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“Oh, dayum,” says Gina, the first time she sees his mark. “Captain, is your husband walking around with the answer to that on his wrist?”
Holt glances reflexively down at the bright silver lines as he settles work cufflinks #3 into their box and snaps the lid shut.
“Yes,” he says, opening the box of the meeting-a-superior-officer cufflinks and easing them free of the velvet. He doesn’t want to discuss Kevin’s mark, even with Gina.
“Cute for you, having literally only one possible person who could ever be your soulmate,” says Gina, planting her palms on his desk and leaning forward in a transparent attempt to get a better look. “Takes all the fun out of it, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t.”
“Sure. But hey, Captain, did he, like, have to try and Jeopardy that shit? Poor guy.”
“I’m sorry?”
Gina blinks three times. Each is slower than the last.
“Oh, you mean you’ve never heard of Jeopardy?”
“That could not have been more obviously implied, Gina. Please explain what you mean.”
Gina stares down at him for a long moment.
“No,” she says, eventually.
“Gina.”
“Sorry, Captain, guess you’ll just have to watch it. After your meeting, of course.”
She is correct: if he doesn’t leave now he will be less than fifteen minutes early.
He resigns himself to the lengthy process of identifying and locating an unknown show, and heads for One Police Plaza.
***
“Thank-you, Ray,” says Deputy Commissioner Aggerton, standing to shake his hand. “Very impressive work, as usual. Anything else I can do for you?”
Aggerton is less strictly formal than he would like in a Deputy Commissioner, but he has always been generous with his time and his advice. Holt hesitates. It’s entirely possible that Kevin may not have heard of Gina’s television show either.
Or that he has, and will think less of him for his ignorance.
“I do have a question, Deputy Commissioner,” he says, folding his reading glasses and slipping them into his left pocket.
Aggerton waves his wrinkled hands expansively. “Go ahead. What’s wrong?”
“Have you ever heard of a television show called Jeopardy?”
***
“A game show,” says Kevin slowly.
“Yes.”
“In which the contestants are given answers, and must provide the questions.”
“Yes.”
Kevin cocks his head a fraction, his mouth drawn up on one side. His sleeves are painstakingly rolled to the elbow. There is flour on his fingers, flour on his palms, and flour speckling the bright copper numbers on his wrist. Raymond wants to kiss him until his cheeks flush blotchy red.
Regrettably, he’s still in his uniform, and he can hardly risk floury fingerprints for his detectives to gossip over tomorrow.
“And who put you up to this?” Kevin asks, depositing the dough in the banneton and washing his hands with brisk efficiency. Raymond can smell the bergamot in the hand-soap. “Your… detectives?”
“Gina Linetti.” He picks up the hand-towel, offering it as Kevin turns the water off. To his surprise, he receives a fleeting kiss on the cheek in return. “My personal assistant,” he adds, to cover his smile. Decades of careful self-restraint allow him to resist the urge to touch his cheek without even thinking about it: he’s not fourteen, and Kevin wouldn’t be impressed by mawkishness.
“Yes, I remember Miss Linetti,” says Kevin, smiling back, and Raymond can’t help but reach out to catch his hand, pull him close, brush a thumb over the dark golden mark. Six nine dot three two eight five six three one, he thinks in satisfaction when Kevin shivers, then forces himself to drop his wrist before things get out of hand.
“I should change,” he decides, with some reluctance. “For dinner.”
“And after dinner?” They are still stood very close. It would be inane, even absurd, to say that Kevin’s eyes are glittering. It must be some difference in their angle to the kitchen lights making them look that way.
“After dinner,” says Raymond, “Jeopardy.”
Kevin nods. The angle of his chin is challenging.
“And after Jeopardy?”
He wants another kiss. He wants to touch the mark again, six nine dot three two eight five six three one.
“After Jeopardy,” he says, teasing just a little, “it seems only fair that you choose what we should do.”
Kevin does not smile, but he manages to look smug anyway. His husband, Raymond reflects, is a man of many highly specific talents.
“Dinner is at half past,” says Kevin. “Go and change.”
It’s just as well. Even without the risk of flour stains, Kevin always seems more relaxed once he rids himself of the uniform. He changes into white cotton with an English spread collar and a burgundy sweater, and then, without thinking, rolls the left sleeve of both back a little.
The silver equation on his skin, careless notation in a childishly uneven hand, remains as obscure, as totally abstract as ever. It’s as much a part of him as his eyes, but it could hardly be more divorced from their life together. Ἀφαίρεσις, Kevin has called it before. It’s apheretic. Abstract.
