Outside, the grounds sit perfectly manicured in the late morning sun, the fountain near the back terrace doing its quiet, expensive thing. Inside, the kitchen smells of espresso and the flowers someone replaced yesterday, and the music drifting through the hidden speakers is something soft and orchestral that your father's housekeeper chose and nobody has ever bothered to change. It’s a beautiful house. It’s always a beautiful house. Some mornings, you can almost forget what it costs to live inside it.

"Friday," you repeat.

"Four days."

"Amelia."

"The confirmation came through this morning." She says. "The schedule is tight but manageable. Amelia has already—" She stops. Blinks. "I've already coordinated with the Barcelona team."

"Nobody told me there was a Barcelona team."

"There is now."

You sit with that for a moment. Two weeks in Spain — the words should feel like something. They do feel like something, actually, just not the thing that probably makes sense. Something restless and complicated, the feeling of a door being opened in a house you've stopped expecting doors in.

You've been to Spain once, years ago, before the security and the schedules and the strange half-life that comes with being your father's daughter in the particular way that you are. You remember the smell of it. Orange blossom and petrol and something underneath both that felt very old. You remember thinking you could disappear there, if disappearing were a thing available to you.

It isn't. But Spain still has the memory of the thought.

"Fine," you say.

Amelia's expression shifts almost imperceptibly — a micro-expression like she had prepared for significantly more resistance. "There's a briefing tonight."

"Of course, there is."

"Security coordination. International protocols." She pauses here, and the pause has something deliberate behind it. "Steve will run it."

You look at her. She looks at her tablet.

"He's been preparing since yesterday," she adds, which is a strange thing to add, and the fact that she adds it tells you something.

"How long has he known?"

"A few days."

"And I'm finding out now."

"The confirmation—"

"Amelia."

She meets your eyes. There's something apologetic in them, which is unusual enough to register. "It was a judgment call," she says carefully. "About timing."

His judgment call, she means. Not hers.

You nod once, slowly, and pick up your mug again. The coffee has gone cold while you were talking, which is a small and stupid thing to be annoyed about, but you're a little annoyed about it anyway.

"Send me the itinerary," you say.

"Already done."

"Of course it is."

She leaves the way she arrived — efficiently, without ceremony, the tap of her heels retreating back down the hallway before the kitchen has quite finished settling. The music keeps playing. Outside, a bird lands on the edge of the fountain and immediately leaves again.

You sit in the quiet and think about Spain.

Steve arrives twenty minutes later.

You hear him before you see him — the particular quality of the house when he enters it, a subtle shift in the atmosphere that you noticed embarrassingly early and have never quite been able to explain. 

He’s worked for you for eight months now. In that time, you’ve developed an involuntary awareness of him that you find both useful and inconvenient, like a second sense that didn't ask your permission before installing itself.

He appears in the kitchen doorway and does the thing he always does — reads the room in about two seconds, windows, to exits, to you, the sweep so habitual now it barely registers as a movement. Dark suit. Loosened tie. The small earpiece that means he's already been working for hours before you were awake. He looks, as he almost always looks, like someone who has already thought of everything and is now simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Except.

There’s something different about him this morning, and you clock it before you can decide not to.

It lives in his jaw, mainly. The way it's set a fraction too tight, the muscle there doing the slow flex that means he's holding something in. His shoulders carry more tension than usual under the jacket. And his eyes, when they land on you after their automatic sweep of the room, stay a beat longer than they normally would — like he's checking something, confirming something, running some internal calculation you're not privy to.

You file this away and say nothing about it.

"You knew," you say instead.

"Yes."

"Before I did."

"Yes."

"And you didn't think to—"

"Timing," he says, the same word Amelia used, which means it’s coordinated, which means there was a conversation you weren't part of about how and when to tell you things about your own life. You know this is how it works. You have always known this is how it works. Some mornings it bothers you more than others.

This is one of the others.

He sets a folder on the kitchen island.

It is — and you want to be precise about this — a substantial folder. Black. Tabbed. The tabs are colour-coded. There is a moment where you simply look at it and then look at him and then look back at it.

"Steve."

"Travel briefing."

"That is not a travel briefing. That’s a document you’d hand to someone about to make a covert insertion into a hostile territory."

"It's thorough."

"It has a table of contents."

"The table of contents is helpful."

"For who?"

Something moves at the corner of his mouth — not quite amusement, just the suggestion of one, there and then not. He opens the folder and turns it toward you and begins, because he has clearly been waiting to begin since before you were awake.

He walks you through it with the efficiency of someone who has rehearsed this and would rather you not know that. Commercial flight under a restricted manifest. Private arrival terminal. Local security coordination in both cities, which apparently has a name and a hierarchy and several contact protocols you're expected to memorise. 

Movement windows. Hotel layouts. Exit routes. The annotated meal locations, which you stare at for a moment before looking up.

"Are these—"

"Estimated movement windows."

"For meals."

"It's easier to plan around."

"Steve. You’ve planned my trip to the bathroom."

"I've planned the window during which bathroom access is most logistically—"

"That's what I said."

He doesn't look embarrassed. Steve Harrington has never once looked embarrassed about anything he has professionally decided to be thorough about, which you have come to recognise as one of his more maddening qualities and also, privately, one of the ones you find least easy to argue with.

You flip through the pages and let him talk. He has a good voice for this — low, even, unhurried in the way of someone who knows the material well enough not to need the notes. You find yourself watching him more than the papers, which is something you do and something you're supposed to not do, and the monitoring of that habit is itself a habit at this point.

He's still doing it. The jaw thing. The weight in his shoulders. The way his gaze keeps drifting, just slightly, toward the windows while he speaks, and then back to you, and then to the windows again. Like he's checking something. Like he's been checking something for a while.

"You're doing the thing," you say, when he pauses.

He looks at you. "What thing?"

"Where you're somewhere else, and I can almost see it." You keep your voice even, curious rather than accusatory. "You've been doing it since you walked in."

A silence. Short enough that another person wouldn't notice. He is, among other things, very good at silences.

"International operations require more active risk assessment than domestic—"

"That's a sentence, not an answer."

His jaw does the thing again. One finger taps once against the edge of the folder and goes still.

"You'll need to stay closer to me than usual once we're there," he says instead. "I want you within arm's reach during all public-facing movement. When I redirect, you move. No delays, no questions."

The shift is deliberate. You notice it, and you let it go, because there’s an art to letting Steve Harrington decide when to tell you things, and the art involves knowing which battles are worth having in a kitchen at half past ten.

"Within arm's reach," you say.

"Yes."

"And if I decide I'd rather not be managed quite that closely?"

He looks at you like you’re stupid, and it's not the first time. You don’t care, to be honest.

"You won't," he says.

A quiet statement of fact from someone who has decided how something is going to go. You used to find it infuriating. You used to push back on it, because the alternative was admitting that his particular brand of quiet authority was doing something to your judgment that you hadn't signed up for.

These days, you mostly just look away first and pretend you were going to anyway.

"Send me the contact list," you say, pulling the folder back toward you.

"Already sent."

"Of course it is."

You look down at the pages. Hotel layouts. Movement windows. Colour-coded tabs. Spain in four days, and Steve Harrington watching the windows of your kitchen.

Outside, the fountain runs on. The music plays. The day moves around the house in its quiet, expensive way.

You close the folder.

"I'll read it tonight," you say.

"All of it," he says. It isn't a question.

"All of it," you agree.

Then he's gone, and the kitchen settles back into its orchestral music and its expensive quiet, and you sit with a colour-coded folder in your hands and the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that you are several steps behind a conversation that has been happening without you.

Spain in four days.

Steve, carrying something he hasn't told you.

You pick up your drink, and consider the window above the sink and think you've navigated worse than this.

You're just not entirely sure, yet, what this is.

—

Friday arrives the way bad things tend to — faster than it should.

You're awake before your alarm, which tells you something about the state of your nervous system, lying in the dark listening to the house come alive around you. The particular creak of the service corridor. Wheels against marble. Someone's radio crackling to life two floors below and then cutting off. By five-thirty, the whole building has a pulse to it, low and urgent, and by the time you get downstairs at half past six it has become something else entirely.

The foyer looks like a staging ground.

