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It had been three weeks since Raven had found out about Erik. Three weeks of her alternating between gleeful meddling, sisterly delight, and the kind of documentary filmmaking that would have made the BBC proud.

And three weeks since Cheryl, normally placid, had declared psychological warfare on the man Charles rather hopelessly loved.

The morning light was thin and grey, London filtered through drizzle. It illuminated the battlefield: one sofa, one armchair, a scattering of cat toys that looked suspiciously like spent munitions. Somewhere, the boiler rattled like distant artillery.

Raven’s camera light blinked red from the bookshelf. “Day twelve of the cease-fire,” she murmured, crouched in the corner like David Attenborough in trainers. “Tensions remain high.”

Across the sitting room, Erik sat on the sofa with the tense dignity of someone attempting hostage negotiation through sheer force of will. He was still in his shirt from work, one cufflink undone, the dark fabric peppered with ginger fur. His shoes were immaculate; his expression was not. Cheryl occupied the armchair opposite, tail wrapped neatly around her paws, golden eyes narrowed in what Charles privately categorised as her you will die by dawn expression.

Charles hovered near the mantelpiece, clutching a mug of tea like a peace negotiator between warring nations. The tea had gone cold but abandoning it felt like surrender. He wanted this to go well – no, perfectly. If Cheryl could tolerate Erik, it would feel like an official blessing from the gods of domestic harmony. And if she couldn’t… well, then his life would be an endless triangle of hissing, shredded textiles, and quiet mortification.
He’d prepared for this with the same anxious precision he used for conference lectures: vacuuming, lint-rolling, a pep talk whispered to the cat that morning about “open-mindedness and sharing emotional space.”

“She’s calmer today,” he said hopefully, trying to sound casual but hearing how brittle it came out.

“She's plotting,” Erik replied. His voice was even, but the faint twitch in his jaw betrayed a long morning. There were scratches across his hand – tiny, precise, like battle honours – and a single tuft of fur clung to his trouser leg. He had been ambushed. Charles suspected the attack had been both unprovoked and richly deserved.

Raven zoomed the camera lens in on the evidence. “For context,” she said, “yesterday she launched a pre-emptive strike on his cashmere. We’re estimating damages in the low hundreds.”

“It was merino,” Erik muttered.

“Oh, that makes it fine,” Charles said brightly. “She’s developing taste.”

Cheryl gave a low, pointed hiss, long and serpentine, as if to confirm this. The sound vibrated through the room like the opening chord of doom.

Raven giggled. Erik exhaled through his nose, slow and measured. Charles knew that particular stillness meant effort. Erik was trying – really trying – to remain patient, but even his iron composure had limits. He was a man capable of handling hostile witnesses and arrogant partners, but Cheryl was a new form of warfare altogether. She was guerrilla tactics wrapped in fur.

Charles took a step closer, half-whispering as though discussing an anxious toddler. “You’re doing beautifully,” he murmured, edging forward. “She can sense when people are anxious, so – ”

“I’m not anxious.” A small lie, delivered with the cool tone of someone maintaining order through willpower alone. His cuff brushed against the sofa cushion; Cheryl’s ears twitched at the sound.

“She’s very intuitive,” Charles insisted, aware that he was babbling but powerless to stop himself. “She feels tension.”

“Then she’s thriving.” Erik’s hand smoothed over his tie – creased, faintly furry – like a man attempting to reassert some shred of control over the morning. His movements were crisp, deliberate, the way people move when they refuse to let the universe see them flinch.

Charles’s heart clenched with a mixture of affection and guilt. It wasn’t that he enjoyed watching Erik suffer; it was that he admired the determination. He’d never seen anyone face a hissing cat with the calm of a seasoned diplomat. Part of him wanted to step in, scoop Cheryl up, apologise profusely; another part wanted to see how long Erik’s famous patience would last.

Cheryl blinked once, slow and deliberate. Then she extended a paw onto the cushion between them, claws half-unsheathed. Her whiskers trembled with the anticipation of violence.

Erik eyed it warily. “Is this a threat or an olive branch?”

“Hard to tell,” Charles said. “She sometimes offers a paw before – ”

The paw swiped. A thread from Erik’s cuff unravelled, curling like a tiny white flag. Cheryl followed the movement with clinical detachment, then hissed again, shorter this time, the feline equivalent of a parting shot.

Raven collapsed against the wall, laughing. “That’s a no-confidence motion.”

Erik inhaled sharply through his nose, exhaled like a man forcing calm through gritted teeth, and stood. “Fine,” he said, adjusting his jacket. “Cease-fire adjourned until further notice.”

Cheryl hopped down from the chair and strutted out with the self-satisfaction of a conquering general. Her tail swished once – victory banner unfurled. A single strand of fur drifted in her wake like smoke after battle.

Charles winced. “She’ll come round. Eventually.”

“I look forward to that golden age,” Erik said, inspecting the rip in his cuff. “Assuming I still own any clothing.”

Raven stopped recording and set her camera down on the table, still grinning. “And that concludes today’s episode of Man Versus Cat: The Attrition Years.”

Charles wanted to melt into the floor. This wasn’t how it was meant to go. In his mind, the cat would have accepted Erik instantly; there would have been mutual respect, gentle cohabitation, perhaps even an adorably domestic photo for Raven to post of Uncle Erik and Cheryl bonding. Instead, his living room looked like the aftermath of a low-stakes war crime.

He smiled anyway, helplessly fond and mortified in equal measure, as Erik brushed stray fur from his trousers with the solemnity of a man dusting off pride. The faintest shadow of a smile tugged at Erik’s mouth, quickly suppressed. Charles felt a ridiculous wave of tenderness – mixed, inevitably, with panic.

Maybe this was what co-existence looked like: endurance wrapped in good manners.
Maybe love was less a fireworks display and more a series of small truces negotiated over shredded knitwear.

He glanced at Raven, who was still reviewing her footage, mouthing possible captions. Please don’t post it, he thought, knowing she absolutely would.

Maybe later he could make it up to Erik with lunch. Or wine. Or reparations in the form of a lint roller.

From the hallway came another hiss – sharp, deliberate, a final warning shot across the domestic front.

“Progress,” Raven said cheerfully.

Charles closed his eyes. “We have very different definitions of that word.”

-----------------------

The morning began the way Charles had once imagined mornings might begin if life were kind – quietly, unshowily kind – without grand pronouncements or cinematic light, just the soft grey of London pressing at the curtains and the familiar warmth of another body at his back. Heat, breath, the steady rise and fall of someone asleep and unashamed of it. He woke to the faint hiss of the radiators and the distant, sulky scrape of Cheryl’s claws on the bedroom door as if she were filing a complaint with the management.

Erik stirred when Charles did, made the smallest contented sound – almost a hum – then pressed a kiss to the nape of Charles’s neck, unthinking and devastating. “Morning,” he said, in the thick voice of someone who had not yet remembered being a solicitor.

“Mm,” Charles managed, which he hoped communicated something between good morning and don’t move, this is perfect.

They stayed like that for a few minutes, somewhere in the pleasant corridor between sleep and the day – Erik’s arm heavy and protective where it was flung over Charles’s waist, the duvet an obstinate animal that refused to arrange itself evenly, the world outside merely theoretical. Charles tried not to inventory the moment, not to turn it into a paragraph in his mind the way he always did. He tried simply to lie there. To be a person who could.

“Coffee,” Erik said eventually, as if announcing a verdict he knew would be well received.

“You’re a saint,” Charles said into the pillow.

“I’m German,” Erik replied, rolling away with the kind of dignity that should not be achievable while wrestling with a duvet. A moment later Charles heard his feet on the floorboards, the familiar cough of the boiler, the soft rattle of the kettle being filled. The flat took a breath with them, awake now, the winter light brusquely unromantic at the edges of the curtains. Cheryl yowled in the hallway, affronted by the closed door and by the mere possibility of joy occurring somewhere without her supervision.

