Chapter 90 Anything We Want

Chapter 90 Anything We Want
The library was exactly what it had always been on a Thursday evening in October, the lamp on the side table casting its warm circle across the floor, the freesia painting catching the light the way it always caught it at this hour, Biscuit on the desk in his permanent position with his tail arranged around his feet and his eyes half closed in the expression of an animal that had achieved complete satisfaction with the conditions of his life and saw no reason to alter them.

Dante was at the reading desk with something he had been reading for an hour without turning a page and I was in the armchair with my own book and the evening was doing what evenings did when nothing was pressing in from the edges of them, which was simply being an evening, warm and unhurried and asking nothing of anyone.

I had been trying to identify the feeling sitting in my chest for the better part of an hour and had finally arrived at a name for it.

Ordinary. It felt completely and entirely ordinary in the specific way of something that had been extraordinary for so long that ordinary felt like the most remarkable thing available.

I put my book down.

He looked up.

"What do we do now," I said.

He held my gaze across the library and the question sat between us and I watched him turn it over in the way he turned things over, completely and without hurrying, giving it the full weight of his attention before he offered anything back.

He set his own book down.

"Anything we want," he said.

The words landed in the quiet library and I sat with them and felt the specific size of what they contained, which was enormous and also completely simple at the same time, the way the most important things always managed to be both simultaneously.

Anything we want.

Not anything that the situation allowed. Not anything that the threat level permitted or the security assessment approved or the operational requirements made possible. Anything we actually wanted, chosen freely from the full available range of things two people could want when nothing was pressing in from the edges of everything.

I looked at the freesia painting and thought about all the things I wanted that I had not let myself want properly because wanting them properly required believing they were actually available and believing they were available required a version of the future I had not been certain of until very recently.

I wanted mornings with cold coffee and nobody requiring anything urgent before ten. I wanted to walk to the market in the city without Nico three steps behind and come back with things I had chosen myself and make something mediocre for dinner and not mind that it was mediocre. I wanted to sit across from this man in a restaurant with bad lighting and a menu that took too long to read and talk about nothing important for two hours and walk home through streets that were just streets.

I wanted to open the bar and stand behind it on the first night and look out at the room I had made and feel it be mine in the complete way that only things you built yourself ever were. I wanted to call my father on a Tuesday for no reason and hear his voice doing its ordinary thing. I wanted to watch Marco be embarrassing at family dinners for the rest of my life and watch Dante endure it with the resigned love of a man who had been managing his brother since before either of them could drive.

I wanted all of it. The whole ordinary extraordinary shape of it.

"Tell me something you want," I said. "Something specific. Something you haven't let yourself want because there was always something else that had to come first."

He was quiet for a long moment and I let the quiet be as long as it needed to be.

"Breakfast," he said finally.

I looked at him. "Breakfast."

"Breakfast that takes a long time," he said. "Not because anything is happening but because there is nowhere to be and the morning is available and the coffee is good and nobody needs anything from me before noon." He paused. "I haven't had a breakfast like that in approximately ten years."

I looked at him across the library and thought about a man who had been running an empire since he was twenty two years old and had not had an unhurried breakfast in a decade and felt the specific warmth of knowing that I was going to make sure he had one tomorrow and as many after that as the mornings contained.

"We are having that tomorrow," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"I am making something complicated," I said. "Something that takes at least an hour and requires your full presence at the table."

"I will be present," he said.

"You will not bring anything to read," I said.

"I make no promises," he said.

"Dante," I said.

"Fine," he said.

I smiled at him across the library and he looked at me smiling and his expression did the thing it did sometimes that I had never entirely gotten used to no matter how many times I had seen it, that specific quality of looking that was warm and unhurried and faintly wondering, like the fact of my smile was something that had not stopped being remarkable to him, like he was still slightly surprised each time it appeared and suspected he was always going to be.

Like he would never stop being surprised by it.

I looked back at my book so I did not make a thing of the expression on his face and he looked back at his book and Biscuit adjusted his position on the desk by approximately two inches and the lamp made its warm circle and the fountain ran outside and the estate breathed its slow evening breath and the library held us both and the whole quiet ordinary evening stretched out ahead of us with nothing in it except itself.

Anything we want.

All of it.

Starting tomorrow.