Committee

The dawn was dimmed by winter, as though the city had been dipped in glacé icing overnight. Ari couldn't get out of bed. He called in sick, knocked his phone onto the floor and went back to sleep.

He dreamed about the Withdrawal Acts. When he woke up again, it was because someone was rapping loudly on the front door. Ignoring it for a while didn't make whoever it was go away. Ari forced himself out of bed and stumbled to open it. The burst of freezing air from Millbank was lethally bracing, enough for him to say, startled: "You shouldn't be here."

"Nice to see you too," Jules said. "God, Ari, you look like hell."

"Thanks," Ari said, nettled. Jules bustled in past him, dislodged a pile of papers on the side table and opened the curtains. Against a dark room, the daylight was photo-flash brilliant. Ari stepped back from it, stumbling again, this time landing on the edge of an armchair. "What are you doing here? How do you even know where I live?"

"I'm here to check on you," Jules said. "Eilidh had some urgent papers to clear, Diggory had a Tinder date, so I drew the short straw. HR gave us your address."

"How very GDPR-compliant of them." Ari put his head in his hands, trying to think through the internal spindrift. "What do you mean, check on me? I called in sick this morning, I'll be back tomorrow, everything's fine."

Jules stared at him. "Ari, you called in sick yesterday. You weren't answering your phone and we were worried."

"Oh," Ari said. He'd been asleep for – his brain balked at maths – at least a day. It tracked. "The Withdrawal Acts."

Jules kept on staring. "Are you actually delirious right now?"

"No," Ari said, exasperated. "I mean… after the Withdrawal Acts. I think I was like this for a while after that. I couldn't get up. I don't really remember."

It was dawning on him, slowly, that the spad was in his living room, he wasn't sure where the last day had gone, and that he had just opened his mouth and shared far more than he'd ever intended to.

The spad was in his living room. Ari couldn't process the out-of-contextness of it, of having Jules there amid the detritus of Ari's home life, such as it was these days. The house plants – of which he had plenty; he'd been lying to Jules the other night about the yucca – were recently neglected but not quite wilting; the books were in their familiar rows on the shelves; the violin in its case propped by the window glass. His working papers were spread over the dining table and spilled haphazardly across the floor. The upper part of the house had been converted into a separate flat years ago, but Ari had never felt the lack; he liked this room with the front door opening right into it, the Thames creeping beneath the windows. His bedroom had the same view, plus more books, plants and papers. The place was his and part of him, and Jules was standing in it like a foreign body or a ghost.

"Well, that is truly fucked up," Jules said. "You should take better care of yourself."

"Thank you," Ari said stiffly. "For that advice. And the, ah, check-in. I'll see you next week when I'm back in."

It was a dismissal, and the best he could do with his head spinning.

"So, here's the thing," Jules said, sitting down on the other edge of the armchair. "You're trying to get rid of me. But you can't really, can you? You're in no state to push me bodily out the door. So if it's all the same to you, I think I'll stay right here."

"Why," Ari said, slowly. "Why would you do that?"

"Because I know you," Jules said. "You probably haven't eaten or drunk any water or opened a window in two days, have you."

It wasn't a question. But Ari must have made some indication of answer, or maybe just distress, because Jules softened alarmingly. "Ari, it's all right," he said. "I'll leave you alone, I promise. Let me just look after you a little and I'll go."

"I can't," Ari said, not quite sure what he was saying. "I can't have you here."

It was true, once he'd managed to get the words out. He couldn't have this man – bright-eyed, lovely, flushed with cold – in his living room, saying things like let me look after you a little.

Jules looked at him. It was a long, appraising, uncomfortable look. "All right," he said. "If you can't have me here, I'm giving you ten minutes to get dressed. Sweatpants will do, but we're going out."

"What," Ari said, meaning it to come out as a question and missing the inflection.

"We're getting you some fresh air," Jules said blithely. "And some tissues, and orange juice, and maybe some Strepsils, and this mad echinacea stuff my mad mother swears by."

"Why?" Ari said.

"What do you mean, why?" Jules said. "Because it will help with the cold or flu or whatever it is you have? Move."

It wasn't a cold so much as exhaustion, Ari was thinking, and there were no scientifically substantiated claims behind echinacea in any case. But rather than saying that out loud he was somehow rummaging through his cupboards to dig out some old jeans, woolly socks, a fisherman's jumper Lil had given him as a joke but he'd always sincerely liked. When he emerged back into his living room Jules was waiting for him impatiently.