“Two minutes,” Charles called, at which the yowling escalated briefly into a litany before subsiding into mutterings. He pictured her sitting outside like a furious landlady, head down, tail lashing.

When Erik came back he brought the day with him: steam and coffee and the faint, clean citrus of his aftershave. He’d put on Charles’s oldest robe, which hung from his shoulders as if it had been resigned to this fate thirty years ago and had simply been waiting for its man. He balanced two mugs expertly in one hand and nudged the door with his foot. “Conscience appeased,” he said, and passed a mug to Charles, who caught at the handle with both hands, grateful enough to be ridiculous.

“You do realise I have no defences against this,” Charles said, once he’d had the first sip and felt the precise, persuasive warmth of it spread through his chest.

“I’m counting on that.” Erik sat on the edge of the bed and kissed him, coffee and heat, morning and steadiness. It was not a kiss with implications, just a seal placed on the day. Charles thought, helplessly, that if he could bottle the sensation of being pressed lightly into a pillow by this man’s mouth he would drink it at mid-afternoon every day of his life.

“You have work?” he asked, when Erik pulled back, already knowing the answer because Erik was a man with a calendar and a terrifying respect for it.

“Client breakfast at eight-thirty,” Erik said, with an expression that suggested he neither approved of nor would ever be late for such things. “I’ll head straight from here if I shower now. Saves time.” He glanced towards the en-suite; the mirror on the inside of the door caught a rectangle of grey light and threw it back at them somewhere softer.

Charles made a face into his mug. “Breakfast meetings should be illegal.”

“That is not how law works.”

“It’s how it should work.”

“Citizen’s arrest of pastries?” Erik suggested. His mouth twitched as if the joke had surprised him on its way out.

“Especially pastries,” Charles said. “They’re the most guilty.”

Erik set his mug down and stood, the robe slipping open just enough to remind Charles he had a body underneath the suit he usually encountered him in. He looked like a study in proportions the Renaissance would have been smug about. “Shower,” Erik said, then added in the toneless voice he used when saying something deliberately unserious, “We should conserve water. It’s very civic-minded of us.”

Charles snorted into his coffee. “Oh, for the planet? Well, if it’s for the planet.” He set the mug aside and followed, pretending to be put-upon and already feeling lighter.

The bathroom filled quickly with steam, making a private world out of the small space. They negotiated in the style of men who had lived long enough alone to have developed systems: you go there, I’ll go here; hot tap, cold tap, an arm lifted so a shoulder could be kissed on the way past. The shower was large enough to make the conceit work without contortions and small enough that when Erik turned the water briefly hotter his shoulder brushed Charles’s chest and they both went very still in the warmth. The glass fogged, their breath fogged the mirror; water drummed; London receded to an abstract. There was a mutual laughter when the soap leapt suicidally towards the tiles, a minor skirmish over who had the right to the shampoo first (“your hair is a lost cause,” “yours is tyranny disguised as order”), and a moment where Erik wedged him gently against the tiles simply to kiss the smile off his face. They did not push the moment further; morning insisted, the day tugged at them, the water could not be hot indefinitely without moral consequences. It was, Charles thought as he stood in the fog later, towelling his hair like a man pleading with a hedgerow, precisely the kind of ordinary intimacy he had trained himself not to hope for.

Back in the bedroom, domestic choreography continued with an efficiency that would have made Raven applaud if she’d been there to meddle. She was not; the silence felt earned. Erik shaved with the care of a man who understood razors; Charles attempted to subdue his hair with cruelty that only emphasised its rebellion. They shared the mirror like a treaty. Condensation beaded and ran, the glass dividing their reflections into column inches. It would be very easy, Charles thought, to live like this: two people making space for each other in the cramped edges of a day. He had always imagined his life would have to be explained to anyone who entered it; Erik seemed simply to stand there and make explanations unnecessary.

“Which client is it?” Charles asked, because asking about work felt like a contribution when he had nothing practical to offer this morning except another towel and his entire doomed heart.

“Small arbitration. Dreadful people with expensive opinions,” Erik said mildly, fastening his cufflinks. His hands moved neatly, deliberately; Charles watched them with an attention he pretended could be attributed to curiosity about the mechanism. “They like starting before the rest of the world. A power thing.”

“Grotesque,” Charles said. “Punish them in court.”

“That is not how arbitration works either,” Erik said, lips tilting. “But I will punish their grammar.”

“That’s more like it.”

Cheryl had slunk into the doorway by then, a feline exclamation mark in the steam. She wove herself around their ankles with the exaggerated innocence of a politician kissing a baby, then sat abruptly, tail wrapped, eyes bright with intent. The sound she made was not quite a purr and not yet a complaint; it was the noise of a creature making notes for later reprisals.

“Truce?” Charles suggested to the cat, as if that ever had an effect. Cheryl blinked, which in her lexicon meant we’ll see.

Erik crossed to the wardrobe, the steam-softened air following him like a clement weather system. “Suit,” he said, to himself as much as to the room. “Tie.” He slid the wardrobe door along its track, and something in his posture changed by a degree – shoulders no longer a relaxed incline but a line held slightly too straight. There was a pause, the kind that makes a person listening in the next room think they have misheard.

Charles’s body noticed before his mind did. A small heaviness in the stomach, a quick inventory of exits. “What?” he said, trying to keep it light, already composing consolations he might need. “What is it?”

Erik exhaled very quietly, the kind of breath a person learns to keep for court. “Charles,” he said, and the single word was a polite invitation to come and see for himself.

The bottom of the wardrobe looked like a parade after it had been trampled: bright, expensive confetti of silk and interlining and the odd, heartbreaking island of intact stitching. Ties lay in ribbons, some reduced to a single heroic loop, others shredded into a philosophy of threads. The guilty glitter of a tie pin winked from somewhere in the devastation. One silk length – Italian, Charles remembered with nausea – had achieved the rare distinction of both being gnawed and then, with a kind of abstract spite, dragged into the litter tray which sat discreetly just inside the bedroom door. The tray’s dignified layer of litter had been used to bury the evidence with the thoroughness of a mobster.

“Oh,” Charles said, brilliantly. “Well.”

Behind them, from under the bed, came a low, deliberate hiss, like a match drawn along the rough side of a box.

Erik did not move for a moment. He held himself in that still, gentlemanly way he had, as if refusing to give the moment the satisfaction of an outburst. Then he crouched, two fingers reaching into the confetti to lift a surviving length of silk. It dangled from his hand like a flag of a conquered nation. He regarded it as one might a fossil; there was a kind of scientific sadness in the tilt of his head.

“She didn’t,” Charles said quickly, and then, because honesty was a basic requirement of the social contract, “she might have.”

“‘Might,’” Erik repeated, very calmly. “In the sense that the Thames might be wet.”

“I’ll replace them,” Charles said. His voice went a fraction too high; he wanted to pick up all the pieces and knit them together with apology. “I swear, I’ll – whatever men do about ties. I’ll browse. I’ll bespoke. I’ll grovel.”

“They were bespoke,” Erik said, still maddeningly, admirably collected. His face had gone unusually non-expressive, which in Erik was the equivalent of someone else flinging a chair. “Which is not a verb.”

“I’ll make it one,” Charles said wretchedly. “I’ll Oxford English Dictionary it into existence.”

Cheryl emerged, all tail and intention, looked Erik directly in the eye, and hissed again, a short, disdainful sound that in any other species would have been an obscene gesture.

“You are escalating,” Erik told the cat, in the tone he reserved for witnesses and, apparently, tyrants.

“It’s protest behaviour,” Charles said, because if you piled enough words on top of a problem sometimes it agreed to be smaller. “She’s making a statement about… change. Or about… colonisation of space. Feline adjustment can manifest as – ”

“She protested my existence,” Erik said. The hurt under the dryness pierced Charles more neatly than anger would have; it was a little clean wound, visible for a heartbeat before Erik covered it with composure.

“She protested the rate of change,” Charles said, and heard how feeble that sounded and winced at himself. “It’s not personal.”

