Chapter Text
At nearly five o’clock, Robin had made it back to the office, bedraggled and tired from the constant rain. The man they'd been hired to follow had a habit of going for long walks while making phone calls, and Cormoran’s leg was simply not up to such abuse in the weather; Robin had been tailing him for most of the week.
She dropped her bag listlessly onto the couch, where it made a kind of squelching noise on the fake leather. Cormoran, restless behind Robin’s desk, where he’d been on the computer for hours, took one good look at Robin’s pale face, her slightly smeary mascara, and announced, “I feel like a drink at the pub is in order. You can tell me about Walkabout over a pint, I think we’ve earned it.”
Robin’s blank stare became one of worry. “Can we- afford that?”
“I got a call from an interested client,” he lied smoothly. “C’mon, I need to get out of this office.”
He followed her carefully down the treacherous stairs, reminding himself once more to call the landlord about getting the lift fixed, knowing he'd most likely forget once again. They walked silently to the Tottenham pub, when Robin shook out her coat while Cormoran ordered a pint of Doom Bar and a white wine.
Sitting across from her at a table, both of them sipping their drinks and not making much eye contact, Cormoran cursed himself for a fool. It had been so very different since-
“So how was Walkabout today?” he asked, tearing himself away from that line of thought with a vicious yank.
“Oh,” Robin said, looking over at him. “Well, the same as usual, I suppose.”
As they chatted carefully, staying on the topic of their single client, the office finances, Cormoran watched her hair dry back into its natural strawberry gold. He was sipping his pint slower than usual, trying to make sure he kept his head on straight.
It’s no good, only talking much to one person, he told himself. You need to get out, chat with some friends. But the thought of ringing up even Ilsa and Nick in his current state felt wrong, uncomfortable. He was no kind of company right now.
Pulling his attention back to what Robin was saying, he nodded and agreed with her that Walkabout was most likely not selling business secrets to his competitor, as their client had thought.
She coughed, quietly, and Cormoran felt a surge of guilt that she was the one out in the rain every day, paired with anger at his own injury and even, he had to admit to himself, anger that he was unable to protect her from someone so banal as the weather.
“Been feeling ok, then? Haven’t caught cold or such?” he asked diffidently, wary of seeming too solicitous, of making Robin think he thought her incapable of caring for herself.
“No,” she said, catching her breath and taking a sip- a gulp, really- of her wine. It was nearly empty. “Just a bit chilled. Feel as though I’m soaked through to my bones.”
He offered to fetch her another wine, which she accepted.
As they sipped their drinks and waited for the food to arrive, Cormoran lapsed into silence, carefully looking Robin over. She was distracted, shivering a bit, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have ordered them a pot of tea instead.
“So,” she said suddenly, snapping back into something like her usual self. “What was the new client interested in?”
“Ah,” Cormoran temporalized, “another wife looking to get rid of her husband, you know how these things go.”
Robin froze, her drink just touching her lip. Cormoran cursed himself for a fool. How could he have-?
“Anyway, she seemed a bit odd,” he invented, trying to break the thrumming tension. “Don’t know if she’ll call back, she seemed to be under the impression that I was going to use Rokeby’s fame to get into clubs and such to tail her man.”
Robin set down her glass, letting her fingers trail through the condensation on its rim. “That’s certainly not how we operate.”
“No, and I told her so. So we’ll see. But either way,” he said, realizing his excuse for taking them out had just been exposed as most likely unprofitable (on top of false), “either way, it sounds as if we might be getting more business soon enough. Perhaps it’s been long enough that we can rebuild our reputation.”
She seemed gratified by his use of “our,” which pleased him, as he’d done it on purpose. Since the day he’d fired her, he felt as if he was feeling his way through the dark, and Robin had the light but had no reason to share it with him. Now that they were in business together again, things were getting easier, but she hadn’t given herself over to that single-minded passion that had been so much a part of their earlier partnership. Cormoran missed it, though he would never say so out loud. It had been heartening, her unswerving belief in the rightness of their now-shared profession.
“I’ll be right back,” Robin said, picking up her bag and heading for the loo. Cormoran watched her go, her drying hair swaying down her back.
“I miss you,” he muttered into his pint, where no one heard him but the hops. Draining the glass, he stood to fetch himself another.
He returned just as she did, nearly tripping over her long legs as he turned to get round the table, and she laughed at the expression on his face, the bugged-out eyes and open mouth, as he prevented his pint from spilling onto his chips.
Looking at her eyes, bright for perhaps the first time that week, her cheeks no longer pale from the cold but her usual pink, her hair shining in the dim lights, her laugh ringing out as he’d not heard it in what felt like years, Cormoran could hardly stop himself from saying, “God, I love-”
She stiffened. He froze in panic for the most infinitesimal moment before finishing, “-the chips here, what a goddamn waste it would’ve been to spill my drink all over them. Watch your legs, then.”
She nodded, taking a bite of her own meal, but he could not help feeling that he’d nearly been caught out at something he had no rights to. He swore, as they made inconsequential chat over their food, that he would deal with his feelings, which were springing up as unruly and untamable as his hair. He was about as happy about one as the other.