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Nightingale has often commented, usually disparagingly, on my fondness for the scientific method. But it's flexible and can be applied to many interesting and important questions, including one Beverley asked me one night as I was driving her home. We'd had dinner out, Bev and Nightingale and Galeed and me, to celebrate the successful arrest of a minor but irritating fae thief, and I was dropping Bev at hers before heading back to the Folly because I had things to do early the next morning. Bev was in an inquisitive mood.
"Do you think he fancies you?"
"Who?" I asked, attention fully on the road in accordance with what I expect they're going to tell me at that fancy driving course when I finally get on it.
"Your boss. Nightingale. Do you think he fancies you?"
"Nah," I said, reflexively, having never seriously considered the question. I mean, I had briefly when he first approached me, and once or twice - watching him in action on the practice range or in a wash of relief when he rescued me from some supernatural risk to life and limb or other - I'd wondered whether I fancied him. But I was pretty sure he didn't take much interest in me beyond my long-term operational usefulness. "What made you think of that?"
"Something about the way he looks at you," Bev said. "I don't know. Maybe it's just an instinct."
"I'm not even sure he's gay."
"He probably is."
Bev and I had discussed this before, trying to work out what was our prejudice about posh white men who went to boarding school and dress very smartly and have excellent polished manners and keep a stiff upper lip and never bring anyone home at all, and what was genuinely less than completely heterosexual about Nightingale. If he was gay, he kept it to himself, but then, if you'd grown up a gay man in the early twentieth century you would, wouldn't you? I thought he'd moved with the times enough that he'd have come out by now, and Bev thought he might not, and I had to admit that she had much more experience with centuries-old beings than I did.
"Probably," I agreed.
"And so maybe he fancies you," she added.
"So what if he does?" I asked, wondering what was making her so interested in this topic. Later on I would find out that there was a bit more, err, worshipping going on with Maksim than I had been aware of, and I'd suspect that she had started this conversation with the intention of distracting me, but at the time she simply said, "I just think you should know if your boss is lusting after you. It might come in handy."
A copper always wants to know things, so she didn't have to sell me on that too much. "How would I find out for sure? Unless he says something?"
"You're the detective," she said, very reasonably, and kissed me on the cheek before stepping gracefully out of the car and waving me goodnight.
*
Experiment 1: observe patterns of homosocial vs heterosocial behaviour to try and establish attraction.
I don't claim to be an expert in human sexuality, but I'd done some reading on my phone and it did seem like observing Nightingale's reactions to various people might give me some clues about who he found attractive. It might not narrow it down to straight or gay - the internet was pretty keen to remind me about asexual people and pansexual people and multiple other options - but some of the body language forums had pretty specific advice about what to watch for. You can't exactly measure pupil dilation, especially when you're not the person being looked at, but I thought leaning towards someone and mirroring their gestures might be clues.
However, this experiment design required the opportunity to observe him interacting with a range of other people. In a quiet day at the Folly, I discounted three occasions on which he leaned towards me for perfectly obvious reasons - passing a book, demonstrating a formae, looking at something on my phone - and one occasion on which he leant towards Molly (receiving a cup of tea). The next day I had to go down to Belgravia nick to interview a suspect, and Nightingale stayed in the library, so I didn't make any observations at all. But the day after that I was in luck on the observation front - we got a shout to a possibly Falcon-involved murder at 5am, and both of us went, and did the usual standing around outside while the forensics did their thing, and then the standing around after the Falcon assessment to discuss our findings, and all that standing around along with the coming and going of senior officers and junior officers and uniforms and people in and out of noddy suits. The poor bloke who'd been shot through the heart by an elf arrow wasn't in luck, of course, although it turned out to be a vengeful customer who was annoyed that the bloke had stopped selling coke to the demi-monde, which at least was a nice neat solve for the Murder Team.