Cheryl, who had never once observed the niceties of non-personal conduct, stepped delicately into the litter tray, scratched with an air of administrative thoroughness, and then stepped out again to sit and watch them.

“All right,” Erik said, standing with a decision so precise it might have been notated. “I have a meeting in less than an hour and no tie.”

“I have ties,” Charles said, with the relief of a man flinging himself at a solution. “I have – well, I have ties.”

“You own ties?” Erik glanced at him, the faintest disbelief edging the words.

“I’m a professional adult,” Charles said, deeply, immediately wounded by the implication.

“You’re a historian,” Erik said, which, he clearly felt, covered several explanatory categories.

“An adult one,” Charles insisted, and marched to his own wardrobe like a man walking briskly into a storm he had scheduled.

He had a box for these things. It was labelled, with the grandiosity of a past era, Heritage, and smelt faintly of mothballs and ancestral disapproval. He set it reverently on the bed and opened the lid to reveal an array of silks that had ideas about themselves. Patterns marched. Colours jostled. There were paisleys the colour of raw liver and hunting scenes in which several small men did unspeakable things to birds. There were stripes so decisive they felt like legislation. There was satin that would not be told it was from the 1970s and was determined to make a comeback at breakfast.

Erik stared as if the box had just told a joke about tax law. “These are… historic.”

“Vintage,” Charles corrected, with the ardour of a man defending a relative. “Family pieces.”

“So: historic,” Erik said, and reached in with the same caution he’d used on the confetti of his former life. He lifted one tie delicately, regarded a golden retriever embroidered at intervals as if trying to make sense of the breed’s role in formalwear, and set it down again with care.

“That’s whimsical,” Charles offered, and wished immediately for death.

“This one appears to feature a pheasant in the act of… shooting a man,” Erik said after a further rummage, holding up a silk that had been, at some point, green. The pheasant, heroic and disproportionate, had indeed turned its weapon on a tiny aristocrat in the corner. “Is that intentional?”

“It’s heritage,” Charles said, and then, to be fair to the dead, “It might be a printing error.”

“An error that persisted long enough to tie,” Erik said, eyebrows doing something minute and eloquent.

“They were my grandfather’s,” Charles said, softer now, passing fingers over one stripe as if it might purr. “We kept them because my mother couldn’t bear to throw away things that remembered him.” He lifted his chin, stubborn suddenly in that way that had got him through adolescence and academia both. “And they are perfectly wearable.”

Erik’s face shifted infinitesimally, the respect that was always in him coming to the fore. “Then we will wear them,” he said, with that soldier’s gallantry he sometimes revealed like a medal. “Which is the least we can do if we have inherited history.”

“Here,” Charles said, stepping in before he could stop himself, hands twitching with the need to be useful. “May I?” When Erik nodded he lifted the ends, and for a moment – ridiculously quick, ridiculously tender – the world contracted to a knot and two fingers and the press of a thumb against the steady pulse in a throat he had known for years and was only now allowed to touch again with this absentminded fluency. He straightened the dimple and flattened the silk, an old, intimate gesture borrowed from films and mornings that sometimes visited other people.

“You’re laughing,” Erik said, not accusing, merely curious at the little betrayed breath that had escaped Charles.

“I’m marvelling at your bravery,” Charles said, which was true. “You could pass for the ghost of a Home Counties Tory backbencher in that.”

Erik looked at himself in the mirror, head cocked, then back at Charles with a half smile that had just enough teeth to be honest. “Distinguished?” he offered.

“Tragic,” Charles said, and then, because the morning had not yet broken him, “handsomely respectable.”

“Ah,” Erik said. “Pre-Thatcher respectable.” He smoothed the tie again, futilely, because respectability could only do so much for a pheasant that had witnessed murder.

Charles reached to brush a smear of lint from Erik’s shoulder, a light swipe that became a touch because his hand did not wish to leave. Erik did that thing where his eyes softened but the rest of his face maintained order; it tended to be worse for Charles than any openly romantic expression. It felt like being trusted in the vicinity of a locked door.

Cheryl leapt onto the end of the bed with the authority of a headmistress and sat squarely upon the Heritage box. The sound she made was the exact noise of a sovereign stamping a document she disapproved of.

“Noted,” Erik told the cat. “Objections recorded.”

“I’ll – ” Charles began, mortification swelling again. “I’m going to order you new ties today. Not grandfathered atrocities. Contemporary, tasteful, non-lethal.”

“You will do no such thing,” Erik said mildly, already collecting his briefcase and sliding documents into their slots with the practised speed of a man who liked his papers as other men liked their gardens. “You will go about your day, teach your students to say circa properly, and we will reconvene later with me wearing this… inheritance.” He flicked the end of the tie once, as if to signal his lack of superstition. “I am not afraid of fabric.”

“Apparently, neither is she,” Charles said.

As if summoned by narrative duty, Cheryl hissed. It was shorter than the hisses in the hallway, more personal. Erik looked at her and, with a composure that might have been read as insolence by anyone less invested in peace, inclined his head, a bow to a monarch. The cat blinked, which in the present détente constituted a victory parade.

“At least let me call a cab,” Charles said, as Erik shrugged into his coat.

“I’ll walk,” Erik said, checking his watch. He was the only man Charles knew who could make checking a watch look like a decision rather than a tic. “Exposure therapy,” he added. “If I survive the commute in this, the rest of the day will hold no fear.”

“You look dashing,” Charles said, and heard the word as if it had been issued by a nineteenth-century pamphlet. He did look dashing, in the way a man does when he is entirely himself wearing something that has no right to suit him. Dashing and slightly haunted by a pheasant.

Erik stepped close enough that the tie’s silk brushed Charles’s sternum. He kissed Charles on the temple with bureaucratic efficiency and disproportionate tenderness. “If I don’t return,” he said gravely, “tell the coroner it was the tie.”

“I’ll tell the coroner it was the cat,” Charles said.

“That will prejudice the jury.”

“She’ll hiss at them. It will be fine.”

Erik’s mouth quirked. “It is never fine when you say it will be fine.”

“It will be,” Charles lied, with that hideous buoyancy hope lends to fools. “Text me if you need – anything. Replacement trousers. Witness protection.”

“I will require a lint roller,” Erik said, glancing down at his sleeve, where a single thread from his cuff still trailed like a white flag. He wound it neatly around a finger and snapped it off. “Beyond that, only your prayers.”

“You have them,” Charles said, and meant it far too hard.

At the door, Erik paused and looked back, the kind of look people in films give in case the audience has not yet understood the point. “We’re all right?” he said, which was cruelly simple, and therefore sacred.

“We’re all right,” Charles said, and felt something in his chest answer yes with a seriousness he didn’t want to examine before eight a.m.

The door shut with the soft conviction of well-hung wood. The flat re-settled around Charles like a coat. He stood very still for a moment, listening to the sound of his own breath and the distant, competent city, then looked down at the Heritage box and the confetti and the place where Erik’s shoulders had been in the mirror and allowed himself, briefly, to be overwhelmed by the absurd tenderness of it all.

Cheryl, never one to permit sentiment uncontested, trod deliberately across the bed towards him, tail at half-mast, expression a lecture. She head-butted his knee with a severity that suggested he was late to a meeting they had both agreed upon, then sat and licked her paw with vicious attention, as if scrubbing the morning from her mind.

“Diplomacy continues,” Charles told her faintly, and bent to scoop up a handful of silk remains, which slid through his fingers like bad decisions. He placed the bits on the dresser, rescued the tie pin from the battlefield, and told himself it could be repaired. Anything could be repaired with attention and care and adequate funding. He set the Heritage box back into the wardrobe with due ceremony, shut the door upon its history, and went to fetch the lint roller from the kitchen drawer like a man arming himself for the next campaign.

