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Martin drives out of London with one hand white-knuckling the steering wheel. Fog clings to his mind like cobwebs. Underneath the numbness is a twitchy paranoia that makes him want to climb out of his skin.
Jon, for his part, stays tense and quiet in the passenger’s seat. Their hands are linked over the console, a sweaty anchor holding Martin together.
Martin glances in the rear view mirror. All the cars just look like cars. But then, some of the worst monsters Martin has ever met looked just like people.
Martin’s fingers twitch in Jon’s grip. “Are you—I mean, are you sure—”
“Nothing and nobody is following us,” Jon says.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Martin says, glancing worriedly at Jon. He looks exhausted, clothes rumpled, his oily hair tangled down his back. “It’s just—I know I’ve been avoiding you and I don’t want you to feel like you can’t tell me the truth because it will scare me or—”
“I’m not lying, Martin.”
Martin flushes, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the highway. “No, no. Of course not. Sorry.”
“No. I’m sorry.” Jon swallows, pushing his overgrown fringe out of his eyes. “I didn’t tell you the truth for so long. Keeping everyone at a distance just felt safer. I didn’t want to drag everyone down with me.” Jon sighs and leans his forehead against their tangled hands. “But in the end, we’re trapped together in this mess, and I was just making things worse.”
Martin pulls his hand out of Jon’s grip so he can shift down gears. His hand goes to the steering wheel out of muscle-memory, instead of back to Jon. He’s too embarrassed to reach out and retake Jon’s hand.
“It’s okay,” he says awkwardly.
“No, Martin. It’s not.” Their eyes meet over the console, and for a moment, Martin wonders if Jon can see straight to the heart of him, the Eye piercing through his carefully constructed layers.
But then Jon blinks and his pupils are just pupils, not the starless and hungry void that Martin glimpses in his periphery on occasion.
“I’m sorry,” Jon says again, as if he caught Martin’s momentary fear. Maybe he did. “I promise I’m going to trust you from now on. You and me. Until the end.”
“Until the end? Good to see we’re off to an optimistic start.”
Jon laughs, a startled, choked sound, and it gives Martin the courage to reach across the console and fumble for Jon’s hand again. Jon laces their fingers together. The grip is clammy and desperate and it feels like an anchor, tethering Martin to the man he’s loved for so long he forgets when it even began.
London disappears in the rearview mirror. Jon never relaxes, but sometime after the congested suburbs give way to grassy hills, Martin looks over and realises that he’s fallen asleep.
Martin has seen Jon sleeping plenty of times before, and it never fails to make him feel so stupidly, impossibly fond.
There’s just something so charming about the way Jon’s face is smashed into the window, mouth hanging slightly ajar. It reminds him of all the evenings (or mornings after Jon pulled another all-nighter) when Martin would find him slumped over his desk, statements sprawled around him, ink smudging the sharp cut of his cheekbones.
Jon grumbles in his sleep. It almost sounds like he’s telling someone off.
Martin suddenly aches for Tim, who would always roll his eyes or pull faces when Jon affected that tone around them. And Melanie, who would grumble right back. And Basira, who would stare at Jon blankly, and Daisy, who would tug gently at Jon’s hair and tell him to brighten up. And Sasha, who—
Who Martin doesn’t remember.
“Sorry,” Martin says against the sudden swell of tears in his throat, even though Jon is asleep and can’t hear him. “My car’s not really exactly comfy, is it? Not sure why I kept it, really. I caught the tube more than I ever drove this thing. Suppose it’s useful now, though.”
Jon’s voice cuts off. Then the disapproving grumbles turn to choked cries, interlaced with soft words that sound almost like pleading.
Martin reaches across the console and shakes Jon’s knee. He jerks awake as soon as Martin touches him, legs kicking out violently, but he goes still when he sees Martin.
“Nightmare?” Martin says softly.
Jon scrubs at his face, blinking rapidly. “Yeah. It was—yeah.”
“Yeah,” Martin agrees.
Jon silently slips his hand back into Martin’s. They stay like that for the rest of the drive out of England.
Daisy’s safehouse is a brick cottage with lopsided gutters and creaky floors. Weeds and wildflowers grow wildly around the house, some of the foliage reaching past Jon’s hip.
The inside is full of mismatched furniture and dust. Jon makes a face, the same face he made at the archives in the early days, Martin realises. A cross between irritation and barely-hidden terror.
They throw themselves into cleaning, unpacking the car, drawing up a grocery list—the daily rituals of life that make it easier to block out the memories of what they left behind in London.