"I don't know why I thought you'd even own sweatpants," he said, taking him in at a glance and picking Ari's house keys off the hook by the door. "Are these the ones? Come on, then."

Outside, the light was still savage. Ari had been detached from time and was surprised to see the sun as high as it ever got in these translucent mid-December days. Jules led the way towards the water, pausing at the edge of the river wall to make sure Ari could keep up, then ambling on with his hands in his pockets.

"There," Jules said, after a while. "Isn't that better?"

"Yes," Ari admitted. The fresh air was still painfully bracing but it was the good kind of pain, cathartic after the stuffiness inside. "It's... nice."

"Though where we're going to find a chemist's I don't know," Jules groused. "Who lives on Millbank, for God's sake? How do you live here if you're not secretly a millionaire? Are you secretly a millionaire?"

"Are you?" Ari said. The cold had restored some of his native wit. "My noble lord."

"Oh, shut up," Jules said. "My brother's going to inherit the title, anyway. How do you come to live here?"

"It was my parents' house," Ari said. "This part of London was grottier back in the eighties. No secret millions. We sold off the upstairs part for another flat years ago. Lil called it the oligarchs' annex."

"Lil?"

"An old friend of mine." It was the light-headedness, Ari decided again, the out-of-contextness, that was making him open his mouth with reckless abandon and just tell Jules things like that. "There's a Boots down here."

They crossed over from the riverbank into one of the side streets, on past the Tate and through the green spaces beyond into Pimlico. When in a better state of mind, Ari liked this particular urban transition, from the grandeur of Millbank and Westminster into what was still, gentrification notwithstanding, one of London's proverbial internal villages, complete with little shops, cafés, public libraries and parks. Without meaning to, he was walking faster, wanting to get this whole thing over with.

"Hey, slow down," Jules said, reaching for Ari's hand to hold him still. "Cold medicine isn't going out of fashion. And when we get it we can go back, I promise."

Again, his tone was all softness. Ari snatched his hand away, his fingers curling in frustration. "Why are you doing this?"

"Because I was so worried about you, you utter bastard," Jules said. "I don't know why your giant mushy brain can't cope with this, but disappearing without a trace for two days tends to make people worry."

"I called in sick."

"I was still worried! Also, leaving a garbled message on Diggory's voicemail that he's not sure is from you falls short of calling in sick. For the record."

"But I'm not…" Ari stopped, trying to think clearly, to get this right. "I'm not anything to you. I haven't been… nice, to you."

"No, you haven't," Jules said. He took a breath. "I, er. I wanted to tell you that, actually. Thank you for not being nice to me."

"I don't think that makes sense," Ari said. He was remembering, belatedly, bottles of water and sweets and gentle reminders of his own frailties. Jules had been nice to him, in a way few people had been since Lil.

"Oh, it does," Jules said. "My father is a peer of the realm. Everyone is nice to me, except you. You – you've given me hard stuff to do, and you've expected me to do it, and you haven't been surprised when I have done it."

"Why should I be?" Ari asked. "It's supposed to be my job, to keep good people around doing what they do best. Though I was an ass about it with you."

Jules smiled at him with appalling fondness. "You know, I think I prefer you like this."

Ari couldn't meet his eyes. "Did Diggory really have a Tinder date?" he asked, partly to change the subject and partly from a burning desire to know. "He's, like, fourteen. And a half. Maybe."

Jules grinned. "Ari, if you are more than ten years older than him I will eat Erskine May."

"I'm thirty-two," Ari said, sparing him from consuming a five-hundred-page leather-bound hardback, "but if a week is a long time in politics, I'm a hundred and five."

"If you say so," Jules said. "Do you want to stay out here while I get some things?"

They'd reached the chemist's. Ari nodded, grateful for not having to face crowded aisles full of people. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again Jules had a shopping bag in hand. Jules repeated the performance at the mini supermarket over the road, and they started back richer for cough drops, paracetamol tablets, orange juice, sundry other perishables and a paper bag of chicken satay skewers for each of them. "Eat," Jules said, pressing one straight into his hand.

"Why do you get to tell me what to do?" Ari asked, not disobeying.

"I don't answer to you, that's why," Jules said, rolling his eyes. "Besides, you probably last ate half a sandwich three days ago."