Two SUVs in the driveway, engines already running, exhaust curling in the cold grey air. Hard cases lined up beside the door in formation. Security moving between the vehicles and the house in the wordless, efficient way of people who have done this many times and are operating well within their own competence. 

You know most of their faces by now, eight months will do that, but this morning, there are others you don't recognise. Bigger. Quieter. The kind of men who stand differently from everyone else, weight distributed in a way that makes them look permanently ready for something.

You stop on the bottom stair and take it in.

Nobody tells you anything. Conversations don't stop when you appear, exactly, but they adjust — shift registers slightly, like a radio being turned down without being turned off. Amelia is somewhere behind you, talking rapidly into her phone about revised press windows in Madrid. Someone near the door is discussing flight clearance like someone who doesn't want to be overheard discussing flight clearance.

You're still standing on the bottom stair when Steve looks up from across the room.

He's been speaking to one of the agents near the door. Dark overcoat, suit underneath, earpiece already in. Black gloves folded in one hand. He looks, at first glance, the way he always looks — composed, calibrated, the kind of put-together that suggests he has never once in his adult life been caught underprepared for anything.

At second glance, the jaw, again. The set of his shoulders. The way the conversation he was having, ends the moment he sees you, the other agent simply stepping back and away without a word, like this was already the arrangement.

He crosses the foyer.

"You're late," he says.

You look at the grandfather clock. "Seven minutes."

"Still late."

Normally, there's something underneath a comment like that — the faint ghost of amusement he lets through when he thinks you won't notice. This morning, it's just the words, flat and functional, and the absence of everything usually tucked beneath them is its own kind of information.

You look at him properly. He looks tired in a way he never lets himself look tired — just something in the eyes that suggests the night behind them was shorter than it should have been and worked harder than most. The muscle in his eye ticks. Once, twice.

"You look terrible," you say.

"You look underprepared."

"I'm dressed. I have shoes."

His gaze drops to your feet for a half-second — actually checks, which is so specifically him that it loosens something in your chest despite everything — and then comes back up.

"We're moving in ten," he says, already turning toward the door.

Outside, the morning air is cold and wet, the driveway slick from overnight rain. You step out after him and watch what happens to his body the moment he clears the threshold — the almost imperceptible shift, every line of him reorganising into something sharper, more deliberate.

You've watched him do this hundreds of times. Today it makes the back of your neck prickle.

One of the agents opens the rear door of the nearest SUV. Steve pauses before you get in — just a second, just long enough to look at you in the particular way he has when he's deciding how much to say.

"Terminal to gate, you stay between Carter and me," he says. "Someone approaches, keep moving. Someone stops you, keep moving. You don't stop for anything unless I tell you."

"I know how airports work," you say.

"This isn't about airports."

He says it quietly, without inflection, and it lands somewhere below your sternum and stays there.

Before you can ask what it is about, his hand goes to his earpiece. He listens, says something clipped and low, and the moment closes. You get in the car.

The drive is twenty-eight minutes, and it feels like three hours.

Steve sits beside you rather than across from you. Close enough that when the car takes a corner, his shoulder presses briefly against yours, a contact so ordinary it shouldn't register, and does anyway. 

He doesn't look at his phone. He doesn't do anything you associate with a normal person spending twenty-eight minutes in a car. Doesn't fidget, doesn't make conversation, doesn't stare at anything at all.

He watches. Traffic, pavements, the cars alongside them, the junctions as they approach. Occasionally, his hand lifts to his earpiece and something passes through him, and his expression processes it without letting you see the result.

Copy. Understood. Negative.

You last about ten minutes with your book before putting it face down on your knee.

"Steve."

His eyes come to you immediately, which is the thing about Steve. He is always, somehow, already paying attention to you even when he appears to be paying attention to everything else.

"You're scaring me a little," you say. You keep your voice level and reasonable. "Not a lot. Just a little. And I think you should know that."

Something moves through his expression. Small and quickly managed, but there. "That's not the intention," he says.

"I know it's not. I'm telling you the effect."

He looks at you for a moment. Then, "You're safe."

"You say that," you say, "like it's an answer."

"It is an answer."

"It's the answer to a question I haven't asked yet." You hold his gaze. "I'm asking why. Why the extra team? Why you haven't relaxed once this morning? Why this feels different from every other departure we've done?"

He doesn't look away. He doesn't give you anything either.

"International operations require a higher—"

"Don't." You say it quietly, without heat. "Please don't give me the line. You've been running that line since Tuesday, and I'm getting on a plane with you in twenty minutes and I think I've earned something better than the line."

One hand, resting on his knee, closes briefly and opens again.

"There's nothing I can tell you right now," he says finally, and the right now is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and you both know it.

"But there's something."

He says nothing, which is its own answer.

You turn back to the window. Outside, the city moves past in the flat grey of early morning, familiar streets emptied by the hour, everything ordinary and slightly unreal the way things look before the day has properly started. You think about what right now means. About the difference between there's nothing and there's nothing I can tell you and what lives in that gap.

Steve's hand lifts to his earpiece again.

You watch the city and say nothing and feel the distance between what you know and what's actually happening grow slowly wider, the way a sound does when the thing making it is moving away from you.

—

The private terminal is the kind of quiet that isn't peaceful.

You've been here before. The low-ceilinged calm of it, the way it always feels slightly outside of time, suspended between one place and another. Usually, it feels like a held breath before something good. Today, it feels like a held breath before something else.

The team moves around you in a formation you understand in theory and feel differently about this morning. Steve is always close — a step back, a step beside, one subtle shift forward whenever anyone unknown passes within a certain radius. You've clocked this pattern for months. Today, the radius feels smaller.

At the boarding desk, while the agent processes your passport, you keep your voice low.

"You've barely looked at me all morning."

"I'm looking at you now," he says.

He is. Directly, steadily, the full version. There's no warmth in it — not the particular warmth you've grown used to from him, the ones that live in the corner of his eyes. Just attention, clean and professional and entirely unrevealing.

Which is somehow worse.

"That's not what I mean," you say.

He doesn't answer. The agent hands your passport back, and you move toward the gate, Steve moving with you, that half-step behind, and you think about the last eight months.

The rhythm of him you've learned, the particular frequency he operates on that you've calibrated yourself to without meaning to — and you think about how entirely that frequency has changed this week, tightened into something you can't quite read, and you wonder what it means that the person who is supposed to make you feel safest is currently the primary source of your unease.

The plane is small and private and smells of leather and recycled air.

Steve does the thing he always does before sitting — reads the cabin the way he reads every room, exit to exit, aisle to windows, every passenger already seated assessed and apparently filed. Then he sits beside you, coat still on, and doesn’t relax.

You open your book. You read the same page four times.

Outside the small oval window, ground crew move through the mist in high-vis jackets, and the sky is the specific heavy white of a morning that hasn't decided what it's going to do yet, and the engines start their low preliminary rumble beneath the floor.

Beside you, Steve says something quietly into his earpiece. A pause. His hand — resting near his knee, close enough to yours that you're aware of it — tightens once against his leg.

Just that. Just the one small involuntary thing.

You close the book.

"Steve." You say it quietly, for him only. "You're making me nervous."

He looks at you. In his expression, for just a moment, is something more complicated, more tired, something that looks almost like it costs him to keep it contained. It's there for less than a second before it goes.

"I need you to stay aware today," he says. "That's all I can give you right now. I need you switched on."

"Switched on," you repeat.

"Yes."

"That is a genuinely terrible thing to say to a person you've just told to stay calm."

Something at the corner of his mouth. The ghost of the version of him you know better. "I'm trying to keep you safe," he says.

"I know you are." And you do. That's the thing, you do know, completely, with the bone-deep certainty that eight months of watching someone do their job with total commitment can produce. You know he's trying to keep you safe. What you don't know is what he's keeping you safe from, and the gap between those two things is where all your anxiety currently lives.

The plane begins to move.

Rain drags sideways across the glass. The terminal slides past the window and falls away, and then there's only the runway and the low sky and the gathering sound of the engines doing what engines do.

You look at Steve's hand near his knee. The slight tension still in it, the unconscious readiness. You think about right now again, about what gets added to that sentence once right now becomes later, once you've landed somewhere warm and loud and foreign, and whatever he's been carrying all week becomes the thing he finally tells you.

