There was a particular quality to the café at ten minutes to closing time that Felix had always found oddly peaceful.
The last customers had gone. The chairs were half-up on the tables, the ones he hadn't needed to reach yet. The espresso machine had been cleaned and cooled and stood quiet at the back of the counter, and the only light still fully on was the one above the pastry case, which gave the whole room a low amber warmth that had nothing to do with the grey evening pressing against the windows outside.
Yuna had left at five-thirty — early, because she had a study group, and because she had given Felix a look on her way out that communicated, without a single word, that she was trusting him to make good decisions and would be asking about it later.
Felix had been making good decisions for twenty years. He was very tired of it.
Jake was at the window table. He had arrived at his usual time that morning and ordered his usual order and sat with his phone and left at nine-fifteen as always. And then at four-fifty in the afternoon — ten minutes before the café closed, forty minutes after Yuna had gone, in the specific quiet gap when Felix was usually alone with the cleaning and the closing counts — the door had opened and Jake Throne had come back.
He hadn't ordered anything. He had simply sat down at the window table, looked at Felix across the half-cleaned room, and said: "I can go, if this is inconvenient."
Felix had looked at him for a long moment. Then he had said, "The machine is already off," and gone back to wiping down the counter, which he recognized, distantly and with some irritation, was not the same as asking him to leave.
Jake had stayed. That had been twenty minutes ago. In those twenty minutes Felix had finished the counter, restocked the napkin holders, balanced the till, and put the remaining pastries in the cold case for tomorrow, and Jake had sat at the window table with his jacket on and his hands wrapped around nothing — he hadn't ordered, Felix hadn't offered, some unspoken agreement had been reached about the fact that this was not a customer visit — and watched Felix work with that particular quality of attention that Felix had spent eight mornings pretending not to notice.
Felix hung up his apron. He came around the counter. He pulled a chair down from the nearest table, reversed it, and sat across from Jake with his arms folded over the chair back and looked at the man directly.
"All right," Felix said. "Ask me."
Jake's eyes moved to his. "Ask you what?"
"Whatever you came back at four-fifty to ask," Felix said. "You've been here for twenty minutes not asking it. Ask it."
Something moved across Jake's face — not surprise this time, not the unguarded flash from the tip incident, but something quieter. Something that looked almost like relief. "I wasn't going to ask you anything," he said.
"Then why did you come back?"
Jake was quiet for a moment. Outside, the evening traffic moved past the window in its usual indifferent procession, headlights beginning to matter in the lowering dark. "I had a meeting that ended early," he said. "I was going to go back to the lot. I drove past here instead."
"You drove past and came in," Felix said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
The question sat between them in the amber light. Jake looked at Felix with those steady grey eyes and Felix looked back and neither of them moved, and Felix thought: this is the third time I have asked him this. He has deflected it twice. He is not going to deflect it a third time. Something in Jake's expression — the quality of his stillness, the particular way he was looking at Felix, as though he had made a decision and was now simply executing it — told Felix that was true.
"I wanted to see you," Jake said. "That's all. I wanted to see you and the meeting ended early and I drove past and came in." A pause. The grey eyes did not waver. "That's the honest answer. I understand if it's inconvenient."
Felix held his gaze. He thought about the twelve things he could say to that — the deflections, the polite distances, the versions of this isn't a good idea that he had been rehearsing in the back of his mind for eight days. He was very good at those. He had been practicing them since he was seventeen years old.
He said: "What do you want from me, Jake?"
Not from the café. Not from the coffee. From him. He said the name deliberately — he had been careful with it, had used it rarely, had noticed Jake's attention sharpen every time he did — and he watched Jake receive it and felt the slight change in the room's atmosphere, the way Jake went very still for a single breath.
Then Jake said: "I want to know you."
Felix waited. There was more. He could see it in the careful way Jake was choosing words, the precision of a man who did not speak carelessly.
"Not—" Jake stopped. Started again. "I'm not asking for anything you're not willing to give. I'm not asking you to be available or convenient or uncomplicated, because I can see that you're none of those things and I find that — I find that more interesting than I know what to do with." He looked at Felix steadily. "I want to know what you're working on in your art program. I want to know why you work three jobs and what you're saving toward and what you think about when the café is empty.
