Archive of Our Own ^beta

In retrospect, I probably should have at least thought about taking the floor. But as my father always says, what you didn’t know, you didn’t know, and there’s no point worrying about what you can’t change.

My mother says that in these sort of circumstances if you’d wanted to do the sensible thing you’d have done it, and by ‘you’ she definitely means me, in particular. The trouble with mothers is that they’ve been there the whole time and can’t be fooled.

Of course, at the time, what either of my parents might have said was the last thing on my mind. It had been a very long two days, starting with a lead on what might have been a misbehaving Little Crocodile that seemed serious enough to get both of us to the Outer Hebrides, moving on through a long drive followed by a ferry ride, peaking mid-afternoon with a late winter storm sweeping in from the Atlantic that it felt like it was coming down from the Arctic, and culminating in the two of us standing in a small shepherd’s cottage, staring at the sole bed.

When I say the cottage was small, I mean small, and I grew up in a council flat in London. Originally it would have been one room; parts had been sectioned off with very un-period modern plasterboard partitions to create a small bathroom, and of course it had been given indoor plumbing and electricity when it had been done up for the tourist market. I wondered if it had been the current owners or previous ones who’d done the renovations. The fittings looked more early two thousands than modern. Mind you, we hadn’t had a long chat; we’d been stashed here because it was the only local accommodation, that was all. I didn’t mind – I was too tired to want to make small-talk.

Whoever had done this place up, they had at least managed to ensure we weren’t getting the full eighteenth-century experience we otherwise might have. Unfortunately, the aim had clearly been the summer tourist market, because there was a notable draught coming in under the door. Or maybe that was just because of the raging storm.

There was a ping of water on stone, and we both glanced up in alarm at the roof, but it was just melting sleet dripping off our coats onto the floor. We’d stumbled in a couple of minutes earlier, shielding our eyes from the snow. Making sure the door was shut and hanging up our coats had occupied us until we’d identified the bed problem.

“Knew I should have stayed in London,” I said. “I could have helped out on that double homicide Stephanopoulos had going.”

“It didn’t have anything to do with our remit, as you are well aware.”

“Turns out, neither did this, really. An overnight trip in a storm, for someone who learned two spells off their grandfather and didn’t even know she was doing magic.”

“That does make it our remit -”

“She wasn’t committing any crimes.”

Nightingale changed tack. “This is quite the tourist spot, you know.”

I made a show of pulling aside the curtain and looking out the window; there wasn’t anything to be seen past the icy slush lashing the small, uneven windowpanes. At least none of it was leaking in.

“I’ll take that on faith.” Behind me, there was a sigh and a faint creaking noise; I turned around to see that Nightingale had lain on his back on the bed, in a way that from almost anyone else I would have described as a dramatic collapse. The trick with Nightingale was that he managed to make it look quiet, and more or less a sensible conservation of energy. Add in his somehow-pristine suit, and the grey tie that matched his eyes, and he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a photo shoot.

He must have noticed me entertaining idle fantasies, because he sat up, running a hand through his hair. It didn’t help. “Right. Shall we flip a coin for the bed?”

I yawned, covering my mouth with my hand. “I can keep my cold feet to myself if you can.” 

“Good,” he said decisively, after studying my face for a second. “The floor does not look comfortable.”

The bed wasn’t all that comfortable either; it managed the trick of being too soft in most places and suspiciously poky in the small of my back. But it had been a very long day, and truth be told I was as tired as I’d ever been. I closed my eyes and that was that.

Sometime in the wee hours I – let’s not say woke up. I rode the escalator of waking almost to the top, as if ascending from a station on the Northern line, and then it reversed direction and I was carried back down into the depths of sleep. But in that fraction of a second where I could see the metaphorical sunlight, I could feel the solid warmth of Nightingale next to me and the huff of his breath on my shoulder. It was perfectly comfortable, and I thought: good thing we’re not going to talk about this in the morning.