You don't ask again.

You turn to the window and watch home disappear beneath the clouds and carry the question with you instead, all the way to Spain.

—

You wake up somewhere over Spain.

For a few seconds, you don't know where you are. Then the seatbelt sign blinks on overhead, and a flight attendant moves quietly down the aisle, and the grey nothing outside the window resolves itself into cloud, and you remember.

Spain. You're going to Spain.

You turn your head.

Steve is awake. Of course, he's awake. As far as you can tell, Steve has not slept once during your four-hour nap, which means he has now been awake for something approaching twenty hours, and he looks it, in the specific way he only ever looks it when he's run out of resources to hide it. 

The shadows beneath his eyes have deepened. There's a faint line in his brow that hasn't smoothed out since leaving. His face carries a particular tension, like he's been tensing unconsciously for so long it's stopped registering as effort.

He's reading something on his phone. Or looking at it, anyway. You're not sure he's actually reading.

Then the cabin doors open.

Warm air moves through the plane like something waking up — thick and golden and entirely different from the grey damp you left behind. You hear Spanish immediately, overlapping and rapid and musical in a way that English somehow never manages, voices carrying through the terminal outside.

You sit up properly. Roll your neck. Feel four hours of cramped sleep settling into your shoulders.

"Good morning," you say.

Steve looks over. Something shifts briefly,  almost resembling relief that you're conscious and present and speaking, which tells you more about the last four hours than anything he might actually say.

"We've landed," he says.

"I can tell."

"You slept."

"Barely."

"More than I expected."

You look at him. "Did you sleep at all?"

The answer is in the way he doesn't answer, already moving, reaching above you for your bag from the overhead compartment.

"Steve."

"We're on the ground," he says. "That's what matters."

It isn't, but you let it go.

—

Barcelona arrives.

You step off the plane, and it hits you — the heat, the noise, the quality of the light, which is different from home in a way you feel before you can name. Sharper somehow. More insistent. The sky above the tarmac is a blue so dense it looks painted, and the air smells of warm concrete and aviation fuel and something beneath both of those things, something older, something that might be the city itself.

You stop at the top of the steps.

Just for a second. Just to stand in it.

Behind you, Steve says nothing. When you glance back, he's watching you with an expression you don't entirely know how to read, watchful in the particular quiet way he has sometimes that feels less like surveillance and more like attention.

"Sorry," you say.

"Don't be."

You start walking.

The private terminal is cool and hushed after the brightness outside, all polished floors and muted conversation. Steve coordinates with the local team in low urgent tones while your bags are sorted and a vehicle is confirmed, and you stand slightly to one side and watch him work and think about the conversation that is clearly waiting somewhere ahead of you.

The one where he tells you whatever it is he hasn't told you yet.

You watch him across the arrivals hall — the set of his shoulders, the way he listens more than he speaks, the way his attention keeps finding you between sentences the way a compass finds north. Like some part of him is running a continuous background check on your exact location without being fully aware it's happening.

He looks up. Finds you immediately, through the crowd, without having to search.

You look away first. You always look away first.

—

The hotel is the kind of beautiful that stops feeling real after a certain price point.

White marble and flowers and ceilings that have no practical reason to be that high. Staff who move like they've been choreographed. A lobby that smells of something expensive and faintly floral while light falls through tall windows in long warm columns across the floor.

You should feel something about it. You feel tired.

The suite is on the ninth floor, two rooms plus a sitting area, balcony doors open to an afternoon that has already turned golden. Beyond the glass, the coastline glitters. The ocean sits flat and brilliant beneath the heat haze, and from up here the beach looks like something from a film — all pale sand and coloured umbrellas and tiny figures moving in and out of the water.

You stand in the middle of the room and look at it.

"Stay back from the balcony edge," Steve says, not looking up from where he's checking the lock on the connecting door. "Until we've cleared sightlines."

"There are nine floors between me and the street."

"Stay back from the edge."

You stay back from the edge.

He moves through the suite — bedroom, bathroom, connecting doors, windows, balcony access, the view from each angle. He says something brief into his earpiece, listens to the response and says something else.

You drift toward the window anyway, stopping where the floor meets the open balcony threshold, close enough to feel the warm air coming in off the water without technically crossing the line.

The ocean from here is extraordinary.

"It's perfect beach weather," you say.

"No."

You turn around. "I haven't finished the sentence."

"You don’t need to."

He's looking at you now. The sunglasses are gone, and the exhaustion in his face is worse without them. He looks like a man who has been carrying something heavy for a long time and has gotten very good at not showing it, except that you’ve spent eight months learning to read him, and the showing is visible to you regardless.

"You cannot honestly expect me to fly to Spain and sit in a hotel room," you say.

"I expect you to follow security protocols."

"I'd like to go to the beach."

"No."

"Steve—"

"No."

Something about the flatness of it makes irritation flare properly through you for the first time all day. Not the low-grade frustration you've been managing since Tuesday. Something sharper.

"You've barely spoken to me since we left home," you say. "Unless it was an instruction. And now I'm in another country looking at the most beautiful coastline I've ever seen, and you're telling me no, like I've asked to do something dangerous."

"I'm telling you no because—"

"Because why?" You hold his gaze. "Give me an actual reason. Not a protocol. A reason."

His face shifts. Something moves behind his eyes that he pulls back before it reaches his mouth.

"Thirty minutes," he says flatly.

You blink. "What?"

"Public beach. Crowded. We leave before the light goes."

He says it like a concession that costs him, like each word is something being given up rather than offered. You stare at him for a moment, genuinely waiting for the reversal.

It doesn't come.

"Okay," you say carefully.

He's already reaching for his phone.

—

The beach in the early evening is the most beautiful thing you've seen in recent memory.

The sand is still warm underfoot when you take your shoes off. The water is the deep greenish-blue of late afternoon, the light coming in low and gold across it, turning everything amber at the edges. The city hums behind you, while ahead there's only ocean.

You walk into the shallows without thinking about it.

The water is cool around your ankles and the shock of it makes you laugh, quietly, just to yourself, and for the first time since getting on a plane this morning something in your chest releases.

When you look back, Steve is standing on the dry sand with his shoes on, watching the beach.

"You know," you call over the sound of the water, "most people enjoy this."

"I'm enjoying it," he says.

"You're scanning threat vectors."

"I can do both."

You walk out a little further. The foam curls around your feet and retreats. Behind you, Barcelona does its thing — noise and music and the particular alive quality of a city that doesn't really believe in evenings ending.

Eventually, you convince him to sit.

This takes longer than it should, and he does it with visible reluctance, but he does it, lowering himself onto the sand beside you with his arms across his knees and his attention still drifting across the beach at intervals that have a rhythm to them if you know how to watch.

You watch the horizon and let the quiet sit.

The sun is low enough now to turn the water silver at the edges. Somewhere down the beach, a group has started a fire, small and orange, voices drifting across the sand too distant to make out as words.

"Most people would say this is a good job," you say eventually.

Steve doesn't answer immediately.

"And what would you say?" he asks.

The question is quieter than you expect. You glance sideways. He's looking at the water, the last of the day's light moving across his profile, and he looks different out here. Softer somehow.

"I'd say the person doing it seems like they're carrying something they haven't put down in a while," you say.

He's quiet.

"You've been different this week," you say. "Since Tuesday. Since Spain became real. And I've been trying to figure out whether I've done something, or whether it's something else entirely."

"It's not you," he says immediately.

"Then what is it?"

The breeze moves off the water. Somewhere behind you, a scooter passes on the promenade, engine fading into the general noise of the city.

Steve looks at the horizon for a long moment.

"International operations carry different risk profiles," he says finally, and the line is so rehearsed you can hear the hours he's put into it, can hear all the times he's run it in his head.

"That's the version you prepared," you say. "I know. I've heard it four times this week." You look at him directly. "What's the version underneath it?"

He frowns.

"Steve."

"Later," he says, later, meaning not here, meaning I will, but not here, and something about that distinction makes you let it go.

"Okay," you say.

He looks at you briefly, surprised perhaps that you're not pushing.

"Okay," he says back, quieter.

