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These days the Archive just takes and takes and takes, and Jon is finding it harder and harder to keep bits of himself back, parts that he can hold in his hand and know are his without the influence of -
Of anything else.
He should stop going, really. If he had any dignity, any self-respect, any self-preservation, he would stop going and get a job somewhere normal. Somewhere that doesn’t want to eat his soul. But every morning he gets up and wraps his scarf around his scarred face and catches the tube to the Institute, as though he hasn’t any choice. Maybe he hasn’t. Elias was unclear. But Jon feels like he knows, somewhere under his skin where all the blood is, that he can’t really leave. It’s like Tim. Tim’s almost entirely stopped working, and now skulks around the building looking increasingly manic and holding long, threatening tools in his hands.
Before Jon goes in through the door, he has a cigarette, leaning against the green-painted fence, watching mildly as the little amber bud at the end eats itself down to the orange filter. One benefit to looking as though he’s played football to a lot of gods that want to hurt him is that the physical side-effects of going back to a pack or two a day are almost unnoticed, and even his fingernails remain white and untouched apart from the bitemarks down to the quick. Fingernails? What fingernails. Hah. The cigarette does what it can to stop his shaking, and once it’s burnt to the filter Jon drops it, crushes it beneath his heel, and hopes nobody has seen him littering. He figures he’s earned it.
Inside, going down to the basement Archive, the aura in the Institute turns from mild-private-library to oppressive-personal-prison. Jon taps his foot on the floor. He is tired, but he does not sleep. His eyes burn but he does not blink. He can’t remember if he dressed this morning, or if he’s been wearing these clothes for several days now, or even where he went when he left work yesterday evening.
He used to disassociate, when he was a child, and it would frighten his grandmother badly. A thin, narrow boy standing at his window, staring out through the speckled single-glazing for hours and hours, looking at nothing. Or was it minutes? It was childhood dissociation, the sort of thing that happens to things that haven’t stopped growing. It happened a few times in university when the stress got too much for him and he just shut down. It’s happening now. Jon sometimes closes his fingers in the top drawer of his desk, just to remind himself that the flesh that moves and feels pain is his own, still.
He walks to his office. The click-click of filmy tape recording is a reassuring background noise; there are tape recorders everywhere, now, but Jon knows he isn’t buying them. Thinks he knows. He knows Martin blames Elias, and he knows Tim blames him, and he knows Basira hasn’t noticed yet because she hasn’t started noticing things like that yet. She doesn’t remember what it was like when this place was -
Well. A workplace.
“Good morning, Jon,” says Martin, in the voice he’s begun using recently. Delicate. Careful. Like Jon is an unfamiliar pet in a shop that Martin wants to coax into the cardboard box he’s holding, so he can take it home with him. Him. Jon. The comfort of care.
“Good morning,” Jon says, in a voice he hopes is normal.
"How was your - how was your night?" They're walking along the hall, Jon's office at the end of their conversation quickly dawning, but he doesn't want to be alone with the statements, and he doesn't want to endanger Martin with his voice. Compulsion.
"Good," Jon says, and searches through his mind for normal things to enjoy. "I watched… um… television."
He doesn't want the conversation to end. Ask ask ask. But what if you compel him?
"A-and you?" Too late.
Martin, if he picks up on the odd beat of conversation, doesn't mention it. "It was okay. I got a Chinese. Slept okay."
“Good,” says Jon, and if he stammers Martin mustn’t notice. This is the longest conversation he’s had with someone that isn’t words on paper in a week - he hasn't seen Georgie although he doesn't know why, and in the absence of that knot keeping him tethered to the rest of the world, Jon has floated blankly and uncaringly into the vast emptiness of everything else. “Good,” he says again. “I’m glad.”
At the door of his office they part, but Martin leaves with a pat to Jon’s shoulder, four points of contact through his shirt, and his skin burns red and sensitive with the lack of having been touched. All morning he feels it, his hand placed on the ball of his shoulder, as though Martin’s still rests there, as though he can make the feel of the touch last longer. The tape recorder flickers, and there is a statement lying on his desk. There is always a statement lying on his desk. When did it arrive? Who delivered it?
Martin touched his shoulder.
