The quiet automatic courtesy of a man who wants to be near the person who has just walked in, and he pulls the chair back just slightly, an inch, enough to be an invitation rather than a demand. His pale blue eyes move over me in the afternoon light, taking me in the way he takes everything in, directly and without advertising it, and they do the thing they do when he has seen something he considers worth looking at.
"You look well," he says.
"I feel like someone who has been caught in the middle of a storm for three days," I say, sitting down.
He chuckles. "We all have."
Tomas is to my left.
He has his glasses on and his gray eyes are doing the warm steady thing they do when he has made peace with something and is sitting in that peace, and he looks at me over the rim of his glasses with the expression that has been doing problematic things to my composure since the first time I walked into his library.
"Are you all right?” he says.
"Fine. Tea and books and Carmen. I was completely fine," I say.
Santos appears with the pasta and sets it in front of me first and the smell of it hits me and every argument I was constructing dissolves immediately.
I take a bite.
It's good.
Not my-tarragon-lamb good, not the duck confit in Paris good, and I pause for a second while eating, then put my fork down and look at Santos across the table.
He has his forearms flat on the table and his warm brown eyes on my face and he is trying very hard not to look like he has been waiting for this verdict and he is failing completely.
"It's good," I say.
The relief that moves through his face is immediate and warm and entirely unguarded, and it starts in his eyes and moves through his whole expression, and the saffron in the air brightens, and I feel it in my chest in a way I am going to attribute to the pasta for as long as that remains even slightly plausible.
"I told you," he says, to Matteo and Tomas, with the specific satisfaction of a man who has been doubted and vindicated in the same morning.
"You told us," Matteo says. The almost-smile. The actual one, brief and real.
"Hmm, the flavors are wonderful. You did well," I say.
Tomas makes the sound, the almost-laugh, and it is brief and genuine and I add it to the collection without looking at him because looking at him when he does that requires a level of composure I don't currently have available.
"I wasn't being sarcastic," I say to Tomas.
"I know," he says. "It is just that Santos takes everything he does too seriously. Everything has to be perfect. He was worried it wasn't."
It's as if I've given them permission to eat too. I nod and carry on eating.
Santos across from me with his forearms on the table and his warm brown eyes finding mine every time I look up. Matteo to my right with his pale eyes steady. Tomas to my left with his glasses and his silver musk sitting around me like something settled.
Santos refills my water without being asked.
Matteo passes the bread before I reach for it.
Tomas adjusts the olive oil closer to my side of the table without a word.
My omega is very quiet in the way she goes quiet when she has gotten what she wanted and doesn't need to say anything further.
"Tell me about Chiara," I say.
I keep eating because I want them to see that I am asking from a place of wanting information and not from a place of insecurity, which is mostly true.
Santos puts his fork down.