It’s Kevin, he reminds himself, before he can start sulking. Whatever the math represents, the meaning could not be clearer: one solution. Anything else would simply be wrong.
To wish it could be something from Mahler’s second symphony instead is just childish whimsy. He rolls his sleeve back down to cover his wrist, and heads downstairs.
***
After dinner, they settle on the couch just in time to catch the show’s opening notes.
This is Jeopardy! Today’s contestants are–
“I was thinking,” says Kevin. “About your birthday.”
“Oh?” They have already fought a little over this: he had wanted a party, to have the company of their friends and Kevin’s less obnoxious colleagues, and to have an excuse to invite Sergeant Jeffords and the 99th’s detectives to his home. Appropriately impersonal, but also… informal. A gesture of trust in his squad.
Kevin had disagreed. He has always enjoyed their birthday dinners, discreet restaurants where nobody assumes anything about two men dining together, long candlelit evenings of impractically small dishes and fine wines.
What is a six-cylinder engine, says a rather nervous young woman on the screen. Correct! crows the host.
“I think we should hold the party,” Kevin continues, folding his hands in his lap. “It’s your birthday. You ought to have what you want.” He sucks in a breath. “But I want to be allowed to hire the catering team.”
What is the Peace of Westphalia? Correct!
What is Norwegian? Correct!
“Oh, really,” Kevin snaps at the screen, distracted. “That doesn’t even make sense as a question.”
“Yes. You would phrase them much better,” Raymond agrees.
“I would reinvent the format to allow for proper answers with multiple suitable questions, and award the prize to the contestant whose question was best.”
“Oh,” says Raymond. “Yes. I see.”
Kevin frowns. “I don’t.”
“No. It... wasn’t something you needed to solve.”
“Well, I’m no detective– ” he begins, and then, at Raymond’s rolled eyes, offers him a dry smile. “Please would you hand me the crossword? I want a proper puzzle.”
Who is Gordon Brown? Correct!
“Yes,” says Raymond, passing him the paper.
“Hm?”
“You may choose the catering team.” Kevin nods, already sucking thoughtfully at the tip of his pencil. A bad habit, but one he hardly seems aware of. Certainly one Raymond enjoys too much to point out to him.
“Cheddar will have to be kept in the garden.”
“Yes, of course.” He had already considered that: Santiago’s allergies hardly allow for anything else. Comfortable silence settles between them, punctuated by slow questions and hurried answers.
What is Calvinism? Correct!
Who is Susan B. Anthony? Correct!
“The format is an absurd façade,” says Kevin, climbing the stairs to bed afterwards, “but I enjoyed it more than I expected to.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Oh?”
“You didn’t finish your crossword.”
Kevin moves faster than he’s used to, fingers curling around his shirt collar with a ferocity he knows better from fencing bouts and suspect pursuits, and stoops to press their mouths together. He can’t remember the last time he was kissed so clumsily, he thinks, as the bannister digs painfully into his back: normally, when he wants to take him to bed, Kevin’s kisses are exact, full of intent and self-satisfied self-control. Kevin, when he wants sex, kisses to prove that sex should be had immediately, to demonstrate that he can turn on every nerve ending in Raymond’s body with absolute efficiency, another thing Kevin has solved perfectly.
Kisses after sex are generally soft and exploratory. Daytime kisses, have a productive day, dear and welcome home, are always brief and sweet.
This, Kevin’s hand pressed to the back of his head, their noses bumping slightly, is different again. Raymond wonders what it means Kevin wants, and catches his husband by the hips, reeling him in, until he stumbles over the edge of the step and into his chest, so good and so close that he has to find a little courage, a little self-restraint, and take his mouth from Kevin’s mouth and his thumb from Kevin’s wrist, and lead him instead upstairs to bed.
***
“Heeeeeeeeeeeeeey Captain,” says Gina the next morning, drumming the fingers of her right hand against her huge sparkling GINA LINETTI. Then, inexplicably, she giggles. “Have you seen Jeopardy yet?”
“That’s not why I called you into my office, Gina.”
“No, but it is why I came in. Did you watch it?”
“I did.”
“I know you did.”
“Yes. Because I just told you.”
“Because I could see. It. In. Your. Eyes. You loved it!”
“I quite enjoyed it.”
“Yeah, you loved it. And now you wanna know why.”
“It was to help me consider the difficulties Kevin must have faced in having only a solution to which he might compose a theoretically infinite number of matching questions, by extension reminding me of my own good fortune in having a mark in the form of a question to which I could determine a single correct answer.”
Gina reaches over the to pat his hand patronisingly.