From the hallway, Cheryl issued a final hiss, more administrative than accusatory now, the minutes of a meeting being approved. “Progress,” Charles said to the cat, to the empty air, to the tie fibres clinging to his pyjama top. “In the most generous sense of the word.” He picked up his own abandoned coffee, discovered it had cooled to the exact temperature of resignation, and drank it anyway, because he was learning – slowly, awkwardly – that sometimes you took the morning as it came, dressed it in a terrible tie, and trusted it to find you again at evening.

-------------------------------

At the office, Erik discovered that a certain kind of silence was as expressive as laughter. He stepped through the glass doors and felt it bloom: the receptionist’s eyebrows rose in slow, courteous horror; a junior’s smile stalled mid-syllable; someone in the corridor performed a polite double-take, as if he’d arrived in a novelty hat.

Emma appeared at his elbow with the quality of a well-timed aside. “Blink twice if you’re being held hostage by the Heritage Museum,” she said, eyes on the tie.

“Domestic mishap,” Erik said. “Exposure therapy.”

“For you or for us?” She circled a finger, indicating the building, the profession, the social contract. “Because this is doing something to my sense of reality.”

“It is a tie,” he said.

“It is an artefact,” Emma corrected. “A haunted artefact.” She took a photo before he could object and then, to her credit, didn’t immediately post it anywhere. “All right, I’ll be kind. But if a pheasant stares at me from the witness stand later, I’m not testifying.”

The receptionist – who had held her nerve through divorces, mergers and a visiting actor once trying to serve her a writ – said carefully, “Lovely colour, Mr Lehnsherr.”

“Thank you,” Erik said, as if he had chosen it on purpose and would again.

By eleven he had survived a boardroom, a partner’s raised eyebrow and a paralegal’s helpless giggle. At twelve he texted Charles a photo of his own stern reflection in a lift mirror with the caption: Still alive. No casualties. The little dots pulsed; the reply came quickly, earnest enough to be audible even as pixels. You’re a hero. Bring your heroism to the Wheatsheaf tonight at seven. Moira promises victory and snacks.

Erik sent back a thumbs-up and, because it was true, a small heart he would deny if asked. Emma saw the movement, made a face as if she’d bitten an unripe plum, and said, “God help you if this quiz has a fashion round.”

-----------------------------

By seven, the city had shaken itself into rain. The Wheatsheaf glowed from its corners like a place where history chose to be manageable: varnish and laughter, the polite chaos of queueing at the bar, the hum of a Thursday willing itself towards the weekend.

Charles arrived early to give himself time to become calm. This was a poor plan; all it did was extend the duration of his anticipation. He stood near the chalkboard where the rounds were written up – History, Law, Pop Culture, Picture Round, General Knowledge – and tried to breathe like a man who didn’t want to win so much he might die of it.

Moira and Sean swept in together, a weather system of laminated sheets and good-natured warfare. They kissed his cheeks, deposited a pencil case the size of a brick on the table, and began a rapid inventory of their strategic advantages.

“We are Factually Correct,” Moira said, slapping a printed team name onto the table like a flag. “Don’t look at other teams. Their hubris is contagious.”

“Our hubris is curated,” Sean added, peeling off his coat to reveal a sweatshirt that said IN THIS HOUSE WE FOLLOW HOUSE STYLE. “Charles, the history round is yours. Do not be clever.”

“I’m never clever,” Charles said automatically, then winced. “I mean – ”

“You know what I mean,” Moira said, patting his arm with the brisk kindness of someone checking a pulse. “We’re not here to essay. We’re here to answer.”

Raven arrived like a separate, smaller pub had agreed to join them. She wore a beanie and carried the kind of camera people used to document snow leopards. “Quiz Night Vibes,” she announced, already filming. “Look at this team. The tension. The dedication. The tragic tie.”

Because Erik had just walked in, bringing a gust of cold air and an object lesson in the limits of stoicism. The tie looked even madder under yellow pub light; it had the glossy serenity of a thing that has made its peace with its crimes. The room noticed, as rooms do. A few heads turned. A barmaid bit the inside of her cheek.

“You brought the tie,” Sean said, delighted and horrified.

“Who let you out looking like you mugged a public-school bursar?” Moira asked, which was, Charles reflected with bleak pride, better than his version.

“It’s inherited,” Erik said calmly, shrugging off his coat. The tie, obedient or resigned, sat where it was put. He repeated, with the manner of someone trying to persuade himself, “I’m not afraid of fabric.”

Raven pivoted the lens towards him. “Tell the viewers your name and crime.”

“Erik,” he said, deadpan. “Accessory to heritage.”

They took the corner table beneath the framed newspaper clippings, the ones declaring local victories and tragedies identical in font. Charles felt the familiar after-school thrill of pencils and paper and rules. He also felt a little sick. He wanted to make a good showing; he wanted Erik to see him be competent in the arena he cared about; he wanted to be light and charming and not at all the man who still remembered saying we to someone as if it named a whole country they could live in.

The quizmaster tapped the mic. “Welcome, quizzers! Team names to the bar, no phones, disputes to be addressed with cash and compliments. Round One: History.”

Moira slid the answer sheet towards Charles like a loaded tray. “Steady hands,” she said. “Short answers. Think like a tabloid, not a journal.”

The first question was a gift. Which British monarch abdicated in 1936? Charles wrote Edward VIII with relief, felt good for three seconds, then felt his brain begin to nibble at the edges. Abdicated. He thought about the religious connotations of abdication, about the difference between stepping down and being forced out, about the debate he had once had with a colleague over the term’s precise provenance. He lifted his pencil, hovering. “Technically – ”

“No,” Moira said without looking up. “There is no technically. This is a pub.”

“But there’s a meaningful distinction between abdication and – ”

“Write Edward,” Sean said, eyes on the page as if he were conducting landing signals. “We’re not here to re-litigate the interwar period.”

Charles wrote EDWARD again as if he hadn’t just erased it, then frowned at his own handwriting, which suddenly looked suspiciously certain. He added a small VIII, then felt like he’d shown off and crossed it out and wrote it again more modestly. He could hear himself from somewhere above his own head narrating the panic: This is fine, this is normal, this is how normal people answer questions about kings.

Question Two: In which year did the Berlin Wall fall? He wrote 1989 and then, with the speed of a man ruining his own life, wondered about the different meanings of fall – opening, demolition, the first pickaxe. He thought about prelude and aftermath, about memory as an event. He hovered the pencil again.

Erik’s hand came into view and, without comment, drew a neat line under 1989. He did it the way one signs for a parcel. “Trust yourself,” he said softly, and the words landed like a small, unexpected coat in the rain.

“Trust him,” Moira added. “He trusts you. He’s wearing that.”

They moved briskly. Who wrote the ninety-five theses? Disgustingly easy. He wrote Luther, then wondered whether they wanted Martin or a surname only, whether the possessive apostrophe mattered, whether the quizmaster would accept wittenberg as an answer to any question just to make someone happy. He resisted the urge to sketch a crying face.

Round One finished; the papers were collected; the pub exhaled. Moira sat back with the beatific calm of a woman who knows she did not marry for nothing. “Good. Strong. Minimal pontificating.”

“I pontificated internally,” Charles said. “Very loudly.”

“Your restraint is admired,” Sean said, and slid him a crisp which tasted of salt and mercy.

Round Two: Law. Erik took the pencil. Watching him answer questions was like watching a magician whose trick is honesty. The scenarios were tiny and ridiculous – parking fines and nuisance neighbours – and he cut through them with the neat dispatch of a man who had lived inside rules long enough to find the shorter path. He did not flourish. He did not guess. He wrote, and what he wrote was sufficient.

Moira looked at him the way some people looked at stained glass. “I feel very safe,” she said.

Sean, who had argued with a parking machine every week for a decade, sighed as if absolved. “It’s like listening to a lullaby.”

Charles sipped his pint and tried not to be wildly, childishly proud. He told himself that pride was unbecoming, that Erik’s competence was not a reflection on him, that he was not twelve. He told himself a great many true and useless things, and then Erik turned the sheet towards him to show the tiny, precise way he’d written nuisance and Charles had to look at the ceiling in case his face betrayed him.

