Chapter 117 Just The Two Of Us

Chapter 117 Just The Two Of Us
Lara's POV

Damien suggested the night out about two weeks after everything ended and I said yes before he finished the sentence.

Not because I needed to go anywhere in particular. Not because the house had become difficult to be in or the ordinary routine of it had started to feel small. Just because there was something about the idea of the two of us, just us, somewhere that wasn't our kitchen or our living room or any of the spaces that had held so many heavy conversations over the past several months, that felt like exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.

He made a reservation at a restaurant I had always wanted to go to and never found the right occasion for. The kind of place that required a booking weeks in advance and that I had been meaning to try since it opened two years ago and had simply never gotten around to because life kept producing more pressing things to get around to.

We dressed properly for it.

Not in the way we dressed for formal work things, not structured and deliberate, just nicely, the way you dressed when you wanted to feel like yourself but a slightly more considered version of yourself. Damien wore the dark shirt I had always liked on him, the one that had been hanging in the wardrobe for months unworn because the months had not been the kind that called for dark shirts. I wore a dress I had bought before all of this started, on a Saturday afternoon when the most pressing thing on my mind had been whether the sleeves were the right length, and had never found the occasion to wear.

It fit differently now. I had not yet started showing properly but my body had changed in the small ways early pregnancy changed things and the dress knew, even if nobody else could see it yet.

I looked at myself in the mirror for a moment.

Then I went downstairs.

Ethan was on the sofa when we came down and he looked up from his phone and did a slow assessment of both of us the way he assessed most things, quickly and completely.

"You look nice," he said to me.

"Thank you," I said.

He looked at Damien.

"You look okay," he said.

"Deeply appreciated," Damien said.

"Don't be late," Ethan said, already looking back at his phone. "Richie went to sleep at seven thirty and if he wakes up and you're not here he's going to want to call you and I don't want to deal with that."

"We won't be late," I said.

"Also there's nothing good in the fridge for a midnight snack so if you're passing anywhere on the way back—"

"Goodnight Ethan," Damien said.

"Just saying," Ethan said.

I was still smiling about it when we got into the car.

The restaurant was warm and a little loud in exactly the right way. Not quiet enough to feel precious about the evening. Not so loud that we had to lean across the table to hear each other. Just the right level of ambient noise that made conversation feel natural and easy rather than performed.

We were shown to a table near the window, small and well lit, with a view of the street outside where the evening was doing the particular things evenings did in this city, people walking, lights coming on, the ordinary movement of a place that never quite stopped.

We ordered without spending too long on it.

Food and wine and water and bread that arrived almost immediately and was warm enough that I ate three pieces before the starters came, which Damien noticed and said nothing about because he was a wise man.

"Is this strange?" he asked after a while, watching me over the rim of his glass.

"A little," I said honestly. "Good strange though."

"Good strange," he agreed.

We talked about things we hadn't talked about in months because there had always been something more pressing taking up the space where those conversations would have lived.

He told me about a development project he was considering. A new building in another city that would require more of his time than his current projects but that he was genuinely excited about in the way he got excited about things that required him to build something properly from the ground up rather than just managing something that already existed.

I listened to him talk about it and watched his face while he talked and thought about how long it had been since I had seen him like this. Not managing something. Not protecting something. Not holding something together through sheer determination. Just enthusiastic about a building.

I loved him very much in that moment.

I told him about the international expansion. About the Nairobi partnership and where it was heading and the conversation I had had with my board about the next phase of growth. About a new idea I had been turning over quietly, a product line that I hadn't mentioned to anyone yet because it was still too new and unformed to survive other people's opinions, the fragile stage of an idea where talking about it too soon could break it before it had the chance to become real.

He listened the way he always listened. Fully. Without performing attention. Just there with whatever I was saying, asking the right questions at the right moments, the questions that showed he had been following not just the words but the thinking underneath them.

I had missed this.

