Errands

Home dissolved quietly, the way it did.

The Empty Room didn’t replace it.

It simply… was.

Cal sat down. Or the room decided she had. She’d long since stopped finding the distinction useful.

This time, she’d brought biscuits.

She set the plate down beside her mug and looked at it for a moment, and then said, to the smooth and unbroken walls:

“…You can come in.”

Footsteps.

Measured. Unhurried.

Grigori arrived exactly where she’d expected him to, grey coat, three books under one arm, and stopped when he saw the plate.

He looked at it.

Then at her.

“You remembered biscuits.”

“I’m evolving.”

“Evidently.” He sat, in the way he had of sitting that suggested chairs materialised out of professional courtesy. He selected a biscuit, examined it as though it might be a first edition, and opened one of his books. “Slowly. But evidently.”

They drank tea.

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

Cal was trying very hard not to mention Nocturne.

She lasted four minutes.

“I was thinking I might go back.”

Grigori looked up from his book.

“Were you?”

“Just to check on him.”

A pause.

Grigori turned a page.

“Of course.”

Cal frowned.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Another page.

“I’m simply trying to remember whether anyone has ever described Jax as needing supervision.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“No.” A sip of tea. “It rarely is.”

She glared at him. He weathered it the way he weathered everything, which was by appearing to find it mildly informative.

She tried again.

“I just think…”

She stopped.

“…he seemed…”

Nothing came.

She could feel the endings queuing up, and every single one of them was wrong. He seemed lonely. He hadn’t. He seemed sad. He hadn’t. He seemed lost. Jax was the least lost person she had ever met. He was so unlost that being near him made her aware of how much of her own life she navigated by guesswork.

The sentence sat there, unfinished, getting heavier.

Grigori rescued her.

Not by helping.

By making it worse.

“Perhaps he’s developed a coffee addiction.”

Silence.

Cal blinked.

“…What?”

“Terrible things happen.”

“Grigori.”

“One cup becomes two.”

“You’re impossible.”

“People begin buying expensive beans.”

“That’s not…”

“Before long they’re explaining flavour notes.” He turned a page with great gravity. “To strangers. At parties. I’ve seen it end friendships.”

Cal laughed.

Properly.

The kind that arrived without asking permission and left her breathless in the quiet afterwards. It was in that unguarded space, before she’d rebuilt anything, that the truth slipped out.

“…I’m still going.”

Grigori nodded.

“I know.”

She waited.

He said nothing. He ate his biscuit with the unhurried thoroughness of a man who had once waited out a century and found it broadly tolerable.

“…You’re not going to stop me?”

“No.”

“Tell me I’m being ridiculous?”

He closed the book.

Looked at her.

Very gently.

“You aren’t going because he needs you.”

A pause.

“You’re going because you need another conversation.”

Silence.

The room, which had no opinions, managed to have no opinions very loudly.

“No,” said Cal.

Grigori nodded.

“I know.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t explain. He simply let the thought exist, set it down between them like a fourth thing on the biscuit plate, and picked his book back up, and read.

They finished their tea without speaking.

It didn’t need filling.

When he left, two steps, the place where the door would have been, or where she’d decided it was, he paused, and without turning around said:

“Do give him my…”

He stopped.

Considered.

“…Actually. Don’t give him anything.”

And then he was gone, and Cal sat alone in the Empty Room, frowning at the space where he’d been, with the growing and deeply irritating suspicion that he’d just made a point.

She went the next evening.

She told herself it wasn’t a decision, just a direction. She had errands. The errands happened to be south. Nocturne also happened to be south. London was full of coincidences like that, if you arranged them carefully enough.

The evening was doing its best. The rain had stopped and the pavements were drying in patches, dark islands shrinking on grey stone, and the whole city smelled of after.

She walked.

Past the canal, where the water held the streetlights like it was minding them for someone. Past the closed bookshop with the handwritten cards in the window you’ll cry on the bus and past the antique shop beside it, dark now, its cluttered window keeping its own counsel.

She slowed there. Just slightly.

Then kept going.

She heard Nocturne before she saw it. The bass reached the corner ahead of her, a low pulse under the pavement, the building’s heartbeat arriving in advance of the building. She came round the corner and there it was, the reluctant sign, the door, the light leaking out around its edges like the place couldn’t quite contain itself.

Cal stopped.

Across the street. Under the awning of a shuttered café, next to a little metal table she had, once, lined three objects up on in the rain.

She looked at the door.

Just to check on him.

She rehearsed it, standing there. Walking in. The bass. The stairs. His eyes finding her before she’d said anything, the way they did. And him asking, because he would ask, plainly, without decoration:

Why are you here?

And she would say…

I came to check on you.

Cal stood very still under the awning.

Because she could hear it now. Out loud, in his office, in front of those dark, patient eyes. She could hear exactly what it was.

Just don’t lie to me, he’d said, the first night. I hate that.

It wasn’t that he’d catch her out.

It was worse than that.

He wouldn’t say anything at all. He’d just look at her and something small that carried more than its size would quietly become less true.

She didn’t have a true sentence yet.

She had a feeling shaped like several sentences, all of them wrong, and one seed, planted by an insufferable man in a grey coat, that she was not, absolutely not, ready to look at.

You’re going because you need another conversation.

“No,” she told the seed, firmly.

The seed, like the Empty Room, offered no opinion.

Cal looked at the door of Nocturne for one more moment.

Then she smiled.

At herself, mostly.

And turned, and walked home the long way, past the canal, where the water was still minding the lights.

She got home at ten.

Put the kettle on.

Made tea.

Forgot the tea.

Made another.

And on the counter, in its plain plastic bottle, catching the kitchen light like a small domestic trophy, sat the milk.

Actually.

This time.