
He stands up. “It looks good.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “I thought you were against lying.”
“I’m not lying.” He picks up his coat from the hook by the door. “Come on.”
He takes me somewhere in Richmond I’ve never been.
The door is dark wood with a small brass handle, and when it opens, it lets out warmth and the smell of something with butter in it and the low particular hum of a room full of people having quiet conversations they don’t want overheard.
A man in his fifties, silver-haired, wearing a very good dark suit, steps forward to meet us.
“Bonsoir.” He looks at us both with the kind of professional warmth that manages to feel personal. “Do you have a reservation?”
“Lennox,” says Lennox.
The man checks his list, nods once, and holds out a hand for our coats. I shrug mine off and pass it over. Lennox unbuttons his slowly, the way he does everything, unhurried, and then the man takes them both, and we follow him between the tables.
It’s small in here. Maybe twelve tables, all of them occupied, the lighting low enough to be flattering and high enough to see by, a candle on each table doing something warm to everyone’s faces.
We’re shown to a corner, the best seat in the room, a small table with two chairs angled toward each other rather than opposite, and I sit down and look around and think, of course.
Of course Lennox would find somewhere like this.
The menus are handwritten on card. I look at mine and it’s short, which is always a good sign, eight or nine things only, written in English with the French underneath each one.
I read it properly once and then hold it and pretend to read it again because across the table Lennox is frowning slightly at his with the focused attention, and I find I’d rather watch that than know what’s on the menu.
“What are you having?” I say.
He doesn’t look up. “The lamb, I think.” He turns the card over, checking the back as if there might be more. There isn’t. “Or the fish.”
“Both are good options.”
He looks up then. “You’ve been here before?”
“No. But when a place is this fancy, you can tell.”
He chuckles and his eyes sparkle in the candlelight.
I set my menu down. “I’m going to have the fish.”
He puts his down too. “I’ll try the lamb.”
Our waiter is young, dark-haired, with the kind of posture that comes from being told about posture a great deal. He arrives at precisely the right moment, neither too soon nor too late, and he has a very small notebook.
“Are you ready to order, messieurs?”
Lennox leans back slightly in his chair, easy, unhurried, and says, without referring to the menu, “Le carré d’agneau, s’il vous pla?t. Saignant.”
The waiter nods. His pen moves.
I look at Lennox’s jaw when he says it, the specific shape his mouth makes on the French, and I file this new information away somewhere it’s going to do damage later.
“Et pour monsieur?” The waiter looks at me.
“The sole,” I say, entirely in English, because I have enough self-respect to know when not to compete.
“And to drink?”
Lennox picks up the wine list that I hadn’t noticed was there, glances at it for about four seconds, and says a name I don’t catch.
The waiter writes it down with the slight increase in attention that means it was a good choice, and then he leaves, and it’s just us and the candle and the other people’s quiet conversations and the sound of the room.
“You speak French,” I say.
“Poorly.” He straightens his fork a quarter inch. “I know enough to order in restaurants and apologize on public transport.”
“Your jaw does a thing when you say it.”
He looks at me. “My jaw.”
“It’s a good thing.” I pick up my water glass. “Don’t worry about it.”
Something moves at the corner of his mouth that he doesn’t let become a smile, and I feel the warm, settled, specific happiness of being someone who can do that to him.
The wine comes. The waiter presents the bottle to Lennox, who looks at the label, nods, and watches while a small amount is poured into his glass. He lifts it. Holds it to the candle for a moment. Drinks. Sets it down.
“That’s good,” he says.
The waiter pours for us both, the wine going deep red into the glasses, and then sets the bottle on the table and leaves, and Lennox picks his glass up and holds it across the candle.
I pick mine up.
We look at each other. Just that. Just the two of us in this small warm room in Richmond on a Thursday evening with the candlelight between us, and I think about all the rooms I’ve been in and all the evenings I’ve spent in them and how none of them, not one, has felt anything like this.
I touch my glass to his. The sound it makes is small and clear and perfect.
“What are we drinking to?” he says.
“This,” I say.
He holds my gaze. “This,” he agrees.
The key is in my jacket pocket. I can feel it there, warm from being close to me all evening, small and solid and real.
Just for this one night, I’m going to let myself believe it. That everything is going to be all right.