Not him, because he had been there through all of it and I had never been without him. But this particular version of an evening with him, uncomplicated by fear or urgency or the weight of things that needed managing. Just dinner. Just talking. Just the two of us being the two people we were before any of this started, and discovering that those two people were still there, still themselves, still interested in each other in the way that had nothing to do with crisis and everything to do with actually liking the person you had decided to spend your life with.

"Tell me something I don't know about you," I said.

He looked at me. "You know everything about me."

"Nobody knows everything about anyone," I said. "Tell me something. Something small. Something you've never told me."

He thought about it properly, turning his glass slightly on the table, not rushing to fill the silence with something easy.

"When I was twelve," he said eventually, "I used to write stories. Science fiction. In notebooks I kept under my bed." He paused. "They were genuinely terrible. My mother found one once and read a page out loud at dinner and my sisters laughed for what felt like several years."

I stared at him.

"You never told me this," I said.

"It was not my proudest period," he said.

"What happened to the notebooks?"

"I burned them," he said simply.

"Damien."

"In the garden," he said. "With matches I was not supposed to have. I took them outside and burned every single one and stood there watching them burn and felt nothing except relief."

"I would have loved to read terrible twelve year old Damien science fiction," I said.

"That is exactly why I burned them," he said. "So that no one could ever say that sentence to me and mean it."

I laughed properly then, the kind of laugh that came from somewhere genuinely delighted, that surprised me slightly on its way out, and he smiled across the table with the smile he kept for moments when he had made me laugh without trying to, the one that was slightly pleased with itself and not remotely apologetic about it.

I reached across the table and took his hand.

He turned it palm up immediately, the way he always did, and held mine.

"We made it," I said.

Not as a summary. Not as a conclusion to anything. Just as something true that I wanted to say out loud across a restaurant table on a night when nothing was urgent and nobody needed anything and we were just two people who had been through a very great deal together and were sitting here, still, holding hands.

"We made it," he said.

We ordered dessert.

We ate it slowly and let the conversation wander wherever it wanted to wander and stayed until the restaurant began to empty and the staff were doing the gentle orchestrated things restaurants did when they wanted you to know the evening was drawing to a close without actually saying it directly.

We walked to the car through the cool night air, his hand in mine, the city around us doing its late evening thing. And I thought about all the nights over the past months when I had moved through this city with a particular kind of vigilance, aware of shadows, aware of who might be watching from where.

There was none of that now.

Just the city. Just the night. Just the particular feeling of walking somewhere with someone you loved with nothing behind you and everything ahead.

In the car he reached over without looking away from the road and put his hand on my knee and I put my hand over his and we drove home like that, through the quiet streets, toward the house where our children were sleeping.

Ethan was asleep on the sofa when we got in. Fully asleep, mouth slightly open, the television still going, the remote control on the floor beside him where it had fallen from his hand at some point. He had clearly had every intention of staying awake until we got back and had comprehensively failed to do so.

Damien looked at him for a moment.

Then he crossed the room quietly and picked the blanket up from the armchair and spread it over him without waking him.

I turned the television off.

We went upstairs together and I got ready for bed and climbed in and Damien came in a few minutes later and got in beside me and turned the lamp off and in the dark I lay there listening to the house settle around us.

Richie's breathing through the baby monitor on the nightstand. The particular creak the third stair made when the temperature changed at night. The faint sound of the street outside, a car passing, someone's music briefly and then gone.

The house being exactly itself.

"Thank you for tonight," I said into the dark.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

"It was my idea," I said.

"It was my reservation," he said.

"Fair," I said.

A comfortable silence.

"The notebooks," I said.

"No," he said.

"If you ever remember what was in them—"

"I won't," he said firmly.

"Just one plot summary—"

"Goodnight Lara," he said.

I smiled in the dark.

"Goodnight," I said.

And I closed my eyes and slept properly, deeply, without waking, for the first time in months.