It was more or less true. Ari ate the chicken and licked his fingers clean of the spices.

"If you're not actually a hundred and five," Jules said, once they were back on the towpath along the riverbank, "then why do you act like it, sometimes?"

Ari hadn't wanted to pick up where they had left off on that. "I don't know," he said, not denying it as he hadn't denied the not eating. He felt old, stiff with cold and exhaustion, overcome by this bright-lit day and this unexpected visit and Jules's brutal kindness. "The job ages me before my time, I suppose. It's… relentless. Regulations, Bills, reforms, withdrawal, more withdrawal, always running and running just to keep standing still. But it's what I know."

"And you love it," Jules said, nudging him in the shoulder.

"I did," Ari said. "Before everything that happened. I don't know if I still do. Give me those."

He took his keys out of Jules's hand and turned them in the lock. He was grateful to be back inside the house, but conscious once again of having Jules in his own space, making him eat, asking him questions. He sat down with a thump and felt overwhelmed by the task of shedding his boots.

"Ari," Jules said, then held up a hand, apparently changing his mind about something. "Actually, wait. You stay there and don't do anything."

Ari stayed there and didn't do anything. Jules took the shopping through to the kitchen – he seemed to have found his way around the place as though he'd been here a dozen times before – and brought back a glass of water and paracetamol for Ari. "Take these. Drink the rest of the water."

There was something new about him, Ari decided, a confidence that he hadn't had when Ari had first met him. For his own part, he had started finding it comforting to just be told what to do. He took the tablets and drank the water.

"That's better," Jules said. "Ari, listen to me. Whatever it was that happened to you, you can tell me about it. You don't have to, but you can."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Yes, you do," Jules said. He got up and started pottering again. "If you don't want to tell me, that's fine. We can go back to arguing about wind farms just like we did before."

Ari thought that if he'd managed to go to work this morning; if he'd managed to actually tell Diggory where he was; if he'd closed the door in Jules's face, then it might have been possible to go back to how they had been before. But he'd let Jules in, and these were the consequences.

"I had a friend, from when I was in the Fast Stream," he said. "Her name was Lil."

"Girlfriend?" Jules asked, back in the kitchen; he was taking the orange juice out and finding glasses for it, putting the remaining chicken in the fridge.

"No," Ari said. It was easier to talk like this, with Jules bustling around and only looking at him in passing. "Actually, yes, for a bit, but that wasn't the important part. We met in the string ensemble. Don't laugh."

"Wouldn't dream of it." Jules peered around the door. "I like the t-shirt, I meant to tell you."

"Me, too," Ari said. It read, The Civil Service String Ensemble Does It in 4/4 Time. Something else Lil had given him as a joke, that Ari had loved and kept. "She played the cello, which was bigger than she was. My fiddle is somewhere here." He waved a vague hand at the room around him, knowing precisely where it was, in its dusty place by the window. "We played together, we hung around together, we lived together for a while. After my parents went back to India I moved in here but we still spent all our time together."

"It sounds nice," Jules said, softly. "What was she like?"

"Funny," Ari said. "Irreverent as hell. She would have come up to you on your first day and pretended to be doing a survey on nepotism in the civil service."

Jules snorted. "Fantastic."

"She'd have liked you, though," Ari said. "She'd have told me to be nicer. She always told me to be nicer."

"She sounds like a smart lady," Jules said. "Was she at Energy and Efficiency, too?"

"No, Health," Ari said. "We never worked together, but I'm glad we didn't. She was what you were asking about the other night. What I had, that wasn't my job."

"You weren't actually together, though?" Jules asked.

"No." Ari rubbed his eyes. "Not after a while. But it wasn't less important, if you can understand that."

"Yes," Jules said, with his head back in the fridge. "Very modern way to live, I think. Very grown-up, very queer."

Ari was startled to hear that spoken. "I, ah, I don't think I've ever told you—"

"I can see your bookcases from here," Jules interrupted. "You've got, ooh, The Well of Loneliness, Gender Trouble, The Charioteer and, how pretty, something about the Folsom Street Fair."

Ari gave up. "Fine. Yes."

"Great. Me too. What happened to Lil?"

"She died," Ari said. In the early days, the starkness of that had been unbearable; now it hurt less to get the explanation over with. "Cycling accident, no one's fault, nothing anyone could have done. Two weeks later the last Withdrawal Act was passed."

