Chapter 16: obviously, it’s for you

"Obviously it’s for you," Cian said, with rather more edge than the situation required. "Who else would it be for?"

He lifted the box off Eoin’s lap and dropped it onto the back seat, then turned back. "Stop staring at it. Put it on."

Eoin turned the scarf over in his hands. The wool was extraordinarily soft, the kind that didn’t pill or scratch, the kind that cost serious money. He could have eaten for months on what this thing was worth. He wound it around his neck twice, pulling it snug.

He looked like he was trying to throttle himself.

Cian said, "Are you serious," and leaned across without waiting for an answer, unwound it, and retied it properly, finishing with a loose, easy knot. The tassels fell across the front of Eoin’s coat and settled there.

Eoin kept his eyes on Cian’s hands while he worked. They were deft and unhurried, long fingers moving with a kind of quiet precision. "Sorry," he said. "I’ve never tied one like this. I don’t actually own any."

Back home there had been his Nana’s old headscarf, soft once, now thin from too many washes, the colour gone out of it entirely.

Cian finished the knot and sat back. His fingers found something on the seat beside him and turned it over without looking at it. He didn’t say anything for a while.

Eoin said, "Should I go in?"

He reached for the door handle.

"Wait," Cian said sharply. "There’s something else."

Eoin stopped. Cian picked up the second box, spent a moment in silent communication with whatever part of himself found this situation deeply unreasonable, then closed his eyes and said, "Lower your head."

Eoin, mildly puzzled, did.

"Push your hair back. Show me your ear."

Eoin tucked the hair behind his ear and held still. Cian opened the box, pressed two fingers gently against the side of his head, and a second later Eoin felt a small, precise pressure on his earlobe as something clipped into place.

Cian muttered something that was technically words. The only one Eoin caught clearly was "ear."

He tilted his head towards the rear view mirror. A tiny platinum clip sat at the edge of his earlobe, no bigger than a grain of rice, with a small cursive letter worked into it in clean, looping lines.

"F?" Eoin said.

"My surname," Cian said, with the air of someone daring the other person to have an opinion about it. "First letter. Problem?"

The original text had called for something considerably more conspicuous, a stud with the full name, which Cian had read once, set the page down, and then quietly gone to a jeweller to have this made instead. He didn’t know how to pierce an ear. He also thought asking Eoin to sit still for that was a step too far, even by his current standards. The system had accepted the substitution without complaint.

Eoin touched it with one finger. From where he was sitting the cuff was barely visible, half tucked under the fold of the scarf, catching the light only when he moved.

Watching him look at it, Cian felt a slow, grinding discomfort spread through his chest. He was sending someone to stand at a podium in front of forty students with his initial clipped to their ear like a tag on a piece of luggage. It was insane. The system had asked for it and it was still insane.

"If you hate it, sell it after class," he said. "It’s a custom piece. You’d get good money for it, enough to keep you going for a while."

Eoin’s hand went still against his ear.

Cian said, "I don’t care what you do with it later. Just wear it in there."

"I know," Eoin said. And then, after a pause, "I’m not going to sell it."

Students were starting to gather at the entrance to the building. Cian’s Bentley sat at the kerb being impossible to ignore, which several people were making no effort to do. With a few minutes to spare, Eoin pushed the door open. "I need to go in."

He looked at Cian, who hadn’t reached for the key. There was a half formed question in his expression that he didn’t quite ask. He nearly said, "Will you wait?" but that felt like too much, so instead he said, "Do you have plans after this?"

Rory was in a police cell, which put something of a dampener on the usual arrangements.

Cian pulled out the key and opened his own door. "I’m coming in with you."

Eoin blinked. "With me?"

"To your class." Cian frowned. "What, is that a problem?"

"It’s probably going to be quite dull," Eoin said honestly.

It was an end of term Q&A session. Trinity did not admit students who found things easy, and Eoin’s module had a failure rate of around fifty percent. Sitting in on it without the relevant background was basically an endurance exercise.

Cian knew all of this and also knew he had no alternative. The scene was set here. He nodded, short and cool. "I know."

