Page 108 of Nine-Tenths

"Hey... you're safe, right?"

"I'm safe. I'm okay. I'm… fuck, I'm even kinda happy?"

"Okay. Shit. Wow. Okay. Talk to you later. Bye."

"Bye."

The call with Mum is harder, filled with tears and grovelling on my part, because I’m not the only one still suffering the trauma and grief of losing dad suddenly. The worry in her voice, the way she describes her desperation to get in contact with me, makes every organ I possess twist with guilt and nausea roil in my gut. I promise to never vanish on her like that again, and when she hangs up, I feel only marginally less like the shittiest son on planet Earth.

A few minutes later, Dav finds me leaning on the fence of the coop, watching the chickens and wiping my face dry.

"I like your farm." His arms wrap around my waist, his chin rests on my shoulder. I don’t want to talk about the calls, andhe lets me change the subject. "I like what you've done. The aquaculture is fascinating. I read an article about…" I trail off, clear my throat. "Sorry."

"Why sorry?"

"Uh, I get ranty about my hyperfocuses?"

"Colin—you don't think I know that?" Dav presses a kiss into my hair. "I’ve been going to the café long enough to be there while you were still studying. "

"Oh god—" I groan, letting my head drop forward both because of the way Dav's mouth is playing at the back of my ear, and also because I am mortified. "All those times I read my thesis to Hadi while we were slow."

"It was fascinating. You've got a flair for word-crafting."

"It's all the romance novels. Sorry."

"It was a delight." Dav says, and pulls the lobe of my ear between his teeth, gently. "I wouldn't have come back if I hadn't enjoyed it."

I turn in his arms, slide my own hands through his hair, and kiss him quiet. Or at least, I try to.

"The thing you said in the first chapter, about serving the community by serving the world—"

"You kinky motherfucker," I laugh.

"It's noble," Dav protests, but he's leering.

"I don't think there's a lot noble about basically shouting for three hundred pages straight—"

"I do," Dav interrupts. "And Luiz agreed."

"That's flattering but—wait, hold on." I push him back to meet his eyes. "Saywhat?"

"I did my best to remember everything you said," Dav explains, as if he's talking about the mundanities of reporting a boring office meeting and notreciting my thesis to an actual winemaker. "But I made rather a hash of it. Too much staring and not enough active listening. Luckily, I was able to obtain acopy after the university published it. Luiz was quite impressed with your diagrams for an aquaculture bed for… what's wrong?"

Jesus.

Fucking.

Christ.

No wonder I find his farm fascinating.

It's a living, breathing,workingmodel of what I had laid out in my goddamnthesis.

Well, as much as it could be, when imposed on top of a pre-existing geography and… and… "Wait, wait, so like, all of this? You what, you did all this because…?"

"Because it was clever. And it sounded like it would work."

"You do the goat thingbecauseI love the goat thing?"

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