around, I don’t feel so awkward about my small talk.”
“Because I talk enough for the both of us, huh?”
“It’s not a criticism,” William assured him, eating another forkful of stew. “This is seriously good, by the way. Do you think…”
“Yeah?” Harper encouraged.
“Do you think you could teach me how to make it? I’m sort of a hopeless cook.”
“I can tell.” Harper decided his foot must have permanently lodged itself in his mouth.
“How? You’ve never tasted my cooking.”
“That sad excuse for a kitchen tells all. You don’t have a single spice in there. Not even salt. Who doesn’t own salt?”
When he glanced over, William had a small grin on his face. “Me, apparently. Maybe you could give me some pointers on stocking the kitchen, then?”
“Of course.”
Distracted writing a mental list of the basics to get William’s kitchen up to scratch, he managed to get through the rest of the meal without saying anything else too controversial. When he went to gather the dishes, William stopped him. “I’ve got it. You cooked, I’ll clean up.”
“You’re exhausted. I’ll handle it.”
There was a brief tug of war over the dishes before William finally said, “They’ll keep until morning.”
Harper suspected William wasn’t one to leave dishes undone, but the alternative was the alpha scrubbing away at pots and pans during their last hour together.
“We’ve still got time,” he said. “How about we move this to the living room?”
“And…?”
“And chat, watch TV, sit in silence. I mean, I’ve never been silent for more than five minutes, but there’s a first time for everything.”
“I don’t have a TV,” William pointed out, pushing to his feet with a yawn. “But sure, sitting and chatting sounds good.”
Harper excused himself to use the bathroom, and when he returned, William was sitting on the couch, pointedly not looking in Harper’s direction. He was holding himself tensely again, one arm curled around his abdomen. Harper glanced at the armchair and back at the couch, surprised that William had chosen the latter to sit on.
“Mind if we try something?”
William blinked tiredly at him. “Sure. What did you want to try?”
Harper kicked off his shoes and threw himself down on the couch beside the alpha, curling his legs up under him. He sat in such a way that they were just touching; in a casual, no-big-deal kind of way.
William recoiled at first, inching his body away from Harper, tense and tight. Harper said nothing, just leaned over and grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which happened to be a magazine about architecture. No surprises there. He flicked through it, murmuring, “Huh,” when he found an article that looked sort of interesting.
“Modern-day architecture meets gothic fairy tale; why the newly redesigned Castle Lesley is a national treasure.”
He didn’t have the first clue what the article was talking about, but the pictures were pretty. Beside him, William turned his head, regarding him with bewilderment. But underneath that was yearning. He had said he liked Harper’s voice, hadn’t he?
It was easy to keep reading. It didn’t matter so much what the words were, though he suspected all the architectural terms were familiar, maybe even comforting, to William. Next to him, the alpha slowly uncurled, his leg bumping lightly against Harper’s knee and just resting there. His breathing became slow and even, and when Harper glanced over, there was a contented smile on the alpha’s face. When he reached the end of the article, he turned the page and kept going, reading a long opinion piece on open-plan workplaces. It wasn’t particularly interesting, but the reading itself was the aim—the content didn’t matter so much.
He kept sneaking glances at William out of the corner of his eye. The alpha’s posture grew more and more relaxed, his body warm where it pressed against him. Harper went to turn the page, glancing over again only to find that William was asleep. He waited a minute, wondering if the silence would wake him, but all he could hear was the soft sound of William’s breathing. Huh. That was interesting. In Harper’s experience, his voice tended to irritate, not soothe. But there was William, sleeping peacefully right next to him. He was beginning to wonder if his initial impression of William was more of a misconception than anything else. He’d seen the alpha as irritable, arrogant, and aloof, when maybe he was really withdrawn and touch-starved, denying himself what he most needed. But knowing that didn’t do much to help. Harper had a fair idea what William needed, but within the bounds