Round Three: Pop Culture. The team groaned as one. Raven, who had migrated to their table with the air of a tolerated stray, rubbed her hands. “At last,” she said. “The common tongue.”

“Common is doing a lot of work,” Moira murmured, but let Raven hover, because there are times to police a team and times to recognise that a person with a camera and opinions is, in this economy, a talisman.

Question One: Who sang Rolling in the Deep? Charles opened his mouth and heard himself say, “Well, known as by whom? There’s a metaphorical reading that – ”

“Adele,” three people said at once. He closed his mouth and wrote Adele.

Question Two: Which reality show features the Prue Leith of your nightmares? They argued briefly and joyfully about whether that was editorialising, then wrote The Great British Bake Off and blamed Raven for any consequences. Raven filmed Charles writing it and whispered, “Look at him, participating in culture.”

“History is culture,” Charles said, immediately aware of how much he sounded like his own lecture slides.

“Not on Thursdays,” Raven said, and blew him a kiss which he failed to catch because he was busy re-reading his own handwriting for hints of betrayal.

The Picture Round arrived like a parent-teacher conference. Photographs of famous people stared up at them with the patient condescension of exams. A grid of couples – politicians, actors, monarchs – arranged themselves in judgmental pairs.

“Oh, that one’s you two,” Moira said, tapping the Abdication Couple with her pencil.

“That’s the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,” Charles said, scandalised on several levels.

“Exactly,” Moira said cheerfully. “Renounce the throne, gain a wardrobe.”

Erik observed the grid and, with a straight face, wrote Cleopatra and Antony beneath a photograph of two pop stars in sparkles just to watch Charles’s soul leave his body and return. “Kidding,” he said, erasing it neatly. “Mostly.”

Between rounds, the pub filled with that specific heat generated by bodies and hopeful certainty. The chalkboard shone with condensation. Someone at the bar argued about the plural of Guinness; someone else claimed to have known an answer in childhood and never told anyone until tonight. Charles felt the shape of the room inside him, the engine of it, the promise that facts might briefly make a net sufficient to hold a life.

He also felt, with the cold clarity of a man trying to ignore it, the small, unpleasant itch of jealousy. It had nothing to do with the quiz and everything to do with memory: Emma’s name at dinner last month, the way Erik’s face became, not softer, but focused when he spoke about a colleague who was good at her job. It was a civilian kind of jealousy – vague, unbeautiful, beneath him. He pushed it aside the way one pushes aside a glass too close to the edge; it sat there anyway, glinting.

The scores were read. Factually Correct sat in joint first with a team called Quizteama Aguilera, which Moira took as a personal attack. “We will not be beaten by a pun,” she said. “We are better than that. We have reading lists.”

Round Four: General Knowledge. The first question was about pasta shapes. Charles, who could tell you more than you wanted to know about medieval grain tariffs, wrote fusilli and then paused to consider the socioeconomics of durum wheat in post-war Italy. Erik nudged his knee gently under the table. “Fusilli,” he murmured, not as a correction but as a benediction. Charles underlined it, relieved to be temporarily governed.

The second question asked for the chemical symbol for potassium; Sean wrote K with the confidence of a man who had sometimes salted chips with theory and been right. The third wanted the capital of Canada, which Charles wrote and then stared at because Ottawa never looked quite real on the page. He added a small star for encouragement.

The tiebreaker came like theatre. “Name,” the quizmaster said, letting the room become quiet for him, “one phrase that changed history.”

The room rustled. Pencils hovered. The table became, for a moment, a jury. Charles’s mind performed a brisk parade: I have a dream; Workers of the world, unite; We’ll fight them on the beaches; Not in my name; The personal is political. He wanted to write all of them, to write an essay about the elasticity of phrases and the way they accrue meaning like barnacles. He wanted to annotate, to footnote, to draw arrows between centuries. He put his pencil down because he was in danger of embarrassing everyone including the concept of paper.

Erik’s hand moved, steady and spare, and he wrote I have a dream with the kind of neatness that suggested reverence. Charles closed his eyes very briefly and let someone else be simple and right.

They handed in their sheets and waited as if waiting altered outcomes. Sean ordered crisps as if they were medication. Raven filmed discreetly and then not at all. The quizmaster took his time, which is to say, he walked slowly, because power is a series of decisions about speed.

“In second place,” he said, “on thirty-seven points… Factually Correct.”

Moira did not swear, which in Moira was louder than swearing. She applauded magnanimously while privately auditing the universe. Sean said, “There’s no justice,” which made him feel better. Charles felt a small, unhandsome pang which he refused to dignify by naming. Erik clapped without irony and came first in Charles’s estimation again.

As the room broke into groups again, Moira leaned across the table and squeezed Charles’s hand. “Don’t brood,” she said. “I need you fresh for next week’s semi.”

“I’m not brooding,” Charles said, and then, because his mouth had not consulted his pride, “I’m being ridiculous.”

“You’re being human,” she said. “Disgusting, but there it is.”

They lingered for a drink they did not need, the four of them and Raven orbiting the table like a small, argumentative solar system. People drifted by to say good quiz; someone stopped to ask if the tie was satire; someone else asked if it was a dare. Erik answered both with the composure of a man on a witness stand, which made it funnier.

When they finally spilled out onto the pavement the rain had gentled into a mist that made hair misbehave and pavements philosophical. The pub door swung behind them with that satisfying pub-door thump.

“Same time next week,” Moira said, already moving towards the promise of a night bus with the confidence of a general. “Bring your brains. Bin the tie.”

“Noted,” Erik said. “On both counts.”

There was the familiar bustle of farewell; arms and cheeks and jokes thrown over shoulders. Then it was just the two of them under the awning, a pocket of quiet while the street performed itself. The adrenaline of almost-winning had left a awkward fizz in Charles’s limbs. He wanted to say something clever. He wanted to be breezy. He wanted not to be himself for five minutes.

“You were very good,” Erik said, which would once have put Charles on a plinth and now only moved him a small distance out of weather.

“So were you,” Charles said, and meant it. “Lullabies for parking fines. I feel soothed on society’s behalf.”

Erik’s mouth did that small tilt that made compliments tolerable. He glanced at his phone, the practical glance of a man calculating train times. A message preview flashed with Emma’s name and vanished, as such things do, leaving only implication. It was nothing; it was work; it was the way a brain in love translates neutral data into music it does not enjoy.

The sentence arrived before Charles could stop it. “I’m sure Emma will be thrilled to hear you nearly won.”

It was not the worst thing he had ever said. It was not even in the top fifty. But it contained within it a tone he recognised and disliked: brittle, wounded, and stupid.

Erik blinked. “Why would Emma care about pub quizzes?”

There was no defensiveness in it, only bafflement. The tie, absurd witness to everything, hung there between them like a visual aid. Charles felt the heat rush up his neck the way shame reliably does. He wanted to say, Because she is competent and you admire competent women and I am currently a man who second-guessed the year 1989 on the grounds of metaphysics. He wanted to say, Because I am jealous, which is humiliating to admit at forty with three degrees and a cat. He wanted to say nothing and undo the sentence by wishing at it until it drowned.

“No reason,” he said, and found a version of a smile that he hoped read as apologetic and not as a baring of small, panicked teeth. “None at all.”

Erik regarded him for a beat, the way a person looks at a map that has omitted a road. He did not push. He never pushed. “Walk you to the station?” he asked.

“Please,” Charles said, grateful for the reprieve. They stepped out into the mild, argumentative rain together, the tie absorbing weather like penance, and the city made room for them in the ordinary way it makes room for all small, ridiculous humans trying and failing to be better than their most obvious feelings.

-------------------------------

Morning arrived indecently ordinary.

No thunderclap of revelation, no chorus of remorseful angels; just weak January light sneaking through the curtains and the smell of Cheryl’s breakfast. The cat, apparently restored to full confidence after the tie campaign, was kneading his stomach with militant tenderness. Each press of her paw felt like punctuation in a sentence he had not yet managed to compose.

