Alejandro allows her to grow into him. Into his spaces. Into the empty crevasse of his worn out heart, and of his aching mind. He allows her to take root. Place her thoughts, her interests, her love - all amassed in his chest. A little at a time.
She is kind to him. Puts up with his evasiveness - sometimes unintentional, other times out of necessity. Touches him the way he yearns to be touched. Accompanies him the way he yearns for company. Exist in tandem for as long as he allows her to.
He sees it in her dark eyes - she knows that there is no permanence to him.
Once, when she had welcomed him into her kitchen, where he observes that she is truly at home surrounded by her appliances and away from the brimming crowd, she tells him about her love for the craft of making bread.
"The dough takes on a life of its own, it has its own way of reacting - sometimes massive, sometimes unhinged," She describes, "It's almost like taming a beast."
So you can put a blue ribbon on my brain
God, I'm very, very frightened, I'll overdo it
"There are things about me I need to tell you."
He had bought a bottle of her favourite red that night. Welcomed her into his space, now more lived in. A record player to the side, a copy of a vinyl by The National - hers, one that spun the very song he has now long regarded as theirs. The shelves, once empty and only storing terrors, have been uncharacteristically replaced with science fiction - replicating, almost, the life he is leading now.
On the bedside table, next to the bed he has finally rested in, his ring.
He has eyes on him.
She doesn't ask him, What is it?
Instead she settles into the leather sofa, to the left of where Graver had once sat, and taps for him to come to her. She doesn't hold her breath. She doesn't flinch.
Alejandro has known her for a while now, but he has never found himself stuttering.
He tells her first about his wife. Then his daughter. There are things about Mexico that he ghosts over - like Kate, he is bound beneath the secrecy of a broken bureaucracy. He dismantles the pieces kept on his shelves - the ones he can still tell - one by broken one. Tells her that he is built from atrocities. A gravitational whirlpool of death, a wolf amongst wolves.
But now a ghost.
Alejandro Gillick, hardened by the ways of the world around him is morally bankrupt - there are no longer tears that can absolve him. So when his story ends, when he closes his chapter, all he does is stare at her. And she stares back.
She doesn't realise the breath she has been holding on to. Doesn't flinch, until he reaches out and ghosts a touch above her fingers.
He suddenly becomes hyper aware of the way she is looking at him.
His apartment reverts to a ghost of its past.
Dark eyes. Stuffy air. Claustrophobia.
"I'm sorry."
He almost doesn't know what he's apologising for. Almost doesn't know if she still recognises the man that sits before her. The one she has fed with her own two hands, the order of coffee she has memorised, the worn out soul that she has allowed to ghost over her.
But she reaches out, grazes her thumb over the scar of where the exit wound would have been. She kisses over the dent in the middle of his lips, wipes a gentle finger over it.
She doesn't stay with him that night. Excuses herself for home, for him to allow her to digest the tragedy that had become him - the blood that his fingers had come to know so well, try to make sense of the anguish, the pain, and the terror that he carries inside him.
There is no permanence for Alejandro Gillick.