Her hair is up.
It's after seven. Her shoes are tucked in neat against the wall, under her hanging coat. The coat is still a little dark across the shoulders from the afternoon's rain but mostly dry; she's been home a while. She's changed the rest of her clothes.
But Alma's hair is still up.
And now that Dylan's looking there are other signs. Like the warped black dish of a microwave meal keeping the trash can from quite closing, and a smell that tells me most of it went uneaten. There are little damp flecks all around the sink where something was scrubbed with a rough brush and no mercy. The note he left when he went out, that he didn't know when he'd be back, is still on the side table where he left it. When he glances at that he catches his reflection in the mirror fixed above it. Could be better. It's been worse, but it's been better. It would be important except that, as has been pointed out, as he can't get out of his head, Alma's hair is still up.
Thank God his own day went smoothly. Thank God he shaved this morning. Thank God it's no longer raining and he hasn't left drips and shoeprints in the doorway.
Before you accuse him of overreacting – or worse, before you have to ask what he's thinking at all – let's just be absolutely clear, it is all the way up. Not tied back, not pushed away from her face, up. Twisted and pinned and neatly up against the back of her head.
Alma's hair doesn't go up until she reaches her desk in the morning. Alma can wind in the familiar knot, knock back a four-shot coffee and give a task force briefing all at the same time. It is the very last thing she does to make herself ready, to become the consummate professional she has to be. And she hates it. She pushes and pulls at it every second her hands are idle. By lunch she usually has to take it down and redo it, she's loosened so much of it. Most nights she doesn't make it so far as the train before she lets it go. He's met her once or twice, dashing into the station with a mouthful of pins, hands behind her head looking for the last of them.
And here she is, after seven, on the couch in mismatched sweats and white rabbit slippers which do not fit her because they were a gag gift not to her but to Dylan, and her hair is still up.
He takes an extra second or two over hanging up his jacket. He wants very much to come straight out and ask what's the matter. But that would be wrong. Don't ask him to explain it, he just has this powerful sense that such a direct approach would get him absolutely nowhere and very probably make her mad. But he wants so much to say it he's having trouble thinking of any other way to put it. And in the end he hesitates too long and misses his chance.
A smile instead of bon soir and, "I didn't make dinner. You said you didn't know when you'd be back, so…" She looks back down to the magazine on the arm of the sofa. Sudden and self-conscious, she flips a page, maybe realizing she's been staring at the same paragraph since before the door opened.
With as much casual caution as he's capable of, Dylan crosses the room and sits next to her. He throws half a glance over her shoulder, just to see what she's reading. Alma bristles.
"Good day?"
"No," she says, and says it so lightly she might be saying just the opposite. "You?"
"Total bust. But it's not the end of the world. These things never work out straight away, you just have to keep chipping away at them." While he speaks she is nodding gently. If you didn't know them better, you might think she wasn't listening, but it's not that. Alma really does agree. She agrees in principle. Principle is really all they have, given they really can't share the details of their separate secret lives with each other. She nods because he seems to be making sense. Sometimes Dylan gets the uneasy sensation that as much as she ever hopes for is that he will make sense.
Maybe you can imagine, this makes small talk difficult to sustain. Normally neither of them has a problem with silence. Gentle, comfortable. Comforting; there are far worse things than being able to live with someone without constantly having to fill the space between you.
But he really, really wants to ask her what's wrong.
It is becoming imperative. It burns in his lungs like a held breath, begging to break from him. But how can he? How can he when Alma is so determinedly placid, so wholeheartedly committed to this act of nonplussed and easy-going and unperturbed. She is a still pool, except that she's gone the other way with her magazine, and has turned four pages in the last ninety seconds.
Stretching out his arm on the back of the couch, Dylan delicately seeks out the end of one of her hairpins and pushes. When the bent head slips free at the other side of the knot, he picks it out and turns it back between his fingers. He's onto the fourth before she feels a hank slide free and flinches. With a terse little noise, like a groan not quite stifled, "Not tonight, okay?"
"What? No, I was just… helping." Or I thought I was, but he bites that back. That's another one of those bad things, one of those things you shouldn't say, a can-opener of a thing and who knows what might be the can?, no, that's something not to say, that is a thing to remain unsaid...
But he did catch her meaning. He knows what Alma thought he wanted. Maybe, then, space is the issue. Space has been an issue in the past. Dylan learned the hard way about space.
It wasn't his fault, not really. He himself is not into space. The life he's chosen, the vocation that found him, even his own natural inclinations, all of these things have conspired to see to it that Dylan grew up with a whole lot of space. So when things are particularly difficult, when there are problems, when he runs into something he can't handle, space has never been Dylan's go-to solution. When he comes to a bad pass, it is generally because space and isolation and independence have not worked. When Dylan is struggling, he looks for other people.
