“Is it feeling any better? The knee?”
“Getting there.” He glanced back at me. “Slow.”
“You hate that,” I said. Not a question.
The corner of his mouth moved. “I hate that,” he confirmed.
“I’ll bet.” I turned my mug in my hands. “You’ve spent your whole adult life doing exactly what your body was told to do, on demand, without argument. And now it’s arguing.”
He looked at me for a moment. “That’s exactly what it is,” he said, like I’d described something he hadn’t found the words for yet.
We sat with that for a moment, comfortable in the way of two people who had stopped needing to fill every silence.
“What about you?” he said. “Where would you go if you could go anywhere. Right now, tomorrow, no obligations.”
I didn’t have to think about it. “Scotland,” I said. “Specifically, a very small bookshop in Edinburgh that I’ve been dreaming of for years and never managed to get to. I want to spend an entire afternoon in it and then walk along the water and eat something I can’t pronounce.”
“Just the bookshop and the walk?”
“And the thing I can’t pronounce,” I said. “That’s non-negotiable.”
He smiled. “What about after Edinburgh?”
“Somewhere with very old libraries.” I looked at the ceiling. “I want to stand in a room full of books that are older than everything and feel that for a minute. That kind of accumulated human thought, all in one place.” I paused. “That probably sounds strange.”
“It doesn’t,” he said. “It sounds like you.”
I looked at him. He was looking back at me with that steady, open expression that I was beginning to understand was just how he looked at things he cared about, and the afternoon light flowed quiet and gold across the room, and the cats were purring, and I had not once looked at the time.
“What about you?” I asked. “Anywhere.”
He thought about it genuinely, which I appreciated. “Norway,” he said finally. “I want to see the northern lights. I’vebeen in enough dark places to know that the dark isn’t always the same, and I want to see that particular kind.” He paused. “And I want to be somewhere cold and quiet where nobody needs anything from me for about a week.”
“That’s very specific.”
“I’ve had time to think about it.”
“Norway,” I said. “And Scotland.”
“Could be the same trip,” he said, easily, like it was merely a practical observation.
I looked at my tea, which had gone entirely cold, and said nothing, and felt the warmth of the afternoon and the weight of what he’d just said sitting in the room together, and didn’t try to do anything about either of them.
At some point, I realized we had been sitting there for hours. The realization arrived with a quiet, two-sided feeling I did not entirely know how to handle. On one side, this is the best I have felt in a very long time. On the other, this was happening very fast, and I did not yet know where it was going.
Jasper checked his phone. Something shifted in his face. Not much. Just the small, inward pull of a man remembering he had somewhere to be.
“I should head out,” he said, and he sounded genuinely reluctant about it. “I’m on the schedule at Paige’s tonight.”
“Okay.”
Neither of us moved for a second. Then I made myself get up, because if I didn’t make myself get up first, I was pretty sure neither of us was going to.
I walked him to the door. He stopped and turned back to me. The hallway was narrow, and he was close, closer than he needed to be for the space. I could smell the faint clean scent of his soap and something underneath it that was just him, and I had to tip my chin up a little to look at him.
“Thank you for lunch,” he said.
“Thank you for the flowers.”
