Chapter Text
Jimmy says goodbye to Asha and lowers the mobile from his ear.
He glances down at the screen out of habit. There’s a text from Cassie telling him she’s already through security and waiting at the gate for her flight to Glasgow. He thumbs over the keyboard to wish her a safe journey and remind her to text when she’s back on the ground. She sends the anticipated exasperated emoji in reply, but he knows she’ll do as he asks anyway. He cradles the mobile in his hand and looks out over the sea toward the horizon. Clouds are scudding across a clear blue sky. A ferry is making its stately way in toward Lerwick, a smaller fishing trawler heading out to deep water. He’s reluctant to go back into the house, anticipating how empty it will be without her. He’s become more used to her long absences since she went off to university but this will be different. This is Cassie starting a new chapter of her life in a country he’s never been to, with a man he’s only beginning to know.
Jimmy knows it could all end abruptly. He remembers how once -- many summers ago, in a fit of reckless, youthful optimism -- he had followed a lover to Dundee during the summer holidays. It had ended, rather ignominiously, with a ferry ride back to Fair Isle before the summer was half over. He’d been swept away by Rickie’s gorgeous curls and term-time passion for Russian literature only to discover that on holidays Rickie enjoyed drink, and club drugs -- and not paying rent -- a wee bit more than Jimmy could stand.
But Jimmy has a good feeling about Cassie’s young man, Edison. He likes the way Edison leans in against Cassie’s shoulder as the three of them talk, likes the easy set of her shoulders as she leans back. He’s taken note of the dozens of casual intimacies that betray their comfort with one another. He gives them at least even-odds for building something that lasts. As Asha has recently -- and somewhat bitterly -- observed, Jimmy is usually prepared to suspect anyone. But nothing about Edison causes Jimmy’s hackles to rise either as a father or as an inspector. So he’s not counting on having his girl back, is in fact hoping she finds a life that suits her, and that fact aches in his chest. Even though he knows it’s a part of life, something every parent reckons with in one way or another.
He wonders if, some day, he and Duncan will be waiting at the Lerwick airport for Portuguese-speaking grandchildren.
The app is still open on his phone and he swipes back to the list of text logs. Duncan’s name is right there below Cassie’s because he’d texted Duncan when he was running late for their goodbye lunch with Cassie. He looks at the name, and the associated photo. It’s a picture of Duncan from the night of EuroVision, down at the pub. One of several photos Jimmy had taken that evening. He’d been just tipsy enough, off duty enough, not to think too hard about why he was taking the photographs at all. It had been something about the delight in Duncan’s face as they sat there listening to the crap pop songs, watching the over-the-top performances, and yelling out good-natured ridicule alongside everyone else in the crowded room. He’d wanted to capture the moment of shared happiness, store it in his pocket for safekeeping.
He shoves his mobile back into the pocket of his jacket and goes inside before he can ask himself again why he cares that Duncan's gone out for the night with explicit plans not to be back before morning. It’s not Jimmy’s business to care. Never has been, quite likely never will be.
As if knowing that has ever stopped him.
The house feels as empty as he expected it would; doubly so because he had been counting on supper with Duncan to ease him into the first night of a different kind of fatherhood. He shrugs out of his jacket, pulling his mobile out of the pocket before he drops the jacket over the back of a chair. He walks into the kitchen and forces himself to set the mobile down on the counter before he does something regrettable. Something like text Duncan to ask how the date is going. Something like come up with a reason he needs Duncan to come home. He considers the half-finished bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon pushed to the back of the counter by the knife block, then opens the cupboard for a clean wine glass and turns on the oven. He pours himself a glass of wine, then goes to the refrigerator and rummages one-handed through the shelves until he finds the remains of the lasagna Duncan made earlier in the week.
He carves out a generous serving with a table knife, wraps it in foil, and puts it in the oven to warm. Then -- in a nod to nutrition -- he tosses a few handfuls of greens in a bowl and sprinkles vinaigrette over them. Wine and salad in hand, he retreats to the dining room table where his laptop sits quietly charging. Standing by the table, he has a short, silent argument with himself about whether or not he should knock off a few hours worth of paperwork. With Tosh’s transfer down to Inverness, her replacement still pending, he's more than a few hours behind on routine emails. Work -- with its promise of mind-numbing memorandum and redundant forms -- wins out after another mouthful of wine. He opens his laptop, navigating by rote through the steps of connecting his machine to the secure network. Maybe data entry and the dry, factual sentences of required documentation will distract him from all of the things he’s trying not to think about. At least not tonight.
When he gets up three hours later to clear away the dinner dishes, he checks his phone messages and sees that Cassie has landed in Glasgow and made her connection for Buenos Aires. She's somewhere over the Atlantic now, chasing the sun westward. He glances out the window toward the water as if he could see the aircraft disappearing over the curvature of the earth. This close to midsummer the evening light lingers through to the early morning hours and out the kitchen window he can still see the glint of the setting sun on the crest of rolling ocean.