*

Next thing, it was the morning, and I was blinking awake to an empty bed. Despite the aura he gives off of public school habits, Nightingale isn’t actually a morning person by preference and I’d been expecting to have to extricate myself. Sunlight was streaming in the window.

There wasn’t any point lying around, so I got up and made use of the shower. Nightingale had left the cottage – that hadn’t taken long to ascertain, given that it only had two rooms and I’d have heard him moving around, if he’d been out of my line of sight. When I came out of the extremely bijou bathroom (it gave my parents’ a run for its money), dressed in my spare jeans and t-shirt, Nightingale had returned. He had put on his spare suit. Of course he had.

“Good news or bad news first?” he asked. He was holding a brown pottery jug that looked like it came off the set of one of those historic farm shows, but presumably came from the farm kitchen.

“Is that the good news?” I asked, pointing at the jug.

“Milk for our coffee,” he said, handing it over. “And yes.”

That left a lot of latitude for bad news, and I told him so.

“Yes, well…” He craned his neck to look up at the blue, blue sky. “The storm’s certainly blown through, but the ferry isn’t running. We’re stuck on the island for another day at least.”

“Right. How long?”

He shrugged. “At least a day, as I said.” He took the jug back off me. “I’ll take care of the coffee, shall I, and you go satisfy yourself that there isn’t a clever solution.”

This was so perfectly calculated to make me insist on making the coffee that I almost fell for it; the look on Nightingale’s face when I said I would, thanks, and actually I had mine black in the morning (which he knew anyway) was a lesson in what real disappointment looked like on him. The smug sensation lasted until I walked to the main road and got some mobile reception, only to determine that there really wasn’t any other way off the island.

“Fuck,” I said, to the charmingly bleak countryside. It didn’t reply. 

*

The cottage wasn’t equipped with a television, presumably because the kind of people who stayed here for fun didn’t want to be distracted with the conveniences of modern life, but it did have a working radio. It looked like it was about the same vintage as Nightingale in terms of design – well, a little newer, Nightingale predates radio – but the shininess of the metal surfaces and the manufacturer’s logo on the bottom gave it away as a modern replica, for the kind of people who wanted to be charmed by eighteenth-century shepherd’s cottages. It had excellent reception of Radio 4. It was so incongruous that after ten minutes I went to sit outside. Nightingale was happily listening to it and doing the crossword. He keeps old copies of the Telegraph in the Jag, for emergencies such as this.

When I came back in, I scoured the cottage for reading material. The only fiction was a copy of the Silmarillion; I definitely wasn’t that bored yet. I ended up resorting to a Nigel Slater recipe book, which I contemplated as a future Christmas present for Molly and then ruled out on the grounds of not being ambitious enough. Then I read Blackstone’s on my tablet for a bit. Then I stared at Book Nine of the Odyssey, which I’d downloaded to my phone for reasons that now escaped me, and reflected on how half-arsed my Ancient Greek still was compared to my Latin. Then I lay back on the too-short sofa and contemplated how unexciting being a wizard cop actually was, on a day-to-day basis, despite the exciting headlines.

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was barely past noon. I got up and flopped down into the chair next to Nightingale; he was, improbably, still working on the crossword. I didn’t know how he made them last that long. If I’d been stumped for more than five minutes, I’d have had to put it away for later.

“This is really quite relaxing, isn’t it?” he said. “All things considered.”

I contemplated this statement. “I think we have different ideas of relaxing.”

He clapped me on the shoulder, and left his hand there. “I know you’d rather be on the way home.”

“Mmm,” I said, slouching back further into the chair. God, I was bored, in that peculiar way boredom is worse when you’re waiting to go somewhere and can’t. There was nothing in this place to do. It was for people who wanted to go for long walks, or stay in bed.

Nightingale squeezed my shoulder, and took his hand away. His thumb dragged against the curve of my bare neck for a fractional second. All at once the feeling from the middle of the night came back to me, the warm intimacy of having been wrapped up in each other, along with a lazy sort of arousal that -

I didn’t know where any of that had come from; I bounced out of the chair as soon as he’d taken his hand away. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Close all the gates!” he called after me.  