At some point, there is a knock on the door, and it’s Melanie coming in armed with two boxed sandwiches in their thin cardboard wrap, and two cups of tea in the mugs Martin prizes so dearly, free company mugs and chipped novelty mugs and plain white mugs from Tesco for fifty pence. He washes them, somehow. Jon thinks he might be taking them home and back again. Melanie’s mug says GKH Preservation Conservation, with a little cartoon scroll on it, and Jon’s mug says World’s Best Boss!! , although the writing is starting to rub off. The tea is just how he likes it. Melanie hands him a sandwich and her thumb brushes his knuckle and he tries very hard not to flinch.
“Martin says you were here at seven,” she says neutrally, after several minutes - or only a second? - sipping tea in silence.
“That means Martin was also here at seven, and you aren’t interviewing him,” Jon says. Martin made the tea. He’s the only one who puts one and a half sugars in, instead of two.
Melanie raises her eyebrows. “Martin lives here. You don’t. Yet.”
“I have a good work ethic,” Jon says lamely.
“You’ve been wearing that shirt for three days.”
Jon plucks at it, and then sighs. “Why do you care?”
“I don’t, but Georgie does,” Melanie sets her mug down, and the tea is gone, which means they must have been talking for a lot longer than Jon thought. “She texted me and she’s worried and she has the good luck not to work with you, so here I am getting saddled with it. She said you’ve been ignoring her when you go back to the flat. And sometimes you don’t go back. Where were you last night?”
“I don’t know,” Jon says honestly. He wonders if Melanie pities him, and he wonders if that irritates or soothes him. “I can’t remember. I saw Georgie-”
“Last week, Jon,” Melanie bites. She stands and her mug stays on the desk. So does one box of sandwiches. “Go home tonight. Apologise.”
As she leaves, she touches his elbow, and the shock of the burning skin against his leaves him slumped in his chair long after the door closes behind her. He’s acutely aware of the passage of time, of the clock Martin hung above his door to help him when the natural light stops filtering down through the skylights in the basement ceilings. Now there are four shining dots, fingerpad to skin, on his shoulder, and two on his elbow, so thoughtless and freely given that Jon feels unmoored from the oddness that swallowed him whole. If he knows everything, how does he know what he sees from the body he is in, and what he sees from the bodies that walk everywhere else?
He wonders if he’s ever known anything, really. He, Jon, and not He, Archivist.
It has been two hours, thirty-four minutes, and eleven seconds since Melanie left, and finally Jon’s stomach cramps in what could have been hunger back when he was human. His hand is shaking too hard to open the sandwich, but finally he tears through the thin plastic with his teeth, and although it is dry and tasteless he eats it feeling a touch on his elbow, and the passage of time smooth over his skin once more, second after second the way it should be.
He gets home on the Tube, although recently he’s been reading more statements that give him second-hand claustrophobia, the shaking fear that he will get in and not out again. The lights are on and the adverts are comfortingly mundane, a sign telling him to mind the gap, another telling him to buy a particular kind of vegan chocolate bar, another with a little two-line poem by a British creator. It is, apparently, National Poetry Month, although Jon isn’t sure what month it is. He forgets the date when he isn’t reading statements.
Georgie is in the flat when he gets in, leaning against the countertop and bobbing a teabag in the mug that has a shiny gold G on the front. The Admiral is purring happily in her arms, and she’s on the phone to someone, her back to Jon, facing out the window, so the cat sees him before she does.
“Georgie?” He asks, and she yelps and the Admiral leaps from her grasp.
“Jon, holy fuck,” she turns around and he sees in the drawn resignation of her cheeks that she didn’t expect him. “I mean - god, where have you been?”
“I don’t really know,” he says, and even he can hear how oddly detached his voice sounds. “I’m - sorry, Georgie, I really am. Things have been. Things have been slipping away, recently. I didn’t mean to-”
“I know,” she says. She’s wearing some merch from Melanie’s old show, GhostHunt UK embroidered on the pocket of a blue t-shirt with a classic-horror ghost face beside it. “I know you didn’t mean to. You never mean to. Just - stay here, tonight. And come home tomorrow.”
Jon makes dinner, a creamy pasta with all the vegetables he can find in the fridge, and then makes Georgie a hot chocolate and goes to bed early. Just as he does, she grabs his wrist, and he finds his whole body freezing in response to the touch, all his skin rushing back to cling to his muscles and bones, his sense of self suddenly centering around those places where her fingers touch his arm. “Wait - wait.”
“Georgie?” He manages to say, his skin on fire, little ghostly bugs of sensation crawling down his arms and raising the airs there. “I - what?”