Jon, still exhausted from the overuse of his abilities, crashes some time after dusk. Martin leads him to the master room and tucks him into fresh sheets.
“You’ve been driving all day,” Jon grumbles against Martin’s firm hands, only half-awake.
“I’ll go to bed soon,” Martin says. “Get some rest, Jon.”
Jon nods, just once, and then he drops into a deep sleep. Martin stands there, watching the way his face smoothes out in sleep, taking in the soft spill of his hair across the cream pillow, before he shakes himself and heads back into the living room.
He doesn’t sleep.
The world feels unreal at night, especially in the early hours of the morning. Every breath is as loud as a scream, and all the fear comes rushing back as if it never left.
He paces the cottage. Keeps his footsteps light to avoid waking Jon. Stops to peer out the misted windows, watching for anything moving in the gloom.
He isn’t much of a threat to anyone or anything. He’s not sure what he would do if there really was something lurking out there. At least he could scoop Jon up and make a run for it. Maybe they’d even make it to the car before they were struck down.
When the fear recedes, it leaves behind a scraped-hollow feeling, a loneliness that’s familiar and all-encompassing. He either feels like cornered prey or like the only person in the world, oscillating rapidly between those two extremes. He supposes that’s what happens when you’re lured in by both the Eye and the Lonely, two opposing forces that have their fingers latching firmly around Martin’s animal-brain.
When the sun rises, bringing light and logic with it, Martin splashes his face with cold water. He barely feels the cool sting against his cheeks.
He fries up some eggs, switches on the radio and lets the music and the crackle of the frypan fill the kitchen.
Soon after, a sleep-rumpled Jon stumbles into the kitchen and collapses at the breakfast table. He finger-combs his long hair, wincing whenever he snags on a knot.
“Every morning,” Jon grumbles under his breath. Like this, groggy and dressed in loose sweats, hair a tangled mess down his back, he looks painfully handsome.
“I could braid it for you,” Martin offers. “That’ll keep it out of your eyes.”
“Do you know how to braid?”
“Well, no. But it can’t be that hard. They have YouTube tutorials for that sort of thing.”
Jon makes a face. “They’re not much help.”
Martin takes that to mean that he has tried to follow said tutorials and failed miserably. He bites down a smile at the endearing image of Jon swearing at YouTube videos, fingers buried in his knotted hair.
Martin loads fried eggs onto chipped china plates and switches off the stove. It’s not a particularly special breakfast. His mum would complain about his cooking almost every day. She would say that his eggs were rubbery and undercooked and all other manner of things, but they were all Martin knew how to cook and as both a teenager and part-time carer, he didn’t have the time to learn anything else.
He supposes he has time, now. Jon is right, there are all kinds of helpful things on YouTube. Maybe he’ll learn how to cook while they’re out here.
Jon accepts his eggs with an honest smile, as if Martin’s eggs were the best breakfast he’d ever had. Warmth spreads through his chest.
Before he eats, Jon wrangles his hair into a bun at the base of his neck. He misses a patch of hair behind his ear. When Jon realises this, he lets out a sound of utter disgust that makes Martin laugh.
“I really wouldn’t mind tying it up for you,” Martin says. “If you’d let me.”
Jon glances at him, expression unreadable. After a moment, he says, “Alright.”
Martin sits on the moth-eaten sofa and Jon sits on the ground, cross-legged between Martin’s legs. When Jon tilts his head back, his long, unbound hair spills over Martin’s knees. Martin’s breath hitches. They’ve been living together in a cramped cottage. They’ve kissed. Why, then, does having Jon beneath him like this, having permission to card his fingers through that beautiful hair, make him feel light-headed?
“Martin?” Jon asks.
“Yes?” It comes out high-pitched, almost a squeak. He clears his throat. “Yes. I’m just… considering where to start.”
“You don’t have to,” Jon reminds him. “I know I have a lot of hair, and it’s really tangled.”
“It’s fine,” Martin says. “Really.”
He gathers his courage and runs his hand down Jon’s hair. It’s soft between his fingers, at once both fine and coarse like unbound thread. Carefully, he brushes it out, starting at the ends and working his way up. When he brushes the roots, gentle against any knots, Jon pushes into his hands like a cat, and Martin has to bite down a smile.
Martin has wanted to do this for a very long time, and Jon’s reaction, the way he goes loose and content, totally pliant under Martin’s hands, is just like something out of his daydreams.
