Page 123 of Bare
'Strong topic.'
'My professor said I need more primary sources.'
'If you need them, come and see me. I've got a reading list.'
'Cheers, Mr Ashworth.'
'You can call me Neil. You've been calling me Mr Ashworth for over a year.'
'Force of habit.'
'Break it.'
Kieran grinned. The grin was Rory's, the same shape, the same angle. 'Cheers, Neil.'
At the end of the table, Beth was showing Freddie a diagram of a humpback's baleen. Freddie was explaining, with the authority of a six-year-old who'd been told by Rory, that mass distribution in whales was the same as mass distribution in paintings. Beth was sceptical. Freddie was insistent.
Across the table, Beth bent over the whale book to find a page. Freddie, for a fraction of a second, lost interest. His eyes left the book. They moved to Neil, then to Rory beside Neil, then to the space between them where Rory's arm rested along the back of Neil's chair. The expression was the one he had worn at five in the kitchen with the felt-tip and the purple whale-hat. He didn't bother to announce it. He turned back to Beth.
Neil had seen him see.
'They're going to be insufferable,' Rory said. Beside Neil. Wine in hand.
'They're going to be brilliant.'
'They're going to be insufferable AND brilliant. Which is the worst combination.'
'It's the best combination.'
'Says the one who's both.'
'I'm neither.'
'You're both. Insufferable in your precision and brilliant in your...' He stopped. 'In everything else.'
Late. Children asleep in the back room, Beth and Freddie on the same sofa, covered in the same blanket, the whale book open between them. The collie at their feet.
Adults at the table. Wine low. Candles guttering. Tess telling a story about the time Patrick's bread dough rose overnight and pushed the lid off the proving bowl and crawled across the counter like a science fiction creature. Patrick neither confirming nor denying.
Neil sat with his wine and felt the room around him. The people in it. Rory beside him, the arm on the chair, the ring catching candlelight. Tess and Patrick across the table. Kieran and Carol, heads together, Carol laughing at something on Kieran's phone. And in the back room, two children under a blanket with a book about whales.
Kieran and Carol left first. At the door, Kieran zipped his jacket, looked at Carol, then turned back. He found Neil, not Rory. Said it low, like a weight carried all evening, finally put down.
'Look after him.'
Then he was gone. Carol's hand in his. The door closed behind them.
Rory hadn't heard. He was in conversation with Patrick. Neil looked at the closed door for a moment.
The room contained his whole life. He'd planned a flat with a lock and a white wall and a mattress that held one. This life was unplanned. Built from paint and coffee and a staff meeting and a card in a wallet and a first kiss that landed off-centre and a painting called Bare and a child who saidyou're brave, Dadand a mother who saidbring himand a father whose hand had hovered and been met.
None of it was what he'd expected. All of it was what he'd needed.
Sunday morning. The flat. Their flat.
Neil woke at six. Internal clock, unchanged. Rory's arm across his chest. Above the bed, Bare. His own face, forward. Fourteen months of mornings and both were still the first things, the arm, and the painting that had made the arm possible.
He got up without waking Rory. Made coffee, the moka pot, the beans, the ritual. The hiss and gurgle in the kitchen. The smell filling the flat.