“I’m glad you’re home,” she says, with a sort of intensity that surprises him. Jon has become used to everyone in his life sort of… blandly accepting the way he is now. “Come back tomorrow night. Promise me you will.”
“I promise,” he says.
She lets him go, and he sleeps with his fingers touching his wrist, and for once he has dreams that are entirely his own.
The woman’s name is Max Benson, and she had refused to come to his office to meet him, so Jon is here now, setting the tape recorder in the middle of the table, a small ceramic espresso mug at his elbow as she twitches and frights in the corner of the little Costa just around the corner from the Institute. She is tall, and thin, but not naturally so, and she would be pretty if she slept and had a few square meals. Her hair hangs, lank and unwashed, over her pale, plastic face. “Thank you for meeting me here.”
“Thank you for contacting us,” Jon replies, awkwardly caught off-guard by the gesture. He isn’t sure when it became normal for the current statement-givers to approach him with belligerence, but this is a nice change.
Statement of, taken by, date. Archivist. It’s a struggle for Jon to remember to pin the Institute’s name to his, but it feels as though he’s outgrown it somehow, as though the Institute and he are two creatures being sewn together in some Frankensteinian experiment doomed to feel nothing but pain. The Archivist is a phrase he can’t bring himself to accept, yet.
Max Benson babbles desperately to him for twenty, almost thirty minutes about the darkness she’s seen following her, always reflected in the mirrors she passes but never there when she turns around. Apparently, it’s been swallowing people she thought she knew, and now when she sees their image reflected they’re black shapes, voids where light refuses to fall, shadows without substance. Her fingernails are ragged, and her foot bounces, and she chews so hard on her mouth that a scab in the corner bursts and red trickles into the little valleys and divots of her chapped lips. She blinks frantic.
But Jon can feel it, as she tells him - as she tells the tape recorder - that the Dark is falling from her words and filling him up with new knowledge of it. It won’t stop following her, of course. But now a part of her is his.
“Statement ends,” he tells the recorder, and with a slim finger switches it off. It switches back on almost immediately, but it’s the thought that counts.
Max looks exhausted. “I - I feel better,” she tells him, accepting the little shot of coffee he pushes over the table to her. “I - thank you. Everyone else I’ve told has called me mad. My girlfriend - she thinks we should see other people. Thank you.”
“We’ll look into it,” Jon promises, ill at ease with the thanks. “I - do you want me to get your contact details? I can’t - well, I can’t say we’ll find anything helpful, but we might find-”
“Here,” clumsily, Max writes a series of blotchy numbers on the napkin folded on the table, and presses it into Jon’s hands. “Ring me if you - well. Yes. I - thank you.”
And she hugs him, right there in Costa, and Jon can feel his body screaming, points of contact too many to name burning red and hot as her arms wrap around his sides, her hands patting his back through his jumper. Her face is pressed against his neck. For a moment, his legs feel weak, and he wonders if he might actually fall over and cause a scene, but instead he hugs her back, skinny arms around skinny shoulders, and presses his chin to the side of her head. He can feel her pulse throbbing in her temple, and he wonders how long she has gone without human contact, with the Dark following her through mirrors, with her mind falling out of its home. She smells of people, and coffee, and unwashed hair. She feels bony and cold.
They leave together, and hug again as they’re parting at the bus stop. “Thank you,” she says, and ducks her head, cheeks bright scarlet.
Jon is left standing at the bus stop, completely aware of the skin he is wearing and the time of day. He gets back to the Institute and greets Melanie with such cheer that she pins him down with suspicion in her eyes for the rest of the day.
As soon as he works out what’s going on, he can’t help himself, like a stray cat wandering pitifully through the rain. Touch keeps him human, takes him away from the pull of the Watcher, and touch keeps him tethered to one state - one form - one time. But he doesn’t want to initiate. He sees Martin fold Basira into a hug, he sees Georgie stroking the Admiral along his arching spine, he sees even Tim, scuttling through the tunnels, greet Daisy with a sort of complex handshake full of posturing and touches - aggressive, but touch all the same. He sees Melanie lean her chin against Basira’s shoulder to read what the other woman is holding. He sees Martin - always Martin - with a friendly smile, a clasped shoulder, a hug to the side, a touch to the waist, fingers brushing as mugs are swapped around. Squeezing through doors. Claps on the back.