“Well yeah, obvs, but mostly to console you for being such a freak of nature. I know nobody normal has math for a mark, but basically everyone on that program does and only about half of them are hopeless virgins with no friends. There’s hope for you too!”
“Approximately eighteen point six four percent of the population of the United States have numerical marks, Gina.”
“Yeah, the nerds. Not cool people like me–” she waves at her sprawling, sparkling mark– “or Rosa, or Beyoncé, or–”
“You’ve seen Diaz’ mark?”
“Yeah.” Her expression turns suddenly rather dreamy. “Can’t tell you what it is though, ‘cause she’d cut my tongue off.” Another of those unnerving giggles. “Anyway, Gina out.”
“Gina, I haven’t given you the list of reports I need collecting from downstairs,” he calls after her.
It’s too late. She’s gone.
***
Kevin has always been fastidious about covering his mark, but, unsurprisingly, he goes about it differently to Diaz. She will frequently wear t-shirts, conspicuously covering her mark with arm-guards and bandages and the occasional piece of terrifying jewellery. Kevin simply wears his shirts a fraction of an inch longer on the arms than strictly necessary, and nobody remarks on the fact that, even in the height of summer, he rarely removes his jacket. It’s just Kevin. He’s just buttoned-up, in every sense of the phrase.
He will roll up his sleeves at home, working in the kitchen or the garden, and smile when he catches Raymond staring. Before The Incident, he’d do the same amongst friends on hot days. But the few times he had shown his wrists in public had been enough to demonstrate to Raymond the wisdom of keeping them covered: young people are obsessed with the number 69, and far too many of them are happy to let Kevin know it in the crassest of ways.
“I’m sorry,” Kevin had said, red-faced, the first time it happened, and Raymond, still strictly reminding himself that catcalling was not an offence requiring the use of force, had almost failed to catch what he was saying. “I’d hoped– well. I do know that you wish I would show it more.”
Which was completely correct, although Raymond still has no idea how he’d known. They’ve never discussed it.
“I am glad,” he’d said, “that you can cover it,” which had had the wrong effect entirely: Kevin had pressed his lips together in a thin line, and avoided his eyes.
“I am sorry, Raymond,” he had said. “We can’t all be so courageous.”
“As what?”
“As you.”
***
Aside from Diaz, none of his detectives cover their marks. Aside from Gina, who keeps all her tops and sweaters rolled up to show hers, and Hitchcock, who seems to simply like his short-sleeved shirts, he seldom sees any of them: this is New York, not California. Long sleeves are simply practical.
Nonetheless, he knows all their marks. Gina’s bizarre nametag, Jeffords’ fragment, even the sunny bit of nonsense Peralta carries around: all of them had struck him, immediately and indubitably, as being right. It’s only Santiago’s which had truly surprised him. Peralta seems convinced that her mark portends something terrible, and whilst he’s clearly pulling pigtails, it is true that it does seem… disappointingly mundane. Domestic, even.
Perhaps it’s natural for him to hope that her soulmate is a well-suited one, though. She doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that the ambiguity of her mark has left her with a profound attraction to puzzles, anagrams and crosswords. The comparison with his husband is inescapable.
He even asks him about it, one evening. Kevin is grading papers, sat with his argyle socks pressed against the armrest and his spine tucked into Raymond’s side, as he now does when one of them has had to work several late nights in a row. It’s a ludicrous pose– bound to lead to nothing but back pain– that never fails to make his throat dry, and rather than say something Kevin will find trite he blurts out instead:
“Detective Santiago’s soulmark is pot. What do you think her match could be?”
Kevin only touches his hand. Raymond can’t see his face like this, but he can sense the smile anyway, and then, when the line of his back shifts a little, he imagines Kevin’s face settling into the focused look he wears when he has a new problem to solve.
He doesn’t share any of his guesses about Santiago’s match, or say anything at all, but he also doesn’t snipe about Jeopardy! when it comes on, so Raymond counts it a success.
***
Having agreed to hold a birthday party, Kevin seems to have thrown himself wholeheartedly into conceding to every request Raymond makes. Yes, he may ask that the guests do not bring gifts; no, there will be no singing of Happy Birthday; yes, Cheddar may spend the evening in their bathroom instead of the garden, which, yes, would be far too cold, and yes, Kevin will check on him periodically.
He’s so obliging, in fact, that Raymond doesn’t even realise until the night before the party, surveying the guest list at the kitchen table, that he’s forgotten to ask for his squad to be there.
“You didn’t invite anybody from my precinct,” he says in surprise, brushing a stray grain of sugar from the list. He should really be in the living room– Jeopardy! is on in seven minutes– but Kevin is in here, weighing out the ingredients for plain scones tomorrow, and he can never resist the sight of Kevin with his sleeves rolled up.
