Calvin nodded soberly, breathing in the honeysuckle scent still wafting, though slightly weakened now, from the bath. The master's skin would be so smooth than sweet-smelling after. It was a shame there was no one hear to properly appreciate those qualities. When was the last time someone other than he or Viola had touched him in kindness?
He wanted, for a blood-quickening moment, to slip to his knees again near the tub, to stroke his fingers down the lines of his face and through his hair, to kiss his forehead and wrap him in a towel and hold him until his equilibrium returned. There's just something about Clovennian men, he'd murmured once to Simon. They come apart so slowly for so long, and then it's all at once.
In the early days of the Usurpation, the angry days, the ones after he'd given the Hiraeth back to the Church, he'd lived for that rush, that feeling of their dissolve beneath his fingers, his tongue, his sweet, accented words. They folded for him slowly, then all at once. And then he craved it, this dance whose steps he nearly knew by heart, now.
Beau would fold for him, if Calvin wanted him to. Maybe not today, even if he acted on his impulse. Maybe not tomorrow. But he would. Fast and hard and soon. He would fold, and then it would be almost as if Calvin had his life the way he wanted it again.
Almost.
"There's a story in the Braddon," He murmured, rising again from the chair to retrieve his half-finished cup of coffee before it completely cooled. He held it out to him on its saucer in offering. "About an ill Aurellian man who collapses in a ditch, and though a Danu and and Robor pass him, it's a foreigner, many scholars agree a Clovennian foreigner, who rescues him." He didn't expected the master to remember the story from when he told it a few nights before, but maybe the echo of it would trigger comfort, somehow. An afterimage of being held, if the real thing was impossible. "Don't sell yourself short, sir."