Jon watches. That’s what he does best these days.
“I’m worried about Jon.”
“You’re always fucking worried about Jon,” Melanie says. “He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”
Martin sucks his lip into his mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “I’m not sure he can. You should have seen him a few months ago. He - when Tim went really nuts, before he left the Archives. He was a mess but he’s even worse now. I don’t think he’s talking to anyone, and you said he’s stopped going home some nights.”
Melanie shrugs. They’re sitting on opposite sides of Martin’s desk, going over quite a horrid statement about a man who has stopped being able to see faces, just smooth expanses of skin where the features once were. “Georgie says he’s started up again. I talked to him. He started. End of story.”
“Yeah, but…” Martin feels the twinge of teeth burrowing into the lip, and stops before he draws blood. “I don’t think he’s okay. Reading too much of them drains him even if it does give him - energy, in small doses. I thought he was gonna collapse the other morning.”
“So what?” Melanie says, and burrows behind her copy of the case file, humming a tune that means she doesn’t want to keep talking.
But Martin is worried about Jon.
Jon arches away from him, like a cat, when they find themselves in the lift together going down to the basement in the morning. It’s nine, a sensible time for someone to head to work, and Martin is riding the high of having only had one nightmare during the night - and the high of seeing Jon so early, in a rust-coloured jumper, the beige collar of an undershirt poking out through the rounded neck of it. His eyes are set deep in his head and his hair is shooting further with grey the more Martin looks at him, but at least he’s put it up today. When Jon is having a bad day he forgets to tie it up, forgets sometimes to brush it, and his streaky grey-black hair falls to his shoulders like some shitty Aragon cosplay. But today it is up in its usual bun, little strands falling down over his cheeks, resting on the rim of his glasses, and Jon looks a lot more alive than he usually does, even if he is crammed into the corner.
“Good morning,” Martin says cheerfully. Dependable Martin. Martin, avatar of the Fucking Normal.
“Good- ah. Good morning, Martin,” Jon says. His stammer is worsening by the day, although when he reads statements it flattens completely from his voice. “I - ah. I hope you, I hope you slept well.”
“Actually, I did,” Martin sways on his feet as the old lift finally clunks into action, “And - did you?”
“Um. I think so,” Jon says. He sounds so lost that Martin can’t keep any of the old anger, the old irritation in his body. Jon didn’t want this any more than they did.
“You should try recording yourself sleeping,” Martin suggests, as the lift swoops in his stomach, the light filtering away from the crack in the door. “Then you can listen to it in the morning and see how many hours you got. I used to do it when I was a teenager. I had - yeah, I had mad insomnia, but it went away.”
“I should,” Jon says, looking at Martin like he’s had some wholly new idea, like he’s a genius. “I - yes. That might help. I - I. Thanks.”
On their way out of the lift, Jon tries to go first, like a scuttling little beetle, but Martin is already halfway through the door and they collide, Jon’s face pressed into the soft plastic waterproofing of Martin’s puffa coat. Martin can smell, for a brief second, old paper and bedlinens and bitter chocolate and coffee, all the small indulgences that make Jon more human than not. Jon has frozen in place, one foot in the lift, one foot out. The rim of his glasses presses into Martin’s skin.
Apologising awkwardly, Martin is the one to wriggle away from it, but as he looks back he sees Jon framed in the lift, his eyes wide and bright and his skin flushed dark.
He all but bolts to his office, and has never been happier to see Daisy there.
But then it keeps happening. Martin is not an unobservant man, and he sees the way Jon cringes away from and craves the touch of others, even Elias when he comes down to irritate them with his I Am The Eye And You Should Fear Me nonsense. Martin sees how Daisy slings an arm around Basira, how Melanie kisses Georgie on the cheek, how even he is the recipient of a thousand little touches every day that Jon is somehow missing, somehow repelling.
And Martin sees the dazes Jon gets into sometimes. The way he will look at his fingers, as though wondering how much force it would take to separate one from his body. The way he will pluck at his skin like he wants to peel it away and spread it out, just another medium for the words. The way he stands still, swaying on the spot with his hands clutching his arms, hugging himself, dislodged from conventional time and fighting to get back into it.
Martin wants to experiment.