In the two hours we were standing about in a suburban street in the early hours, I made the following observations. No noticeable leaning towards anyone (except the corpse to check for vestigia, which doesn't count). Only two incidents of mirroring gestures, both to senior officers who needed placating about the presence of weird bollocks on their manors. (And one of them was Stephanopoulos, so if that was flirting I'd need to go back to the internet for some more explanations.)
I was watching a police van full of useful crime scene equipment do a tricky reversal round the corner when Nightingale touched my wrist. "We're done here, Peter. Breakfast?"
I agreed. Over breakfast we worked out our actions for the day, and while I was driving to my first appointment I tried to work out a new experimental approach.
*
Experiment 2: test responses to other people's flirtatious behaviour.
Logically, if I wasn't having any luck observing Nightingale's own reactions to other people, I could create some stimuli and look for responses. This seemed to have a higher chance of success because I had more control - I could choose the time and place of the interaction, for example, and make sure that I, or some handy CCTV camera, witnessed it. The downside was that it involved higher risk, because I'd have to recruit some fellow investigators and brief them on their mission.
This was a very substantial downside, because although I have had extensive experience in breaking bad news to people and in explaining all the weird bollocks which goes down around me, "my girlfriend thinks my boss fancies me so I designed an experiment to test his sexual orientation" is very strange even by my standards. It didn't come up in conversation naturally at any point over the next few days, and when I thought about ways to introduce it I thought people would draw inaccurate conclusions, so I decided to adjust my experimental protocol. If you are the only experimenter... you have to do it yourself.
The stimuli had to be distinct and repeatable. Leaning towards him wasn't going to be enough, and nor were things which happened anyway as we worked and lived together - mirroring would be hard to measure because a chunk of our magical practice involves deliberately and specifically me copying what he does, mostly the forma but also the words and gestures. So I settled on touches: two kinds of touch which were casual enough to be plausibly deniable, within or close to the range of touches he would give me for merely communicative reasons, and easy to repeat and count.
I started with the shoulder-touch. On Thursday, my first full day of experimental data collection, I found five opportunities to touch Nightingale's shoulder - four times on the left and once on the right. This is probably mainly chance although it supports a previous suspicion that he prefers to have me standing on his left, especially if I'm behind him. We were out and about the majority of the day, asking questions at various pubs and houses associated with members of the demi-monde, so I repeatedly found that he was standing half a pace ahead of me, cane in his right hand, me slightly to the left. I made a note of that but considered it irrelevant, on balance, to the main data collected.
Five touches, five reactions. On four occasions he looked or at least glanced at me, grey eyes over his shoulder. When there's nothing much else going on, it's enough to get his full attention, a look which is measured or perhaps measuring. On look five, in the evening, he gave me such an assessing look that I began to wonder if he was wondering why I was touching his shoulder so often, and decided to terminate the experiment there for the day. On the one occasion when he didn't even glance at me, it was probably because the half-fae supermarket shelf stacker he was questioning had just made a packet of dried basil start growing roots. Which, to be fair, is distracting, even if you are moderately accustomed to magical happenings.
After that conversation finished and we left the supermarket, he did look at me, but I don't know whether to count that or not.
*
Experiment 2 part 2: lower back touches.
I decided, on reflection, that the data from the shoulder-touching experiment wasn't very secure. They were too much like 'getting you attention' gestures. On the Friday, we spent most of the day at the Folly running our basic training course on 'when to call it in as Falcon-related'. I was pleased he let me help with the teaching side of it, and I counted six times when he touched my shoulder, so...
So what, actually? I asked myself as I lay in bed. Did that mean he understood it as a non-sexual gesture and was comfortable using it with me? Or did it read as flirtatious to him and Bev was right? Or was he copying what I'd done the day before? Or did it mean that I kept drifting off to think about my experiment when I should have been paying attention to the group of uniforms I was meant to be teaching?