"Oh, my God." Jules shut the fridge and came to sit beside Ari on the sofa. "I'm so sorry. Did you… were you able to…"

Ari shook his head. "I had to do what I had to do. Delegated powers memoranda, mostly. I didn't—ah."

"What?" Jules paused. "Ari, love, you don't have to tell me this."

The endearment hung in the air, shimmering. In silent consensus, they both looked away from it and went on.

"I think I should," Ari said. "I helped see the final Bill through its final passage. I had to, you understand? There was no one else, there was nothing else. It was the last days of Rome. I didn't play her requiem. I haven't played at all since."

"Oh, God," Jules said again. "Ari, I am so, so sorry."

Ari wanted to say, it was a long time ago, or these things happen, but the words wouldn't come. He sat quietly, looking at the light scattering through the dust. Jules pulled down a blanket off the back of the sofa and shook it out over Ari, who pulled it down gratefully. Neither of them spoke for a long time.

"I should leave you alone," Jules said, at last. "Unless you want me to stay?"

Ari shook his head again, drifting. The paracetamol and orange juice had helped; perhaps it really was a cold, after all. "I'm about to fall asleep again. I'm sorry about all this."

"That's okay," Jules said softly. "If I leave the rest of the juice here, will you promise to drink it when you wake up? And eat the rest of the chicken?"

"Yes," Ari said. "Yes, I promise."

"And don't read any Bill papers, even if you do feel better."

"I won't," Ari lied. "Thank you. Thank you for everything."

"It's all right," Jules said, bending to kiss him but stopping short of it. Ari looked up and they both froze, caught in a moment.

"Ari," Jules said, sincere and urgent, "I'm sorry. That's not what this was about. I shouldn't have—anyway. I'm really sorry."

"You can kiss me," Ari said. "Just not yet."

He was drifting again, thinking about how he had let Jules into his life without wanting to, and without wanting to he had started to want for something: a life beyond work and memory, grief bitter as frost.

Jules stood still for a moment, then brushed his fingertips across Ari's palm, a fleeting tenderness. He put the orange juice on the side table, checked the fridge was closed, and let himself out.

___

Jules had promised to report back to Diggory and Eilidh, and was able to reassure them that Ari was alive and some values of all right without going into detail about the five hundred other things on his mind.

"Burnout," Eilidh said, understanding, when Jules called her. "I guess we'll all be over it some time."

She meant the Withdrawal Acts alone, without any further attendant grief. Jules didn't ask any more questions about that; he was starting to understand that he wouldn't understand it, not without having lived through it himself. But he was transformed nevertheless and still transforming: he was starting to feel, not useless or overshadowed, but part of something greater than himself. He'd half-expected his father to ignore him after the sharp words at the dinner party, but to his surprise, he'd had a sequence of badly-spelled texts, asking if he was doing well, hoping that he was. Jules replied blandly, without feeling anything in particular. At some point, he'd stopped caring about his father's good opinion.

What he cared about now, it turned out, was Ari. In his heart, Jules wanted everything that Ari had placed within reach, and in a strange alchemy of time and circumstance, it felt in reach: it felt like a natural culmination of what was happening to Jules here, now, in this place he hadn't understood, where he hadn't meant to stay. Two days later on his way into the department, he had it settled in his mind: he wanted Ari, and he wanted to stay.

What the universe wanted, on the other hand, was for him to be dragged into a meeting room the size of a broom cupboard by two overenthusiastic lawyers before he'd had a chance to take his coat off.

"We've been thinking about your question!" Eilidh said happily. She had a whiteboard pen threateningly in hand. Jules wanted Ari's respect, his friendship, and maybe much more than that, but right now he would settle for Ari in his capacity as local Bill manager to march in and deliver him from legal advice.

"My question," he said weakly.

"It was a very interesting question!" declaimed the senior of the two lawyers. Prashant was Eilidh's boss and he had the diction of a man whose brain had been laying down legislative sediment for decades. "It's really unprecedented in our post-Withdrawal Acts jurisprudential praxis."

"Is it," Jules said.

"This point, for example, of making co-extensive freestanding provision, poses a number of fascinating implications."

"Does it," Jules said, with a glance of entreaty at Eilidh.

"Yes, it does," she said. "Freestanding provision. That point. The point the minister asked you about."

