Page 21

Cassian picked a flake of pastry off the front of his shirt and ate it while he thought.

“Colin says I’m not allowed to just believe you,” he said. “Or do what you want without question.”

Ruari’s brow furrowed. “He said that about me?”

“No.” Cassian brushed the last crumb away and met Ruari’s eyes. “He gave that to me as a life rule. For how to deal with everyone.”

“That’s a fine life rule,” Ruari said. “You should listen to him.”

Cassian considered this. Colin would be pleased that he’d deployed the life rule correctly, and even more pleased that Ruari had endorsed it rather than getting defensive about it, because according to Colin, alphas who got defensive when you set a boundary were alphas you wanted to stay clear of.

“You can come to the markets with me,” Cassian said. “But you absolutely cannot make me eat jellied eels.”

“What if I trade you one bite of eel for a dozen kouign-amann?”

Cassian scoffed. “You’d give me the kouign-amann anyway without me having to eat a single eel.”

Ruari laughed so loudly that the woman by the window looked up from her laptop. He came to stand beside Cassian, pulling his apron over his head, and the whole length of him unfolded into the shop as he moved.

“RAF!” he bellowed towards the kitchen. “We’re closing down for the day!”

He crossed to the door in two strides and flipped the sign so it read CLOSED.

Raf emerged from the kitchen. He looked at the sign, then swept his arm around the shop, where every table was occupied.

“Go,” Raf said. “I’ll oversee things.” Then he walked to the door and flipped the sign back to OPEN.

Ruari clapped him on the shoulder, rocking him forward a step, and held the front door open for Cassian with one arm propped against the frame.

Portobello Road was all noise and colour the second he stepped outside. The market stalls stretched in both directions, bright with awnings and hand-lettered signs.

Cassian looked up at Ruari, who was squinting into the morning sun with his jacket slung over one shoulder, and thought: I want to be able to smell him every single day for the rest of my life.

He didn’t examine the thought. He tucked it away in the same place he kept his collection of good words, and followed Ruari into the crowd.

Chapter Nine

Cassian had been afraid of crowds for the first four months after he left the compound.

People were fine individually, and sometimes better than fine. They gave him their full attention, and he read faces well, working out what they might want before they even had to ask. It was the volume of them that had done him in.

Nicholson Street in Melbourne, on his first proper outing with Hamish, had nearly put him on the pavement. The sheer density of strangers, moving in every direction with no one directing the flow, was too much. In the compound, you knew every face, and every face knew yours. Nicholson Street had hundreds of people with no idea that he was Calyx, and his lungs had seized so hard that Hamish had steered him into a doorway and crouched beside him until he could breathe again.

When he was married to Charles, crowds hadn’t been a problem; Charles hadn’t taken him anywhere that had any. The Bayswater house was large and quiet and staffed by people who kept their eyes off Cassian unless he spoke to them first. Charles left for work at seven and came home at six, and the hours in between were Cassian’s, as long as he stayed inside the house.

He’d listened to the Lumineer’s recordings. He’d talked to the housekeeper, who brought him cups of tea without being asked and clucked about Cassian needing more pillows under his hips and advised him to squeeze tight afterwards if he wanted it to take. She monitored his cycles on a wall calendar in the kitchen, and on the days she circled in red, she left the bedroom door ajar and placed an extra mound of pillows on the bed. That was the shape of his days, and he hadn’t questioned it.

Now Cassian threaded through the Saturday crowd on Portobello Road with Ruari’s hand on his back, and the crowd didn’t bother him at all.

He ducked under a woman’s outstretched arm as she reached for a bolt of fabric at a textile stall, sidestepped a pushchair mid-stride, and cut through a gap between two men arguing over a box of vinyl records.

A stall selling olives appeared on his left, and Cassian was there before Ruari had finished turning his head.

“Try this one,” the stallholder said, holding out a glossy black olive on the end of a toothpick. “Kalamata. From my uncle’s grove in Messinia.”

Cassian took it. The flesh burst against his teeth, briny and rich, dense with oil. He made a noise that turned Ruari’s head and the stallholder’s at once.

“That is incredible,” Cassian said, already scanning the tubs for more.