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“You are certain,” he says.

“Completely certain,” I say. “It’s just me. Come on.”

He steps through the door like he’s testing whether the threshold might reject him. Once he’s upstairs and properly inside, standing in my actual kitchen for the first time in the entire history of knowing him, he goes very still. He looks round at everything, the kettle, the mismatched mugs, the calendar on the fridge with my shifts scrawled across it in different coloured pens.

“This is where you live,” he says, like he’s confirming a fact he already suspected but wanted to hear stated plainly.

“This is where I live,” I say. “Very glamorous, I know. Mind the wonky chair, it’ll tip you out if you lean back too far.”

He doesn’t sit in the wonky chair. He doesn’t sit anywhere, actually, just stands in the middle of my kitchen taking up considerably more space than any ordinary person would, and it’s only now, with nobody else around to distract me, that I let myself look at him the way I don’t usually allow myself to, not properly, not for long.

He’s solid tonight. More solid than I’ve ever seen him, no flickering at the edges, no half-formed suggestion of a shape. Just him, entirely. Dark hair, sharp cut features, that same deep amber gaze that’s been finding me from corners and doorways for months. Except now there’s nothing between us at all, no distance, no shadow to squint through. He’s devastatingly, almost unfairly handsome, the sort of face that would look staged and unbelievable on anyone else. A jaw you could apparently cut glass with. Something in the set of his mouth that suggests he’s perfectly aware of the effect, and has simply chosen, until now, never to let me see it properly. I find myself staring for a beat too long before I remember I’m meant to be doing something other than staring.

“You’re very solid today,” I manage.

“It is easier here,” he says. “Fewer eyes.”

“Just mine,” I say.

“Just yours,” he agrees, and something about the way he says it settles low and warm in my chest.

He moves round the kitchen slowly, taking it in properly, the way you’d walk through a museum. He pauses at the fridge, reading the shift calendar with what looks like genuine interest. Then at the little corkboard by the door, where I’ve pinned up a postcard from Felix’s holiday and a photo of Big Brian and me from years back, faded at the edges.

“This is you,” he says, tapping the photo lightly, careful, like he thinks it might be fragile.

“That’s me,” I say. “And Big Brian. He taught me to whittle, badly. I think I was about eleven there.”

“You look happy,” he says.

“I was. Extremely happy.” I come to stand beside him, looking at the same faded photograph, where I’m young and gap-toothed and grinning at whoever was holding the camera. “It wasn’t bad, you know. People assume, when they hear cult, that it must have been miserable start to finish. It wasn’t. It was awesome.”

He doesn’t say anything to that, just looks at the photo a moment longer, and something in his silence feels even bigger than his way of turning what I’ve said over properly rather than simply waiting for me to keep talking. The information I just shared with him is clearly important to him, and he’s taking it very seriously.

I busy myself putting the kettle on, mostly to give my hands something to do. It’s while I’m rummaging through the cupboard for tea bags that I hear him moving behind me, opening the bread bin with the careful, deliberate curiosity of someone conducting an experiment.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“You have not eaten since your shift,” he says.

This is true, and mildly alarming that he’s tracking it, though I decide not to examine that too closely right now. “I was going to make toast.”

“I will do it,” he says.

“You don’t need to, honestly, I can manage toast,” I say.

“I want to,” he says.

There’s something so plain and certain in the way he says it that I let him. I turn back to the kettle, listening to the small domestic sounds of someone who’s clearly never made toast before, attempting toast for the first time. Bread bag rustling, the toaster lever clicking down with more force than strictly necessary.

By the time I turn around with two mugs of tea, he’s frowning at a plate like it’s personally disappointed him.

“I do not think this is correct,” he says.

I look down at the plate.

Two slices of toast, golden and perfectly done, actually rather impressive for a first attempt, but pressed together like an actual sandwich, which isn’t necessarily a problem in itself. The trouble is there’s no peanut butter between the slices at all. It’s all sitting on top instead, spread thickly across the surface of the assembled toasted sandwich like icing on a cake, glossy and generous. Entirely on the outside of a sandwich that is, underneath all that effort, just two pieces of dry toast pressed together.

I stare at it for a long moment, torn between the two most natural human responses, which are laughing until I can’t breathe, and being so touched I might actually cry a little.