Chapter 109 THE WINTER MARKET
Elias
“You’re doing it again,” Alex said.
“Doing what?”
“Walking like you’re still at your desk.” Elias was moving too fast, slightly ahead, the purposeful stride of someone going somewhere rather than someone who had nowhere to be. Alex pulled at his hand. “We are at a market. There is no deadline.”
Elias looked at him. Then at the stalls around them. Then consciously, visibly, slowed down.
“Better,” Alex said.
The market was small. Someone had strung lights between the bare trees and set up perhaps twenty stalls along the path, the kind of thing that appeared in city parks in December and was gone by January without leaving any evidence it had been there. Hot food. Handmade things. A stall selling only candles that smelled too strongly of cinnamon. A woman is playing a violin badly but enthusiastically near the entrance.
They had not planned to come. Alex had seen a handwritten sign on a lamppost on their street that morning and said: Do you want to? And Elias had said yes before thinking about it, which was the right way to say yes to things on Saturday mornings.
They walked hand in hand between the stalls. Elias adjusted his pace deliberately and felt the adjustment become natural after two minutes. This was the thing about being with Alex. You recalibrated without noticing you were doing it. The speed. The specific attention he brought to small things, stopping now at a stall selling handprinted cards, picking one up, reading it, setting it back down carefully.
“I keep thinking about it,” Alex said. Still looking at the cards.
“The paper.”
“Whether we are too close to it.” He moved to the next stall. “To each other. Whether that makes the work softer than it should be.”
Elias thought about the morning’s session. The red pen. The two qualifiers crossed out. The transition that had needed a bridge. “Do you think this morning felt soft?”
“No.”
“Then you have your answer.”
“This morning felt like a fight.”
“A productive one.”
“Yes.” Alex picked up a small carved wooden thing from the next stall, turned it over, and put it back. “But what about when it stops being productive? What if we get to a point where we cannot push each other because we do not want to cause damage?”
Elias stopped walking.
Alex stopped beside him.
“That is a real fear,” Elias said. “It is worth having. But I think you are describing a version of us that does not exist.” He looked at Alex directly. “You crossed out both qualifiers this morning. I rewrote the transition twice. Neither of us was gentle about it.”
“Because it was the first session. We were both honest.”
“Were you?”
Alex looked at the path. “No.”
“Neither was I.” Elias started walking again. “The fear is that love will make us careful in the wrong ways. That is a good thing to watch for. It does not mean it is already happening.”
Alex was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded once, the small private nod that meant he had received something and was putting it somewhere useful.
They moved further into the market. The violin had improved slightly or Elias had adjusted to it. A stall selling hot drinks appeared on the left and they joined the short queue without discussing it, the automatic shared decision-making of two people whose preferences had become largely legible to each other.
Two cups of something warm. They stood to the side and drank and watched the market move around them.
A couple nearby were trying to fold a large paper map in the wind, failing, laughing about it. Two children ran between the stalls with the focused urgency of children who had been told not to run. An old man examined every item on a stall selling hand-knitted things with the thoroughness of someone who had all the time available to him and intended to use it.
“I like this,” Alex said.
“The market.”
“Being here. With you. Just.” He looked at the lights in the trees. “Ordinary Saturday.”
Elias looked at him. At twenty-four years old in a winter coat with a cup of something warm in both hands looking at market lights like they were sufficient. Like this was the whole of what was needed.
It was the whole of what was needed.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He took it out. A text from James.
Flight booked. Arriving 23rd. Is the couch still available or has Alex taken over the spare room with books?
Elias showed Alex.
Alex read it and smiled. “Tell him the books have been reorganised.”
“They have not been reorganised.”
“Tell him anyway.”
Elias typed back: Couch is yours. Books have been reorganised. A pause. Then he added: Looking forward to it. He sent it before he reconsidered the last part, which was the right way to send it.
They finished their drinks and kept walking.
At a stall near the far end, Alex stopped. Small notebooks. Handmade, the covers various colours, and the pages are unlined. The kind of thing that sat on a desk and waited to be filled with something that had not yet announced itself.
Alex picked one up. Dark green cover. Held it for a moment.
Elias reached past him and took it from his hand.
“I’ll get it,” Elias said.
“You don’t have to.”
“For the gaps.” Elias paid before Alex could object. Handed it back. “You have been thinking about them for months. You need somewhere to put them that is not the dissertation margins.”
Alex looked at the notebook. Then at Elias.
“The gaps,” Alex said.
“The ones that are not problems. The ones that are where the meaning lives.” Elias kept his voice even. “You need a place to think about them that is not formal. Not academic. Just yours.”
Alex turned the notebook over in his hands. His fingers found the edge of the cover, the slight texture of it.
“Thank you,” he said quietly.
They walked back the way they had come. The violin player had stopped. The market was thinning slightly as the afternoon darkened. The lights in the trees looked different in the early dark, warmer, more deliberate.
At home, they took off their coats and Elias made tea and Alex sat on the couch with the green notebook in his lap not writing in it yet, just holding it, which was the right thing to do with a new notebook. You did not rush the first page.
Elias brought the tea and sat beside him. Close. Their shoulders and their knees touch along the full length of both. Alex leaned into it without adjusting.
Outside the city, Saturday evening moved through. Inside the apartment was warm and quiet and entirely sufficient.
“James is coming on the twenty-third,” Alex said.
“Yes.”
“Are you ready for that?”
Elias thought about it honestly. “More than last time,” he said. “Which is all ready ever is. More than before.”
Alex nodded.
He opened the green notebook to the first page.
Wrote one word at the top.
Then closed it.
Elias did not ask what the word was.
Some things were allowed to stay private even between people who knew each other completely. The first word in a new notebook was one of those things.
Alex put it on the cushion beside him and picked up his tea.
They sat in the warm apartment while the Saturday evening settled around them and said nothing else for a long time.
It was enough.
It was more than enough.