She didn't leave that night.
She told herself it was practical — late, better to sleep, phone her parents in the morning from a stable location. All of this was true. None of it was the reason.
In the morning she called her parents and her mother cried and her father said "Jane, love" in the voice that always made her feel ten years old in the best way, and she told them she was safe and home and would explain everything and she'd be on the train to Bristol on Saturday.
She put the phone down and found Dimitri in the kitchen — the kitchen, which still surprised her, him in domestic spaces — making coffee with the focused attention he brought to everything.
"I'm going to Bristol on Saturday," she said. "To see my parents."
"Good," he said. "You should."
"And then back to London. I have a thesis chapter due in three weeks." She paused. "Life, resuming."
He poured coffee. He handed her a cup. Their fingers touched around the cup, briefly, and neither of them moved.
"Jane," he said.
"Don't," she said. "Don't do the thing where you're noble about this. I've been with you for six weeks and I know what you look like when you're about to be noble and it's very irritating."
He looked at her. "I was going to say that I don't know how to do this."
She looked back. "This being—"
"This." He gestured between them, with the slight awkwardness of a man whose hands were better suited to precision than to gesturing at feelings. "Whatever this is. I have not—" He stopped. "I have never wanted to—" Another stop. "You are the first person in fifteen years I have wanted to not lose."
Jane stood in the kitchen of a Mayfair safe house with coffee going cold in her hands and looked at this enormous, impossible, complicated man who had kidnapped her and shown her Russia and Italy and chess and fairy tales about heroes who get up, and she thought about what she wanted.
Not what was sensible. Not what was practical. What she wanted.
"I'm going to Bristol on Saturday," she said. "And I'm coming back to London on Monday." She looked at him steadily. "And when I come back, if you would like to have dinner — in a restaurant, which you will book, like a person, and not a kidnapper — then I will have dinner with you."
Something happened to his face. Not dramatically — it wasn't a man who did dramatic expressions. But something in the grey of his eyes, and the line of his mouth, and the careful architecture of a face built to show nothing, all moved at once in the direction of something she recognised.
"Dinner," he said.
"Dinner," she confirmed. "A table. A menu. Conversation. Like regular people."
"I'll book somewhere," he said.
"Don't book anywhere ridiculous. I'm a literature student, I'll be intimidated by the wine list."
"You are not intimidated by anything," he said, with such flat certainty that she laughed.
"Fair," she said. "But still. Nothing with fourteen courses."
"Twelve," he said.
"Dimit—"
"I'm joking," he said. And the corner of his mouth moved in the way it moved when he was fighting something that wanted to be a smile.
Jane looked at him.
"You made a joke," she said, with considerable wonder.
"I make jokes," he said, with dignity.
"I have never heard you make a joke."
"You weren't listening at the right times."
She shook her head and drank her coffee and thought about Monday and how London in spring might look from the other side of the longest six weeks of her life.