"Ah," Jules said gratefully. "That point."

Despite everything else, Jules hadn't forgotten the request the minister had made at his parents' horrible dinner party. He'd written up the question for Eilidh, who had referred it to Prashant, who had responded gleefully to say they would do some thinking. Jules had learned enough to know that meant a memo of at least twelve hundred words. He ought to be thankful, he supposed, if this encounter in a broom cupboard was saving him from actually reading it.

"Eilidh, Prashant," he said, "I really appreciate your help. But if you could explain it in words of less than four syllables…"

"Of course," Prashant said. "Apologies. Yes. All right. The new section four – Opposition Amendment Eleven, as was – doesn't have perpetual effect. As we reach the middle of the transition period, it will fall away."

"What does that mean?" Jules asked.

"Right now, not much," Eilidh said. "The Northern Infrastructure Bill needs the two-thirds majority if we want to use the original wind farm clauses, and there's nothing we can do about that. You're going to ask whether that's true for freestanding provision."

Jules had been going to ask no such thing. He kept quiet and hoped no one would say ‘jurisprudential praxis' again.

"It is," Prashant said. "The minister was suggesting we just put the original wind farm provision somewhere freestanding, not in the Northern Infrastructure Bill. Opposition Amendment Eleven means we can't do that, not without all the same problems. But, when it falls away—"

"When will that be?" Jules interrupted.

"October 2022."

Ten months away. Jules ignored the inner voice that pointed out he hadn't meant to be here for nearly that length of time. "All right, what happens then?"

"Then there's another way," Eilidh said. "The minister has responded to the sub, did you know?"

"No," Jules said patiently. "Because you haven't let me get to my desk and check my email."

"Well, she has. She wants to go with option two, putting the tweaked wind farm clauses into the Northern Infrastructure Bill. We limit the scope of them and get them in without the majority requirement."

Jules remembered the minister saying at the dinner party that she would have to respond to the submission quickly. "All right, let me get try and get this straight," he said.

Both lawyers smiled encouragingly.

"We can't do anything now except new wind farms that are exactly like the old ones," Jules said, gaining confidence. "But we could do another bill in less than a year from now, which would let us build brand new highly advanced wind farms and do hydroelectric and solar while we're at it."

"Exactly," Eilidh said. "No recommendations from us, mind you. This is purely policy, not legal. But you could do it."

"All right." Jules nodded. "Could you send me the incredibly long memo on this that you were planning to send me anyway?"

He didn't want to read it, but he'd need to know it inside out when he tried to pitch it to Ari.

"Sure," Eilidh said. "That's all from us. Want to get a coffee?"

"Sounds great," Jules said. Prashant wandered off with his department-sponsored reusable cup, still muttering things about fascinating and unprecedented, leaving Jules and Eilidh to walk up the stairs from the canteen together. As casually as he could, Jules asked, "Where's Ari today?'

He half-thought she would say still at home, or – irrationally – avoiding you. He was surprised when she said, "Over on Marsham Street. Regional Infrastructure said if we didn't get the final Bill documentation across to them today they'd come over and have us shot."

"Does anyone round here," Jules said, "not operatically overreact to everything?"—and Eilidh chuckled and petted him on the shoulder.

"You know, I don't know what we did without you," she said. "Come up to the fifth floor after six, all right? I've got a surprise for us all."

Jules had had enough of surprises for a lifetime, but promised he would. He spent the day rereading his original memo on alternatives to wind power and then attempting to understand Prashant and Eilidh's nightmarish bullet points. After thinking about it for most of the afternoon, he distilled it and sent it to Ari with a covering note: what if we pulled out of the Bill and did it better later?

By ten past six, Ari hadn't replied. Jules put his papers away and trudged up to Eilidh's office to find everything mostly deserted. It was Friday, so the people lucky enough not to be working on a bill had mostly cleared off, leaving behind Eilidh herself, a couple of other lawyers, and – Jules's heart quickened – Ari. Looking just like the respectable civil servant he was, as though Jules hadn't last seen him on the edge of some shattering intimacy.

"Surprise," Eilidh said, and Jules blinked, wondering if Eilidh had somehow read his innermost thoughts, if Ari himself were the surprise. He blinked again and spotted the pizza boxes and the two bottles of wine. "Ari dealt with Regional Infrastructure. We're off the hook till the Bill comes out of committee."