“I know, I know, Dom always tells me!” According to him, leaving the gates open is the number one sin committed by city-dwellers when they trespass on rural land. Or visit it with all due invitation, for that matter.

Anyway, I’m perfectly capable of listening to instructions when I’m given them the first time, and in any case had no particular interest in tangling with angry…well, this was a sheep farm…actually I wasn’t sure where rams fell on the aggression scale. So I went around the back of the cottage and practiced building elaborate structures of sticks with magic. It required precision, and concentration, and long pauses to consider structural integrity, like a game of reverse Jenga. It didn’t allow any time for pointless speculation. By the time I’d successfully replicated the Gherkin, I realised the sky was starting to get dark, and that someone was calling my name. Soft light, from faux-candlelight LED bulbs, was coming from the windows of the cottage.

“Peter?” Nightingale said again, this time uncertainly, like he thought I was going to stay out in the cold for – well, why would I do that? That would be stupid. I’d known him too long to let stray thoughts get in the way. It wasn’t even like I was in that much of a dry spell. It was just – I didn’t know.

I went back in.

*

The second night was…trickier. It was clear, and cold, and despite the fact that there wasn’t a storm howling outside, it felt colder inside the cottage; the electric heater wasn’t doing the trick. I would have said something about Nightingale’s delicate lungs, courtesy of that very fun time he got shot in the chest right in front of me, but there wasn’t any point and he hates it when anybody brings that up.

Last night I’d been asleep as soon as my head had hit the pillow. Today, with so much less to do, I lay awake. It wasn’t too bad under the blankets as long as you didn’t move and let the cold air in, but I could feel Nightingale radiating next to me. We’d both kept our socks on as well as pyjamas (well, proper pyjamas for him, a t-shirt and track bottoms for me). I almost fancied I could detect his bare hands and neck as hot spots. That’s the secret behind that old saying about losing all your heat through your head, by the way – it was based on infrared photography of researchers in the Arctic, fully rugged up everywhere but their heads. Sometimes the most obvious explanations are the right ones.

Nightingale’s hand brushed mine, and I realised I’d been absent-mindedly moving closer, trying to see if I really could feel warmth from his hand more than the rest of his arm. I froze.

He didn’t move; he must have fallen asleep. Lucky bastard.

Over the next fifteen minutes – at least that’s probably how long it was, it felt like an eternity – the old, soft, probably straw-filled mattress rolled us both inexorably towards the centre of the bed. At no point did I feel myself moving, and yet, bit by bit, we sank towards each other. Forget hands and necks, Nightingale was the warmest thing in the room and it was taking all of my willpower not to give in to it. By now I fancied I could sense every inch of him, barely inches away, like static electricity or vestigia. It was so intense I was starting to overheat. I flipped the edge of the blanket down to let a bit of the cold air in. Nightingale made a highly disgruntled noise and fumbled across my chest to pull it back up. Then he let his arm flop where it was.

I held my breath for a second, in case he thought I was asleep; then I let it out, because it was way more likely that he was still asleep, or mostly asleep. And in any case I wasn’t awake enough to do much else about it.

“Ah,” Nightingale said after a prolonged pause, in the rusty voice of the just-awakened. He lifted his arm an inch, and then lowered it again. Then he curled his hand into a ball, carefully, none of his fingers touching my arm. “It is chillier tonight, isn’t it?”

“We should have looked for hot water bottles,” I said, grasping for the first thing I could think of. “Or an electric blanket. I can’t believe they don’t have an electric blanket. Is there a spell for that? Seems like there should be a spell for that.”

“Unfortunately,” Nightingale said, his hand relaxing, “I believe all attempts in that direction suffered the same sort of risks as electric blankets. Heat is heat, and as Frank Cafferty has told us any number of times, enough heat creates fire.”