You sit together while the beach empties around you, the sun dropping toward the water, the city starting to glow at the edges as the light changes. You stop three separate times to look at dogs on the walk back up the beach, which Steve notes like he's reassessing his life choices, and when you nearly lose your footing on the uneven ground near the pier, he catches your wrist before you've registered falling.

His hand is warm and immediate and gone again in the same second, the wall back in place before you've fully processed that it moved.

"Pay attention," he says.

"I was paying attention to a very good dog."

He exhales through his nose and keeps walking. You fall into step beside him and don't say anything, and the silence between you is easier than it's been all week.

The promenade at night is a different city.

The restaurant lights are all on now, and the tables outside are full, and the music has changed from afternoon to evening — slower, louder, more confident. Somewhere, a bad guitarist is playing something recognisable badly enough that a small crowd has stopped to listen.

"This is the most relaxed you've been since we arrived," you say.

Steve keeps his gaze forward. "That's concerning."

"You know what I mean."

"I usually do."

You're aware, walking beside him through the lit streets of Barcelona with the ocean somewhere behind you and the city ahead, that this is the thing that's been missing all week, and you hadn't fully realised how much it had been missing until you got it back.

Then his hand goes to his earpiece.

The change happens in real time beside you, and you watch it happen and can't stop it.

His posture shifts first — a half-degree adjustment in his shoulders, something tightening through him from the ground up. His gaze changes from relaxed-watchful to the other kind. His expression flattens, deliberately, efficiently, someone who has switched modes and left the previous one somewhere behind him on the street.

"Copy," he says quietly. Then, "Route change. Yes."

His hand drops. "We're cutting through the next block," he says.

"Why?"

"Congestion."

"The street looks fine."

"There's a better route."

You look at him. He's already moving, one hand coming to rest briefly at the small of your back as he steers you left off the promenade and into a narrower street, darker, the restaurant noise receding behind you.

"Steve," you say.

"Keep moving."

"That's not—"

"Please."

The please stops you more than anything else would have. There's something in it that isn't professional. Something underneath the control that's been there all week, and keeps almost surfacing and keeps getting pushed back down before it reaches the air.

You keep moving.

But the warm thing from the promenade has gone. The version of him that made the beach feel easy, that almost smiled at the dogs, that said later like he meant it — that version has folded back inside the other one so completely you can barely find the seam.

"You keep doing that," you say.

"Doing what?"

"Closing. Every time it starts to feel normal, you close."

He says nothing.

"I'm not imagining it."

"I know you're not."

"Then—"

"Not here," he says, and it's the same word as before — later, not here — but with more urgency underneath it now, something that makes the hair on your arms lift slightly without knowing why.

You walk. The street is narrower here, balconies overhead, the noise of the city muffled. Somewhere behind you, very far away, someone is still playing music.

"You're avoiding me," you say.

"I'm doing my job."

"You're using your job to avoid me."

He stops. You stop.

You're at a crossing, red light, people pressing past on both sides. He's looking at you, tired like he's been maintaining something at great cost for a long time.

"You think being around you isn't—" He stops himself. Looks at the crossing signal. Looks back at you. "You think this is simple for me."

"I think you're making it harder than it needs to be," you say. "I think you've been carrying something all week, and you won't put it down long enough to tell me what it is, and in the meantime you keep—" The words come out smaller than you want them to. "You keep disappearing. And I'm standing right here."

The light changes. He reaches for your arm.

And that's when you see it — his gaze snap to something over your shoulder, the shift happening so fast it's like watching a switch thrown, every line of him going from this conversation to something else in a single instant.

"We're crossing," he says.

"Steve—"

"Now." His hand closes around your arm, and he moves, steering you off the kerb into the crossing, and the urgency of it is different from the usual kind , something more afraid, and he's not hiding it as well as he was an hour ago.

By the time you reach the other side, you've had enough.

You pull your arm back. "Stop."

He turns.

And there it is — the thing he's been keeping below the surface all week, finally visible, finally closer to the surface than he has the resources left to suppress. Scared.

Real and immediate and almost immediately folded back under control, but not before you've seen it. Not before it's lodged somewhere in your chest like a splinter.

"Tell me," you say.

"We need to keep moving."

"Steve." Your voice shakes slightly. You hate that it shakes. "Tell me what's happening. Right now. Please."

He looks at you for a long moment.

Around you, the city continues its oblivious Friday night. Music. Laughter. Somewhere, someone drops a glass, and the sound gets a small cheer.

Then, "There's a man who has been trying to get to you," he says quietly, "for the last four months."

The words land in you strangely, like something you heard wrong and are waiting to hear again correctly.

"What?"

"Multiple attempts. Hotels, venues, your building." He's watching something over your shoulder while he talks, speaking low, barely moving his lips. "He's been tracking schedules. Getting close through staff. Through fan channels." A pause. "He followed the tour to Spain."

The city keeps moving.

You stand in the middle of it and feel the ground shift beneath you in a way that has nothing to do with the pavement.

"You knew," you say.

"Yes."

"Since when?"

"Before we left."

"And you—" The words come out thin. "You didn't tell me."

"We made a judgment call about how much information—"

"You let me walk around another country." Your voice is very quiet. Quieter than anger. Quieter than fear. It's gone past both of those things. "For a whole day. Without telling me."

"You were safe. You've been safe. That's what—"

"That is not the point."

He stops.

He knows it isn't. You can see him knowing it, the slight drop in his shoulders, the way the professional scaffolding takes a visible effort to maintain.

"I know," he says.

Just that. Just I know, and the weight of it, and his face in the streetlight looking more tired than you've ever seen it.

You stand there for a moment longer. The fear is still arriving, still settling into you in pieces you can't fully take in yet — four months, your building, Spain.

The extra team at the house. The way he never relaxed for a second on the plane. The constant scanning, the earpiece, the later, the way he kept putting distance between the two of you right up until the moment he couldn't.

Fear. Disguised as control.

"Steve," you say, and your voice has changed.

"We need to keep moving," he says, but he's looking at you now, not over your shoulder, and the look is different from any version of it you've seen today.

"I know," you say. "I will. Just—" You take a breath. Let it out. "You should've told me."

"I know," he says again.

"And we're going to talk about it properly."

A pause. "Yeah," he says quietly. "We are."

He takes one more look at whatever he's been watching over your shoulder. His hand settles at your back, light and careful and entirely different from the grip of ten minutes ago.

"There's a restaurant," he says. "Two streets over. I want you inside."

You glance at him sideways. "You want me to eat."

"I want you somewhere contained where I can see the door." A pause. "And I want you to eat."

"How long have you been planning the restaurant?"

He says nothing, which means since before you got on the plane, which means even while he was deciding not to tell you there was something to be frightened of, he was working out where he'd take you when you found out.

You walk. His hand stays at your back.

The city moves around you, warm and beautiful and entirely indifferent, and somewhere behind you in the crowd — though you won't know this until later, until Steve tells you — a man who has been watching you for four months watches you walk away.

—

The restaurant is small and warm and smells of garlic and wine and the particular amber comfort of a room that has been full of people eating good food for a long time.

Steve pauses inside the entrance.

You don't say anything while he reads the room. You watch him do it now with different eyes — exits, sightlines, the man at the bar who gets a second look before being apparently filed away. The corner table, half-shielded from the rest of the room, that he guides you toward with a hand at your back and a matter-of-factness that means he'd already decided on it before you got here.

He pulls your chair out. Sits opposite you, facing the door. Looks exhausted.

"How bad is it?" you ask, when the waiter has come and gone and the menus are sitting untouched between you.

He pours you both a glass of water from the carafe.

"Steve."

"He's been escalating," he says carefully. "The early attempts were opportunistic. More recently, they've been—" He pauses, choosing words. "More deliberate. Better planned."

"He followed us here."

"We believe so."

"You believe so."

"We're working to confirm."

You look at the candle between you. At the wax pooling around the wick. At the way the light catches the rim of the water glass and throws a small, bent circle of brightness onto the tablecloth.

"Why didn't you tell me?" you ask. It isn't a question exactly. More like thinking out loud.

"We determined that if you knew, your movements would change. The way you carry yourself in public, the decisions you make about where to go. Small tells. Enough to make the operation less—" He stops. "I wanted to keep your behaviour as natural as possible."

"My behaviour," you say.

"Yes."

"So I was the variable you were managing."