Kevin purses his lips, eyes fixed on the scale as he adds cubes of butter. “I didn’t realise you wanted them invited,” he says, stiffly. “You didn’t ask.”
“Would it be inconvenient to ask now?” He knows it is. He suspects that it’s by design. His husband is far too brilliant to be petty by accident.
“The entire precinct?” He thinks he sees a muscle spasm in Kevin’s cheek, which is interesting: he’d have no cause for alarm if he didn’t intend to try and accommodate the new demand.
“Of course not,” he says, as soothingly as possible. “But Sergeant Jeffords. And the six detectives. And Gina.”
Kevin visibly bites his tongue, and nods once. “Yes, that should be fine. I’ll e-mail the invitations as soon as I’m done here.”
“The addresses–”
“I have them. Miss Linetti,” he clarifies, before Raymond can ask, “felt for some reason that I should.”
It is the easiest argument he has ever won. He wonders what on earth Kevin is up to.
***
He discovers what Kevin is up to the next evening, when he emerges from the shower in his blue robe to find his husband perched on the corner of the bed, already dressed and tugging self-consciously at his cufflinks.
It’s not a new suit, but an old one he doesn’t wear any more, due to the way the sleeves slip back when he moves, and the blue shirt is new, a full half-inch shorter on the arms than usual.
Kevin hasn’t risked exposing his mark to anyone else since The Incident– even playing squash, he wears a wristband– and the flash of warm copper, barely visible where his left cuff ends, is making Raymond’s head swim.
“Kevin,” he says, and Kevin looks up at him, fingers still twitching. Raymond takes them, presses them still before hooking a finger into his sleeve and dragging it back to see the numerals, shining in their entirety on the fragile skin of his inner forearm. When he presses a kiss there, Kevin gasps quietly, and he bites down, apparently unconsciously, on his lip. They have time, Raymond thinks, sliding a hand into his husband’s hair, running his tongue over Kevin's bitten mouth, before the guests–
The doorbell rings.
“That will be the caterers,” Kevin says, expression ironic as he stands, buttoning his jacket. It helps a little, but he still looks debauched, hair in disarray over one ear and his mouth still wet and his wrist– well, it’s covered now, but they both know, and so will anyone he shakes hands with tonight. No wonder he was concerned about inviting the detectives. He doesn’t even know them.
Raymond does, though. They might be immature, but he’s confident that they’re too kind to do anything that might spoil the evening.
***
His confidence turns out to be misplaced.
***
Once, in a sweltering faculty meeting in the height of summer, Kevin had thought it safe enough to cast off his jacket and roll back his sleeves. In a sense, it had been: nobody had said anything at the time.
But he had been approached, two weeks later, by a nervous undergraduate student in dungarees who’d shown him the blue numbers of her own soulmark.
“One of Robert’s students,” he’d explained, relating the whole affair to Raymond that evening as they were leaving the Lincoln Centre. “Which makes sense. He’s a gossip. And she was correct.”
Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden, which had been lingering in his head, had come to an immediate, inelegant ending.
“It came to–?”
“69.3285631 exactly. Yes.”
“Huh,” said Raymond Holt, like the brainless bimbo he was, and began to do the math in his head.
Of the seven point eight billion residents of the planet, current research placed the global percentage with numerical marks at between sixteen point three two and eighteen point six four percent. Anywhere between one billion two hundred and seventy-three million, and one billion four hundred and fifty-four million. Of those–
“Raymond, stop.”
He’d snapped out of his clumsy estimations to find himself still frozen to the sidewalk, Kevin standing closer than he ever normally would in public. His husband, normally so unfailingly discreet, had actually seemed a hair's breadth away from touching his face.
“Raymond?”
“I didn’t mean to make a display,” he had said, guiltily watching Kevin’s shoulders slump in relief. “I was merely… surprised.”
“Yes, well,” Kevin had said testily, returning to their usual public distance. Just a little too far to be called intimate. “Truth be told, so was I. But I explained to her that she was mistaken, and she agreed.”
“Was she mistaken?”
He hadn’t meant to say it. To this day, he’s not sure how he had managed to speak with so little input from his basic common sense. But he had been lucky: Kevin had only waved a hand in irritation. “Of course she was. And she knew it.” He’d begun ticking off reasons on his fingers. “I have already found my match. Neither of us were… compatible.”
“Platonic matches–”
“And,” said Kevin, finality in his tone, “her mark was only a simple x + y. I forget the numbers. There was nothing pertinent about it. An unfortunate statistical anomaly. She wasn’t my match, Raymond. You are.”