I had no way to know for sure, so I decided to carry on with my original experimental design and escalate to lower-back touches. This was drifting into the sort of thing they warn you about in sexual harassment seminars, which was either a flaw in the plan or an advantage, depending whether it meant I was about to be disciplined or about to find out for real whether Nightingale was interested in me. Or maybe those were both flaws, because the reciprocal shoulder-touching had made me realise that some outcomes to this experiment might pose the further question: am I attracted to Nightingale?
("Of course you are," Bev would say the next day when I shared this with her. "The way you talk about him..." But I hadn't yet been given the benefit of this insight.)
But if there's one thing my years of policing have taught me, other than to believe nothing and check everything, it's not to ask the next set of questions until you have answers to the current set. If Nightingale isn't interested in me, the question of my attraction doesn't come up. I rolled over in bed, determined to start the next experiment the very next morning, and made myself go to sleep.
The first thing I realised is that lower-back touches are harder to deliver than shoulder-touches. They're more context-specific. You can get away with it fairly easily if you'd letting someone up some stairs ahead of you, or maybe walking with them on the street... breakfast together and a couple of hours of Latin lessons in the library provided no opportunities. (He did lean over my shoulder to check my work in a way which involved more physical contact than I thought was strictly necessary, and which was very pleasant, but I didn't have a way to include that in my results so I decided to ignore it for the time being.) It wasn't until Toby snuck into the library mid-morning with his lead in his mouth that I came up with a plan.
Good weather was on my side and we were soon strolling through the park, Toby snuffling through the flower beds, still discussing Latin verbs, and I went for the first touch. Light, that was the idea, plausibly deniable. Something you could say 'oops' about and never mention again.
Nightingale glanced meaningfully at me and very, very briefly paused in the middle of a sentence. Neither of us broke stride and he didn't move away, either; if anything, he settled back into the touch before picking up where he'd stopped speaking. "... and that's why conjugation by mood matters..."
I didn't know why conjugation by mood was important and if I was going to find out, it would have to be from the textbook later, because my mind was much too busy processing that result. Expression plus pause plus moving towards me rather than away... I knew what I thought that added up to. And it meant I had some other questions to consider.
*
When we got back to the Folly I headed for the tech cave rather than going into the main building. "Oh," Nightingale said when he realised, and maybe I was imagining the slight note of disappointment in his voice.
"I just need to make a phone call. I'll be back in soon."
Nightingale nodded. "I'll be in the library. We've still got that stack of photocopies from Harold about unicorns to sort through."
Only one other person knew about my experiments, so I phoned her and posed my new question only to receive an unequivocal answer. "And more to the point," she said, "what are you going to do about it?"
"You mean, will I have sex with him?"
"And all the rest. Are you really going to get into a relationship with your boss, your teacher, a white man? What will your mother say?"
"My mum loves him."
"As your boss."
It was a fair point, but it wasn't leading anywhere useful. I pointedly refrained from raising the whole question about professional standards, too. "Let's not get ahead of this. What if I'm wrong?"
"Then nothing else will happen. Or at worst you'll have to have an extremely awkward conversation with him."
I could imagine that: make a more explicit move, be turned down kindly and politely, and cement my reputation for setting things on fire by spontaneously combusting in a ball of embarrassment.
"This is risky," I said to Bev.
"Your call, love," she said to me. "Anyway, gotta go, Maksim and I are going to buy a willow tree."
Not terribly helpful, but at least it made it seem more real and less like something I might have dreamed. I took a deep breath and went to find Nightingale in the library with the photocopies.
*
Experiment 3: responding in kind.
I was almost certain about my read on Nightingale's response. Almost. And I thought Beverley was probably right when she said I was attracted to him, too. Probably. To test both hypotheses, I decided to wait for him to touch me, but then to respond in kind - a shoulder-touch for a shoulder-touch, lean in when I was touched and give a lingering look if I couldn't respond another way.
I'm not sure either of us learned very much about unicorns that afternoon. That was partly because Postmartin's pile of photocopies were mostly not actually about unicorns, but about someone's fantasy of a unicorn, or something they'd heard once, or some of kind of magical horse, or something else entirely. It was also, at least on my side, because I was completely distracted by Nightingale.