Something crosses his face. "That's not—"

"I know it's not." You look up at him. "I know that's not what you meant. I'm not—" You exhale slowly. "I understand the logic. I just also think that I had a right to know someone was following me into another country, and those two things can both be true at the same time."

He holds your gaze.

"Yes," he says. "They can."

You pick up your water glass. Put it down again.

"How long?" you ask. "Before you were going to tell me."

"I thought if I could get you through the trip—" He stops. "I hadn't planned past the trip."

"That's not like you."

"No," he agrees, and the word is very quiet. "It's not."

You look at him across the table. At the exhaustion sitting in the lines of his face, deeper now in the candlelight than in the city outside. At his hands resting near the table — stiller than they've been all day.

"You've been scared," you say.

He doesn't answer.

"Not of the job. You're not scared of the job." You keep your voice even. "You've been scared of something happening to me specifically."

The candle flickers. Somewhere in the restaurant, a table laughs at something.

Steve looks at the tablecloth for a moment. Then back up at you.

"I'm trained for threat management," he says carefully. "This is a high-value threat situation. The fear is—"

"Steve."

He stops.

"Is it just professional?" you ask.

A long pause. His finger taps once against the table and goes still.

"You're spiralling," he says, which is an avoidance, and you both know it, and he seems to know that you know it, because something shifts in his expression immediately afterward. Something like a person who is very tired of holding a very specific thing at a very careful distance.

"I thought you were pulling away from me," you say quietly. "All week. I thought I'd done something, or that I'd — read something wrong, between us. I thought you were trying to make me feel it."

"No," he says immediately.

"I know. I know that now." You hold his gaze. "But I want you to know what it looked like from where I was standing."

He's very still.

"I couldn't—" He keeps stopping. Starts again. "I needed to keep my head clear. And you—" Another stop. "It's harder to keep my head clear around you than it should be. And when I'm worried about you on top of that—"

He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't need to.

The candle keeps burning.

Across the table, Steve looks at you with an expression you are going to be sorting through for a very long time — tired, unguarded, careful in a way that isn't professional at all, that is in fact the opposite of professional, that is the look of someone who has been trying very hard not to look like this for quite a long time.

The restaurant moves around you, warm and indifferent, full of people having ordinary evenings. The food arrives eventually, and Steve orders for you without asking because he knows what you'll eat when you're not quite yourself, which is a thing you've never told him and a thing he knows anyway. The conversation becomes lighter, or tries to — he steers it gently toward tomorrow, toward practical things, away from the precipice you've both been standing at.

But before you leave, before the plates are cleared and the cheque is paid, he looks at you across the table and says:

"I should have told you."

"Yes," you say.

"I was trying to protect you."

"I know." You hold his gaze. "Next time, tell me anyway."

"Okay," he says.

The night air hits you when you step outside.

It's warmer than it should be for this hour — Barcelona holding onto the day's heat long past the point where it has any right to, the stone buildings releasing it slowly into the dark. The restaurant door swings shut behind you, and the noise inside cuts off, and the street opens up around you.

Steve steps out beside you.

His hand finds the small of your back before he's even fully through the door, warm and unhurried, the way it's been finding you all evening. And you let it be there, which is its own kind of answer to the things neither of you said properly over dinner.

You start walking.

The city is beautiful in the way it's been beautiful all evening — completely, effortlessly, the way places are when they don't know you're watching. Couples lean over balcony railings overhead. A table outside a bar erupts in laughter about something. 

You watch all of it and feel it at a slight remove.

Because underneath the warm night and the lights and the smell of the ocean still on your skin from the beach, you're walking through a city where someone has been watching you. Someone who knows your face well enough to have followed you here. Who has been in the background of your life for four months without your knowledge.

The knowing changes the texture of everything.

Every stranger who glances up as you pass. Every figure standing slightly still while the crowd moves around them. Every face you don't recognise, which is all of them, which is everyone on this street.

Steve's hand stays at your back, and you stay close, and neither of you mention it.

"How far?" you ask.

"Ten minutes. Twelve."

"Direct route?"

"Mostly."

Mostly means no. Mostly means he's already mapped an alternative and is running the calculation on which one is safer at this hour with this crowd density. You know that now. You know what all of it means now.

You nod and keep walking.

The main drag thins after a few minutes, the crowd dispersing into quieter streets that run back toward the hotel. Restaurants give way to apartment buildings with lit windows, small local bars below. The pavements narrow. The noise softens into something more ambient.

Steve hasn't spoken since you left the restaurant.

This isn't unusual. But this silence has a different quality to it — alert in a way that resting silences aren't, pointed, doing something.

You glance at him.

He's watching the street ahead with the precision you've seen him apply to terminals and arrivals and the open exposure of public venues. The scan moving constantly across doorways and side streets and the gaps between parked cars, so practised it barely registers as movement.

"Steve," you say quietly.

"I know," he says, before you've finished.

"You don't know what I was going to say."

"I know." He glances at you once. "Keep walking. We're close."

Something underneath his voice makes you close your mouth.

You keep walking.

You're two streets from the hotel when the man steps out of the crowd.

He comes from the right, stepping around one of the outdoor restaurant tables, slightly awkward, like he's been waiting for the right gap in the foot traffic. Dark jacket. Cap pulled low enough to shadow most of his face. Ordinary in every surface detail — height, build, the unremarkable quality of someone designed to blend.

Except that he doesn't pass. He slows. He looks at you.

And it isn't the usual recognition. You know the usual recognition by now — the shape it makes as it moves across a stranger's face, the double-take, the recalibration, the flutter of a person encountering someone they know from everywhere. It has a specific progression to it. Surprise, adjustment, the decision of whether to approach.

This man skips all of it.

He looks at you the way you look at something you've been trying to reach for a very long time. Not surprise. Not the recalibration.

Relief.

Something moves down the back of your neck before your brain has caught up enough to explain it. Beside you, Steve has already changed.

The hand at your back is different now, the pressure of it, and the quality of his presence beside you shifts in the same instant that the man slows. Like two things recognising each other across a pavement.

The man smiles.

"Oh, my god." His voice is warm, and it lands wrong, like he's been practising this. "It's actually you."

"She's not available tonight," Steve says. Pleasant. Professional. Carrying something very cold underneath it. "Enjoy your evening."

The man doesn't look at Steve.

This is what makes your pulse jump. He looks at you, and only you. You’ve been the only thing in this man's field of vision since he stepped out of the crowd, and everything else on the street, including Steve, who simply does not exist to him.

"I just wanted to say hello," he says, still to you. "I've been wanting to do that for such a long time."

"Thank you," you say, neutral, controlled, the voice you use when you need something to end. "Have a great night."

You move.

He moves with you.

No blocking or grabbing — nothing that looks like anything from the outside. Just walking beside you, keeping your pace, like this is a natural continuation of a conversation between two people who know each other.

"I've been following everything," he says, with the same conversational warmth. "Since the beginning. Since before anyone knew who you were." A small pause, loaded. "You never noticed me."

The grammar of it turns your stomach. Not I was watching you. Not I followed you. Just — you never noticed me, as if your not noticing is the aberration, as if his watching is the natural state of things, and your unawareness has been a kind of failing.

"Step back," Steve says.

The pleasant surface is completely gone from his voice.

What replaces it is something you've never heard from him and cannot fully name — flat and very quiet, stripped down entirely to its own meaning. 

Several people nearby glance over without knowing why.

The man looks at Steve for the first time.

You watch him assess. You watch him run the calculation — Steve's height, Steve's shoulders, the expression on Steve's face that you can see from here and that you have never seen on him before. And you watch him arrive at his answer. Steve is an obstacle. Obstacles can be dealt with. He files Steve accordingly and looks back at you.

"I just want to talk to her," he says. Still pleasant.

"Step back," Steve says again. Identical. No variation. 

The man's eyes come back to you and soften in a way that makes your skin feel wrong.

"You always talked about Spain," he says, and his voice has dropped now, intimate, like a secret being shared between two people in a room with no one else in it. "That interview. The one where you said you wanted to go somewhere and disappear." A pause that he lets sit. "I remembered."

Cold moves through you in a slow, complete wave.