***
If he had nightmares about anything other than filing for a tax return extension, he thinks they would likely be about Kevin saying there was nothing pertinent about it. An unfortunate statistical anomaly.
***
“Did you ever,” asks Jake, “have, you know, a moment of doubt?”
“A moment of doubt?”
How complicated the whole thing seems to be, Jake mumbles, bouncing nervously on the fraying rubber of his sneakers. Holt reflects, briefly, on the infinite number of questions with the answer six nine dot three two eight five six three one, and the young woman living her life somewhere with a simple little addition in blue that matches Kevin’s mark exactly.
There are so many equations and numbers and symbols and phrases that might as easily match Kevin’s mark as his own does. Something more elegant, more meaningful than the clumsy notation that had led him to miscalculate for so many years.
There are probably men out there, clever and sophisticated men, with marks also matching Kevin, marks as superior to his equation as his own had been to that poor student’s. It’s just Raymond’s mark that will only ever have the answer six nine dot three two eight five six three one.
“No,” he says.
***
“Peralta was still searching for his match when he went undercover,” he tells Kevin one evening on the sofa, stroking the copper numbers idly and feeling Kevin’s pulse as he does.
“You think he might have found them in the Mafia?” Kevin asks. He probably intends it to sound arch– Kevin normally does– but he’s had a very long day and is all but falling asleep on Raymond’s shoulder, and the mumbling robs his sarcasm of its usual sting.
A few strands of Kevin’s hair have fallen out of their usual impeccable parting, he realises as the Jeopardy! theme tune plays, and touches them once, fond, concerned, before brushing them back into place.
It’s a sensible and helpful task to perform for his bone-weary husband. He’s not petting Kevin. They have Cheddar for that. “I’m sorry,” says Kevin, voice still rather muffled. “I know you miss him.”
“His soulmark,” Raymond says, as Alex Trebek announces the contestants’ occupations, “is bing.” He almost regrets saying so when Kevin lifts his head from his shoulder, but it’s worked: he looks as utterly alert as he always does when presented with a puzzle.
“The Old Norse for a pile is bingr, and in some dialects of English bing was a slag-heap, which even for Peralta may be a little on the nose.” Raymond pokes him once, reproving, but finds himself chuckling anyway. “Bing Crosby? Or it could be a part of binge, or bingo, or climbing or combing or bombing or bribing or perhaps–”
“Shh,” says Raymond. “If you miss inventing questions for yourself so much, watch this with me.”
“I still don’t consider having to preface an answer– and they are answers– with what is as a substitute for a proper puzzle with limitless potential answers.”
“I think you mean potential questions. And you needn’t watch it if you object,” he says placidly, returning his gaze to the television screen and wondering if Kevin will leave.
A few moments later, Kevin’s head returns to his shoulder.
He smiles all the way to the closing credits.
***
Raymond is surprised by how genuinely pleased Kevin is to receive Gina’s invitation to her mother’s wedding. He’s even more surprised that the invitation is addressed to Professor Cozner and Captain Holt.
“It’s hard to avoid the implication,” he says, watching Kevin mark the date in their calendar, “that you are much closer to Gina than I had realised.”
“We text,” Kevin informs him primly. “It used to be e-mail. But last Christmas you received multiple death threats that you elected not to inform your husband of until the day after you had confronted your would-be murderer, seen the resultant casualty to the hospital, and missed dinner.”
Raymond winces. Kevin has never once asked him not to put himself in harm’s way for his job. It does, on reflection, seem reasonable for him to want to be appraised of exactly how much harm he is putting himself in the way of. He wonders if Kevin is still angry.
“Gina told you first?”
Kevin purses his lips. “Gina provided me with live updates.” He glances over. “Please thank Sergeant Jeffords for me.”
“You can thank him yourself,” says Raymond. “At the wedding. He’s officiating.”
***
Sergeant Jeffords is not officiating the ceremony. Raymond rolls his left sleeve back, in accordance with Episcopalian tradition– the wedding is secular, but he’s yet to attend one in which the officiant covers their mark– and stands before the congregation with nothing to say, and looks at Kevin.
Who, in accordance with Episcopalian tradition, in the middle of a crowd of strangers, has rolled back his left sleeve.
“You would make a very poor rector’s wife,” Raymond tells him, the moment they find each other after the wedding. They’ve both already covered their marks again, but it hardly matters.
“Oh, terrible,” he agrees. “It would scandalise the entire parish when I ran off with a police officer instead.”
They’re still smiling at the idea when Sergeant Jeffords approaches.