He also seemed distracted. We kept trying to work, and we kept 'accidentally' touching each other - our fingers on the pages, shoulders as we bent over the desks, maintaining each touch for longer until we settled side-by-side at the dinner table. Molly served us and left, and Nightingale took one bite before he put his knife and fork down (carefully, not clattering) and sighed and said, "We are going to have to talk about this."
"This?" I said, although I'm sure he didn't buy my pretence of ignorance for a second.
"Didn't someone say, 'Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards'?" he asked.
"Tolkien," I said. "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." My heart started racing with the ready-to-run beat I recognised from a hundred fights. Nightingale was not, in my experience, actually quick to anger, but when Britain's most powerful practitioner chooses to remind you of a saying like that, it's alarming. I tried to stay outwardly calm and kept our eye contact, but he would have read my reaction easily enough.
"I wasn't thinking of that part," he said. "But, Peter, the last week or so... you have been... unusually tactile."
It's a fair cop, guv. "Yes, sir," I said and opened my mouth again to try and start talking my way out of it.
He raised a hand, a tiny gesture but enough to stop me speaking. "I'm not angry," he said. "I might not fully understand, yet, but I would have stopped you sooner if I minded."
"Sir..." I tried again, but again the hand.
"I think we are more likely to reach a good conclusion to this conversation if we make ourselves as equal as possible within it, Peter," he said. "My name is Thomas."
"Thomas," I said, and stopped, because this no longer felt like something I needed to talk my way out of.
"And you decided to raise the level of physical contact between us because...?"
Because science, I did not say. I also discarded Because Bev says you fancy me. "Because I wanted to know what was possible," I said as levelly as I could. I met his gaze and his grey eyes were wide with something like amazement or maybe shock; perhaps even a little fear.
"And what do you imagine might be possible now?" he asked.
"Well..." Time for one last experiment. His hand was pressed flat to the table next to his fork, maybe in an effort at self control. Gently, I covered it with mine. "I can imagine a lot of outcomes," I admitted. "But some of them involve a lot of mutual pleasure."
Thomas nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, indeed. Will that be enough, though? What about the ethics of the situation?"
"We're both consenting adults," I said. "You're not forcing me. I'm not forcing you - or I don't think so."
He shook his head quickly. "If you're sure those are the main concerns. You have thought of the potential career implications."
"I have," I said. Later, I would realise that I really hadn't, probably because I'd never known another cop who started sleeping with their boss; I was thinking of vaguer things, stories about students who graduated from university and then married their professors.
"So you're sure you want this? You don't feel that it would be a dereliction of my duty of care?"
"I want you," I said, clearly and precisely. "As part of... as part of our duty of care towards one another." I'm not sure that actually makes sense but I said it very convincingly. "And, if you want me... I'd rather know, than spend all my time wondering about it."
"I understand."
"And you? What do you want?"
He picked up his knife and fork again and started trying to disassemble, if not exactly eat, Molly's carefully made dinner. "It's been a long time since I thought very much about what I want."
"And now that you are?" I poked at the pie half-heartedly. It was probably amazing and Molly was in danger of getting completely the wrong impression.
"Am I right in thinking that you were - I'm not sure of the modern phrase - putting the moves on me?"
I covered my surprise with a large mouthful of pie. It was delicious. It also meant that my mouth was full and I only had to reply in the form of an enquiringly raised eyebrow.
"Not just touching me," Thomas expanded. "Watching. Noticing. I felt like one of your experiments." Sometimes he's just a bit too insightful. I gave him a cautious nod. "I... liked that. Being the centre of your attention. You working out what I enjoyed." He was looking down at his plate and the faintest blush of pink was spreading over the corner of his cheeks.
"I could carry on," I offered. "Try things out... systematically."
"Good idea." He looked at me again, then, his mouth slightly open, and I found I had a lot of ideas about things to try.
