Afternoon traffic in the city was godawful, and something about the absence of color seemed to suck the light out of everything too, or perhaps this was a separate effect from the same source; so it was already dark by the time Roman returned to the house. There was a light on in the living room, he noticed as he opened the door, but it did very little to illuminate the space for similar reasons.
Sauvage was sitting at one end of the couch with his knees pulled up against his chest, staring at the ceiling. "You came back," he said softly.
"Yes?" Roman said. His apartment in the back of the cafe, which barely qualified as such, had been restored in the course of the renovations, but he hadn't been back there since the flood, and it had not occurred to him to go there now. And where else would he go?
"I wish," Sauvage said in that same soft voice, "that were as obvious to me as it seems to be to you." He blinked, once, very slowly, and his eyes were huge and black in the darkness, vast pits with thin outlines of red. "I made dinner. An hour or two ago, but I have endeavored to keep it fresh. It doesn't hurt me," he added, anticipating Roman's concern. "It's only moving energy around, fending off bacteria and so forth. I hardly even have to think about it."
Roman nodded, and came over to sit next to him on the couch. He wanted to kiss Sauvage, to take his hand, something small that might bring some reassurance, but given how things had gone earlier he couldn't guess whether such a gesture would be welcome.
"I'm..." Sauvage, still not looking at him, took a deep breath. "I'm ready to talk, if...if you'd like."
"Please," Roman said.
Sauvage nodded, and then nodded again, as if confirming to himself that he had agreed, that he really did have to do this. Another deep breath. "We've known each other a long time," he said, and he said it in what Jules called his storytelling voice, the voice of high drama and events far away in time, and Roman said:
"Stop. Don't do that."
"You have no appreciation for the art of theatre," Sauvage said.
"I don't want theatre," Roman said wearily. "I want you to be honest with me."
"I am honest with you! You don't trust me?" He sounded so anguished that Roman wanted to take it back, let him continue spinning his yarn, let him put a pane of glass between himself and his life and his feelings; it would be easier for him that way. Easier for both of them, perhaps, for a little while. But one thing Roman had come to know—not in the time he'd known Sauvage, but in other, earlier parts of his life, though it had taken some time to figure out how to apply them to this confounding man in particular—was that a relationship could not be founded on a performance. One could not properly love someone who was always hiding.