The Name

The Name
\# Chapter 62

Twenty minutes was a long time to sit across a kitchen table from a man you had been finding in your dreams for a fortnight and not touch him.

Jean had set the table for two before going upstairs. Kettle waiting on the hob. Two mugs. Shortbread baked Wednesday morning, after Isabel had asked, in the uncertain voice of a young woman who did not yet know she had earned the right to ask anything, whether she could help. Pot of honey from the bees Mora kept in the field behind the chapel three miles down the road. Butter in a little ramekin from Edinburgh, nineteen seventy-three.

Nothing on the table had been touched.

Across from Alexander in the green silk dress, hair down, bare feet on the cold flagstones, Isabel sat with both hands wrapped around a mug of tea that had not been hot for the better part of the last twenty minutes.
.

Twenty minutes was the length of time it had taken them, after Jean had kissed Isabel’s hair at the top of the staircase and disappeared into the upstairs bedroom with the private sound of a grandmother choosing to let her grandson find his own way through a door, to walk from the front hallway to this kitchen and sit down across from each other and not touch.

They had made it, briefly, to small talk.

“You drove down from the airport.”

“Aye.”

“Volvo smells like cigarettes, doesn’t it.”

“Lemon air freshener and someone else’s cigarettes.”

“Mora says rentals always smell like the last person’s bad decision.”

A laugh from him that was not quite a laugh.

Then nothing. Twenty minutes of nothing. Kettle ticking on the hob. Cat watching them from the windowsill with the flat unblinking expression of a creature settling in for a sporting event he had personally bet on. Cottage breathing low in the warm dark. And the bond, under the table, under the mugs, under their two pairs of bare feet on the cold flagstones, ringing.

Ringing was the only word for it. Like a bell still vibrating inside his sternum from the moment her gold had run into the back of his hand at the newel post, and her own sternum vibrating with the same note, and the air between them, in the low light of his grandmother’s kitchen, vibrating along with both of them, because two old lines completing a circuit do not, by any honest accounting of what was happening in this kitchen, stop ringing just because the bodies they were running through have decided, for politeness, to drink tea.

Isabel lifted her mug, then set it back down.

Her hand on the table was four inches from his.

Counted, re-counted, counted again, those four inches had been the only thing Alexander had been doing for nineteen of the twenty minutes.

His own hand stayed wrapped around his mug because the moment it let go of the mug, the four inches were not going to remain four inches, and after nine years of mountains arranged so a decision of this shape could not be made, the hand was not, this evening, going to be trusted to make it slowly.

The thumb on her side of the table moved.

Just the thumb, a slow stroke against the rim of her own mug. Through the bond, the stroke registered before his eyes registered it, which was, by every fair reckoning of what was happening to him in this kitchen, a problem.

“Alexander.”

Until that second, she had not said his name.

The dream had given her his hands, his mouth, his back, the specific way his body had folded around hers in the velvet room and the stone room and the bed in the bedroom of a man who had not, until this morning, owned a bedroom on this continent. His name, though, had been saving itself.

She said it the way a woman says a name she has already decided is hers.

Without his permission, his hand let go of his mug. Nine years of arrangement, undone by a thumb releasing porcelain.

Across the four inches.

Slow enough that her gold, between them, had time to wake up and rise out of the wood of the table in a faint visible shimmer running along the grain of the oak the way it had run along the banister at the staircase. Her own hand did not move toward his and did not move away from his, because her body had decided, the same way his had, that this was not a thing she was going to do for him. This was a thing he was going to do.

Half an inch from her hand, his fingertips stopped.

Looking up, he found a face already looking back.

In the low light of the kitchen, her eyes were the green he had not, this evening, been able to stop registering, and her mouth, which had said his name, was, by the unsteady reading her own breathing was making it impossible to disguise, half open.

Closing the half inch took the rest of the breath he had been holding.

The pad of his index finger landed on the back of her hand.

Gold flared up out of her skin to meet it before his finger had fully settled, and the cottage, around them, in the quiet confirmation of a building that had been holding its breath for the entire twenty minutes, breathed.

Untouched on the hob, the kettle whistled once and went still.

On the windowsill, the cat jumped down to the kitchen floor and walked, without looking at either of them, out of the room.

Isabel rose.

Alexander rose with her, and neither of them, by any reading of what their bodies were now doing, was going to be drinking tea.

Closing his hand around hers, he felt the cottage hum once, low, in the wood of the floor under their feet, in the iron of the kettle on the hob, in the brass of the doorknob across the kitchen that was, in the next breath, going to need turning.

She turned first toward the hallway, and he followed. The cat, on the rug at the foot of the stairs, lifted his head and watched them pass, and in the part of him that had been older than human civilization for longer than he cared to discuss with anyone, the cat made the editorial note that the kitchen tea was going cold and someone, in the morning, would have to remember to throw it out.

Up the staircase, slow.

Twenty minutes of not touching had been the longest twenty minutes either of them had survived in waking life, and the brass handle of the guest-room door under his palm was, by every reasonable reading of his own pulse, the last barrier between them and the next stretch of their lives.

His hand turned it.

She did not look back to see if he was following, because the bond, in the low ring at the centre of her chest, was already telling her he was.

Behind them, the door closed.

In the kitchen below, on the table where the gold had risen out of the grain of the oak, the shimmer settled slowly back into the wood, and two mugs of cold tea sat across from each other in the quiet, witnesses to a contact that had taken a fortnight of dreams and an ocean and an hour and forty-eight minutes of dark county road and twenty minutes of porcelain to finally make.

On the rug at the foot of the stairs, the cat did not get up.

Some things, his face suggested, were better watched from down here.