*
We got to the end of dinner - it's a blur now - and I took him up to my bedroom. I hadn't prepared for this, exactly, but at the Folly there's always a strong chance that someone is either going to burst in or call you out during the middle of the night, so I kept it tidy with my clothes easy to find. When I closed the door behind us there was a pause. We hadn't touched over dinner, and although I'd put my hand to the small of his back in encouraging him up the stairs, he hadn't reached out to me. I let the pause hang for a moment, just an arm's length away, watching him, checking that he still wanted to be here.
He looked back at me, then away, not assessing the room unless he was checking the quality of the carpet. (Deep pile, soft, and clean, just like in the rest of the Folly.) I almost asked whether there were any sex spells I should know about, but I figured that reminding him of his role as a teacher was more likely to ruin the mood than letting the silence stretch.
Eventually I stepped closer, inside his personal space, then close enough to feel his breath on my cheek. "Do you like kissing?" I asked.
"Err... I think so."
"You think so?"
"When I was last... sexually active... we didn't always have time for that sort of thing."
Oh. For a moment I pictured cottaging, a constant fear of arrest, hasty hand jobs and blow jobs in public spaces. It was just a guess but it didn't seem like the moment to ask. "Let's try and find out."
The start of the kiss was gentle, even hesitant, mouths closed, my hand on his shoulder and his coming towards my face before stopping, controlled, palms spread over my shirt. I was still half-tracking his responses - leaning in, mirroring my movements, at this distance I might get pupil measurement although I didn't open my eyes to find out - and when I was fairly sure he was enjoying it, I deepened the kiss: very slightly open mouth, the tip of my tongue, hand running down his back and the other joining it to pull him closer, starting to become aware of a rhythm forming between us. I was just wondering whether to go for something even deeper when he pulled away, panting slightly, and rested his head on my shoulder.
Not quite the response I was expecting, but a good copper - presumably a good scientist, too - always try to adapt their plans as new information arrives. He wasn't moving backwards, just resting, so I held him close and waited for a moment. I really do have a duty of care here, I thought. He's so aware of his power in everyday life but there are things he might not be ready for.
"Okay?" I asked, when he seemed to have caught his breath.
"Yes, quite alright. Sorry. It was a little overwhelming for a moment."
Lesson learned: take it slow. "No problem. Want to try again?" He lifted his head and we kissed - still gentle, less hesitant, more tongue, but nothing further. Like trying to wave each other through a door first. I remembered that I'd been put in charge and worked out my next move. Thank goodness he'd adopted the Met's preference for clip-on ties, because that came off immediately, but I paused with my fingers on the first button of his shirt. I leaned back just far enough to see his face, asking permission.
"If you really want to," he said, shrugging, both consenting and somehow implying that nudity was an unusual fetish.
"I want to," I said firmly, and started undoing his shirt. I did pretty well, revealing a strip of pale and scarred skin, until I got to his cuff links, which seemed to be jammed somewhere between the fabric and the bones of his wrists. I was tempted to use force, just to get to the next stage where I got to see him properly, but I didn't want to hurt him or damage anything expensive.
I felt him line up some forma, cast, and the cuff links dropped softly to the carpet.
"Useful," I said. In a heroic piece of self-control, I still did not ask any questions about sex spells. Instead, I slipped the shirt off his shoulders; I considered leaning back for a look, but his muscles were tense under my hands and I opted for maximum skin contact instead, nuzzling close as the fabric fell away. He shivered, just once, and it made me want to expose him to every amazing sensation the world has to offer.
"Your turn." I didn't wait to be asked again - I lent back just far enough my hoodie and t-shirt came off over my head in one go, my patently quick-change routine which massively annoys anyone else who has to sort out my laundry. And when that was done I did get to look at him. Some of the scars I recognised. Other were clearly older, or minor. On his left side there was a bruise, probably from a bloke we thought was a vampire but instead turned out to be mainly interested in throwing bricks at us. Thomas had sworn at the time that none of them had connected, probably to avoid the inevitable prodding by paramedics.