“You know electric blankets haven’t been that bad for about twenty years,” I said, wriggling again because Nightingale’s knees were a bit poky too; the rest of him was all right. I definitely wasn’t thinking about the rest of him, anyway. I was mostly thinking about how I absolutely couldn’t roll over, because my body and I were having differing opinions about the likelihood that this proximity was going to turn into…anything else. “I guess we’ll have to put Abigail onto it. Detailed heat output measurements. She’ll love it.”

Nightingale gave a low chuckle, like he didn’t have the energy for more. He was so close I felt the breath of it on the side of my face. It was absolutely pitch-black, had I mentioned? Like a moonless night in the countryside; like the earth under Oxford Street Station.

I conjured up a little werelight in the red spectrum, the old reliable lux spell that generated light but not heat, the first question I’d asked about how magic worked, all those years ago. Affixed to the wall above the bed, it turned everything a dull shade of copper; the satin binding on the wool blankets, the metal of the bed frame, Nightingale’s brown hair. I saw the glitter of his eyes through his lashes, then they closed again. He looked younger like this; younger than he already wasn’t. I wanted to touch the bow of his mouth.

“Hmmm,” he said, and turned his face into the pillow. The wash of memory eased. The awareness of Nightingale beside me didn’t.

I fell asleep anyway; amazing how tired a day of not doing much can make you.

*

The next morning I did have to extricate myself from Nightingale, who had managed to pin me down with three limbs. I’m not even sure how he managed that one. Luckily, he didn’t wake up in the process, or it would have been awkward for both of us. Some physiological reactions you can’t escape, no matter how far along you are in your magical career – or your improbable functionally immortal existence.

I changed into jogging gear from my emergency bag and went for a run to the main village and back, for the exercise and the reception. I had too much energy to stay in the cottage until he woke up. It was extra-chilly outside, but that just encouraged me to keep moving. 

Unfortunately, all getting back to reception told me was that there was still no way home. Of course not.

I manfully forged through the paperwork I could without an internet connection for most of the morning. I could have driven somewhere and sat in the car to do it, but I just wasn’t that enthused. Nightingale observed me with curiosity from the other chair at the small table, only half-pretending to do the sudoku from yesterday’s paper; he’d run through both crosswords.

“You can borrow the tablet when I’m done,” I said, knowing that there was absolutely no way he would have downloaded any of it onto his – for security reasons, naturally. “There’s at least three things on here that you have to fill out.”

“It can’t possibly be that urgent.”

“It’s that or read one of those books about trout-fishing in the nineteenth century,” I said, pointing at the bookshelf. “Or go for a scenic walk, which I already did. Other than that…” I gestured around the room – there really wasn’t a lot to it; bed, table, bookshelf, something that barely rated the term ‘kitchenette’. The bed dominated the room, really. Your eyes just drifted back to it, tugged by a gravitational pull.

“I…yes,” said Nightingale, like he’d lost his train of thought too. He caught my eye, and looked away. I wondered what he was thinking; it couldn’t be what I was.

“Or how about both of those,” I said, wiggling my fingers in the manner suggested by children’s novels involving idyllic country childhoods. “You can show me how to catch trout with your hands. Don’t tell me you didn’t try that in that creek you were always running off to look for fairies at.”

“I hate to disappoint,” he said, making a discreet face, “but that was one of the things all three of my brothers said they’d teach me and then never got around to. The only way I know to reliably catch fish without a rod involves…” he made a gesture that I half-recognised as associated with a spell, although I wasn’t sure how fireball grenades related to magical fishing.

“Actually, it seems right up your alley, though I doubt our hosts would be pleased. It turns out fish are just as susceptible to shockwaves as anything else, and if you detonate one of those underwater -” He broke off when he saw me laughing. “I’m extremely serious! And while I admit it’s not sporting, the circumstances under which – is it really necessary for you to be that amused?”

I swallowed my final laugh. “It’s more that you kept asking and asking how it was that you ended up with apprentices who were so good at blowing things up with magic, and then I ask you about fishing -”

“Yes, yes,” he said, somewhat testily, although the corners of his mouth were turned up. “All right.”

“Besides, I’ve never been that good with my hands.” I held them up, to demonstrate my sad lack of handiness. My nails needed a trim. Pity I didn’t have clippers in my overnight bag.

