Chapter 28: ch.28 [First Steps]

The street was empty.

Seth noticed it on his second step out of the building, and his shoulders climbed toward his ears, waiting.

Nothing came.

No flash.

No long lens in a parked van.

No kid holding a phone sideways and whispering is that her.

Just the sidewalk, and the cold, and a streetlamp ticking as it warmed.

And above the towers, the moon.

It was full.

It hung over the glass like someone had put it there on purpose, and every window on the avenue held a small silver copy of it.

He had walked this street a hundred times.

He had never once looked up.

Astrid had stopped beside him.

Her face was tilted to the sky, white hair gone silver at the edges, the folded coat forgotten on her arm.

"It is very bright."

"It’s a full one."

"I know that."

"Sorry."

"I was not asking for an apology." A pause.

"I meant that I have not seen it like this. Without a window in the way."

Seth looked at her.

Then he looked at the moon, fast, so she would not catch him doing it.

He tugged his bomber cuffs down over his knuckles.

"Come on," he said. "It’s a bit of a walk."

They walked.

Click. Click. Click.

Her boots on the pavement, long and certain.

Then, half a block on, the sound changed.

It slowed.

He glanced down.

Her stride, which on any other day ate a sidewalk in military lengths, had shortened.

It matched his.

She did not look at him.

She did not remark on it.

He did not remark on it either.

They walked at the speed of two people with nowhere to be, and the wind came down the avenue and put her hair across her face.

She caught it with two fingers.

Tucked it behind her ear.

It came loose again at once.

She tucked it again, with the grim patience of a woman fighting a weather system she had personally agreed to.

"It does that," Seth offered.

"I am aware."

"It’s just. Hair."

"It is insubordinate."

"Mine too," he said, and pointed at the crown of his head.

The one piece stood in the moonlight like a lightning rod.

Astrid looked at it for a long, serious second.

"Yes," she said. "I had noticed it in particular."

A sound came out of her.

Short. Quiet. Startled.

It was not quite a laugh.

It was what a laugh would be if it had been locked in a room for eleven years and someone had finally tried the door.

She shut it down immediately.

He pretended not to have heard.

He had.

He was keeping it.

"The broadcast," she said, in a voice pressed flat to hide the corner.

His stomach dropped.

"Yes?"

"You were terrified."

"I was so terrified."

"You kept the index card in your pocket for the entire first hour. Your hand never left it."

"You saw that?"

"I see everything."

"I thought I was going to throw up on a Grandmaster."

"Which one?"

"Any of them. I wasn’t picky."

That sound again.

Shorter this time.

She turned her face away and studied a parking meter with great interest.

"And yet," she said to the meter, "you stayed."

"You were next to me."

It was out before he could stop it.

He yanked his cuffs down over his hands.

Astrid walked three steps in silence.

"The training," she said, as if the last sentence had never been spoken. "The first week. You tried to castle with a bishop."

"You said it was creative."

"It was illegal."

"Creative and illegal!"

"The two are not mutually exclusive." Her chin rose. "I have lost sleep over that bishop."

"You don’t sleep."

"That is why."

He laughed.

A real one, helpless, bouncing off the empty buildings, and he did not even think to be embarrassed.

She walked beside him with her eyes on the pavement.

The corner of her mouth did not go back to where it came from.

They talked about nothing, and it was the best conversation of his life.

The pin drill.

The kettle.

The morning she had salted the tea.

The note on the fridge that said please stop apologizing to the toaster, which he still considered unjust, because the toaster had been judging him.

She did not correct one story.

She asked a question after each.

Somewhere around the fourth block, he realized she had been asking him things for ten minutes.

What he had liked.

What he had hated.

What had been the first object in the apartment that felt like his.

"The blue plate," he said. "The one with the rim."

She went still for half a step.

Then she kept walking.

When he looked down, one of her hands had closed around the strap of the purse so tightly her knuckles had gone paler than her sleeve.

He did not ask.

He thought he knew.

? ? ?

Gus’s store glowed at the end of the block.

Green sign. Fogged windows.

One moth bumping the door light like it had a grievance.

Astrid had passed it a hundred times from the back seat of a car.

She had never been inside.

"A convenience store," she said.

"Yes."

"This is the destination."

"No." Seth pushed the door. "This is a stop."

The bell rang.

The smell reached her first.

Warm plastic.

Sweet bread.

Floor cleaner.

Coffee that had been on the burner since the afternoon and had stopped being coffee some hours ago.

Her eyes did what they always did.

Threat. Utility. Disorder.

Thirty-one items on the nearest shelf, facing thirty-one directions.

Disorder, she thought.

She waited to mind.

She did not.

Behind the register, a man in a gray hoodie looked up from a crossword.

DAD’S FISHING TRIP 2019.

His eyes went to Seth.

Then to the woman in the red sweater.

Then to Seth.

Then, with great care and no change of expression whatsoever, back to the crossword.

"Evening," Gus said, to the paper.

"Evening," Seth said.

"Seven letters. Unexpected arrival."

"I don’t know."

"Surprise." said Astrid.

Gus wrote it in.

It fit.

He did not look up.

"Cold case is on the left. Hot stuff’s by the register. Nothing’s expired. I checked. Personally."