He can’t say how long they spend like that. But eventually, Jon falls asleep, leaning heavily against Martin’s knee. It’s raining outside, pelting against the shutters. Martin thinks he could fall asleep like this too.
It’s a long while before he puts down the brush and ties Jon’s hair up.
It’s a twenty minute walk into town. Martin could take the car, but he enjoys the fresh air.
He’s never lived in the country before. As he strolls up roads lined with paddocks, he imagines what it would be like, building a life here, settling down in the countryside with Jon. Maybe they would even get some animals. Chickens. A cat. Possibly even a couple cows named after poets. They’d have to look into how to care for animals, since he knows Jon wasn’t even able to keep house plants alive when they lived in the city. But they could learn. Together.
It starts raining when he’s ten minutes from town. Martin didn’t bring an umbrella or a rain jacket. The only reason he’d remembered the reusable bags is because Jon pushed them into his hands as he ran out the door.
The rain comes down in sheets. The mud churns beneath his runners, rapidly turning into sludge. Martin slips in a puddle lining one of the paddocks and crashes into the wonky fence. The impact is far-off. Like a crash of thunder in the distance, heard but not felt.
When he finally arrives at the grocery store, his curls are plastered to his face. He catches sight of himself in the storefront windows and grimaces. His skin is fish-bone white, freckles standing out in ugly splotches, hair dyed brown by the rain.
He pushes into the store. The bell above the door doesn’t jingle, and his shouted, “Hello?” is lost to the cacophonous rain. There is no one behind the counter.
Standing in the entry, he tries to shake the water off, but there’s not much he can do without a towel. He’ll have to apologise to the staff for dripping water through their store. If he can find a staff member, that is.
He floats through the aisles with the shopping list scrunched in his fist. It’s damp with rain, Jon’s sloping words smudged and barely readable.
What did they need? Bread. Teabags. Jam… The list is a blotch of ruined ink, even when Martin squints and holds it up to the light.
What else? His mind is ruined with static. He’s on autopilot. A voyeur floating above his body. Disconnected.
He stares at a shelf of canned soup. There, squashed between laksa and butternut squash, is a tape recorder.
“Oh,” Martin says, dropping a soggy loaf of bread. “What are you doing here?”
He scoops up the tape recorder, holding it like he might hold an insect, fingers curled and palm flat, careful not to squash its delicate wings. It whirrs up at him.
“Did you follow me? I’m not doing anything special, you know. I’m just shopping.” Martin glances down. The bread has fallen against his muddied trainers. “Not sure why. Can’t really remember deciding to leave or the walk over here or… Much of today, really. Everything’s been a bit…”
Foggy.
“Martin?”
He turns on his heel. Jon blinks back at him, wind-swept and worried next to a display of instant ramen. He’s wearing a raincoat, and his hair is still in that wonky plait that Martin braided it into last night.
“Jon,” Martin says. At a loss, he holds out the tape recorder.
Jon huffs at it. “What are you doing here, huh? You’re going to freak people out. This isn’t the Magnus Institute, you know.” He reaches for it, but Martin jerks his hand back.
“Actually,” Martin says. “I’ll hold onto it, just until we get back home. You don’t mind, do you?”
Jon flushes, not meeting Martin’s eyes. “No, no. That’s fine.”
They do the rest of the grocery shopping together. Martin keeps the tape recorder pressed between his fingers and bobs after Jon like a balloon following its string. The strange warmth of the tape recorder, its whirring mechanisms like a pulse between his palms, keeps him grounded until they’ve collected everything they need.
They pause at the check-out. No one is there.
“Hm.” Jon spins around, scanning the small store with too-keen eyes. “Well. No choice for it, then.” He digs for his wallet, pulls out a handful of notes, and lays them on the counter.
“Is that enough?” Martin asks.
“And an extra five pounds for the trouble,” Jon says without having to count it.
They go home together. It’s stopped raining, but their shoes squelch loudly in the mud.
“I’m sorry,” Jon says after a few minutes, glancing at Martin.
“What for?”
“For letting you go out. For not realising how bad it had gotten today.” Jon makes a face. “And for the tape recorder, I suppose.”
“It’s okay,” Martin says, mustering up a weak smile. “And I like them. They’re…” A part of you, he almost says, but he doesn’t know how either of them would take hearing that truth said aloud. “They’re grounding,” he settles on instead.
Jon clears his throat, looking oddly flushed again. “Right. Well. So long as you’re okay with it, you can hang onto them. For as long as you like.”