“I disagree,” said Nightingale. This side of winter, the backs of my hands were barely darker than the palms. “You’re perfectly dexterous when it comes to those television games of yours.”

“I know you know they’re video games.” I’d lost my breath as well as my ability to think in a straight line; it wasn’t as if Nightingale and I never touched each other – well, obviously – but this felt…different. I was transfixed by his fingers, by the feeling of callouses against my skin. My mouth was dry. God, why had I picked now to start thinking like this? “And you’re a bad loser.”

“Never.” Nightingale grinned. “But we’re not making that the subject of a bet again.”

“You had fun.” I’d beaten him solidly at Super Mario Kart and I know he enjoyed it because he’d demanded a re-match. Then Molly had shown up and beaten both of us, but we both knew who’d been the better man on the day.

We kept smiling each other for longer than the joke really deserved. I almost leaned forward, and then – I didn’t.

Nightingale turned my hands back over and, with as much care and precision as I’d ever seen from him, let go. I almost stopped him.

“I…think I shall go for that walk you suggested,” he said, standing up. “Er – I really will get onto those forms. When we’re home.” He was out the door before I could say anything.

*

For some reason I lost the ability to concentrate on paperwork after that. All the TLAs started swimming before my eyes, like when you’re trying to read in a dream. I decided to take a nap instead, and lay down on top of the blankets. Without Nightingale in the bed it was almost comfortable on its own merits – whatever mysterious mattress filling had been assaulting my kidneys, it was undetectable if you were lying exactly in the middle. I closed my eyes, letting my arms spread wide, and enjoyed the space.

On a whim, I focused on the vestigia of the cottage. It was old enough and mostly built of stone, and living beings had used it, year on year, leaving the residue of everyday behind, the smallest sort of magic. I’d got hints over the last two days – mostly of sheep. The results when I focused were more of the same. The smell of wool, but deeper and more animal-like. The crackle of a fire, and the taste of porridge. The warmth of skin against skin, when ice rimed the eaves.

I preferred going without pyjamas when it was warm enough, too – good thing I hadn’t expected it to be warm on this trip. Imagine how awkward that would have been. Not uncomfortable, though. Nightingale’s pyjamas were brushed cotton, almost as smooth as silk. I’d felt them against my feet. It wasn’t hard to imagine, almost as strong as a vestigium, what they might feel like against the rest of me. What it might feel like if we were lying here tangled like we’d been when I’d woken up this morning, and instead of climbing out of bed I’d curled my hand around his nape, where soft cotton ended and soft skin started, and –

I realised, like a shock of ice water, two things. One: I could hear footsteps on the gravel path. Two: I was spine-tinglingly half-hard, worse than last night.

Despite the bed’s roll-together nature, I was up off it as fast as if it was a trampoline, and in the tiny bathroom half a second later. I clutched the edge of the metal sink and leant my forehead on the mirror, adrenaline fighting with panic.

“Peter?” I heard Nightingale call, in the main room.

I counted to five, flushed the toilet, turned on the tap – cold – and washed my hands like I’d just spent some quality morgue time with Abdul and Jennifer. “One minute!”

By the time I was drying them, panic had won the battle with adrenaline and all parts of me were behaving professionally. I had to go out there and talk to him normally. I had to get into bed with him tonight and not make an idiot of myself. I needed to make a decision; except I didn’t; we were both professional adults who were going to do the responsible thing.

“F-,” I started to mutter, and then changed my mind, because that was exactly the wrong word. So were several others. “Damn.”

I opened the door. Nightingale was standing there with the high colour of a brisk walk still on his cheeks. He had taken off his winter coat and was in his shirtsleeves, only his grey suit trousers the same shade as his eyes. He looked more or less exactly the same as he had the better part of a decade ago when I’d thought he was trying to pick me up in Covent Garden, and it was the first time in the better part of a decade I’d thought to wish he had been. Not actually, because I loved my job. But - hypothetically speaking.