I want to know what made you decide that tearing money in half was the correct response to that situation, because I have thought about it every day since and I still think it was the most interesting thing anyone has ever done in front of me."
Felix sat with the chair back under his arms and looked at Jake Throne and felt something shift in his chest — not the scent-pull, not the Alpha-awareness he had been suppressing for eight mornings, but something underneath those things.
Something that would have been easier to deal with if it were only physical.
"That's a lot of things to want," Felix said.
"Yes," Jake agreed.
"You could have just said you wanted to get coffee with me."
"I have coffee with you every morning," Jake said. "That's not what I mean."
Felix looked at him. "I know," he said, quietly. "I know it's not."
The amber light held them both. The city moved outside the glass. Felix thought about sealed rooms and rules about mornings and the very specific, very carefully constructed system of his own life, and he thought about the way Jake Throne had stood in the rain outside his art school without explanation and not left when Felix told him to, and he thought: I am going to make a decision right now, and I should be careful about it, and I am not entirely sure I am going to be.
"I'm not easy to know," Felix said.
"I didn't ask for easy," Jake said.
"I don't talk about myself much."
"I noticed."
"I have three jobs and a full course load and exactly enough hours in the week to sleep if I manage them correctly," Felix said. "I don't have—" He stopped. The sentence had been going toward I don't have room for this, and it was true, and he was aware with the quiet precision of self-knowledge that it was also not the real reason he was hesitating.
The real reason was sitting across from him with grey eyes and a patience that should not have been as unsettling as it was.
"I know," Jake said. He said it gently, without pressure — the way he said most things, as though he had all the time available and was simply making an offer. "I'm not asking you to rearrange your life. I'm asking if I can sit here for another twenty minutes."
Felix looked at him for a long moment.
Then he stood up, reversed his chair back to its place, walked to the pastry case, and came back with two small plates — the last of the almond croissants, which he had not put in the cold case, which he had in fact set aside sometime around four-forty without consciously deciding to.
He set one in front of Jake. He sat back down, this time in a chair facing the right way, and broke his own croissant in half with his fingers.
"Twenty minutes," Felix said. "And then I have to lock up."
Jake looked at the plate in front of him. Then at Felix. The corner of his mouth moved — that architectural suggestion of a smile, the one that was not quite a smile and meant more than one would have.
"Thank you," he said.
"Don't thank me," Felix said. "It's a croissant. It would have been stale by tomorrow."
"Of course," Jake said, and ate the croissant, and did not smile, and Felix ate his and looked at the window and thought: twenty minutes. He had twenty minutes before he had to lock up and go home and think carefully about all of this.
He was already certain the thinking was not going to help.
✦ ✦ ✦
They stayed for an hour and forty minutes.
Felix noticed at the forty-minute mark that the twenty-minute limit had passed and said nothing about it. Jake noticed Felix noticing and also said nothing about it, and the conversation had reached a point by then that stopping it would have required more deliberate effort than simply continuing, so they continued.
It had started with the croissants — Felix commenting, without meaning to, that the almond cream was slightly over-sweetened and he had been meaning to adjust the recipe, and Jake asking whether Felix made them himself, and Felix saying yes, he did most of the baking for the morning case because he came in an hour before his shift to prep, and Jake going quiet for a moment in the way he went quiet when he was filing something away.
"Why?" Jake asked.
"Why what?"
"Why come in an hour early. You could buy from a supplier."
"Because the supplier's croissants are adequate," Felix said, "and adequate is not the same as good. And if I'm going to spend eight hours in a place I might as well be proud of what's in it."
Jake looked at him. "You're studying fine arts," he said.
"Painting, specifically. Mixed media second year." Felix broke off another piece of croissant. "It's not related to baking."
"It is, though," Jake said. "It's the same — the thing about adequate not being the same as good. That's the same impulse."
Felix looked at him. He had not expected that. He found he didn't know what to do with it, so he filed it away in the back of his mind where he kept the other things about Jake Throne that he had not expected, and moved on.