You do remember it. Distantly. A press junket, years ago, a throwaway sentence said in a room full of lights and microphones, the kind of thing you say without thinking because you say dozens of things without thinking and they dissolve into the air the moment they leave your mouth.

Not for him.

He held it. He carried it here.

"I've been waiting," he says.

Steve says your name.

Your name, the way only a handful of people have ever said it, the version that means something has changed, and before you've consciously decided anything, you're already moving — your body responding to something in his voice that bypasses thought entirely.

His hand closes around your arm and moves you back in one immediate motion, behind him, and the last fraction of the professional surface lifts away from him all at once and what replaces it is something you didn't know was there, something that has been underneath everything for eight months, and you understand standing behind him that you have been shown a very small and very managed portion of what Steve Harrington actually is.

"Last chance," Steve says.

The man looks at you over Steve's shoulder.

"You don't have to let him speak for you," he says softly.

His hand moves inside his jacket.

There is no clean sequence to what happens next.

Your brain stops recording in order. What you'll have instead, in the weeks and months after, are pieces. Disconnected. Without reliable before or after, without cause and effect — just a series of images that exist in isolation, no thread between them.

The glint of it first. Light catching metal — the bar window behind him throwing a brief reflection off the blade before it fully clears his jacket — and your body knows what it is before your mind does, your body having apparently always known things your mind takes longer to catch.

Steve moving.

This is the image that stays longest. Steve moving in a way he has never moved in front of you. Something with no gap in it. He crosses the distance between himself and the man in what feels like no time at all, and the man barely gets his arm up before Steve is already inside it.

The sound of the first impact.

Nothing like how it sounds in films. Closer and flatter and more final than that.

Then pain.

Hot and immediate and shockingly personal, arriving along your left side beneath your ribs at a slight delay, like your body needed a second to process the information and report back.

You look down.

Your hand goes there automatically, pressing against the source of the heat, and when you lift your palm your fingers are dark in the light of the street.

You look at them.

You look at them for what is probably three seconds and feels like considerably longer, the world having narrowed down to the dark of your own hand, and then someone is shouting somewhere nearby, and the world expands again.

You don't fall.

Your back finds the wall of the building behind you — how you get there, you can't account for, whether you moved or someone moved you — and you stand against it with your hand pressed to your side and you watch what's happening in the narrow street in front of you.

Steve has the man against the opposite wall.

The man's jacket is bunched at the collar in Steve's grip, the knife on the pavement between them, and Steve is speaking directly into his face in a voice too low to carry. You can't hear the words. You're not sure they're words in any conventional sense.

Then Steve steps back and hits him.

The sound travels down the street, and the people nearby stop. A woman at a table outside a restaurant rises halfway from her chair. Someone's phone comes out. The sounds of a normal Friday night pause.

The man slides down the wall. He gets one hand beneath himself. Tries to rise.

Steve hits him again.

The pavement is rough-textured beneath the soles of your shoes, you notice this, you notice this specific detail with extraordinary clarity while the rest of the world feels muted and slowed. The pavement. The particular grittiness of it. The way your hand is shaking slightly against your side. The warm wet of it.

The man tries to cover his face.

Steve moves his arm aside.

And this — this — is the part your brain keeps returning to in the aftermath, the part that won't leave you alone. Not the knife. Not the blood on your hand. The specific quality of what Steve is doing, which is not the quality of rage. 

Rage has a disorganisation to it, a loss of structure, something coming apart at the seams. This is not that. This is something that knows exactly what it's doing and has made a decision to keep doing it, and the decision is not unconscious. Every movement is efficient. Precise. Chosen.

That's what frightens you most. 

The choosing.

The man on the pavement has stopped fighting back.

Steve has not stopped.

"Harrington."

Carter's voice, from somewhere to your right. Sharp and low, the voice of someone issuing an instruction to a specific person.

Steve doesn't stop.

"Harrington." Closer now. Carter is moving across the pavement toward him, and another figure is with him, and then a third, and it takes all three of them, it takes the physical weight of all three of them stepping in and getting between Steve and the man, and Carter's hand on his arm and another on his shoulder and the word again, twice, three times, before Steve finally steps back.

He breathes.

His chest moves with it, visible from here.

The man on the pavement makes a sound. Someone from the team steps over to him, says something into a radio. The street has rearranged itself around the event — the circle of onlookers at a careful distance, the phones raised, the low collective murmur of people trying to process what they just witnessed.

Steve looks at the man on the ground for a moment.

Then he turns.

His eyes find you the way they always find you. The same automatic thing, the same immediate locating, the compass-point of it that you've felt a hundred times without fully registering until now. And his face — for just a moment, before he gets anything back under control — shows you everything.

Not what he just did.

The fear of this. Of your face. Of what your face is doing right now and what it means.

He starts toward you. You press back against the wall like there’s any room.

It happens before you decide to. Your shoulders push back into the stone and your feet shift and the distance between you and him, which has been closing, opens again, and he stops.

He stops so completely, and so instantly, it looks involuntary.

Two feet between you. Maybe three.

He looks at you.

You look at him, and you look at his hands, and you look at the cut above his eyebrow that is bleeding freely now, a dark line running down into the hollow of his temple and along his jaw, a bright split in the skin that someone is going to have to close. 

His knuckles are split, the skin torn across two of them, blood welling and running between his fingers and dropping, very slowly, to the pavement. His jacket sits wrong at the shoulder where the seam has given. There is a bruise already rising through the skin below his cheekbone, dark and fast the way bruises are when something has hit with real force.

He looks like something happened to him, too.

He looks like a stranger.

He looks like Steve.

You don't know how both of those things can be true at the same time, but they are.

"Hey," he says.

Low and careful. The voice you know. The specific voice that has been talking you through things for eight months, the one that cuts the size of a room down to something manageable, the one that you have been relying on to locate yourself by.

It reaches you, and you feel it reach you, and you feel it fail to land.

You open your mouth. Nothing comes out.

He watches this happen. Watches you try and fail, and watches whatever follows that on your face.

"Okay," he says, very quietly. "Okay."

He takes one slow step toward you. Stops. Holds his hands out at his sides — low, palms open, not reaching for anything. The gesture is so deliberate that it must cost him something. 

You look at his hands.

You look at his open palms.

You look at the blood across his knuckles.

"I need to see your side," he says. "Can I do that?"

The asking costs him too. You can hear it. Steve doesn't ask permission for things — he moves, he acts, he makes decisions and executes them. The asking is what he has available to him right now, and he is using it because he has looked at your face and understood something and adjusted himself to it, and you know this, you know exactly what he's doing and why, and it doesn't help the way it's supposed to help.

You nod. Barely. Your chin drops a fraction of an inch.

He moves to you carefully, and he reaches out and moves your hand gently, just enough, and looks at what's underneath.

"It's not deep," he says, and his voice is controlled with visible effort now. "Caught you along the surface. You need stitches, you need it cleaned, but—" He looks up. Meets your eyes. "This is okay. You're going to be okay."

You look at his face.

You look at the blood on his face, the rise of the bruise below his cheekbone, the cut above his eye still running freely. You look at his mouth, which is forming words. You look at his eyes, which are doing the thing they do — the thing that has always made you feel located, anchored, like you exist in a specific place, and he’s confirmed it.

It doesn't anchor you right now.

Right now it just confirms the distance.

"Can you tell me your name?" he asks, and the question is so unexpected that something in you flinches. It's a grounding technique. You know it's a grounding technique. He's asking because you haven't spoken and your eyes have gone somewhere he can't follow, and he’s trying to bring you back with the simplest possible tool.

You know all of this.

You still can't answer.

He exhales through his nose, slow and controlled. "Okay," he says, for the second time, third time, like the word is the only one he has access to right now, like he's using it to hold the space while he figures out what comes next.

"Say something," he says quietly. "Anything."

Nothing.

You watch his face do something again. The flicker of it — something afraid, not of the man on the ground behind him, not of what just happened, but of this, of the silence you're giving him, of the step you took back against the wall — and he buries it quickly but not quickly enough. You see it and you can't speak and you don't know if you're ever going to be able to speak again in any way that matters.

"You're in shock," he says. "That's okay. That's—" He stops. His hand lifts toward your face, hovering for a moment near your jaw, not touching, giving you every possible chance to move away from it, and then his fingers brush very lightly against your cheek, checking for something, temperature maybe, responsiveness, the professional assessment underneath the personal need of it.

