Page 39

He’s quiet again, the particular weighing quiet that means he’s deciding whether something is worth the risk of saying. When he finally answers, his voice has dropped low enough that I have to lean in slightly to catch it.

“Because I made you toast once, badly, and you told me it was the loveliest thing anyone had done for you all week. I would like, one day, to make you toast that is simply the loveliest, without the badly attached to it. If the pause should ever end.” A careful pause of his own. “I did not think it worth mentioning until I had something actually worth offering you. I am not there yet.”

I have to look at the pavement again, for entirely different reasons this time, because that is possibly the most devastating thing anyone has ever said to me in the middle of a conversation about bread. I have absolutely no idea what to do with my face about it.

“I have a confession of my own,” I say, mostly to give my mouth something else to do. “You should probably know, before this goes any further, that I wrote your name on six coffee cups in a row. At work. By accident. Well. Accident the first time. I genuinely couldn’t tell you what happened for the other five.”

He looks at me with his full intensity for the first time since we started this whole exchange, something bright flaring behind the amber.

“Six,” he repeats.

“Felix found them lined up on the counter like evidence at a crime scene,” I admit, wincing at the memory of it. “I had absolutely no memory of writing a single one. It was, if I’m honest, deeply humiliating, being caught pining that visibly in front of my own boss.”

“I am not humiliated by it,” he says, entirely unbothered.

“You’re not the one who did it.” I give him a look. “Your only embarrassment is having your name written on six takeaway cups.”

“I would happily be written on considerably more than six cups,” he says, with the particular solemn gravity he reserves for sentences that absolutely should not be delivered that seriously. I laugh properly, the sound of it echoing slightly off the empty street.

“Did you eat the toast anyway?” I ask, once I’ve recovered myself, steering us back towards safer ground. “Even knowing it was terrible?”

“Most of it,” he says. “It seemed wasteful not to.”

“That’s very you,” I say, and mean it fondly, thinking of bread rolls eaten four at a time out of sheer determined politeness, of cheese consumed like it might be evaluated by an examining board. “Committing to the bit even when the bit is objectively terrible. I should introduce you to the commune’s approach to synchronised crying. You’d have thrived there. Terrible ideas, executed with total sincerity, is basically our whole brand.”

He doesn’t answer straight away, and the quiet that follows has a different weight to it than the easy sort we’ve been trading back and forth all evening. Something heavier settles in underneath it before he’s said a single word to explain why.

“I do not know what else to do with my evenings,” he says, quieter now, and something underneath the words has gone raw in a way I don’t think he meant to let show. “Before you, I did not require an occupation for the hours between duties. I simply existed in them. Now they are simply hours where you are not, and I find I do not care for the shape of them at all.”

I press my lips together, hard, because that is not a fair thing to say to someone three feet away from you who isn’t allowed to close the distance. I suspect he knows it isn’t fair, and has said it anyway, because days of restraint have apparently worn him down considerably further than he’d like to admit.

“You’re not supposed to say things like that,” I tell him, and it comes out somewhere between a scold and a plea.

“I am aware,” he says, not remotely sorry about it.

“We agreed.” I point at him, mostly to seem stern about it, which doesn’t especially work. “Pause means pause.”

“I have not touched you,” he says, with the particular careful precision of someone drawing a line exactly where he can defend it. “I have kept the letter of it entirely. I made no promises about my thoughts. I did not realise, when I agreed, quite how loudly they would insist on being had.”

“That feels like upholding the letter of the law but not the spirit,” I say, though I can’t entirely bring myself to mean it.

“It may be,” he allows. “I have limited experience with the rules of restraint. I am doing my best with an activity I was not designed for.”

“For the record,” I say, “I’m not exactly a natural at it either. Cheerful is my whole personality. I don’t have a setting for quietly pining by a park fence. This is new territory for both of us.”

I laugh again, properly this time, and the sound of it seems to loosen something in both of us, the tension easing back a fraction. Enough that I take one small step closer without properly deciding to. He doesn’t retreat, though I watch him very deliberately not close the remaining gap either, like a man standing at the very edge of something he’s promised not to fall into.

“Tell me something else,” I say. “Something that isn’t about me being difficult to stop thinking about. Give the toast a rest for a minute.”

He’s quiet for a moment. I recognise the particular shape of his quiet, this one that means he’s deciding whether a thing is worth the risk of saying out loud.

“I have been watching the couples in the park again,” he says eventually. “Not for the picnic this time. Simply watching. There is a bench near the fountain where an elderly pair sits most evenings. They do not speak a great deal. They simply sit, her hand in his, and watch the water.” A pause, careful, weighing something. “I did not understand it, the first several times I observed them. It seemed a poor use of an evening, to sit somewhere and do nothing at all.”

“And now?” I ask, quietly.

“Now I believe I understand it perfectly,” he says. The amber of his eyes does the thing it does, flares bright and sudden before settling. I feel the whole of it land somewhere behind my ribs with considerably more force than a comment about a park bench has any right to carry. “I would very much like to sit somewhere with you and do nothing at all. I did not know, before you, that nothing could be the thing I wanted most.”

“That’s an outrageous thing to say to someone you’re not allowed to hold hands with,” I tell him.