"What about you," Felix said. "The acting. Is it something you wanted, or something you fell into?"
Jake considered this with the seriousness he brought to everything Felix asked him. "Both," he said finally. "I fell into it for reasons that aren't — that were circumstantial. And then I found I was good at it. And then I found that I liked being good at it, which is different from the falling."
"What kind of circumstantial?" Felix asked.
"The kind I'm not going to explain tonight," Jake said, without apology.
Felix absorbed this. "Fair," he said. He meant it. He had things he was not going to explain tonight either, and more things he was not going to explain for considerably longer than that, and he respected the existence of the boundary even while noting it precisely.
"Does your family support it?" Felix asked. "The acting."
Something moved across Jake's face — brief, contained, the compression of something larger into a manageable shape. "No," he said.
"But you do it anyway."
"Yes."
Felix looked at him. "That must be expensive," he said. "Doing something you're good at that the people who are supposed to know you best think you shouldn't."
Jake looked back at him with those grey eyes and something in them went very quiet and very attentive, the way they did when Felix said something Jake had not anticipated. "Yes," he said. "It is."
They sat with that for a moment. The café was entirely dark now except for the pastry case light and the ambient glow of the street outside. Felix thought about his mother, and about the painting he was working on in second year studio — two figures in a corridor, one made of light and one made of shadow, reaching toward each other with the specific uncertainty of people who were not sure the reaching was safe. He had not told anyone what it was about. He was not going to tell Jake tonight.
"What are you working on?" Jake asked. "In the program."
Felix looked at him. Jake had said, forty-five minutes ago, that he wanted to know what Felix was working on in his art program. He had remembered it and come back to it and asked it directly at the exact moment when Felix had been thinking about it.
"A painting," Felix said.
"What of?"
"Two people," Felix said. "In a corridor. It's not finished."
Jake nodded. He did not ask for more. He seemed to understand, with the particular sensitivity that Felix had been noticing and cataloguing against his will, that that was the amount Felix was offering and that asking for the rest of it would be wrong.
"I'd like to see it," Jake said. "When it's finished. If you're willing."
Felix looked at the window. At the dark street, the headlights, the ordinary evening city that had no idea what was happening in this small amber room. He thought about sealed doors and rules about mornings and the system of his own life that he had built with such care.
"Maybe," he said.
Jake accepted this completely. "Maybe," he agreed.
Felix stood. He began putting the chairs up properly, the ones he'd missed earlier, moving around the room with the quiet efficiency of closing. Jake stood too, without being asked, and began helping — taking chairs from the near tables, lifting them cleanly and setting them up with the ease of someone who had done manual work before, which was not what Felix would have expected from a man who looked like a magazine cover.
They did not speak while they finished closing. They worked around each other in the small room with a naturalness that Felix noticed and did not comment on, the particular ease of two people who had somehow, without negotiating it, learned each other's movement and left the right amount of space.
At the door, Felix turned off the pastry case light. The room went dark. He unlocked the front door from the inside and held it open, and Jake walked through into the cool evening air, and Felix followed and locked it behind them.
They stood on the pavement outside the café. The city moved around them. Jake's car was parked a half-block down — Felix had noticed it earlier, a dark, understated thing that was expensive in the specific way of things that did not need to advertise it.
"Thank you for the croissant," Jake said.
"It would have been stale," Felix said, for the second time.
"I know." The corner of Jake's mouth moved. "Goodnight, Felix."
"Goodnight," Felix said.
Jake walked to his car. Felix stood on the pavement and watched him go and told himself he was just waiting to make sure the street was clear before he headed for the subway, which was true, and was also not the reason he was standing there.
Jake got to the car. He opened the door. He paused — just briefly, the pause of someone deciding something — and looked back.
Felix was still standing on the pavement.
Neither of them said anything. There was nothing to say that the moment had not already said more precisely. Jake got into the car. Felix turned up his collar against the evening cold and walked toward the subway entrance.
He did not look back either. He was halfway down the steps when he realized he was smiling — a small, reluctant, entirely undignified thing that he pressed flat immediately and told himself was just the cold.
He was not even slightly convincing.