"That's great," Jules said, trying to sound like he meant it; he was genuinely pleased to hear it, despite everything else fighting for space inside his head. "Did you take everything over by hand?"

Ari nodded. "Saves us from technological difficulties," he said. "Remember when we did the last lot of exit Regulations? We ended up laying them from Starbucks."

He was talking to Eilidh, not looking at Jules. There had been some avoiding going on, then.

"I sent you something earlier today," Jules said, feeling suddenly resentful. "About a new option for the minister other than the ones we put in the sub. It's important that you look at it, it matters to how we proceed with the Northern Infrastructure Bill."

"I haven't had the time today, I'm sorry," Ari said, finally looking at him. His expression had returned to the perfectly bland, neutral default. "First thing on Monday."

Jules nodded, not sure if he believed this. There was something depressingly familiar about this interaction, reminiscent of Ari as he'd been when they'd first met, with no time for Jules. With a crushing feeling of inevitability, he understood that the glimpse he'd seen of Ari outside this context had been just that, a glimpse, and passing. He thought about giving up and going home, like nearly everyone else had; the civil servants not working on the Bill had mostly headed out and the department was shifting to late-night quiet. But Eilidh put a pizza slice in his left hand and the corkscrew in his right and Jules reconciled himself to it. He'd been too busy with the lawyers' memo to have lunch. Ari was barely suffering to be in the same room as him, but alcohol might help with that.

A couple of hours later it was just the three of them left, and he'd been right about the alcohol.

"How," Jules said, watching Eilidh root around in a filing cabinet, "how do you have so many wine glasses in there? How do you have any wine glasses in there?"

"Give," Ari said, holding out his hand imperiously until Jules passed him the bottle. "We did an office move a few years back. We had port glasses and whisky tumblers and those big flat things."

"Like breasts," Eilidh said, emerging from the filing cabinet. She leaned against the wall, kicking off her shoes. "Like what's-her-name's breasts."

"Marie Antoinette?" Jules asked, taking a second. "You mean, champagne glasses?"

"That's the one," Ari said. "But they made us chuck them all so now we only have wine glasses. Do we still have the harder stuff?"

"Does he mean whisky?" Jules demanded of Eilidh, while Ari hunted in the other filing cabinet, throwing old briefing papers and litigation bibles over his shoulder. "And… Celebrations?"

"They went out of date two governments ago," Eilidh said, unwrapping one and eating it. "Here, catch."

Jules grabbed a tiny Snickers from the air and watched in bemusement as Ari poured the whisky into a mug emblazoned with We Delivered the Domestic Leasehold Valuation Act 2017.

"Here is some free advice," he said, and Jules suddenly realised that Ari was talking to him, if only about whisky and Marie Antoinette's breasts. "Don't drink with lawyers. They are fucking crazy."

Eilidh laughed, her wine glass shaking in her hand. Jules reached out and put it safely on the floor. "Don't be horrible, Ari," she said. "I was a high-flying corporate lawyer once. I used to do six hostile takeovers before breakfast and run five miles before bedtime. Then I came here. Just in time for the Withdrawal Acts."

Ari hummed and played an imaginary violin. "How sweet the sound."

Jules remembered Ari saying that he hadn't touched an instrument since Lil's death. Abruptly, he understood that Ari wouldn't have done that in front of him before sharing that secret; that it meant affection, trust. Ari looked up at Jules from beneath his lashes, then away. There was a spreading warmth under Jules's skin that was nothing to do with the wine.

"Yeah," Eilidh said. "Exactly. How old were you when we were doing those, Jules? Like, five?"

"I'm not that young!" Jules said, outraged. It was a happy, familiar, comfortable sort of outrage. "I'm not Diggory."

"Ah, Diggory," Eilidh said. "Such a sweetheart. One day his suit will fit."

Jules laughed. "He's trying. So am I. Aren't we all?"

"Yeah." Ari's head landed on his shoulder. "You've been a blessing. For God's sake let's have another drink before we all get sincere on each other."

Jules topped up all three wine glasses, taking the whisky mug away from Ari to stop him from absent-mindedly mixing them together. The three of them were all on the floor now, leaning against the wall with Jules in the middle. Without thinking about it, he moved closer and Ari nestled in beside him again, his body heat palpable, shifting. Jules breathed in and out, conscious of every point of connection between them.

