Afterwards

Cal walked home the long way, which was unusual, because it was raining, and she noticed the rain the way she noticed most things, thoroughly, and slightly too late.

She was thinking.

Not about anything in particular. She was very clear with herself on that point. She had gone somewhere, met someone, satisfied a curiosity, and left. The evening was complete. Filed. Done.

She crossed the bridge.

That man doesn’t fit

The thought arrived without punctuation, somewhere around the middle of the canal, and she stopped walking for a moment to inspect it.

It wasn’t attraction. She checked. It wasn’t guilt, which she would have recognised, having an extensive collection. It wasn’t even interest, exactly, in the usual sense of the word.

It was the feeling of reading a room and finding one object at the wrong angle.

Everyone performed. That was simply how rooms worked. Everyone adjusted, softened, arranged themselves for consumption, she’d spent a lifetime watching it, and a good portion of one doing it, and she could read a performance at forty paces in bad light.

He hadn’t been performing.

Not once. Not even slightly. Not even in the small structural ways people don’t know they’re doing.

That man doesn’t fit

“Hm,” said Cal, to the canal, and walked on.

By the time she reached her front door she had resolved the matter completely. It had been an interesting evening. He had been an interesting man. She was finished with Nocturne.

She let herself in, satisfied.

The flat was exactly as she’d left it, which she found vaguely disappointing, in the way one does.

She put the kettle on.

Made tea.

Forgot the tea.

Made another.

Home dissolved quietly.

The Empty Room didn’t replace it.

It simply… was.

Cal sat down, or the room decided she had, and for a while she did nothing at all, which the room, having no opinions, entirely supported.

She held her mug and looked at the smooth, unbroken walls.

At least, that’s what she told herself they were.

“…Grigori?”

Silence.

She smiled faintly.

“…You can come in.”

For a while, nothing happened.

Then footsteps. Measured. Unhurried. The sound of a man who had never once been late for anything, largely because he refused to acknowledge the concept.

Grigori arrived exactly where she’d expected him to. Grey coat. Three books tucked beneath one arm. He looked around the room with the expression of a guest inspecting a hotel he had stayed in many times and still had notes on.

“As invitations go,” he said, “this one could use biscuits.”

“You always say that.”

“I find consistency reassuring.”

He sat, in the way he had of sitting that suggested chairs materialised out of professional courtesy, set his books down, kept one, and opened it.

They drank tea.

The room did what it always did, which was nothing, beautifully.

Cal was not thinking about Nocturne.

She was being extremely deliberate about it, in fact, keeping her mind arranged around the space where the thought would have been, the way you walk around furniture in the dark.

Grigori turned a page.

“You’re not drinking your tea,” he observed.

“I’m pacing myself.”

“Mm.” Another page. “Is that what we’re calling it.”

She looked at him. He looked at his book. He had the particular quality of stillness he always had when he had already noticed something and was politely waiting for it to introduce itself.

She lasted, by her own later estimate, about four minutes.

“I went out last night.”

“I know. You’ve brought the pavement in with you.” He didn’t look up. “Somewhere loud.”

“A club.”

“Adventurous.”

“It’s called Nocturne.”

The page, which had been mid-turn, completed its journey a fraction more slowly than the ones before it.

That was all. If she hadn’t spent her whole life cataloguing the moments when people’s stillness changed shape, she’d have missed it entirely.

“I met the man who runs it,” she said.

Grigori read for a moment longer.

Then, without any particular weight, as though asking about the weather in a city he used to live in:

“How is he?”

“He’s fine.”

Grigori waited.

He’d always been irritatingly good at waiting.

“…I didn’t ask whether he was fine.”

“No,” Cal admitted. “You asked how he was.”

A nod. “They’re different questions.”

She looked into her tea. The answer took its time arriving, and when it came it was smaller and heavier than she expected.

“He was…”

She searched.

“…kind.”

Grigori closed his eyes.

Only for a heartbeat. If she hadn’t been watching, but she was always watching.

When they opened again:

“…Good.”

“Good?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Sure about what?”

A pause. He looked, for a moment, at a point somewhat beyond the wall of the room, at something that wasn’t there, or was.

“Whether he’d kept the important things.”

Cal frowned. She turned the sentence over, looking for the door in it, and found the walls smooth and unbroken, which was, she reflected, becoming a theme.

“You say that like you know him.”

“I knew someone like him,” said Grigori, mildly, and turned a page. “Once. Argued with furniture.”

“…What?”

“Spent twenty minutes explaining to a chair why it was in the wrong place.” A sip of tea. “The chair, I’m told, remained unconvinced.”

“You’re making that up.”

“I’m improving it.”

Cal laughed and the room, briefly, felt less like somewhere she had built and more like somewhere she lived.

The quiet came back afterwards. Not awkward. Just full.

“Anyway,” she said, eventually, with the firmness of a person closing a drawer, “it doesn’t matter. I was only curious. I’m not going back.”

Grigori did not disagree.

He did something far more effective, which was nothing at all.

“Of course,” he said.

“I mean it.”

“I can hear that you do.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. He read his book with the serenity of a man who had never in his long life implied anything.

Then, some pages later, apropos of nothing whatsoever:

“Perhaps he’s finally bought decent beans.”

Cal blinked.

“…What?”

“Hm?” Grigori glanced up, the picture of innocence, which on Grigori was not a convincing picture. “Nothing. An old joke.”

“An old joke about what?”

“If I tell you,” he said, returning to his book, “it stops being one.”

She stared at him for a moment longer, then let it go, and filed the remark where she filed most of what Grigori said, under later, in a drawer that was becoming, though she hadn’t noticed yet, rather full.

He left the way he always left. Two steps. The place where the door would have been, or where she’d decided it was.

There he paused, and without turning around:

“You’ll want biscuits in, next time.”

“Will I?”

“For the visit after this one.” A beat. “I’m told curiosity is very more-ish.”

And then he was gone, and Cal sat alone with her tea, which had gone cold, which she noticed approximately never.

She looked at the smooth walls.

She thought about nothing in particular.

She was finished with Nocturne. That was simply a fact now, established, filed, closed. She had gone, she had looked, she had satisfied the curiosity, and the man interesting, unusual, wrong-angled as he was, was no longer any of her business. People met interesting strangers all the time and never thought about them again. That was how cities worked. That was how she worked.

She was completely, entirely finished with Nocturne.

The Empty Room, as always, offered no opinion.