Something in his voice. Not different, exactly. The same precision, the same economy. But the air in the room had a quality I couldn't name, something that hadn't been there before the phone call or had been there and I hadn't noticed it, and I didn't know which of those options was worse.
I pulled the shirt over my head.
It was too big. I knew it would be too big, Cross had at least a couple inches on me and broader shoulders, but knowing it and wearing it were different.
The fabric settled against my skin, and it smelled like him, clean soap and something underneath that, something warmer. I was standing in his bedroom wearing it while he stood in the doorway watching me, and I had nowhere to put any of this information.
I looked up.
He was looking at me in his shirt the way you looked at something you were trying not to have an opinion about, and not entirely succeeding. I could see the not-succeeding from here, and I had nowhere to put that either.
I held his gaze for one second.
Two.
He looked away first.
That had never happened before. In the months of Cross looking at me and me looking away first because I had things to do and not for any other reason, Cross had never once been the one to break it. I stood there with that information and the shirt and the clean soap smell and felt something shift in my chest that I was absolutely not examining.
"Let's go," he said, to the hallway, and turned and walked down it.
Leo was watching me from the floor with his warm brown eyes.
"Not a word," I said.
I followed Cross down the hall, and the whole drive home I sat in the passenger seat in his shirt thinking about the two seconds before he looked away.
The Ice Doc definitely hated my guts.
Right?
9
The car was very quiet.
This was a problem I had identified on the way to Cross's apartment last night and had apparently not solved, because here we were again, same car, same quiet, same Cross in the driver's seat doing nothing visibly but existing in a way that took up all available atmospheric space.
The morning was gray outside the windows. Boston doing its thing, overcast and self-contained, the streets not yet fully committed to the day.
My head was a four. Maybe a four and a half. I was choosing to consider this an improvement. I probably just needed coffee.
I was also choosing not to think about Cross's shirt, which I was wearing.
"So do you always kidnap patients," I said, "or am I special?"
Cross looked at the road.
"That's a yes to both," I said. "Interesting."
Nothing.
Why did I expect anything else?
I sighed and watched the city pass the window. A coffee shop with its lights on. A guy walking a dog who had opinions aboutthe pace. The same streets I’d been driven through in the dark, reversed now, making more sense in the morning.
"Your cat," I said.
Cross's jaw did something almost imperceptible. “Leo.”