I was so fucked, and I’d brought it on myself.

“There you are,” he said. “There’s – ah – good news. The ferry’s running; we can get out this afternoon, if we go now while there’s daylight.”

It took me a good ten seconds to process that. So we wouldn’t have to – I was safe. Was I?

“Uh,” I said. “Fantastic.” 

“Splendid news, yes,” said Nightingale. He gave me an encouraging smile, but it was a bit thin. I noticed, now, that he had his bag on the sofa and most of his things already in it.

“Right.” I pointed. “I’ll just clear out the bathroom, shall I?”

“Yes,” Nightingale said. “Thank you, that would be very helpful.”

(When we got back to the Folly I found that I’d left Nightingale’s shaving soap and my toothbrush behind, but under the circumstances, I don’t think you can blame me.)

*

The excitement of getting back to the mainland wore off when we realised we had a lot of driving ahead, and were gong to have to decide where to spend the night. I scrolled through booking sites while Nightingale drove. We were both uncharacteristically quiet; fine, mostly uncharacteristic for me. He kept looking at me and then away without speaking, and I did the same thing.

“Any luck?” he asked at one point.

“Yeah, but when I went to book the place I picked only had two rooms left. You’d think it’d be easier to get something at short notice.”

“Lucky for us,” Nightingale said lightly. I caught his eye for a second too long, given that he was driving. I deliberately looked away and made a show of fiddling with the radio, trying to get decent reception, except he reached for it at the same time and our hands collided and tangled.

Without looking at him, I guided his hand back down to the gearstick, and said “I thought the rule was that I could choose the radio, as long as you didn’t, and I quote, actively object to it.”

“Yes,” he said, very quietly. Oh. Oh, we were in trouble.

*

Nightingale took charge of speaking to the landlady when we stopped for the night, very late; given how far we were out of London, I’d decided that was the wiser move, but as it happened she only gave me a briefly curious glance.

“Yes, we got the booking, but I’m afraid there’s been a mix-up – you know how it is with online systems,” she said. “There’s only one room left after all. Will that be alright?”

One of the things they teach you at Hendon, funnily enough, is that you should never lock eyes with someone across a crowded room. Well, they don’t put it like that, but what they do teach you is that when you’re tracking a suspect, or at least a member of the public who may be able to assist you with your enquiries, it’s always important to keep at least part of your attention on your surroundings. As one ex-policewoman who definitely needs to assist me with several enquiries would tell you, I was never much chop at that, though my laser-focus tended to land on architecture and things written on walls, rather than people. And in any event you couldn’t call this a crowded room, seeing as the reception for the rooms was off to the side from the pub proper, so it was really just me, Nightingale, and the landlady behind the desk in here.

Nevertheless, in that moment I locked eyes with Nightingale, the indistinct chatter from the pub fell away, and part of me went huh, that’s what that metaphor is describing at the same time as the rest of my brain registered five conflicting thoughts at once and then gave up.

“Sure,” I said with my mouth. “We can cope with that.”

We were in a city, technically, by some standards of city, although not my personal standards; there were certainly other places to stay; one of them had to have two rooms. I waited for Nightingale to say all of this.

 “Ah,” he said. “Yes. Yes, that will be fine.”

*

Based on the outside of the inn I’d been hoping that the internal architecture might be interesting. But it turned out that the place had been re-built in the seventies, or at least I reckoned it was the seventies based on the not-particularly-well painted-over wallpaper and the complete and utter lack of vestigia, which I commented on to Nightingale.

“It would be suspicious if anybody lived here, but I think they just don’t get very many people for more than a night,” he said. “I suppose the last few decades haven’t really been conducive to the sort of events that leave a really strong trace.”