Seth moved down the aisle like a man in his own kingdom.

Astrid followed, watching him pick things without reading a single label.

Two cans from the warmer.

A paper-wrapped something from beside the register.

A small bag of fish-shaped biscuits, which he held up to her like evidence.

"Taiyaki," he said. "Sort of."

She turned the bag over.

It was a fish.

It was absurd.

"What does it contain?"

"Sugar."

"And?"

"More sugar."

"I accept."

At the register, Seth reached for his wallet.

Her hand went to her purse by reflex.

Fifty million dollars lived behind a small leather clasp, and one tap would have bought every item in the store and the store.

His hand closed over the wallet first.

"Mine," he said.

She stopped.

The word sat in the air between them, small and entirely innocent.

Mine.

She had said it on Saturday.

She had said it like a lock turning.

He had just said it like a man offering to cover four dollars of fish.

He had not meant anything by it.

She watched him realize, one second late, that it could have meant something.

His fingers went to his cuff and pulled it down over his knuckles.

"The bill," he said. "I meant. The bill is mine."

"I understood you."

"I can pay for a convenience store. I’ve got it. I can do this."

She looked at the cans.

At the paper-wrapped thing.

At the bag of fish she was still holding against her chest.

She could have paid for the building.

She put the purse back on her shoulder.

"Then I owe you."

The words felt strange.

Not unpleasant.

Like finding a stair she had not known was in the house.

Seth stared at her.

"Four eighty," said Gus, to the crossword.

Seth paid.

Gus slid the change across the counter, then kept two fingers on it.

"Your shift’s still yours," he said.

"I know."

"I was talking to the other one."

Astrid blinked.

Gus lifted one eye from the grid.

"She knows where the stockroom is. There’s a chair back there. It’s a bad chair." He lowered the eye. "She can have it."

He took his fingers off the change.

Then, still staring at the paper, in the same flat voice he used for expiry dates:

"Saw the stream, kid."

Seth went very still.

"Customer wanted me to change the channel. I said no. Made him stand and watch the whole thing."

"Gus—"

"Proud of you."

He wrote a letter in a box.

Erased it.

Wrote another.

"I’ll be here. If you need something. Any hour. The door sticks, you push it, I’m behind it." A grunt. "Don’t make it weird."

"I won’t."

"You’re making it weird."

"I’m not."

"Seven down," said Gus.

"Warm feeling. Starts with a G."

Seth’s eyes had gone bright, and he turned them very fast to the nearest shelf.

"Glow." said Astrid, quietly.

Gus looked at the grid.

He nodded.

He wrote it in.

The bell rang as they went out.

Neither of them spoke for most of the block.

Astrid carried the fish against her chest the whole way, and Seth walked with his sleeve pressed to his face and an elaborate interest in the sky, and she let him.

? ? ?

There was a bench at the edge of a small square.

Iron frame, wooden slats, a lamp with one dead bulb.

It faced nothing in particular.

It faced the sky.

Seth stopped in front of it and realized he did not know how to do the next part.

She had stood beside him.

She had walked beside him.

She had sat across a board from him for weeks.

Astrid stood at one end of the bench with her hand on the cold iron of the armrest.

"May I sit?"

She was asking.

It hit him somewhere under the ribs.

"Yes. Please. Yeah."

She sat.

Not in the middle.

At the end, nearer the lamp.

Leaving room.

He sat in it.

Not across.

Beside.

He passed her a can.

She held it in both hands.

"It is warm."

"They keep them in the little warmer."

"Why?"

"So somebody can hold something warm."

She said nothing.

She drank.

Her eyes closed.

"It is extremely sweet."

"Yeah."

"I would like another."

He bit the inside of his cheek so he would not grin.

They ate the fish, one by one, in a silence with nothing to defend.

The wind came across the square.

Her hair lifted.

She reached for it.

Stopped.

Let it go.

It blew across her face, and she sat there with white strands over her eyes and a can in her hands, and did not fix it.

She looked, Seth thought, like someone who had quit a very old war.

Above them the moon had cleared the towers.

A few stars held on around it.

His phone buzzed.

Once, against his chest, through the lining of the bomber.

Astrid felt it too.

Her fingers closed on the can.

Neither of them moved.

It buzzed again.

Stopped.

The square went very quiet.

"You may look."

"Nope."

"Seth."

"It’s not the time."

He kept his eyes on the sky.

She studied the side of his face a moment longer.

Then she looked up as well.

In her small leather purse, her own phone made no sound.

She was not looking at that one either.

Her coat lay folded between them on the bench.

At some point her shoulder came to rest against his arm.

Neither of them acknowledged it.

Neither of them moved away.

Seth fixed on one small star just left of the moon and tried to hold all of it at once.

The cold. The can. The weight of her.

The fact that he had known for three days exactly what he was going to say next.

He stood.

His legs were less certain than he had hoped.

"Okay," he said.

Astrid looked up.

Moonlight on white hair.

Red eyes, wide, wary, and for once not guarded at all.

"There’s a place."

His voice shook once, and held.

"Where I used to go. Before chess. Before the contract. When I couldn’t afford the bus."

He pushed back the cuff of the bomber.

All the way, past the wrist.

He held out his bare hand.

"I’ve never shown it to anyone."

The can in her hands went very still.