He replayed the night with the precision of a man writing an autopsy report.
The pub door.
The rain.
The sentence – I’m sure Emma will be thrilled.
The look on Erik’s face, which hadn’t even been hurt, just puzzled.
That was somehow worse.

He had always thought of jealousy as a rather low-resolution emotion – something for novels about teenagers or unfaithful husbands, not for grown men with postgraduate degrees and credit ratings. It had no elegance, no irony. Yet there it was, lodged behind his eyes like a hangnail, absurd and undeniable.

Erik wasn’t even attracted to women. The entire premise was ridiculous. Emma could have been carved from marble and reciting Rilke naked and it would not have moved him; Charles knew this as certainly as he knew the capital of Canada (Ottawa, still unconvincing). The jealousy was chemical, uninvited, and therefore humiliating.

It wasn’t about Emma. It was about the awful realisation that he could still spoil something by being himself.

Once, years ago, it had been the other way round. Erik had been the jealous one – terribly, almost sweetly so – possessive in the way of someone who had learned too late that the world could take things from him. Charles had teased him for it, gently, indulgently. Teased him! He could remember the exact tone of voice he’d used: airy, affectionate, superior. The cruelty of it made him wince now, a small physical wince in the silence of the flat.

Jealousy, it turned out, felt like being inhabited by an idiot who refused to shut up. It made everything too bright and too loud. It turned love into a mirror that only showed the worst angles. It was, he concluded, an emotion for people with less education and considerably more self-awareness.

He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.
“Happy now?” he asked Cheryl.
She blinked at him, unsympathetic, and continued kneading.

He would apologise, obviously. He would say something measured and intelligent about misplaced emotion, about projection, about linguistic overreach. He would be casual, dry, adult. He would behave normally.

Which, as experience had taught him, guaranteed abnormal behaviour.

He didn’t hear from Erik until mid-morning: a text, brief and practical – Meeting ran late. Survived the day. Surviving the tie. Hope cat truce continues. E.

Charles read it four times, looking for nuance, then typed Glad to hear both wars are manageable. See you later?
He deleted see you later and replaced it with speak later?
Then replaced that with no rush!
Then, panicking at the exclamation mark, replaced it with nothing and pressed send.

He was still staring at the screen when the phone rang.

“Hello?”

Erik’s voice, calm as ever: “Hi. Quick question – do we need milk?”

Milk. Of course. The most neutral topic in the English language.

“Yes,” Charles said, too loudly. “We’re low. Semi-skimmed.”

“I’ll pick some up on the way.”

“Thank you.”

“Anything else?”

“No, that’s everything.”

A pause. The faint rustle of city sound behind Erik’s voice.

“All right,” he said. “See you later.”

“You too. Love you.”

The words were out before his brain had even arranged the syntax. They hung there, perfectly formed, and then the line clicked off with the polite finality of a gavel.

Charles stood in the kitchen, phone still in hand, heart thudding in an entirely unacademic way.

No. No, that was breezy. He’d said it breezily. People said that all the time. Not his people, perhaps, but statistically speaking, people existed who said love you the way they said cheers.

He put the phone down and immediately picked it up again, as if the object itself might absolve him. Cheryl, having finished her breakfast, leapt onto the counter and stared at him with the blank disapproval of the unflappable.

“Tone,” he told her. “It was about tone.”

She yawned.

He started the voice-notes at eleven.
The first was meant to be a single line of clarification. It became a dissertation.

“Hi. So – obviously that was idiomatic.”

“Hi. Just realised how that might have sounded, but obviously I say that to everyone.”

“I don’t literally say it to everyone, that would be weird, but to – Moira. Sometimes. In a collegial way.”

He stopped, stared at the phone, and felt the slow, spreading horror of realisation. Why in the seven hells had he brought Moira into it?

He hadn’t meant to; it was simply the first example that had come to mind, but somehow he’d managed to imply a whole new and entirely fictitious layer of intimacy with his best friend – the one that Erik had always worried about.

“Oh, brilliant,” he muttered, stabbing the delete icon. “Now I’ve invented a polycule.”

“Also once to the Tesco driver, but that was gratitude, not affection.”

“Intonation is everything.”

He pressed record again, forehead against the cupboard. “What I mean is, it was breezy. It was British. Like saying ‘cheerio.’ Which, come to think of it, is also etymologically about affection, so possibly not a good example.”

He groaned, stopped the recording, listened back, and deleted it immediately.

By noon he had sent eleven voice notes. The kitchen counter looked like a small crime scene: coffee cup, notebook, his phone lying face-up as if playing dead. Cheryl batted at the edge of it with her paw; he interpreted this as judgment.

At 12:37, against all better judgment, he sent another.

“Hi. Ignore me. Obviously. Just clarifying that earlier was breezy. Casual. You’re probably laughing at me, which is fine. Perfectly fine. All right. Bye.”

He listened back to the bye and decided it sounded both final and needy, a combination he had previously thought impossible.

He meant to text Moira for perspective.
Moira, practical, unshockable, had seen him through the breakup, the reunion, the cat diplomacy. She would know what to say.

He opened his messages, scrolled automatically looking for her name, and, with the precision of the doomed, typed into the wrong thread.

The Department of Feeling Studies thread.

It was a group chat consisting of Moira and three of her academic colleagues – Farah (comparative literature), Leo (gender theory), and Liz (psychology) – who used it to exchange drafts and snark. Charles had been added months ago to give “historical texture” to a grant proposal and had never had the courage to leave. They treated emotion as a methodology. He treated them as a benevolent plague.

He wrote, without looking properly at the header:
Terrible slip of tongue this morning. Said “love you” at end of call to Erik. Attempted to clarify, made it eleven voice notes worse. Please advise.

He pressed send.
Three dots appeared immediately.

FARAH: live data!
LEO: what tone? tender? ironic?
LIZ: syntactic crisis.
MOIRA: Charles, wrong chat.

Too late.

FARAH: never wrong. nothing is wrong.
LEO: confession via intonation!
LIZ: deliverable: acceptance by dinner.
MOIRA: I’m muting this thread. Charles, check your phone.

He did. Moira had messaged privately.
You are fine. He will not combust. Breathe. Stop leaving voice notes.

Charles typed back, I am composed, then dropped the phone onto the sofa like a live grenade.

By three o’clock the universe had found a way to escalate.
Raven texted: you’re trending.

He stared at the words, convinced he had misread them. Then the link arrived. It was one of Raven’s reels from the previous day – Cheryl prowling across the armchair, captioned The War on Cashmere Continues. Someone, somewhere in the algorithmic abyss, had paired it with audio ripped from one of his deleted voice-notes: “I say it to Moira. And sometimes the Tesco driver.”

The internet had done the rest.

The clip had half a million views and counting. Comments ranged from this is peak bisexual academia energy to we’ve all been this man, god bless him. There were memes. Someone had subtitled it Love in the Time of Semiotics.

Charles lowered the phone very carefully onto the coffee table and sat on the floor behind the sofa. Cheryl joined him, possibly out of pity, possibly to maintain eye contact.

“Disaster,” he told her.

She blinked, turned twice, and curled up against his knee as if to say, you made this bed, lie in it.

His phone buzzed again. Moira, ever the medic.
It’s fine. Internet loves a man with feelings.

He sent back a single period, the textual equivalent of a whimper.

At Erik’s office, Emma slid her phone across the desk towards Erik. “You’ve seen this, right?”

He didn’t look up from his notes. “Define this.”

“The video. The one with your boyfriend and a cat and the phrase ‘Tesco driver of desire.’”

That got his attention. He tapped the screen, watched a few seconds, and felt the unmistakable combination of affection and second-hand embarrassment that only Charles could induce.

Emma watched his expression, arms folded. “So this is romantic now? Voice notes as courtship?”

“For him,” Erik said, setting the phone down, “it is almost a vow.”