Eoin had no real answer to that, so he led him inside.

The hall was unusually full, end of term panic having dragged in people who had not been seen since October. Cian looked around the rows of anxious faces and went straight to the back, finding a corner, which was where he had always sat in school on the basis that teachers developed a kind of selective blindness once you were past the third row.

Eoin watched him settle, then stepped up to the podium. He opened his notes, let his eyes move across the room in a slow sweep, landed briefly on Cian before moving on, and said, "Right, let’s start with the questions that came up most in the homework."

He looked well up there. That was the only word for it. The coat Cian had bought him fitted properly across the shoulders, the belt at the waist showing the clean line of him, and he had a way of standing at a podium that was neither stiff nor casual, just composed, like someone who knew where they were.

Cian looked at him for a moment, then checked the time. "Keep track of the plot points," he told the system quietly.

Time moved. The slides changed. Students bent over their work.

"Press the remote," the system said.

Cian reached into his bag, pulled out the hotel TV remote he had brought specifically for this purpose, slid his hand under the desk, and pressed buttons at random.

The remote was, of course, completely useless. The hotel was on the other side of the city. No television anywhere in the building was going to respond to it, and if it did, something had gone profoundly wrong with the laws of physics. He had brought it because the original text said "remote control" and he had decided to take that at face value.

The original text had described the scene in some detail. The young master watching from the back of the room, deciding on a whim to test how much the person at the podium could absorb, pressing the remote with a small, satisfied smile.

"A remote is a remote," Cian had said to the system when he read it. "It doesn’t specify which one."

The system had chosen not to argue.

He followed its instructions, volume up, volume down, pressing whatever came to hand, and got through it.

At the front, Eoin had moved on to a practice section, giving the students ten minutes to work through a set of questions. The room went quiet except for the scratch of pens. Eoin stood at the board and let his gaze drift, and it came to rest on Cian with the steadiness of something that had been building towards that point without quite meaning to.

"Make eye contact and touch the scarf," the system said. "Now."

Cian reached up and adjusted the scarf around his neck.

He held a completely neutral expression while doing it. "I want you to know," he said to the system under his breath, "that I am aware of how this looks."

At the front, Eoin reacted as though something had brushed the back of his neck. He dropped his eyes fast, found his notes, and didn’t look up again for several minutes.

The plot point was done. The class was not. Cian had no acceptable reason to leave, so he stayed, chin on his folded arms, listening to Eoin explain things he had no framework to understand.

The problem wasn’t that the lecture was boring, exactly. It was that it was completely impenetrable. Eoin spoke well, clearly, with the kind of logical structure that presumably made perfect sense if you had the relevant foundation, but Cian had approximately none of it. Within a few minutes the terms had blurred into a pleasant, meaningless rhythm, the voice rising and falling at the board, chalk tapping, students scribbling.

He put his head down and was asleep in under three minutes.

Eoin paused mid sentence.

Cian was at the window. The beech trees outside had gone fully gold, and the afternoon sun was coming through the glass at a low angle, landing across the back of his coat and the side of his face, picking out the fine down on his cheek in warm light. He’d shifted slightly in his sleep, one arm loose on the desk, and he looked, if Eoin was being honest about it, completely peaceful.

Eoin stood at the board and looked at him for a second longer than he should have.

Cian’s whole manner was the opposite of his own. Eoin moved through most days braced for the next thing, which tended to give him a certain quality of alertness that people sometimes described as cold. Cian in sleep had none of that. He was warm and entirely at ease, like a cat that had found an excellent patch of sun and was getting the most out of it.

Eoin caught himself thinking that it would be very pleasant to put an arm around him.

The thought arrived without warning and he recognised it immediately, with some discomfort, because he had thought it before. Many times, on many of the nights they had spent in the hotel room, when the light was off and the distance between them was exactly one arm’s length and Cian was asleep and warm beside him.

He had told himself each time that it was simply the contract. Proximity without stakes, warmth without meaning.

He was becoming less certain that was what it was.