"Blessing," Eilidh said, emphatically, lost in some reverie of her own. "How sweet the sound."

"Damn right," Ari said, almost into Jules's ear.

Jules rubbed his eyes, tried to think. "You all say that," he said finally. "All the time. Why?"

Ari took a second to speak again. "We tried so hard," he said. "The Withdrawal Acts. But if it'd—you know. Gone all wrong. Operation Grace, it was going to be called. Contingency preparation. That sort of thing. I shouldn't be telling you this."

"No, you shouldn't," Eilidh said, sitting up for a moment. "Your lawyer says shut the hell up."

"Don't drink with lawyers," Ari said, confidingly. "Anyway. We got through it, somehow."

"Ari," Jules said. "Are you all right now, really?"

He didn't know if he meant now, as in after the Withdrawal Acts; or now, as in after the couple of days Ari had spent refusing to get out of bed; or right now, in this golden, whisky-laden moment. It was a horribly intimate question to ask in front of another person, and he wouldn't have if he hadn't been sure of Eilidh's affection for Ari, or of the half-litre of wine currently sloshing around her bloodstream.

"No," Ari said. "But better."

His voice was kind, not demanding of sympathy or response. Jules held still, knowing any words would be trite, unnecessary.

"And I'm glad you're both here, now," Ari said after a moment, reaching out to Eilidh. She clinked glasses with him. "How sweet the sound."

"It's a toast," Jules said, understanding it at last. "To… survival?"

"Yes," Ari said. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound."

He sang the words rather than saying them, with the clarity of a division bell. Jules felt something inside him shatter. He turned, kissed Ari and waited for whatever came next.

"Oh," Eilidh said. "This is happening. This is happening right now. Great. Excellent. Er, I'll see you on Monday."

She got to her feet with impressive steadiness, picked up her coat and bag, kicked over an empty bottle on her way out and clattered off down the corridor.

The sound brought Jules to himself. He drew away from Ari, breathing heavily. "I'm sorry," he said, terrified he'd got it wrong. "I know you didn't want this yet, I just, you—"

Ari kissed him mid-word, his mouth whisky-sharp. Jules smiled against his lips, let his hands wander into Ari's hair and then under his shirt collar, enjoying the warmth of skin against his hands. Ari made a small noise of protest, and Jules drew back, cautious again.

"Do you," he said, "do you not want—"

"Yes, I do," Ari said, cutting him off. "But not here."

"You're right," Jules said. "You live closer than me. Unless, we could always—"

"We're not doing it in the gents, either," Ari said, miffed, "or the gender-neutral toilets."

"Do you ever shut up," Jules said indulgently, kissed him again, then pulled him to his feet and out of the door, turning out the lights as he went. They made it out onto the street without embarrassing themselves and in a moment of inspiration, Jules hailed a passing black cab. They made the five-minute drive in a charged silence, their fingers clasped together, the tension electric in the air between them. Jules chafed at the delay, wanting Ari against him, to feel the weight and skin and flesh of him, and at the same time wanted this moment to stretch out forever, the lights of Westminster slipping past the glass. Everything felt rich with beauty, possibility. The cab drew up and they tumbled out. Jules put a ten-pound note through the driver's side window, Ari fished his house keys out of his pocket and then they were alone together, in a dim-lit room with the gleam and slop of the Thames at the window. Ari locked the door behind them.

"Well," he said.

"Well," Jules echoed. This ought to be awkward, he thought; they ought to be straitlaced and prudish like the rules-mongering officials they were. Ari ought to ask if Jules wanted a drink; Jules ought to be standing there self-consciously; it ought to be hapless, unromantic, a movement incomplete.

Instead, Ari stepped right up to Jules and kissed him again, more slowly this time, with the methodical, clear-eyed focus with which he did everything. Jules had the sense he was thinking all of this through bit by bit, deciding to take each further step and then taking it. The part of his mind that had recognised Ari was avoiding him was still worried, cautious, not wanting to startle Ari away from something that felt as beautiful and fragile as glass.

"Ari," he said, drawing away, still close enough to feel his breath. "What do you want?"

"You," Ari said. "In my bed, if reasonably practicable."

Jules laughed delightedly at the bureaucrat's caveat, lifted Ari's hand to his mouth and then gripped it. "Take me there," he said.