***
“I intend to accept,” says Kevin softly, sliding his pawn noiselessly to d6. Raymond wishes he wouldn’t do this: chess with Kevin is hard enough without trying to outmanoeuvre him in an argument at the same time.
He sets his knight down on d4 with a smart rap of wood on wood. “It would probably be unwise to turn down the opportunity,” he admits. As expected, Kevin glances up, brow furrowing.
“You don’t mind?”
He takes the pawn with his eyes still fixed on Raymond, the unbearable showoff. It’s incredibly attractive– which he knows– not least for the way his sleeve draws back a little when he stretches to move, which he probably knows too.
What he almost certainly doesn’t realise is that Raymond had bought this entire set purely for the bright copper tops of the black pieces, he thinks, moving his knight to take the pawn.
“It is your decision.”
His game always suffers accordingly when Kevin plays black. He hopes Kevin considers it an intriguing mystery to solve, rather than a pitiable weakness in his play, but he knows it’s more likely to be the latter.
Kevin pushes his knight to f6, and for a fleeting moment Raymond wonders what he’d do if he set up a Maróczy Bind. Evade it effortlessly, no doubt, and then tie him up in knots. Much better to follow a more traditional opening and hope to hold out a respectable amount of time. “It’s a decision that affects both of us.”
For a moment, he wants to say oh really? You think this affects me too? How very considerate. He wants to slam his fist on the board and say how dare you do this you faithless excuse for a husband and he wants to get on his knees and say please don’t leave me it will break my heart and–
He moves his second knight to c3 instead.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” Kevin asks, clearly sensing his reluctance to discuss the Sorbonne any further.
“I meet Jim Martens for lunch. My old C.O.,” he adds, in case he had forgotten.
“He of the Islanders puzzle?” asks Kevin, brightening considerably. “Did you ever find a solution?”
“No,” he admits. “I’m surprised that you didn’t, though.”
“Only three.” Kevin slides a pawn to a3. Najdorf Variation, Raymond recalls. If he didn’t know better, he’d have suspected that Kevin was playing a deliberately orthodox game to soothe him. “I worked at it for a long time, but I couldn’t see any others. I’m quite sure they exist, though.”
Only three. Raymond sets his bishop on e3 with slightly more force than necessary, and then resents himself as well as Kevin. His tells may be subtle, but he’s playing a man who knows every one of them.
Sure enough, when he glances over the board there’s a quizzical eyebrow aimed in his direction.
“Raymond?”
“It’s nothing,” he says, and then, swallowing: “I am, perhaps... a little daunted by the idea of spending so much time apart.” It works perfectly. Kevin’s expression softens at once. “And at meeting Martens again without a solution.”
His face snaps shut again. “Raymond,” he says, none too gently, sliding a pawn to e5, “you don’t want to take credit for something you haven’t done. You’ve never wanted that.”
“No,” says Raymond slowly, already formulating a plan in his head. “Of course not.”
Kevin might be literally and intellectually abandoning him, but he still has his squad.
***
“Bing...pot!” cheers Peralta, and then winces. Holt’s entire brain goes blank.
Bingpot.
How could he have missed it? Two halves of a synonymous pair wandering around his own precinct, and he’d never even noticed.
“Bingpot works,” says Boyle, jolting him out of his thoughts. “It's taking off.”
“It's taking off!”
Bingpot, thinks Holt.
No wonder he hasn’t been able to fathom what his own mark means yet. No wonder Kevin needs to leave for Paris. He must be sick to death of living with such a short-sighted fool.
I will ask him, he decides. Perhaps he’s worked this one out, too. I am done with all this distance.
***
He helps Kevin pack, folding up the shirts and sweater vests into neat piles, meticulously organised. They’ve already sent the books on ahead.
“It will be at least a month before I can visit.”
“I understand.” Kevin rolls a navy tie and nestles it next to a dark brown one. “You will call?”
“Of course.” He has a plan: if he calls at lunchtime he’ll reach Paris an hour before Kevin prefers to eat dinner. “Seven p.m., C.E.T.”
He can draw the blinds. Make sure Gina knows he’s not to be disturbed. Make sure Jeffords knows it too, in case Gina... forgets.
If he limits himself to three calls a week Kevin will have plenty of evenings to himself, to work late or dine out. Visit museums. Go to the Palais Garnier, the Opéra Bastille.
Without him.
As it happens, it’s Raymond who has to leave the house first, to make his squash match with Boyle. Kevin kisses him a brief goodbye.
“Win,” he says.
