Chapter Text
An amber glow illuminated the corner of the room as the two partners finished the last of their respective meals. They’d been quiet for the last couple of minutes, both comfortable in their shared silence, save for the soft scraping of their plates. Robin looked over at her partner, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration as he ate his last mouthful of food and smiled slowly.
Inside their office, the murmuring of voices and the hums of drunken laughter could be heard out of the open window, and Robin shivered as a cool breeze floated into the room. From the open window, drunken laughter and snippets of conversation drifted into the office.
Within moments, her partner stood up and shut the window with a click. The last few months had brought the two of them closer; the lack of any romantic entanglements from either party had meant that they’d spent more time in each other’s company than ever before. It was wonderful. There was no one waiting impatiently for her to get home, no one constantly misunderstanding her job, her purpose. She was happier than she could remember ever being in her adult life.
This wasn’t all down to Strike. She had taken better steps to deal with her stress, no longer moving from one long-term relationship to another and instead learning how to nurture her own company. With one step forward had come one step back, and a difficult case and a series of sleepless nights and panic attacks had resulted in therapy once a fortnight for the indefinite future. Six months ago, this would have been excruciating, but she was beginning to see its use. She’d picked up hobbies she thought she had lost forever, now spending her time off sketching or walking. Though London was not a patch on the rolling hills of home, time strolling by the river on a lazy Saturday morning and meeting Strike halfway for a coffee was quickly becoming one of her highlights.
However, spending so much time with her partner had its own complications. Over the years, the hours they’d passed in each other’s company had resulted in a shorthand so effective he barely had to start speaking before she could finish his sentence. This was something she had prided herself on – there was no one that could read her better than him, and him her.
Lost in her thoughts, she scrolled idly through her Google results as he cleared up the remains of their meal around her. The clinking and clattering of crockery and the rustling of the kettle floated into their office, and she smiled brightly at her partner as he wordlessly brought her a tea, just the way she liked it.
Despite their easy shorthand, there were invisible walls between them, unspoken boundaries that neither dared to cross.
She had felt it most keenly a couple of months ago, stretched out in bed with a large glass of wine and her laptop, a drink past sensible already. She’d been thinking about him—about them—about the quiet but persistent feeling that, for all their time together, she still only knew as much of Strike as he allowed. If she was perfectly honest, she couldn’t recall a time that he had truly opened up to her when he wasn’t drunk or at least vulnerably hungover. After some idle googling, she stumbled across Arthur Aron’s paper “The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings”.
She decided it was worth a try.
Had she not been under the influence herself, she might have hesitated at clicking the link below the paper to that fateful New York Times article. If she had been stone-cold sober, she wouldn’t have read the author’s experience with such bated breath. If she hadn’t distracted herself by spilling the remainder of the wine on her fresh bedsheets, she might have noticed it was her breath that hitched at the title of the article. If it hadn’t been ten past two in the morning, she might have thought twice before texting her partner the first question.
She hadn’t expected him to answer. But the next morning, with a pounding headache and an embarrassing sense of dread, she’d seen his reply waiting on her screen. Robin never brought it up. She let the questions trickle into their conversations naturally, months apart, careful not to ask too many at once. She told herself it was about trust, about shared vulnerability, about understanding him better. She refused to acknowledge the articles focused on romantic love.
Loudly, he slurped his tea as he sat in front of her, eyes focused on the screen separating them. She jumped out of her thoughts and smiled as he looked over the screen at her, eyebrows tilted in question.
“Have you found anything for her yet?” she asked, hurriedly pulling herself back into the present.
He sighed, rubbing his face roughly. “No, what do we know about that woman other than she bakes an excellent fruitcake and her nicotine addiction that rivals mine?”
She laughed gently at his frustration, rolling her chair around the desk to sit beside him. Typing quickly, she selected a website and then a product before seamlessly moving her laptop between them as he moved his out of the way. The familiar smell of tobacco and tea and something else that she’d never been able to quite put her finger on got stronger as he leaned in to see her selection.
“Pat will love it.” He said, eyes still focused on the deep green mixing bowl as he leaned back in his chair.
She felt the tips of her cheeks warm at the praise. Despite this not being a very strictly work matter, she still craved to impress him. “Thanks. I can order it from us both?”
“I’ll pay. You did the work of finding it, she’ll know you chose it anyway.”
She nodded, head staying ducked down as her hair fell in front of her face. He watched the colour of it change to a brighter red under the yellow glow of the lamp beside her. She was quiet as she concentrated, and he absentmindedly watched her type and select the size and then their address. “And she definitely wants to work her birthday?” he checked, being all too aware of how the office manager tried to keep up the pretence that she would only work to what was absolutely necessary.
