Chapter 310: Countryside pt 2
CASSIAN
I just watched him. I stood there with my hands in my pockets, letting the sound of his voice hit me.
I realized then that I had been keeping a picture of this exact moment in the back of my mind for years, through every dirty job and every midnight drop, without ever knowing I was saving it.
I had just wanted him to breathe without looking over his shoulder, and here it was. Or at least the illusion of it.
We didn’t sit down and talk about how we were going to live. We didn’t make a list of chores or rules for the house.
When you’ve spent that much time watching each other’s movements in the dark, you don’t need a map to figure out how to share a kitchen.
The routine just grew between us like grass through the stones.
The first big surprise was the mornings.
Back in the city, Julian would stay under the blankets until the sun was high, hiding from the noise of the streets and the reality of whatever work was waiting for us.
But here, before the gulls even started crying on the shore, I’d feel the mattress shift.
I woke up cold one morning and found him standing by the double windows in the living room.
The sky outside was that pale, misty grey before the pink starts to show.
He was wearing one of my old shirts, the hem of it hitting him mid-thigh, and his bare feet were flat against the cool tiles.
"I like the light here," he said, without turning around. He knew I was awake because he knew my breathing better than I did. "It doesn’t look like it’s trying to hide anything."
I stayed in the bed, propped up on one elbow, just watching the line of his back through the thin cotton. I didn’t move a muscle.
I had this sudden, stupid fear that if I shifted or cleared my throat, the whole scene would dissolve back into a dream about the apartment in the city.
Julian turned around then, caught me looking, and let his head lean against the wooden frame. "You’re staring," he said.
"I’m looking," I said.
He rolled his eyes, but the corners of his mouth pulled up into that easy, lazy smile that always meant he was pleased. "There’s coffee. Don’t look at me like that, I didn’t poison it."
He had spent three hours the day before arguing with the metal machine the landlord had left on the kitchen counter.
He didn’t know the local words for half the parts, but he had figured out how to make the steam come out right, and he had spent twenty minutes over dinner explaining the difference between the local roast and the garbage we used to buy at the corner store back home.
I didn’t care about coffee... to me, it was just hot water that kept my eyes open... but I had sat there and listened to him talk about beans like it was the most important thing in the world, just because it was him doing the talking.
Our walks became a morning thing.
The town was mostly dead before nine, the old men still inside sweeping the floors of their shops and the fishing boats just small black dots out on the water. Julian walked slow.
That took me some time to get used to. In the city, if you walked slow, you were either looking for trouble or waiting to get hit. But here, he’d stop every ten feet.
There was a grey cat that lived on the stone wall near the bakery. The first time we passed it, Julian dropped right down on his hunkers in the middle of the dirt path, extending two fingers toward its nose.
He started talking to it in a low, nonsense murmur, using a soft voice I’d never heard him use on a human being.
I stood two paces behind him, my hands buried deep in my trousers, watching the way his fingers moved over the animal’s ears.
The sun was getting warm on my neck. I didn’t look at my watch. I didn’t look down the road for cars we didn’t recognize.
If the cat wanted to sit there for an hour, I would have stood right there behind him until the sun went down, just to see him keep his hand steady.
At the market, it was even worse. He had to touch every single thing on the wooden crates. He’d pick up a lemon, roll it between his palms, smell it, and then put it back to grab another one.
"For someone who tells everyone he doesn’t know how to boil water," I said, watching him weigh a dark purple onion in his hand, "you’re spending a lot of time with the produce."
He didn’t look up. He was examining a green vegetable with weird spikes that neither of us had ever seen before. "It’s research," he said, his face completely serious.
"Research into what?"
"Vegetables, Cass. Don’t be ignorant."
I didn’t argue. I just reached into my pocket, pulled out the local bills, and handed them to the woman behind the stall.
Whatever it was, we took it home. It sat on the counter for three days until it turned brown, but neither of us minded.
The shop was small and narrow, squeezed between a place that sold old ropes and a café that smelled like fried dough.
The window was full of dusty glass bottles, rusted pocket knives, and cheap postcards for tourists who had lost their way.
Julian stopped right in the middle of the doorway, his eyes fixed on a leather case sitting on a shelf near the back.
The camera was old.
The metal around the lens was scratched and the leather strap was worn thin in the middle where people had held it, but when the old man behind the counter clicked the shutter, the sound was a clean, sharp snap.
The old man nodded a lot and spoke fast, waving his hands to tell us it still took film if we could find it.
Julian took it in his hands. He held it carefully, his thumb tracing the little wheel on top, his fingers wrapping around the base the exact way he held things he had no intention of ever giving back.
"You don’t know anything about film," I told him, leaning my shoulder against the doorpost.
"I’ll learn," he said. He was already looking at the tiny dials on the back, his eyebrows pulled together in that deep, quiet concentration he gave things when he actually cared about them.
He didn’t look at me or the shopkeeper; he was just figuring out the machine by the feel of the metal under his skin.