You don't move away.

But you don't move toward either.

His hand drops.

He takes the cloth from his inside jacket pocket — the folded cloth that he had ready, that he prepared, that he has been carrying since before you got on the plane because he plans for everything including this specific contingency — and he presses it carefully to your side and your hand comes up automatically to hold it there and for one second his hand stays over yours, warm and steady and entirely there.

Then it's gone.

He straightens.

"Talk to me," he says. Almost a request. Almost not. "Please."

You look at him.

You have nothing to give him. Not because you don't want to. Not because you've decided to withhold it. 

He sees this.

That is the entire foundation of every interaction you have ever had with him. He plans. He prepares. He acts. He has a folder with colour-coded tabs for every contingency, and he had a cloth in his inside pocket, and none of that has prepared him for the silence you are giving him right now. You can see it on his face.

"Okay," he says again, and you might kill him for it.

Carter arrives.

He comes in from your left and stops beside you, and he looks at your side, then your face. He looks at Steve, and something passes between them that you don't follow.

"Ambulance is ninety seconds," Carter says.

Steve nods.

"Can you walk?" Carter asks you. "Just to the end of the street."

You look at him and nod also.

"Good," he says, simply, and he puts a hand under your elbow, careful and neutral, and he begins to guide you gently away from the wall.

You go with him.

Your feet move. One and then the other. 

You don't look back.

Carter keeps your pace, says something quietly into his earpiece, and at the end of the street the ambulance is pulling up, its lights running blue and white against the buildings, casting everything in alternating colour. 

Two paramedics come toward you, and there are hands and voices and questions in accented English, and you answer them, short and accurate, because you know how to do this, you have always known how to do this, the functioning of the exterior while the interior is somewhere inaccessible.

The ambulance doors are open.

There is a step into the inside. It's white and bright and smells of antiseptic, and the narrowness of it closes around you. Carter says something to the paramedics, and one of them is already cutting back the fabric at your side. You let them, you let all of it happen, because your job right now is to let things happen and not to think.

You don't think. Except that you do.

In the three seconds before the doors close, you look.

You don't decide to. You just do.

Steve is at the end of the short street.

He hasn't moved. He is standing exactly where Carter guided you away from him — torn jacket, blood drying dark on his jaw, the cut above his eye still running, hands at his sides — and he is looking at you through the open ambulance doors with an expression that you have no reference for in eight months of knowing him.

Just — him. Just his face. Just the fear in it that he's not doing anything to hide, not from this distance, not anymore. 

The doors close.

White light. The smell of it. The sound of equipment and the murmur of the paramedics working.

The ambulance moves.

You face forward, and you press the cloth to your side. You breathe, you feel Barcelona moving underneath you, and you feel the distance between you and that end of the street growing with every second.

You breathe.

The image stays with you.

It will stay with you for a long time — Steve at the end of the street, hands at his sides, not following, blood drying on his jaw, looking at you through the gap in the closing doors with everything showing on his face that he's spent eight months keeping very carefully off it.

You breathe through the ache in your side.

Barcelona carries you away from him.

For now.

He looks back at you with that particular expression he has, the one that’s patient and a little bit knowing and careful in a way that makes your sternum feel too small.

"I'm fine," you say.

"You've said hello to the same group of people twice in the last hour without realising it."

"That's networking."

"That's autopilot." He shifts slightly, angling himself toward you without making it obvious, the way he's learned to do so that it looks like casual conversation and not what it actually is. "Say the word, and we go. Car's already out front. I texted Carter twenty minutes ago."

Of course, he did. Of course, he'd anticipated it before you'd even consciously registered how tired you were.

That’s the thing about Steve that you hadn't expected when this arrangement began — you'd expected competent, you'd expected professional, you'd even been prepared for charming.

You had not been prepared for perceptive. For the way he pays attention to you with a kind of quiet consistency that nobody has ever really bothered with before.

You want to argue. You are good at arguing with him — genuinely good at it, which surprises you because most people fold under the particular brand of stubborn that you've developed over years of being underestimated. 

Steve doesn't fold. He pushes back with this infuriating calm and occasionally a smile that makes an argument feel less important than it had a moment ago. It’s become something of a sport between you. A very confusing sport with rules that seem to be changing gradually, and without your full consent.

But your feet are screaming, and your face hurts from smiling, and the thought of another hour of this makes something in your chest cave quietly inward like a building settling.

"Five minutes," you smile without a lot of light. "Let me say goodbye to the Hargrove table."

Something in his expression eases — barely perceptibly, the way tension leaves a room slowly. "I'll get your coat."

—

The rain had started while you were inside. Of course it had.

Steve meets you outside the cloakroom with your coat already open, holding it out by the lapels so you can slide your arms in without fumbling — a small thing, effortless, the kind of thing he'd started doing without either of you commenting on it. 

Early on, you'd said thank you every time. Somewhere around month four, you think you stopped, because the gratitude had started feeling inadequate for what it was actually expressing, and inadequate felt worse than silence.

The doorman near the entrance has a stand of umbrellas, and Steve lifts one without breaking stride, shaking it open one-handed as you step out from beneath the awning and into the night.

The rain is steady and cold, the self-serious kind that means business, and the pavement in front of the venue gleams under the amber streetlights like dark polished glass.

Your car is idling at the curb roughly ten metres away, where there’s room for the SUV, Carter visible through the windscreen.

Steve falls into step beside you, umbrella raised. You’re maybe halfway there when you notice it.

You notice it the way you notice most things about him — sideways, peripheral, the brain catching something before the conscious mind catches up.

A faint cool mist against your left hand. You look down. Your hand is well within the umbrella's coverage. You look up, following the angle of the canopy, and the whole picture sets itself with a clarity that's almost annoying.

The umbrella is tilted entirely over you. The rain is hitting Steve's right shoulder in a steady dark bloom that is spreading down the back of his jacket, darkening the grey wool by degrees. He’s looking straight ahead at the car, expression perfectly even, apparently unbothered by the fact that he’s getting rained on in a suit that probably cost more than most people's rent.

"Steve."

"Mm."

"The umbrella."

"What about it." More of a statement than a question.

You stop walking. He takes one more step before the absence of you registers, and he stops too, turning to look at you with an expression that’s making a genuine effort to be neutral and falling slightly short of the mark.

"It's completely over me," you say.

"That's the idea."

"That's not — you're soaked."

"I'm a little damp."

"Your whole shoulder is —"

"It's rain." He nods toward the car with the patient air of someone who considers this topic closed. "It's fifteen feet. Let's just —"

"Steve." You reach up and take hold of the umbrella handle — his hand is already there and your fingers close over his, which neither of you had planned and neither of you immediately correct.

You pull the umbrella toward centre. Toward both of you. It brings you closer together, your shoulder against his arm, the warmth of him immediate through the fabric of your coat. 

The umbrella now covers the space between you imperfectly, not quite reaching either edge. "Don't do that."

He looks down at you. Up close, in the rain and the amber light, there’s something moving across his face that he can’t name and doesn’t try to. The string of water drips from the umbrella's edge, caught the light for a moment before it falls.

"Do what?" he says, quieter.

"The self-sacrificing thing." Your fingers are still on the umbrella handle. His hand hasn't moved. "You do it constantly and you act like I don't notice."

"I'm just holding an umbrella."

"You tilted it entirely over me and were going to stand there and get rained on and not say a single word about it."

A pause. The rain keeps falling. Somewhere behind you a car door closes.

"I'd rather we both get a bit wet," you say, "than you take all of it."

Something shifts in his expression. Something slight and unannounced, like a key turning in a lock that nobody has acknowledged exists.

"Noted," he says, finally. And he doesn’t move the umbrella back.

—

The car is warm and dark and smells like leather and the faint trace of whatever product Steve uses in his hair, which you had clocked sometime around month three, and had been pointedly not thinking about ever since. 

Carter has the radio on low — something ambient and instrumental, the kind of music that exists specifically to fill silence without demanding anything from it — and the rain is hitting the roof in a steady percussion that’s frankly unfair given how tired you already are. Like the universe offering you a lullaby and expecting you to decline.