“There’s the usual sort of background hum if you concentrate hard enough.” We rounded a corner – the whole trip from the reception area had taken twenty seconds at best – and found room seven. It took me two tries to get the key in the lock. The lighting in the hallway wasn’t very good. Nightingale standing right behind me had nothing to do with it. I was already picturing the bed that would take up most of the small room, and how we’d shrug and say we’d have to make do, and then – and then, maybe I –

“You know, during the war –” Nightingale started to say as I pushed the door open to reveal a small and extremely dull room whose principal feature was two twin beds. I stopped dead in the doorway with a crashing sense of – I realised – disappointment, that the universe had suddenly stopped being helpful. Nightingale walked into me and cut himself off, muttering an apology. I kept going, on auto-pilot, and put my travel bag down on the left-hand bed. He followed me in, silently, and reached around to put his bag down next to mine. The door swung shut; just because they’d re-done the place in the seventies didn’t mean they’d done it level. That would be asking too much of vernacular British architecture.

“You were saying,” I said, without turning around. “About the War. Let me guess – you had to sleep in all sorts of uncomfortable places, and compared to that, sharing a poky double bed with a colleague the same height as you are isn’t that bad, it’s just like boarding school really?”

When I did turn, I caught him with one hand behind his neck, and a rueful smile on his face. They’d really had to work to get two beds into this room; there was about six inches between us, and maybe another six between him and the door.

“Something like that.”

“Except I bet they definitely didn’t have double beds at boarding school.” I could have stepped around him and pretended to go and investigate the doubtless Lilliputian en-suite, but I didn’t.

“You were expecting that one as well, then.” The smile hadn’t gone away; it had migrated hopefully up to his eyes, taking off years that weren’t visible on the rest of his face.

“It would have been a good…” I didn’t know how I wanted to finish that sentence. Instead I reached out and took the hand he had behind his neck with one of mine, and brought it down. He went absolutely, preternaturally still. But his eyes didn’t change.

He was wearing driving gloves, which is the sort of thing that sounds pretentious but is actually pretty helpful if you’re worried about keeping a grip on the wheel – although these were buttery-soft leather, which would bring it all the way around to pretentious again if it wasn’t Nightingale. (Or would anyway, if I wasn’t used to him.) I peeled the glove off, carefully, with one hand circling his wrist. He offered me his other hand, and I took care of that one, too, just as carefully.

“Excuse,” he exhaled, as I dropped the gloves on the bed, then took his hands again. It took me a moment to realise he was finishing my sentence. “Just…in case.”

“Never had much time for excuses,” I said. “And I don’t think you ever have, either.” I ran my thumbs up the back of his hands, and felt as much as heard him breathe sharply in.

“Peter,” he said, in the same way he’s said it once or twice when I’ve been a bit tardy getting out of a tight spot; I would have let go of his hands then, just in case, but his fingers tightened around mine, so I kissed him instead. The door I had him pressed up against gave an ominous creak. We relocated to the empty bed, with a minor detour to the other one because we were too busy to remember where we’d put our bags. He was as warm and solid and real as he’d been the last two nights, but now neither of us were pretending anything. God, it was good.

Somewhere around the point where I was working on his shirt buttons, which there were approximately twenty too many of, I felt my left leg veer perilously off the side of the narrow bed and he had to haul me back onto it. We ended up with me lying more or less fully on top of him; it wasn’t much use for the shirt buttons, but it was enjoyable in every other way. I gave up and bit the side of his neck very lightly, instead, for the pleasant feeling of him shifting under me.

“This would,” he managed to say, “have been a lot more practical last night.”

“You could have said,” I mumbled against his jaw; he hadn’t been deterred by poor angles and had my shirt most of the way off, which was very distracting. “We’ll just have to make do until we get home tomorrow.”

“Will we.” He stopped moving – and unbuttoning my shirt - to scrutinize my face. “I - suppose we will.”

“Yeah,” I said, and tried to kiss him again, but it’s hard when both of you are smiling.

It was his turn to nearly fall off the bed a little later in proceedings, but, somehow, we made do.

*

The weather was clear and perfect for the drive back the next day.

“Admit it,” Nightingale said, as we got in the Jag. “It’s been a good trip.”

“It’s had its up-sides,” I said, not bothering to hide my grin, and leaned back in my seat. “Home?”

“Home,” he agreed, and we were on our way.