Chapter Text
It only happened once. He’ll give her that. A brief knock at the door and her face tilted up from the game to reveal . . .could it have possibly been embarrassment? Was the woman in front of him capable of such an emotion? She knocked the table with her knees as she sprang up, his hands steadying their glasses while she hurried toward the door and waved Mr. Butler aside. She closed it swiftly behind her, her bare feet perched on the cold front step as he caught her muffled voice “rescheduling” the deliverer of the knock.
He kept his gaze steady on the chessboard until she sat back down and swallowed the rest her whiskey. Her eyes told him she was waiting for him to make a joke, or enquire about the visitor so she could offer one. But he had officially retired from saying too much.
On most nights, they settled into the acceptable subjects. The war. Politics. Literature. Hugh and Dot and the lessons that only life would teach them. The occasional gruesome crime scene. He imagined it felt like the ease of a fifty-year marriage, complete with the same, sexless routine. When he yawned, she would tease him out the door. The only time she ever yawned, he ran straight into a young footballer bounding up the front steps, ready to finish whatever game he’d unknowingly been tagged out of.
So twice. It had happened twice.
Once she had fallen asleep in her chair and he just sat there finishing his drink. An awkward cough didn’t rouse her. He had taken their glasses to the kitchen, grabbed his coat and hat, looked back once, turned off the lights, looked back twice, and then he simply left. He thought she would tease him the next day, but she never mentioned it.
What might another man have done? She probably wouldn’t have been bored to unconsciousness in the first place. They weren’t all pretty faces with blank minds. Certainly a revolutionary or a dashing professor could tell a story or two that he couldn’t. But somehow, she never made him feel like an extra card in her back pocket. He knew that she hated cards.
Everything used to feel like a joke. Even an unexpected kiss was a thing that could be blown aside like air. Shameless remarks floated away like smoke before they had a chance to settle into one’s skin. But it didn’t feel like that anymore. The details of evenings spent apart were danced around. The artifacts of faceless male visitors that once had felt like an Easter Egg hunt gone wrong had now disappeared from her house, or perhaps they were carefully stowed away. Everything felt heavy, weighted, calculated. As if the only digestible outcome for the two of them was a stalemate. Because winning. . .well winning meant that someone would inevitably lose.
“Jack. Sometime today, please.”
“I’m sorry?”
Maybe he was imagining it, but there was a new face in her expressive repertoire, one that made him feel like she was trying so very hard to figure him out. Like there wasn’t enough damning evidence. As if he had never said what he had said and as if he hadn’t had the very light snuffed out of him when he thought she had gone and died.
“Jack. . .It’s your move.”