More than anything Jon wonders if he’s been obvious, and the thought makes him so angry at himself that he doesn’t go to work for a week, and instead shuts himself up with fourteen brown paper case files and the Admiral and a kettle that plugs into the wall and five packs of cigarettes, reading them until his throat hurts, until his eyes burn and when he rubs at the tears there his skin comes away burnt red, smelling coppery. He doesn’t touch a single soul, and when eventually the rope around his neck leads him back to the Institute, he is so unmoored he can no longer see where he’s going.
“Jon? Jon? Are you okay?”
And Martin touches him, lightly on the back, and with a rushing thump all of the Jon that has spread out into the world to watch comes rushing back into him. The impact from all sides sends him bouncing into Martin, right into his side, and Martin -
Lifts an arm and pins him there, so Jon can no longer move. The skin keeps him trapped inside himself.
He gasps, like a drowning man lifting his head above water for the first time in minutes, feeling the hot sun on his hair.
“You don’t look okay,” Martin says, looking down so he can peer into Jon’s eyes, his face drawn with worry. “Did you - I mean, were you travelling? We didn’t. I didn’t. Um, you were gone for a week.”
“I didn’t know,” Jon says and it is enough the truth that it doesn’t hurt to say. “Oh, Christ.”
He can no longer properly walk, so Martin (humiliation of humiliation) parades him through the little gathered rank of archival assistants and hangers-on that have collected in the main office, an arm slung around his neck. He drapes Jon on the worn red sofa at the back of the room, and presses a hand to Jon’s forehead and the overstimulation of it all makes Jon want to scream.
“Is he okay,” Daisy says flatly. It isn’t a question and there isn’t any worry in it.
“He’s not dead,” Melanie observes, like Jon is an injured animal post-surgery, a curiosity that can’t move on his own away from poking fingers. “Where did you find him, Martin?”
“In the street,” Martin says, and tosses a pack of cigarettes her way. “Trying to light one of these, but I don’t think he should have any.”
“He’s fucked,” Basira says from over the top of the book in her lap. “His lungs are not going to be what kills him. Let him have the smoke.”
(From the tunnels under the office, Tim, listening to the echoes through the pipes, smiles. His lungs are not going to be what kills him.)
“That’s not why I don’t think it’s safe. I found him holding this-” Martin holds up the spider’s lighter for them to see- “And trying to set fire to his mouth. Something’s gone wrong.”
“Oh dear,” Daisy says in the same flat monotone. “Poor Jon.”
Jon decides he’s listened to enough of it, and curls up as best he can on the sofa, holding his knees, his eyes closed as if that makes any sort of difference.
It never does. He hasn’t slept restfully in -
Probably since this whole thing started.
But then Martin backs up, so the back of his thigh is just about touching the top of Jon’s knee, and he’s falling asleep so fast he can see the vastness of unconsciousness rushing up to meet him, a man jumping from something to somewhere else without a tether.
“He’s asleep,” Tim says, and he sounds shocked. “He’s fucking asleep.”
“Martin did it,” Melanie points. She’s grinning. “I thought he didn’t sleep. I thought he was the Watcher or whatever the fuck.”
“He doesn’t,” Martin says, looking down at Jon’s twitching face, his mouth half-open in sleep. The surprise of Tim actually making it above sub-basement level isn’t even enough to make any of them forget the gently snuffling Archivist on the sofa, occasionally shifting a little closer to Martin, who’s perched on the arm of it closest to Jon’s head, his fingers gingerly resting on Jon’s cheek. “He doesn’t - he told me, a few weeks ago, but I don’t know if he’d remember. Said he was getting as much as he needed to survive but no more. Said it was part of turning into the Archivist. You can’t know things if you’re asleep.”
“Well, why is he asleep, then?”
“Martin did it,” Melanie says again. She turns back to her case. “We all saw him do it. Maybe it’s the power of lo- oh. Sorry, Martin.”
Martin shrugs, even through the sting. At this point it’s barely even an open secret anymore - just an open thing oozing cruel potential into the air. Elias has already lorded it over him, and back when it was all normal and he, Tim, and Sasha used to go for pints down at Old Man’s Hat, the pub just around the road, it was even fun. Sasha and Tim used to gently take the piss over cards, and imagine who would take who’s name. Now nothing is a joke. Everything is a new eggshell to be trod upon. “‘S okay. It isn’t that, though.”
Jon makes a noise and his hands briefly flail, one of them tucked into his chest, the other loose, an unpinned flag. It lands on Martin’s leg and immediately settles and Martin can hear Melanie giggling behind her folder.