Martin hasn’t kept much of a sleep schedule in months. After the Unknowing everything outside of the Magnus Institute, including his apartment, began to feel too-big and unfamiliar. Eventually he came to feel disconnected from the Archives as well, like he’d become totally untethered from the world.
Sleep stopped being useful around then, too. He was always tired, but he would fall asleep on the lumpy couch in his office and wake up hours later feeling even more exhausted than he’d been the day before.
Peter caught him napping more than once. He thought it was a good use of Martin’s time, not going home, staying tucked away in the Archives where he was safe.
That had almost felt good, having Peter there, staring at the mussed nest he’d been napping in and not being judgemental or pitying, but understanding why Martin sometimes did the things that he did.
That was the danger of Peter Lucas. Most of the time, he never really forced Martin into doing something horrible, not like Elias did. He almost made Martin want to follow him. He was like a collection of all of Martin’s most destructive habits, wrapped up with a smile.
It’s raining again. It sounds overly loud against the tin roof, like the whole cottage will cave in on him. It drowns out the buzzing of tape recorders.
Martin drifts like a boat lost on the black sea, no wind or paddles to bring him ashore. He doesn’t realise he’s dissociating until he squints at the white-orange blur in the window and faintly registers the formless blue sweater, the featureless oval face, a smear of a man reflected in the rain-streaked window.
He blinks hard. And then he remembers he’s a person with a physical body and the man in the window is him.
It makes him feel like a thing from Jon’s statements. He gets up and moves to the other side of the living room, where he can’t see the window anymore.
He loses time. This used to happen to him when he was younger, sleep deprived and hollowed-out from interactions with his mum. And again, at the institute, after they’d lost Sasha. His thoughts would blur and without him realising, hours would have passed. No one has ever caught him doing it before.
Jon catches him.
“Martin?” A scarred hand on his shoulder, shaking him gently. “Martin, are you alright?”
Martin jerks around. “What?”
“Are you alright?” Jon repeats. “You were staring at nothing. How long have you been out here?”
“What time is it?”
“It’s just gone two in the morning.”
It feels like everything is happening a second too slow, brain lagging behind his body. Martin nods dumbly. “Right, right. I was just about to go to bed.”
Jon sits beside him on the couch. His gaze is intent and Martin feels uncomfortably Seen.
And then Jon blinks and the sensation is gone and Jon is just Jon.
He brushes a curl off Martin’s cheek. “Why didn’t you say anything? No, that’s not right. I should have noticed sooner.”
“I’m fine, Jon.”
Jon chews at his lip. Martin blinks sluggishly back at him. The rain has stopped, and the windowsills are slick with frost. When did that happen?
“Could you braid my hair?” Jon asks.
It’s enough to startle Martin. “Pardon?”
“My hair.” Jon reaches up and undoes his hair, letting it spill down his back. His hair is knotted, bunched up from being twisted into a bun all day. “Could you braid it for me? It’s easier to sleep that way.”
Martin nods numbly. Jon gets up and fetches his hairbrush. When he comes back, he pushes the brush into Martin’s hands, nudges his knees open and then sits between them as if he belongs there.
Martin gathers up Jon’s hair, and brushes it as gently as he can. It’s soft and uneven under his fingers, curling in all directions, and Martin feels entranced. Jon relaxes under his touch.
“My grandmother used to brush my hair,” Jon confesses. “She was always rough about it, though I’m not sure if that was because she was impatient with me or because I used to go days without brushing it until it ended up almost matted. Both, most likely.”
Jon’s voice is crisp and statement-steady. Martin follows it back from that cold place he had been inhabiting, as though Jon is his North star guiding him to safe waters. He doesn’t notice the tape recorder is on until Jon has finished another story about his grandmother and it clicks off. Martin suddenly misses the buzz of noise.
Martin ties off the end of the braid. Jon twists around, resting his chin on Martin’s knee, gazing up at him with big eyes.
“How are you, Martin?”
He takes a moment to think about it. “Better.”
Jon smiles, sleepy and so content against Martin. “Good. I’m always here if you need me. You know that, don’t you?”
Martin holds out his hand and Jon meets him halfway, lacing their fingers together. He’s trying to remember that, even though it’s hard sometimes. “I know, Jon. I know.”
Two nights later, Jon catches him again.
Movement in his periphery brings Martin back to himself before Jon can touch him. Jon pauses in the doorway. He’s wearing pyjamas—old plaid pants with holes in the waistband, and one of Martin’s shirts, hanging loosely on him like a dress. His hair is down and freshly brushed.