He was looking at me, too. I've got my share of scars and a scattering of hair and not exactly a six pack, although I'm still - Beverley had assured me recently - in pretty good shape. Thomas's long fingers hovered and he glanced up at my face. "Please," I said. "Anything you like."
For a moment, his hand still hovered over my skin, as if checking for vestigia. Then he began to touch me properly, first stroking me gently, then one hand over my shoulder pulling me in for another kiss. I made sure to take my time and enjoy that before making my next move. Of course I found a fiddly button fly, but patience was the name of the game, and we managed to keep the kiss going while I dealt with it. More skin. I ran my hand round, inside his waistband, to his back. I didn't have to pull him close because he ground his hips into mine.
"Yes," he said. "Your hand. I presume that's still a common practice?"
It was. For all his early hesitancy, he was now more than ready, and I hardly had his dick in hand (long, I noticed, and somehow finely shaped, like the rest of him) before he was spilling over me, onto the trousers we were both still wearing, but fortunately not onto the carpet. He was very quiet, face pressed into the crook of my neck again at the final moment, and afterwards he rested there. I could feel him controlling his breathing, trying to slow it down as quickly as possible.
"There," I said, my hand running up and down his back. "Was that good?"
He took another deep breath and swallowed, forcing himself to speak. "Yes, very good. Thank you. I'm sorry, you may have expected more from me."
"There's plenty of time for something else if we both want it," I said, aware that I wasn't quite sure what 'more' he would have in mind, but keen to get him to relax again.
"Mmm, yes, I suppose so." He got a handkerchief out from somewhere - good-quality cotton, with his initials in the corner - and cleaned up. I took the rest of my clothes off and sat on the bed, which may have been a mistake, because when he turned to look at me there he paused again and the tension came back. I held out my hand to him, thinking that he might sit down beside me, but instead he dropped neatly to his knees in front of me.
At least it's a good carpet, I thought, as the sense memory of rug-burned knees washed over me. Something may have shown on my face, because he glanced away. He tried to look down but got an eyeful of my erection, which at least served to refocus us on the business in hand. Or not yet in hand.
"Do you like to give blow jobs?" I asked, thinking about the way he'd assumed kneeling was the next step. "Because I know I'd enjoy getting one but I don't want you to..."
Thomas answered that question, and stopped me from waffling any more, by the simple approach of putting my dick in his mouth. He nudged my thighs slightly further apart with one hand while he held me in the other and began to lick and suck. Leaning in, I thought, definitely a sign of attraction, and it seems like he's done this before and a few other irrelevant things before the pure sensation overtook linguistic thought. Not long after that, my orgasm swept over me as well. I was leaning back on my elbows - I didn't want to start pulling on his hair or anything - but I managed to open my eyes and watch him as I came. I hadn't said anything, but he was expecting it, and swallowed neatly before pulling off and wiping his mouth. On the sleeve of his shirt, I noticed, which meant I should check for a lost handkerchief later.
"Satisfactory, I hope?" he asked, but he had a little smile which meant he knew he was good at that.
"Excellent," I said. "Come here."
I sat up and he stood up and for a moment we were at an impasse about which was to go, but I managed to grab his hand and tug him onto the bed beside me. He was still half dressed but he let me hug him and give him a short kiss before he rested his forehead on my shoulder again. My copper's brain said he was hiding his face, but the part of me which can coax a cat out of a tree told me to wait and listen.
"I suppose I should go," he said eventually.
"If you want to," I said.
"People might..." he waved his hand vaguely, sitting up straight and moving slightly out of my arms. "If I stay all night..."
"If you stay all night, nobody but Molly will know, and I don't think she'll tell," I said.
He stayed all night. I didn't discover the absolute optimal position for cuddling - anything close enough for my liking seems to feel smothering to him - but I developed some theories for future testing.