“That’s very sweet,” she said. “And profoundly unhinged.”

“Both can be true.”

She grinned. “He’s lucky you speak fluent subtext.”

“He’s lucky,” Erik said, “that I’ve stopped trying to correct it.”

Emma laughed, turning back to her computer. “For what it’s worth, the comments are on his side. They think he’s adorable.”

“I know,” Erik said quietly. “He is.”

When she glanced back, he was smiling at nothing – softly, privately – the kind of smile that explained the tie, the cat, and the entire ungovernable fact of loving Charles Xavier.

By evening, the adrenaline had burned down to ash. The flat smelled faintly of over-boiled tea. He had drafted an email to his department about online impersonation, deleted it, and re-drafted one entitled A Note on Context. He had considered moving to the Outer Hebrides, where no one knew what a reel was.

The buzzer sounded at half six.

He considered ignoring it – he was in the emotional state of a man who could not face post or pizza – but Cheryl’s ears pricked up in recognition, and that, somehow, was enough to make him stand.

When he opened the door, Erik was there, tie-less, calm, holding a bottle of wine like a peace offering.

“Hi,” he said.

Charles could only stare. “You listened to them, didn’t you?”

Erik’s mouth twitched, the barest smile. “Every one,” he said. “Twice.”

And Charles, struck by the impossibility of both breathing and speaking, thought that maybe love really was just language – terrible, inadequate language – and that for all his education he had finally found a sentence worth failing at.

Erik’s “Every one. Twice.” hung between them like a joke waiting for its punchline. Charles stepped back automatically, as if to make room for whatever came next – apology, catastrophe, absolution – and then remembered to behave like a host.

“Come in,” he said, voice scraping at ordinary. “Please. Before the neighbours hear my humiliation narrativised in the stairwell.”

Erik stepped inside with his usual unshowy care, the kind of physical politeness that made even the hallway feel respected. He set the wine on the little table by the door and shrugged out of his coat, solemn as a man removing armour. Cheryl materialised from nowhere, sniffed the wine bag with forensic suspicion, and retreated with the air of a sovereign declining tribute.

“I brought something red and forgiving,” Erik said, toeing his shoes neatly beneath the radiator. “For morale.”

“Morale is very low,” Charles said, and heard in his own voice the late-night broadcaster steadiness of someone reporting on a flood from inside a canoe.

“In that case,” Erik said, following him through to the kitchen, “we’ll increase supply.”

The cork resisted in a manner that would have been heroic if it weren’t so inconvenient. The cheap corkscrew objected to its purpose; Erik made a patient, practical sound and adjusted his grip. Charles, vibrating with the need to say everything and therefore saying nothing, found himself staring at the line of Erik’s wrist as if it might offer a syllabus for not making things worse. He wanted to seize the moment and apologise, to throw himself on the mercy of the court and beg for an immediate ruling. He wanted to pretend none of it had happened and start the evening at some other, better hour.

The cork gave up with a softened pop. Erik poured and handed him a glass with the tenderness of someone returning a library book in perfect condition.

“Thank you,” Charles said, then forgot how to drink.

They stood for a moment like people on opposite banks of a small river, neither quite ready to be the first to step into the water.

“I am,” Charles began, “mortified.” He gestured weakly towards the living room, where the sofa remembered yesterday. “And sorry. And – well, sorry.”

“For voice notes?” Erik said mildly.

“For everything.” He took a breath. “For the pub – my comment about Emma. It was childish. It was not even good childish, it was the sort of childish that gets you sent home from school with a note. And this morning – what I said – ”

“Breezily,” Erik supplied, and the corner of his mouth moved, the first sign they were not, in fact, standing on a cliff edge.

“Breezily,” Charles confirmed, as if they were discussing an isobar. “It was an accident. No – worse than an accident. It was one of those things you say when your mouth outruns your thinking and your thinking is already lagging behind your feeling. Which,” he added miserably, “I suppose is just another way of saying accident.”

Erik studied him over the rim of his glass with the grave attention he gave to witnesses he wanted to encourage into telling the truth. “We should sit,” he said. “Before your guilt gives you shin splints.”

They moved to the sofa. Cheryl, having done a perimeter check, sprang up between them, sat with her back to Charles like a tiny, displeased chaperone, and placed one paw proprietorially on Erik’s thigh. It felt like a papal blessing performed by an enemy state. Erik’s eyebrows lifted a fraction; he settled his hand beside her without touching, polite even to a tyrant.

“All right,” he said, turning back to Charles. “Proceed.”

Charles swallowed. The task of explaining himself loomed like a lecture he had under-prepared for. “First,” he said, “I would like to retract, with gratitude and shame, every voice note after the second.”

“I liked them,” Erik said.

“You did not.”

“I did,” Erik repeated, with the emphasis of a man who knows how to insist without quarrelling. “They were – informative.”

“Informative,” Charles said faintly, as if he had been praised for his bibliography.

Erik’s mouth tilted. “I learned that intonation is everything. That you have, apparently, told the Tesco driver you loved him. That ‘in a collegial way’ is a phrase you are willing to deploy outside of academia, which, I will admit, shocked me.”

Charles covered his face with one hand and spoke into his palm. “I was attempting to be light. Instead I became a cautionary tale.”

“You became yourself,” Erik said simply.

He lowered his hand. “That is the one thing I was trying not to be.”

“You’re bad at not being yourself,” Erik said, and the warmth in it made Charles’s ribcage go inconveniently soft.

“I meant it,” Charles blurted, because he could not bear the thought that his cowardice might be mistaken for the truth. “The breezy thing. I didn’t mean to say it, but I meant it. Which isn’t an argument in my favour, I realise. It’s just – ” He gestured helplessly, as if the air might contribute a better clause. “ – you know what I’m like with language. It’s treacherous. I try to use it as a fence and it turns out to be a door.”

“A door,” Erik echoed, considering it, as if the metaphor had arrived with legal credentials. “That’s new. I like that better than your fence.”

“I don’t,” Charles said. “People can walk through doors.”

“I walked back through,” Erik said. “Remember?”

The simplest sentences always undid him. He stared at the wine, at the reflection of the lamp in it, at the way the surface almost trembled with his own nerves. He felt, absurdly, near to tears and not because anything was wrong but because something had finally stopped feeling impossible.

“And Emma,” he said, because you cannot have a clean floor if you keep kicking the same dirt under the rug. “I’m sorry. That was – shitty of me. I know you’re not attracted to women. I know she’s your colleague. It wasn’t about her. It was about me being a jealous idiot for the first time in my life and not knowing what to do with it. It felt like being possessed by a stupid ghost.”

Erik set his glass down. “It wasn’t shitty,” he said, in the patient tone that had once persuaded Charles to eat actual meals during exam weeks. “It was human.”

“It was petty.”

“It was human,” Erik repeated, untroubled by being contradicted.

Charles grimaced. “I used to tease you for being jealous.”

“And I probably deserved it,” Erik said dryly. “I was not at my best.”

“You were twenty-seven,” Charles said, softer. “No one is at their best at twenty-seven.”

Erik’s eyes went complicated for a second; then he let the past go with the clean ease of a man who has learned how. “I was jealous of everyone,” he admitted. “Students who got your attention, strangers who got your smile, waiters who got to hear you say thank you the way you say it when you mean it. You were the first person I wanted to keep and the first person who ever stayed long enough to make keeping unnecessary.”

Charles closed his eyes because the sentence was too much to look at directly. When he opened them again the room had the particular clarity things acquire when you have decided to stop lying to yourself. “I’m terrified,” he said, because truth often sounds like cowardice before it learns how to stand. “Not of you. Of me. Of the way I could – do – ruin things by thinking too hard about them. Of saying we again and discovering I’ve imagined the geography.”

Erik considered him for a long, quiet moment. “We,” he said, as if reading a figure into the record, “is a place. It is. I have a house key for it. The cat owns a majority share.”