“Jon,” Martin says, shifting nervously on the sofa. “What time is it?”
Jon crosses the room. He climbs onto the sofa, pushes Martin down, and then flops down so he’s mostly on top of him. He’s a heavy and comforting weight on Martin’s chest.
“Is this alright?” Jon asks into Martin’s sweater.
“Uh,” Martin says, completely overwhelmed by the warmth of Jon against him. Everything is foggy, like he’s just woken up from a very long sleep. “I think so.”
Jon nods, his sharp chin digging into Martin’s shoulder, and then slumps, boneless, against Martin’s side.
Martin stares up at the watermarked ceiling and listens to Jon breathe. Idly, he runs his fingers over the back of Jon’s head, and before he knows it, he’s combing through his hair. Jon snuffles in his sleep and snuggles closer.
Martin’s heart feels too big to fit inside his body. Jon doesn’t weigh much, but in that moment, Martin can hardly breathe beneath him, totally subsumed by the soft crease of Jon’s face, the silky tangle of his hair.
He falls asleep like that, loving Jon so fiercely he aches from it, and when he wakes, it’s almost noon. Jon is folded in the armchair to his left.
Martin could convince himself last night never happened, but then Jon smiles and stands up, padding over to the sofa and kissing Martin gently.
“Good morning,” Jon says.
“Good morning,” Martin says, feeling warm and stiff from sleeping on an ancient sofa, smiling so wide his cheeks hurt.
They continue sleeping in separate rooms. When they first arrived, Martin insisted Jon take the master bedroom, and he only managed to win the ensuing argument because Jon was groggy from sleeping in the car.
A week after they arrived at the creaky cottage, Martin lays on the double-bed in the spare bedroom, staring up at the yellow ceiling. He feels hollowed out, like Peter or Elias or some other omniscient Avatar scooped out his insides.
The Fears came with them to Scotland. They are reminded of that fact constantly: Jon’s gnawing statement-hunger, and Martin’s cold limbs and bleary eyes, and the feeling of being watched draped over the cottage.
They’ve been irreversibly changed by all that’s happened. Maybe it would have been like this even if Elias hadn’t purposely turned them into Something Else. Trauma changes people.
The door creaks open. Jon peeks through the gap, waving awkwardly when he sees Martin looking back. “Can I…?”
He should be sleeping. They should both be sleeping.
“Uh,” Martin says. “Sure.”
Jon tiptoes into the room, as though he’s afraid to break the nighttime quiet. He hovers by the bed. “Can—can you move over?”
Martin shuffles to the farside of the mattress. Jon climbs in, resting on the other pillow, and they lay there for a moment, side by side in bed, just looking at each other.
“Hi,” Jon says at last.
It’s so endearing that Martin can’t help but laugh. “Hi there.”
Jon reaches down and takes his hand. His palm is warm and sweaty against Martin’s always-freezing fingers. “Is this okay?”
They might have napped together, curled up on the couch, but they’ve never shared a bed. A part of Martin is screaming internally. It’s getting easier and easier to shove down that panicked reaction whenever Jon gets close or smiles gently at Martin or links their hands together. Easy to convince himself that he belongs here at Jon’s side.
He has the sudden urge to find a pen and scribble down verses about the slant of Jon’s smile. He thought his poetry had died with Sasha, but it seems Jon has found a way to coax it back.
“You don’t have to keep asking me that,” Martin says. “The answer will always be yes.”
“I like making sure. I never want to make you uncomfortable.”
“I’ll tell you. Promise.”
Jon inches closer and lays his head on Martin’s shoulder. He glances up, checking Martin’s expression, before burying further into his side.
“Thank you,” Jon says.
Martin has no idea what he’s being thanked for, can barely breathe around the warmth coursing through his bones. In the end, he doesn’t say anything at all. But it’s okay. He thinks Jon already knows.
They start sleeping together regularly, after that. Martin sits in bed, reading one of the many moth-eaten novels abandoned in the cottage, until Jon tiptoes into the room and slips into bed beside him. Just knowing that Jon will seek him out during the night makes it easier to stay in bed, rather than wandering out into the living room and losing himself to the fog.
And just like that, Martin has a sleep schedule again. It’s almost healthy.
Both of them have nightmares semi-regularly. Martin can’t imagine a world in which their memories are entirely forgotten, even in sleep. But when either of them wake gasping, the other is there to bring them back down.
Last night’s storm has transformed the dirt roads into sludge. No Fear-powers could save Jon from how slippery the muck is.