Returning from Shaw’s that night, Raymond is strangely unwilling to go upstairs. He finds that if he sits on the sofa, Cheddar curled in a fluffy ball in his lap, it’s not entirely unlike the evenings that Kevin retires early, and is asleep before he comes to bed.
It’s not until the next morning, waking on the sofa with a start that tips Cheddar, barking, onto the floor, that he realises he never did ask Kevin about his mark.
***
When he reaches the arrivals gate of the Charles De Gaulle airport, he scans the crowd.
Kevin isn’t there.
The absence is unexpectedly painful. The pain is unexpectedly visceral. Though he knows his chest is no heavier, his body insists that it is, and although he knows he has eaten nothing unsound in the past seventy two hours his brain tells him that he is nauseated, and despite knowing that the floor is level, it does not feel very level to his feet.
He was correct, then. It’s the end.
You will still be able to see him, he tells himself, trying to regulate his uneven breathing by force of will, he is a very reasonable man, he won’t forbid you from walking Cheddar, you’ll still be able to see him perhaps bi-weekly to take Cheddar for walks. If he doesn’t stay in Paris and comes back to New York and if you sign over the house then you won’t have to worry about where he might be, you have a financial plan in place for this, why are your eyes so damp, Holt, you’re going to have to get a grip if you want to be able to see him agai-
“Raymond!”
At the other end of the arrivals hall, but gaining ground fast, Kevin is flying through the crowd with his odd ungainly academic’s run, and although he wears his hooded woollen coat his top button is undone, his breath is irregular, his usually pale cheeks are a hectic blotchy red, and the airport lights cannot possibly be responsible for the way his eyes are shining.
He barely slows even as he nears, almost crashing into Raymond as he stretches out a hand and they are shaking hands, Kevin’s in his, with Kevin still so close, perhaps half an inch, that anyone who looked at them right now would be able to see beyond reasonable doubt that Raymond loved him, and was loved, and–
“Have you been crying?” asks Kevin, incredulously.
“Are you late?” Raymond snaps back, because he won’t have this, not now, not with Kevin’s top button undone.
“I think I know what your mark is,” says Kevin, hand still clasped in his. “I was triple-checking and lost track of the time. Raymond–”
His heart is hammering, yes, and having heard Kevin's voice again, finally free of microphone distortion, he hardly wants him to stop talking, but this is an airport, and if his brilliant husband has solved it then Raymond is going to do and say things Kevin considers inappropriate for even semi-private spaces.
“The taxi,” he decides. “Is there one waiting?”
“I– yes, I left it running,” Kevin says, frowning faintly, “but Raymond, are you listening, I said I’ve solved it.”
The urge to kiss him is becoming almost unbearable. Raymond releases his hand, hoping that distance will somehow make him seem less desirable. It doesn’t. He heads for the doors instead, tongue clamped between his teeth with the effort of not putting it in Kevin’s mouth.
Once outside, he realises that he has no idea at all which taxi is theirs.
“The black Renault,” mutters Kevin, which could be any one of five taxis waiting but thankfully means the nearest, and then slides after him into the back seat as the driver lifts Raymond’s suitcase into the trunk. “Is everything all right?” His eyes are creasing in concern. “I thought you’d be more pleased.”
“I am,” he says under his breath, checking their driver's sightline before taking Kevin’s hand. “Very pleased.” His voice is rough: to his delight, it makes Kevin shiver and shift a little in his seat, pulling their hands apart.
“Not here.”
“You wanted to show me in the airport. This is far more private.”
“I wasn’t thinking.” He’s obviously not thinking much now, either, if the way his fingertips dig into his knee is any indication. If their taxi driver notices how charged their silence is, however, he’s polite enough to ignore it, and Raymond admires the professional bland cheer with which he drops them outside a tall limestone building. It takes him all of five seconds to forget the taxi driver, however, when he notices how quickly Kevin climbs narrow stairs to the apartment. Is the new speed a permanent adjustment in Kevin’s behaviour, made in his absence? Impatience to share his theory? A response to the non-regulation tread?
He dismisses it. He has the rest of the week to find out. Right now, he has priorities.
Inside, Raymond has no time to admire the little apartment, or to despair at the books and pamphlets spread out haphazardly on the desk: Kevin has pulled off his coat almost as soon as he’s through the door, then rids himself with quick economical movements of his jacket and sweater, draping them over the back of a chair like a layabout. When his trembling hands completely fail to unbutton his left sleeve, Raymond decides that enough is enough, and pushes him gently by the shoulders down into the worn armchair. His own knees complain as he settles down on the floor to undo the button for him, and Kevin, laughing, fumbles for a cushion with his free hand.