“Unfair share,” Charles said automatically, and had to press his mouth together to hold in the laugh that wanted out.

Erik’s hand moved, the smallest permission. He rested his palm, finally, on Cheryl’s back, and the cat did not file a complaint. She made a sound that could only, in honesty, be called a purr. It vibrated through the cushion into Charles’s thigh like the universe tapping the microphone to say we are live.

“I know what you meant,” Erik said, returning to the earlier cliff. “On the phone. This morning. I knew in the moment. I recognised the tone.”

“Disaster?” Charles suggested.

“Relief,” Erik said.

He didn’t know what to do with that, so he did nothing. The silence expanded around them into something kindly. He could feel the hinge of the evening turning.

“I love you,” he said, because at some point cowardice becomes a kind of rudeness. “I do. I’ve done it badly. I’ve historicised and footnoted and apologised for it in advance, but the thing itself is not theoretical. I love you.” He swallowed. His mouth, faithful saboteur, added, “For real – ” and then, helplessly, “ – sies.”

Time performed a small pratfall. The word clanged through the air like a novelty bell.

Cheryl’s head lifted. Erik’s eyes widened by a degree so minute only a historian would have recorded it. Charles felt his soul try to leave his body via the embarrassment exit.

“No,” he said, half-prayer, half-command. “Erase that from the record. Strike it. Burn the court. I’m sorry. My brain panicked and a child came out.”

Erik’s head tipped back and the laugh arrived like weather breaking. It wasn’t unkind. It had the delighted, incredulous music of a man discovering a ridiculous truth and finding it perfect. He put his glass down with care; he reached across the cat with less; he curled a hand around the back of Charles’s neck with a certainty that calmed the rest of the world.

“For realsies,” he said, solemn as a judge, and then, because once you start dancing with idiocy you might as well learn the steps, he said it again, closer, softer, as if the word belonged to them now. “For realsies.”

Charles covered his face with both hands, which did not stop the ridiculous grin. “I hate you,” he said into his fingers.

“You do not,” Erik said, running his thumb along the hinge of Charles’s jaw until the hands gave up and let his face be seen. “And if you did, you would write me a paper about it, complete with graphs.”

“I could do a chart,” Charles said, hoarse with laughter. “Axes labelled mortification and desire.”

“That’s just a circle,” Erik said, and kissed him, brief and warm and exactly sufficient.

It wasn’t the kind of kiss people wrote poems about, except that it was, because poems are not always made of fireworks. Sometimes they’re made of relief. Of muscle memory. Of the soft noise a person makes when the part of them that has been braced for impact finally unclenches. They stayed like that, in the shallow water of it, until the humour became quiet and the quiet felt safe enough to be happiness.

Cheryl kneaded once in approval and then, apparently satisfied that policy goals had been met, leapt down to patrol the kitchen.

“More wine?” Erik said, when their faces were close enough that suggestion felt like another form of intimacy.

“Please,” Charles managed, surprised by how grateful the word felt in his mouth.

They moved around each other with the small choreography mornings had taught them – bottle, glasses, a discussion about whether the good corkscrew counted as an heirloom. The lamp caught the surface of the wine like approval; the living room felt less like a courtroom and more like a place where people had sat through storms and discovered they owned the roof.

“Text Emma,” Charles said, as Erik hunted for the bottle stopper. “Tell her I’m not a danger to myself or others.”

“I already told her you are adorable and ridiculous,” Erik said, not looking up from the counter. “She sent a book emoji and said ‘Exposure therapy successful.’”

“Oh God,” Charles said, leaning his forehead lightly against a cupboard door. “Tell her I apologise to the profession.”

Erik’s phone buzzed on the counter. He glanced at it and then at Charles, as if to ask permission for a reality check. Charles raised an eyebrow in the international sign for do what you like, I’m busy pretending to be dignified. Erik tapped a reply – He’s fine. We’re fine. – and slid the phone away like a man returning a tool to its drawer.

“We are,” Charles said, tasting the sentence before he let it out again, and feeling it, to his surprise, land on something solid. “We’re – what do the children on the internet say? Fine-fine.”

“Fine,” Erik agreed. “For realsies.”

“You’re not allowed to weaponise it,” Charles said, pointing the corkscrew like a gavel.

“I am absolutely allowed,” Erik said, reaching past him for the glasses and, incidentally, into his space. “It is part of the historical record.”

They drank like a treaty. Cheryl returned to demand her dinner in the tone of one who has always been on the right side of history; Charles obliged with the haste of a man eager to keep allies. Erik set the table with the ritual solemnity he gave to all small tasks. The gentleness of it undid Charles again, privately.

“I was going to move to the Hebrides,” he said, purely to hear Erik laugh.

“You’d hate the ferry,” Erik said. “And the wind would bully your hair.”

“This is true.” He paused. “Do you ever get tired of being the reasonable one?”

“Yes,” Erik said promptly. “That’s why I chose you.”

“Because I am chaos?”

“Because you are alive,” Erik said, and placed his glass into his hands like proof.

They took the rest of the bottle to the sofa, where Cheryl had arranged herself in the exact centre as if quelling territorial disputes. They sat anyway, careful around her, knees touching just enough to make the fabric of the evening continuous. Outside, the city performed its appetites – sirens, laughter, buses doing their heavy, miraculous turns – and inside, two men drank wine and decided not to argue with happiness.

After a while – after the kind of while that sounds small on paper and large in a body – Erik lifted his phone again, thumb hesitating over the screen, then typing something brisk. Charles didn’t ask. He didn’t need to. There was a new, astonishing luxury to not needing to see the words to know their direction.

“Do you want to watch something?” Erik asked. “Something with fewer committees than your day?”

“Everything has fewer committees than my day,” Charles said, and then, surprised by the courage of the impulse, he added, “Stay?”

Erik’s head turned, that tiny pleased-oh flicker like a pilot light. “I intended to,” he said simply.

They watched a very gentle programme about competitive pottery and made it competitive anyway, quietly, between themselves – who’d choose which glaze, whether the judges had been unduly harsh to a vase that had simply been born sad. Cheryl snored once with the emphatic innocence of the morally victorious.

When the credits rolled, the night had settled into itself. They had made an amiable dent in the wine bottle; the room had learned their shape again.

“We should – ” Charles began, with the politeness of habit.

“We should,” Erik agreed, echoing the shape of it, then failed to supply a verb and instead leaned over to kiss him again, which felt like the correct grammar. “I’ll text Emma back in the morning,” he said, when they separated. “Tell her the experiment was replicated and the results are robust.”

“Peer-reviewed?” Charles asked.

“By a cat,” Erik said. “Which is the only kind that counts.”

They tidied glasses in the lazy way of people who had decided to be good citizens of their own evening. Erik folded his coat over the back of a chair instead of putting it on. Charles tried not to notice how that small domestic thing made something deep in him go yes like a hinge clicking home.

In the bedroom doorway, they paused, as if unsure whether ceremony was required. Cheryl solved the problem by leaping onto the bed and taking the exact amount of space necessary to force them into proximity. They obeyed the cat’s geometry, lay down like men grateful for mathematics, and let the dark do what dark does – soften edges, forgive faces.

“Hey,” Erik said into the half-silence, not a question, just a light on a porch.

“Mm?”

“For the record,” he said, the legal joke softened into kindness, “I love you, too.”

The sentence did not surprise so much as complete; it fitted into the place Charles had been saving for it. He made the small, undignified sound of a person who has been handed water after pretending not to be thirsty.

“Good,” he said, because anything larger would have broken the gentle thing between them. Then, because he was still himself, and because survival sometimes requires leaning into the ridiculous, he added, muffled against Erik’s shoulder, “For realsies.”

Erik’s laugh arrived like a seal, warm and pleased. “For realsies,” he said into Charles’s hair, and the word, that ridiculous word, turned from a car crash into a key.

They slept with the window cracked open to the city, the radiator tapping out its tiny metronome, the cat in her annex of duvet, and the knowledge between them not needing to be looked at to be true.