When they left London, Martin brought boots, But Jon—whose wardrobe consisted of pyjamas and office wear—brought oxford shoes and thin sneakers. So this morning he was forced to borrow a pair of Daisy’s wellies, stuffed with socks to keep them on Jon’s smaller feet.
Jon trips over a root and falls into an almost knee-deep puddle. Mud soaks his jeans. He squawks and flaps his arms. Martin grabs him before he topples over.
“I think,” Jon says, “I’m done romanticising the Scottish countryside.”
“We have mud in London too, you know.” Martin links their arms together and helps drag Jon out of the muddy puddle.
“Yes, but there’s not quite so much of it.”
“So you can deal with monsters and primordial fear gods, but mud is too much for you?”
Jon sniffs, still holding Martin’s arm close. “Yes.”
Martin huffs out a laugh. The rest of the walk into town is spent in silence, arm in arm, avoiding the puddles where they can.
The sky is patchy above them, splotches of blue peeking out behind heavy storm clouds. When they get into town, the ground becomes firmer. The roads here are paved over, unlike the dirt tracks that branch around Daisy’s safehouse, but they’re dotted with potholes, little burrows filled up with mud.
Jon trips into yet another pothole, drenching his jeans. His scowl makes Martin choke on a laugh.
“Watch where you’re going,” Martin advises. Jon grumbles something under his breath that Martin doesn’t catch. He leans in. “Pardon?”
Jon glances up at him, then quickly away. “I said you’re distracting.”
Their arms are still linked, Martin realises. He turns his face away to hide his sudden grin.
“I’m holding you too,” Martin says. “But I haven’t fallen into any puddles.”
“Am I just not distracting?”
“You’ve been distracting me since we first met. I guess I’ve just gotten a lot of practise at functioning while you’re near me.”
Jon stares at him, mouth slack. Martin sees the next pothole coming and doesn’t say anything. As expected, Jon tips into it. He flails out of Martin’s grip and makes a horrified, high-pitched wail like a cat dumped into a cold bath. The sight is so undignified that Martin has to brace himself on his knees to stop from falling over, laughing so hard it hurts.
Jon stumbles out of the muck, shaking out his wet leg. “Martin!”
“S-Sorry!” Martin hiccups, holding his ribs. “Oh, sorry, I just—” He turns away, trying to compose himself, but laughter comes bubbling up his throat.
Jon sighs and slots their arms together again. Martin leans heavily into him, and they both list to one side as Jon struggles valiantly under his weight.
They tumble into the corner store, Jon drenched and grumbling, Martin pink-cheeked and still laughing. The cashier looks back at them, eyebrows lifted.
They quickly collect themselves. Jon tugs subconsciously at his windswept hair, and Martin clears his throat and tries to look composed.
“Sorry,” Martin says, voice hoarse.
Jon shuffles back to the mesh doormat and tries to discreetly hop up and down to shake off the last of the water clinging to him. That makes Martin choke, fist shoved against his mouth to keep from laughing again.
“Sorry,” he wheezes again. Jon glances at him, realises he’s close to bursting into laughter again, and jumps harder in place. Trying to get Martin to crack. Bastard.
The cashier watches them silently. “I was wondering when I’d get to meet you two,” she says at last. “We’ve been seeing you ‘round town, but you keep to yourself. Thought maybe you didn’t like people or something, I don’t know, you both just seemed… tired.”
That sobers them both. Jon slinks guilty back to his side and knocks their shoulders together in silent apology.
“We’ve been through a lot recently,” Jon admits, “but we’re alright. We’re looking after each other.”
“You definitely seem happier,” she says, glancing pointedly at the small puddle Jon left in the doorway.
Jon clears his throat. “Yes. Well…”
He looks around awkwardly, before pretending to spot something on the other side of the store and disappearing down one of the aisles. Martin smiles at the cashier. “Nice to meet you.”
She laughs. “You too. Take care, the both of you, alright?”
“Yeah,” Martin says. “Yeah. You too.”
He grabs a grocery basket and runs after Jon, basket thumping against his legs. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. He thinks he can hear the distant rattle of a tape recorder somewhere in the store, leading him closer to Jon.
When Martin finds him, he’s pretending to examine a carton of eggs the way he might examine a statement. He glances at Martin under his lashes. “Alright?”
It’s not the first time either of them have botched a social interaction. A week ago, that might have made Martin want to fade away like fog. Now, he just feels warm and real and in love.
“Yeah,” Martin says. “I’m okay.”
Against all odds, they’re both okay.