Ari pulled him along, throwing open the curtains without turning on the electric lights. The glimmer of the Thames reflections spilled in, purplish on the crisp white sheets. Jules waited for Ari's cue and got it in the shape of an insistent tug at his tie and collar. They shed some layers in the semi-darkness and Ari kissed Jules, again, deeply, before pushing him down onto the bed. He moved something gently to the floor – files or books, by the sound – and started undoing the remaining buttons of Jules's shirt, dexterity unaffected by alcohol. Jules looked up and felt a wash of affection as well as lust for Ari, who even now didn't tear fabric or throw books.

"I'm sorry," Ari said, apparently reading his mind. "It's just who I am as a person."

"I love who you are as a person," Jules said with utter truthfulness. "Ari, are you sure? I'm not trying to put you off, I'm just saying, because you are—"

"Yes, a little," Ari said, and Jules realised he'd heard the unspoken word as damaged, when Jules hadn't been going to say that. He'd tried and fallen short of expressing, you are precious; or, you are loved. "But I want this. I want you. Please."

"Yes," Jules said, undone by please, unable to stop the smile spreading over his face. Even in this dimness, he could make out the details of Ari's body as he sat naked and cross-legged at the end of the bed: the gloss of brown skin, the curve and rise of collarbones, wrists, hips, cock. "Yes. Oh, God, Ari."

"What?" Ari said, leaning forwards from cross-legged, or trying to. "Oh, fuck, I'm too old to do it like this any more. I'm better at it on my knees."

"Please don't say things like that," Jules said breathlessly, as Ari knelt between his legs, hands on Jules's hips. "Because I might die."

Ari laughed and did something with his mouth that put all other words out of Jules's mind. Jules could feel from the warmth of his breath that he was still laughing while he did it. It was a small detail that made him freeze. He sat up, lifted Ari up forcibly and pulled him close.

"Ari," he said, and faltered, because he wanted to say, as he had once before: I was so worried about you, you utter bastard. That he'd been buoyed up with a confidence that was still new to him, changing him in ways he didn't understand yet; that he'd nevertheless pushed Ari to let him in, while not knowing the first thing about exhaustion, or grief. That he knew Ari had said, not yet, and had spent today avoiding him, and had still called him a blessing, and knelt as though he were. That it felt unnavigable, and all that he wanted, just the same. When Jules opened his mouth again, what came out was, "I don't want to hurt you."

"That's a shame, I rather like it," Ari said, holding him at arm's length, taking him in. Jules had the dizzying sense of being seen clearly. "Jules, you aren't going to hurt me. You care for people like no one else. You have cared for me like no one else."

Jules closed his eyes, letting that wash through him. Ari kissed him and went back to what he was doing. Jules's capacity for rational thought yelled something about condoms before departing for sunnier climes, but Ari, bless his practicality, had that in hand. It seemed as though he were reasonably experienced; Jules wasn't, himself. It didn't matter. They came to rest tangled up together in the sheets, a hand's breadth of space between them. Ari was awake but blurry, looking at Jules in a way that did something strange and precise to his heart. They'd been this close together, before – in the pub, the other day on the sofa – and Ari had pulled away from him. This time, Jules thought he would stay.

___

In the morning, the rain hammering on the window had the rhythm of a metronome. Ari heard it as strathspey reels and waltzes, arpeggios in the drips. Water music, he decided, pleased at the pun. He got up carefully, without disturbing Jules, and picked a random assortment of clothes up off the floor. In the kitchen, the curtains had been left open and the dawn was barely creeping in; it wasn't quite seven. Moving softly, Ari made a cup of masala chai with real spices, for once taking the time to steep and strain it properly.

He's nice, Lil said. Nice arse.

"Very nice," Ari said, warming his hands on the mug, watching the first ferry services ply the river. It was chilly but no longer freezing, the towpath slick with water, not frost. He was feeling strange, unsharpened, as though by the aftermath of a thaw. Jules's presence, even sleeping, was a comfort rather than an intrusion.

Don't fuck this up, Ari, Lil said. You deserve to be loved, the same as everyone else.

"What do you know, you're dead," Ari muttered. He went back to bed, setting the mug down on the bedside table. Jules woke up for a moment, murmuring something about letting in the cold. Ari stroked Jules's hair with one hand, reaching for a book with the other. He read and sipped the tea, listening to Jules's breathing and the raindrops on the window, each one a diminution of loss.