Robin rolled her eyes at her partner. “Says the man who hasn’t had his birthday off in years.”
“I want to be here. I don’t know if she even likes it here!”
“She does. You know she does. Besides, she told me she doesn’t like to do anything big to celebrate; there’s too much pressure on birthdays to make them perfect, apparently.”
Strike smiled at that. “I can hear her saying that.”
Robin nodded, touched that as much as Pat and Strike may have initially seemed unnerved by each other, their mutual appreciation was never as hidden as either thought. Though the tasks of the evening were now complete, she found herself not wanting to leave.
“What would a perfect day look like to you?” she asked, her heart hammering in the specific way she was starting to grow accustomed to when she asked him one of the questions from the list she’d kept in her notes on her phone. She’d been conscious to spread them out, not ask too much from him, so this was only the fourth question of thirty-six. The last thing she wanted was for him to realise she was up to anything, so she fought to keep her expression neutral and light.
Strike hummed as he leaned further back in his chair in thought.
“Well, it wouldn’t begin as early as today, that’s for sure.” He started, smiling at his partner’s breath of a laugh. Robin had had the pleasure of seeing him on many the early morning and had quickly become familiar with the particular facet of his grumpy disposition that could only come from a stakeout starting before 9.
“What else?”
“Umm, I’ve been meaning to catch a game one of these days; that could be nice.” He continued, feeling slightly exposed at Robin’s intensity of the question.
She nodded. If it wasn’t for their recent high volume of cases and Barclay being away for his anniversary, she would have been surprised he hadn’t gone that weekend. Last month, an ex-client had thrown in tickets in a private box alongside a pretty substantial bonus for reuniting him with his daughter, and Robin found herself looking for them on their corkboard, pinned with pride in the centre.
“And?” she asked, internally rolling eyes at herself.
He looked at her quizzically for a moment before relaxing. “I’ve not thought about it. It would probably end the evening in the pub,” he sighed before asking, “Go on then, Ellacott, what would your perfect day be?”
She sat back, slightly startled. In the few questions she had manage to slip into their conversations, he had never asked her the question in return. He smiled at her reassuringly, having noticed the hesitation present on her face, “Not so easy now you’re the one who has to answer, is it?”
Robin stayed quiet for a few moments, reaching for her still-warm tea to give herself a moment to think. Her mind briefly flickered to their almost-perfect evening at the Ritz, her partner more open than she had ever seen him, the bashful expression on his face as he held the balloon in the crowded street and then the hurt in his eyes as he shut the door of the taxi. She shook her head lightly to physically clear herself of those thoughts. “I’d start the day early, maybe go for a run?”
“In London?” he asked incredulously, his voice teasing and playful.
“Maybe not.”
“Sorry, go on.”
“Start with some movement outside anyway.”
He nodded at this, having noticed that Robin’s recent increased desire for exercise and nature coincided with starting sessions with her most recent therapist but tactfully decided this was not the moment to mention so.
“Ilsa and I have been meaning to try one of those art and wine afternoons, but she’s been so busy lately we haven’t had the chance.”
This was a fact that Strike knew all too well. His contact with both the Herberts had been more limited recently, with their family and professional lives having become busier. “I’ll go with you,” he found himself offering, not really thinking of the implications, just that Robin’s art intrigued him.
His partner’s raised eyebrows made him snort. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you even doodle!”
“I don’t,” he said gruffly, feeling embarrassment warm his face, he avoided eye contact with Robin.
She kept her eyes down too, mindlessly picking at the chipped paint on the mug’s handle with her nails to distract herself from the warm feeling blossoming in her chest at his kind gesture. “Thanks, Cormoran.”
“S’ok.” He said, shuffling slightly in his chair, still avoiding eye contact.
She cleared her throat slightly before moving on. “And I’d end the night at the pub too, or maybe on the sofa with a glass of wine.”
He laughed slightly at this, making eye contact once again. “So your perfect day ends with getting sloshed; I should have known.”
She rolled her eyes, busying herself with closing down her laptop that had long since timed out to ignore the fact that although a glass of wine was lovely, the perfect evening she was envisaging involved her partner’s face on the other side of the table, not alone on the sofa.
“I don’t know about perfect, but what do you say to a drink down the Tottenham before I send you home to bed?” he asked, already standing up and moving across the room to pick up their coats before she answered.
“If you’re paying,” she said, accepting the offered coat with a smile as Strike locked the door to their office.