“Woah,” Tim says. “Fucking colour me surprised, mate. The All Knowing Master of Fate has a weakness.”
“I think he’s just tired,” Martin says defensively, but he doesn’t move Jon’s hand, and he doesn’t move from the arm of the sofa. Jon sleeps and they can all practically see the bruises leech away from the underneaths of his eyes. Basira brings him a case to read, and Daisy, horror of horrors, makes the tea.
Jon sleeps.
Where is he? Where am I? Who am I? He is on a bus, heading through Sydney towards the suburbs, where his mom lives. He is walking along a road in Bhubaneswar, where his brother waits so they can run home together. He is sitting on the end of a jetty in Minnesota, dangling his feet in the water to cool them, freshwater shrimp nibbling at his dry skin. He is in Hong Kong, fighting his way through the crammed mass of bodies to get back to his wife, who told him he should stop being so late home from work. He is asleep on a boat, bobbing in fishing waters off the English Channel. He is picking apples with his sister, on a farm in Bedfordshire, although the language they talk in is not one the English do, and it reminds him of the warm, humid summers at home. He is petting a rabbit in the shop, cooing because he has not yet learned to speak. He is stressed, he is relaxed, he is in love, he hates desperately, he needs to use the loo, he’s about to crash his car, he’s about to fall asleep, he’s about to have his first kiss, he’s about to divorce his husband, he’s about to marry his wife, he’s about to die, he’s about to be born, he’s - He is-
“I don’t actually know where Georgie lives and I didn’t want to ask Melanie, so I brought you here,” he is hearing, with two ears that are his own, attached to a body that is his only because it is nobody else’s.
Blindly he pulls his way to the surface. Hands claw out of his eye sockets, scrabbling for grip, and haul his mind away from the vast nothingness of everything, and he comes to gasping. “What-”
“I’m sorry,” says Martin, his earnest face shining like the moon on a dark night. “It’s eleven at night. I didn’t want to leave you in the Archives until morning with only Tim there, just - well. Just in case..”
Jon is lying on an unfamiliar sofa, and the noises of an unfamiliar street drift up through a window he’s never seen before. “I’m in your flat,” he says. “Why am I in your flat?”
Embarrassment tinges Martin’s words with a confidence that isn’t usually there. “I brought you here. You were - uh, you were walking but I don’t think you knew what I was doing. Um. Melanie had her van, from the Ghost UK thing, so she dropped us here. I didn’t think you’d want to take the Night Tube. Did - are you - I mean, I can walk you home, if you-”
“Thank you,” Jon says softly. He feels tired. Tired down to the bones.
He can’t really believe they’re all still his, and they all still belong to him. Somehow.
“I’ll make tea,” Martin says, all brittle and determined, and he vanishes through the door to a little kitchenette Jon can barely see past the frame.
He remembers, of course, having Martin touch his skin and feeling so fixed to his own body that his physical problems became real again, and his body suddenly had his mind back in it, to cash all those written checks for another few hours, for a travel, for a minute of unblinking knowledge. He remembers feeling safe. He hasn’t felt safe in a long time.
“So tell me.”
Jon hadn’t realised time had passed and he shakes himself, wriggles on the sofa, accepts the cup Martin hands him. One and a half sugars. “I’m coming loose.”
“I noticed,” Martin says. “Elias said you were changing.”
Jon gives him a tired smile. “I’m - it’s easier for me to know things, but I don’t always - I can’t always stay where I am when I do. I realised, I - I realised. When I’m - touching someone, then I know which body is mine. And I - well, I believe it keeps me human. Human er. I never meant to make you, you, uncomfortable, or - or, or aware of it. I thought - I thought I had it under wraps.”
“You fainted,” Martin points out, lips twisted upward. “Because I tapped you on the back.”
“Well. All things in moderation,” Jon says.
“Moderation, not starvation.” Martin sets his mug down on the coffee table and shuffles slowly over to Jon’s sofa. “Let me try something.”
Hands, laced together. Shoulders, pressed against one another, Martin broad and firm, Jon slender and knobbly. He has to regulate his breathing, counting the in-beats and out-beats, but his self remains firmly underneath his skin, somewhere between the flesh and the outside.
“I’ll hold your hand every day,” Martin says, like it’s simple. “And you won’t have to go anywhere.”
Jon takes a shuddery breath, and thinks it might be.