You have your phone out with every intention of returning three emails that have been sitting unanswered since this afternoon. Important ones, probably. Your assistant had flagged at least two of them.

"You don't have to do that tonight," Steve says from beside you.

You don’t look up. "I know."

"It's nearly midnight."

"I'm aware of what time it is."

A pause. You can feel him looking at you in the particular way he does — not intrusive, not demanding, just present in a way that is somehow more noticeable than if he'd been staring.

"The emails will be there in the morning," he says.

"So will my anxiety about them."

He doesn’t push further. That’s another thing about him that you hadn't expected and hadn't prepared for — he knows when to stop. Most people either drop things too early or don't drop them at all. Steve has some internal calibration that tells him exactly where the line is, and he stops precisely at it every time, and it’s one of the more quietly disarming things about him.

You answer one email. The words keep sliding off each other in a way that suggests your brain is running on significantly reduced power, the sentences take longer to form than they should, your thumb hovers over the keyboard for stretches that are becoming embarrassing.

The city begins to thin outside the window. The streetlights grow further apart. The radio plays something without edges.

You answer half of a second email.

The phone screen is very bright. You turn the brightness down. That helps for approximately ninety seconds before your eyes begin their campaign of passive resistance, growing heavier in increments too small to catch until they’re simply, undeniably, difficult to keep open.

You blink hard. Sit up slightly straighter. Refocused on the email.

Hi David, thank you for your message regarding the —

Your head dips. You catch it. Steve says nothing.

— regarding the proposed timeline for —

You blink again, slow. The rain on the roof is so constant it stops sounding like rain and starts sounding like quiet itself, like the audio equivalent of a weighted blanket, like something designed specifically and maliciously to undo the last of your resistance.

The phone goes dark in your hand on an auto-lock timer. You don’t unlock it.

You aren’t aware of the precise moment it happens. That’s the nature of that particular kind of exhaustion — it doesn’t announce itself or give you the chance to negotiate. It simply arrives, folds you under, and takes the decision out of your hands entirely. 

One moment, the dark interior of the car, the glow of passing lights through the rain-streaked window. Then nothing.

What you aren’t aware of, and won’t be aware of until later, is the way it happens. The slow lean — incremental, unconscious, following the pull of gravity and warmth — until your head comes to rest against Steve's shoulder. The slight shift of him as he registers it. The pause, long enough to count, long enough to make a choice.

He doesn’t move. He doesn’t clear his throat or shift away or do any of the things that would be easy and reasonable. He stays exactly as he is and lets you sleep and says nothing.

He does, after a moment, reach forward with his free hand and adjust the air temperature, turning it up a degree. A small thing. A thing nobody would ever know he'd done.

Carter glances in the rearview mirror once and keeps driving.

The radio plays on.

You sleep on, completely unaware of the fact that Steve sits very still for the remainder of the journey with his eyes forward and the careful expression of a person thinking through something they aren't quite ready to say out loud. 

The city lights run across the window in amber and gold. The rain tapers slightly as you leave the centre behind. He doesn’t move until Carter takes a corner and the motion shifts you slightly, and his arm comes up, instinctive, automatic, before he catches himself and lowers it back. His hand settles at the edge of the seat instead. Not quite touching. Very nearly.

You sleep through all of it.

You wake briefly, once, somewhere on the motorway. A foggy and graceless resurfacing — the world dark and moving, the rain soft on the roof, a vague awareness of your own weight leaning into something solid. The shoulder resolves itself first. Then the sleeve of his jacket, slightly cool and faintly damp from the rain. Then the warmth of him beneath it.

Your brain performs a slow inventory of the situation from somewhere very far underwater. You should sit up, it offers, with very little conviction.

You should say something, it tries again. Or move. Or acknowledge this in some way.

You do none of those things. The warmth is too complete and the exhaustion is too total and Steve isn't moving, and somehow that last fact is the one that settles everything.

He isn't moving. He'd had forty minutes to move, and he hadn't, which meant something that your three-quarter-asleep brain didn't have the capacity to fully examine but noted carefully for later, filed it somewhere it would absolutely surface at an inconvenient moment.

You mean to sit up.

You let your eyes close instead.

The last thing you’re aware of is the sound of the rain, and the steady warmth of him, and the radio playing something low and wordless into the dark.

—

"Hey." Close and quiet. A hand on your arm, careful. "We're here."

The car has stopped. The rain has thinned to almost nothing, just the occasional tap against the glass. You blink, slow and graceless, at the hotel lobby burning gold through the window, and then you blink at your own hands, and then you become gradually and unhappily aware that you had been asleep on Steve’s shoulder for what had apparently been the entire journey.

You sit up. Your neck protests. Steve is watching you with an expression you have been cataloguing for months without successfully filing under any category you trusted.

"How long was I asleep?" you ask.

"About forty minutes."

"Please tell me I didn't snore."

The corner of his mouth moves. "I'm not going to tell you that."

"Steve—"

"You're fine." He reaches across and pushes the car door open, which requires him to lean briefly across your eyeline, and you look at the ceiling of the car with great focus until he’s done. "Come on. Before you fall back asleep sitting up."

"I don't do that."

"You absolutely do that."

—

The hotel is the quiet kind of grand. All deep carpet and low lighting and the particular hush of a place that charges enough per night to insist on it. Your rooms are side by side on the fourteenth floor, 1407 and 1408, which had been a logistical arrangement at the start and had since become something that felt, without any discussion, simply correct.

You say goodnight in the corridor. Steve waits until your door closes — you know because you listen for the sound of his own door and it doesn’t come until after yours clicks shut, which is something you never once comment on, or think about more than what was probably advisable.

You shower. You change into something that isn't architecture held together by ribbons and your own stubbornness. You sit on the edge of the enormous white bed in your cardigan and your socks, and you feel, profoundly, the particular peace of being somewhere quiet after somewhere loud.

Then you pick up the room service menu and stare at it for far too long because your brain is still operating at roughly sixty percent capacity.

You order the pasta because you want it. You order the soup because it’s cold outside. You order the bread because it’s been a very long night and you feel you’ve earned it.

And then, already reaching to set the phone down, you notice the last item in your basket.

A burger. Medium-well. No onion. Extra pickles. Mustard instead of mayo.

You stare at it.

The specific and complete wrongness of it registers slowly and then all at once. That was not how you ordered a burger. You don’t even particularly like mustard. There’s exactly one person in your life who orders a burger that way, and you know it because you had watched him do it across eleven meals, in nine different cities, over eight months, sitting across from him in hotel restaurants and airport lounges and once in the front seat of a hire car outside a motorway service station in the rain. 

The particulars had apparently been transcribed somewhere in your brain without ever asking your permission.

You look at the confirmation screen for a long moment.

Then you put your phone down, fold your hands in your lap, and sit with the information quietly for a minute.

Then you pick the phone back up and complete the order.

When the knock comes twenty minutes later, you open the door, sign for everything, tip generously, and stand in the corridor in your socks, staring at the bag with the burger in it.

You pick it up. You walk four steps to the left.

You knock on the door of room 1408.

A pause — the television going quiet, the sound of movement. Then the door opens, and Steve is there in a grey t-shirt and joggers, with his hair damp from the shower, and he looks at you, and then at the bag, and then back at you, and his expression does something that starts as confusion and lands somewhere else entirely.

"Don't," you say, before he can get there.

"I haven't said anything."

"You were about to say something insufferable."

"I was going to say—" he pauses, recalibrating, a smile threatening the corner of his mouth "—how did you know?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"That's—"

"Against my will," you say. "Completely against my will. I was barely conscious. It just happened."

He takes the bag from you, and the back of his hand is warm where it passes over your fingers, and neither of you say anything about that either. He’s smiling properly now, not his professional smile, not his public one — the other one, the quieter one, the one that does something unhelpful to the general situation of being near him.

"Thank you," he says.

"Go to sleep," you say.

"You too."

You turn back toward your own door. Behind you, you hear him stay — hear the absence of his door closing, the particular quality of silence that means he’s still there, still in the doorframe, the way he always waits until you’re inside. 

It’s a small thing. It’s the kind of small thing that has been accumulating for months, quietly and without ceremony, like rain collecting in something that has only just begun to understand it's a vessel.

You let yourself into your room. You don't look back.