Alma is more sociable. Not just generally, off-duty, but at work too. She's part of an organization and on a normal day she isn't working against it from inside so there's a considerable difference there. Sort of a yawning chasm of a difference and maybe you'd think Dylan should have spotted it a mile off.
'Should have' and 'did' are not the same thing. The relationship survived the ordeal but he's never been able to shake the suspicion that the final round of yelling might have been what killed Alma's last goldfish.
It is with one eye on its replacement, drifting blithely around its tank and utterly unaware of its own importance, that he gets up and tries to leave her there. At first he does very well, encouraged by the note of mild relief on her sigh as he leaves the room. He gets all the way through showering and changing and does not want to go back to the couch, not for a second. The burning, clawing desperation to just ask her what's the matter subsides. Really it does, it's not urgent at all. He even manages to think of something else for a second, and when he goes to the door of the living room again, it's only because the kitchen is on the other side of it. Honestly. He's hungry. That's it, that's all, no more than that. Dylan wants a sandwich.
But he looks at her. Well, of course he does. To not even look at her, that would be taking things too far in the other direction. She doesn't have to return the favour, it's just that he happens to look in her direction.
Alma's hand is curled up by her mouth. Tiny but insistent, her front teeth click as they slide over and over again off the end of a nail they would like to bite through.
With the uncanny speed of the guilty and caught, her hand flashes away but it's too late. "Okay, that's enough." Forget the kitchen, Dylan sits next to her again. "First the hair and now this-"
"Hair? What are you talking about? Now what?"
"You haven't bitten your nails since you stopped smoking!"
Alma draws back. One fussy fumbling hand reaches back to pull the rest of her hair down. She mutters, "That was before I ever met you."
"C'mon, don't change the subject. I see things, it's my job."
"Didn't we agree we wouldn't bring work home with us?"
"Look who's talking."
"Ah! Bien sur, j'étais la problème. Tu compliques toujours les choses! On était d'accord. J'ai promis de ne rien dire, ne demandes pas. Je me sens déjà mal."
"Woah, hang on, slow down-"
"Ton français ne pas si mal…"
"Pas mal at all, thank you, but you only switch to French when we're disagreeing about something. And I haven't had a chance to say anything you could disagree with. It was a completely unfair language change, it was a linguistic sucker punch. Just give me a sec to catch up."
The slightest flicker of a smile tries to take hold, then slips. She could so easily have glared, have sighed and called him childish, but Alma almost smiles. If anything, it's worse. She's not really angry. All of her warmth and her light are in there somewhere. It's just that something is heavy enough to keep them buried, and she can't forget it for more than just a flicker. "Please." Her voice is soft and choked. Then she draws the deep breath she should have taken before she spoke at all and puts her hand on his arm. "It's work. We don't talk about work."
Because that would lead to all sorts of problems. It's not the legal considerations – she told him all about the Russia-based money laundering operation which was collapsed when they found the eighty-year-old oligarch behind it all trying to see just how many hookers he could fit into a pool. It's so they can't hurt each other. They can't worry about each other. Neither of them will ever learn anything that could compromise the other. There are no moral quandaries because they quite simply don't venture into that territory. They knew all of this from the beginning, came right out and discussed it and came to an accord – in order to have a life together, their lives have had to remain separate.
For the most part they've been sticking to it, and for the most part it has worked.
That's why he tells her she's right. He doesn't feel that way, but he says it. He isn't sorry, but he apologizes. He goes to make her tea and says nothing when he hears her get up, following him to the kitchen. Some dim instinct tells him space is still key. That's why he doesn't look round right away. He finishes what he's doing while she pulls one of the tall stools out from under the breakfast bar. He thinks she settles there.
She doesn't settle. Dylan sees his mistake the second he finally turns. Alma isn't settled, not in any way, not any part of her. She's perched on the edge, lips parted as if she had something to say and forgot it.
He resists just long enough to finish making her tea and his own coffee. When he puts the mug in her hand she looks up as if she'd forgotten where they were. When her eyes stop drifting, his are there to hold them fixed. "Tell me."
"No."
"I hear you, and I hear the reasons, and I tried to agree, I really did. But you're upset. I can't have you upset, not if I can help it. It might not be one of the out-loud explicit promises we made each other but that's only because it's too basic for that. It's a given. So tell me. Even if that's all it is and there's nothing anybody can do about it, tell me. Tell me everything."