“Your ridiculous addiction to wooden floorboards,” Raymond grouses, rolling his husband’s sleeve back carefully before dipping his head and pressing his mouth to the copper numbers. Six nine dot three two eight five six three one. He’s missed them so badly that at times it has felt as much an ache as the discomfort in his knees: he removes his mouth briefly to slip the cushion under them. Kevin is watching him with significantly darker eyes than usual.
“Yours, please,” he whispers, and Raymond, removing a cufflink to fold back his own sleeve, realises suddenly that he doesn’t care what his mark means. It only needs to mean something: to be proof that he is as indubitably Kevin’s soulmate as Kevin is his.
“It’s mine,” says Kevin, stroking a finger over the mark. “I'm fairly sure. My handwriting.” That startles him for a moment, because it’s not. It can’t be.
“My mark? No, it isn’t.” He knows Kevin's writing.
“Not now,” Kevin clarifies. “Once I realised that the nature of my mark meant that I should stop neglecting math, I improved. But as a child, I wrote like… well.” He gestures to Raymond's spidery silvered left wrist. “Like that.”
“How long have you known that?”
“Since I saw it.” Kevin seems startled, even confused, by the question. “Why?”
“You never said.” Except that of course he had said.
Was she mistaken?
Of course she was. I have already found my match.
Kevin hasn’t been covering his mark out of loyalty, to avoid meeting a more appropriate match. He's been covering it because he has already found his soulmate, and didn't care for the trouble of exposing it.
“Are you all right?” Kevin is staring at him, a crease between his eyebrows, hand firmly curled firmly around his mark.
“I am.” He grasps at the chair’s arm to stand, the motion pulling Kevin up with him. “And you solved it?” It hardly matters now, but he thinks it would be a shame not to hear the explanation. Kevin nods once, and pulls him over to the map open on the desk.
“Look.” He realises that the books, which he had assumed to be texts and academic journals, are old train timetables. “Here is where I grew up,” says Kevin. “And this is where you were.”
“A calculation of distance?” Even as he says it, he knows that it can’t be. It’s far too complex.
“No,” says Kevin, “Of time. The complexity is due to how poor the transport links were. The first nine minutes and eleven point two five seconds–” he points at the initial handful of fractions, printed out from memory in a neat hand on a loose sheaf of ruled paper– “is the time it used to take me to cycle to the station. I’m fairly sure that at one point–” he touches his little finger to another sub-calculation– “I stop for a sandwich. It is abstract, but only in the sense that it's the one version I never actually worked out, because we hadn't met. I only realised now because I’ve started doing it again."
“Again?”
“Yes.” Kevin suddenly seems to find something fascinating just beyond the window. “I- it's a very useful exercise in... I used to do it quite often before buying Gertie. And sometimes,” he adds, looking pained, "when I have to attend a conference."
"A useful exercise."
"Yes."
"To seven decimal points." He finds he can't help the way the corners of his mouth turn up. He had been mistaken to think that the meaning wouldn't matter. "And... you've been doing it again."
"Yes."
"My mark is the one version you hadn't worked out." The implications are making his head spin.
Kevin glares at him. Raymond has missed his frown.
"Yes."
"The precinct to your office?"
"Obviously. It's practical to know the travel times."
Undeniable.
"It is. But how much longer would it take you to reach my fencing club from Martin's house than from ours?"
"Raymond."
"You do have an estimate for how long both journeys would take, though?"
Kevin sighs, and meets his eyes. One sleeve rolled up, still wearing his shoes, somewhere between mortified and furious, he is more compelling and better composed to Raymond's eyes than anything in the Musée D'Orsay.
(He doesn't exaggerate. He's never cared for the Impressionists).
"Yes."
"To seven decimal places?"
"Five."
"Even though you've only been there once. With Peralta."
"Yes. I suppose."
When Kevin is away from me, Raymond muses, he spends his free time thinking about how long it would take him to come back.
It is a dazzling thought.
Kevin does not look dazzled. He looks embarrassed, arms folded defensively across his chest. Raymond glances down at the paper Kevin has been working from.
“You’ve written out my soulmark.”
“Yes,” says Kevin, latching onto the new topic of conversation like a drowning man to flotsam. “Yes, it was important to make sure that everything matched up.”
“You’ve written it out… eight times.”
Kevin flushes crimson. It’s absolutely magnificent. This week, thinks Raymond, is going to be perfect.
***
(It doesn’t once occur to him, during his perfect, perfect week, to turn on the television in the corner of the apartment. It’s just as well. Kevin had not been looking forward to the seemingly inevitable teasing about the number of episodes of Jeopardy! he keeps recorded on it.)