He pours another glass of wine, and carries the bottle back to the table wondering how soon would be too soon to visit Cassie and Edison. Christmas, maybe? In his mind’s eye he sees both Duncan and Cassie rolling their eyes at him. Duncan, who -- as far as Jimmy has been able to pry out of him -- left his childhood home at sixteen and never looked back, thinks Cassie needs space away from the Shetlands, away from her parents, just away. Duncan had never gone to university, spending the better part of a decade working oil rigs out on the North Sea -- six weeks on, six weeks off -- and traveling when he was on leave. That was how he’d met Fran, who had been at the American University in Cairo on a one-year fellowship teaching art history. They’d hooked up at a club one night only to discover they had grown up a stone’s throw away from one another in Dundee. Jimmy suspects that the three years Fran and Duncan --eventually joined by baby Cassie -- had shared a flat in Glasgow mark the longest Duncan has lived in one place since Duncan struck out on his own. He’s been expecting Cassie to leave, is probably surprised it took her this long.
He shakes his head and wipes a hand over his face. Here he is, thinking about Duncan again when he’s promised himself he won’t spend the night doing just that. He considers his half-empty wine glass and tops it off before closing his laptop and taking himself to the sofa. He turns on the television. There’s a football game on and he lets the burble of the commentators wash over him as he watches the players move up and down the field with soothing predictability. He’s never been particularly good at following football, though Fran -- who had played at uni -- had tried to teach him. But the sounds of the televised game remind him of Fran and that’s comforting and familiar. He lets his eyes rest on the jerseys moving up and down the field and thinks about the puzzle that is Duncan, Duncan’s place in Jimmy’s life, and Jimmy’s place in Duncan’s.
The thing is, Jimmy has always been aware of the fact that he could want Duncan. If he let himself. It’s just that he had, years ago, learned to carry that awareness without any intent to act upon it. He and Duncan had first met perhaps six, seven months after Jimmy and Fran began dating. By that time Jimmy had already known he and Fran were serious. Serious enough that he wasn’t looking for anyone else. Serious enough that he’d already felt the relief of certainty deep in his bones: the knowledge that he and Fran and Cassie were good together. Good at being a family. So when Duncan had turned up on the stoop one day -- back from a summer working Celtic festivals across the Canadian prairies -- to reacquaint himself with his two-year-old daughter, Jimmy had acknowledged that initial spark of interest for what it was … and then set it aside.
“I can see what drew you to him,” he’d admitted to Fran, tugging her into his lap one night a few months after the wedding. The two of them had gotten a sitter and gone to hear Duncan’s band at the Southside Fringe. The sharp, warning edges that a younger Duncan -- God, they’d all been so young then -- had carried with him almost everywhere had softened when he the bodhrán in his hands. The intensity of his attention to the other musicians, the joy that radiated from him, was electric. Jimmy had felt the tug of that energy, even then, and considered being jealous that Fran had once been included in that circle of joy.
“Mmm,” Fran had replied, leaning back to rest her head against Jimmy’s shoulder, her cheek alongside his. Together they watched Duncan on the raised platform at the back of the pub that stood for a stage, watched his hands move in steady rhythm keeping time for the fiddler and the vocalist. It felt intimate, Jimmy had thought then, watching Duncan play with Fran in his arms. The three of them tied together by a tangle of accumulated history and commitments.
“Should I be worried?” Fran had asked, eventually, her hands resting lightly over his where they held her snug at the waist. He was conscious of her wedding band pressed into his flesh. The question had been barely a murmur -- more felt than heard -- pitched not to disrupt the fiddler’s moment in the spotlight.
“Mmm,” he’d murmured back. “Do you think he’s likely to kidnap me, spoil my virtue?” He’d nuzzled her ear as he asked it, making her laugh.
“Hardly,” she’d snorted. “He never goes after the married ones.” It had been Duncan’s wandering feet, not wandering eye, that had eventually led to their amicable breakup: Fran had wanted to stay near her parents, had accepted a job at the Kelvingrove, put their daughter in school. Duncan had resisted the idea of putting down roots. Fran hadn’t wanted an absentee partner. With Jimmy happy to be a dad who picked his daughter up at school, Duncan had slipped into the role of a cosmopolitan uncle. He’d blow in unexpectedly for a day or two -- always with a small, magical gift for Cassie, something that came with embellished tales of the adventures he’d been on since the last time. He would brighten their lives for a long weekend and then it was off again to Cardiff, to Nice, to Prague, or Addis Ababa. Jimmy suspects that it’s from her father that Cassie gets her wanderlust.
For a handful of wonderful years -- three, four, five, six -- it had worked, and worked well, for the four of them.
And then -- when Cassie was almost nine -- Fran had gone into hospital with what they thought was persistent case of pneumonia and then found out soon enough was cancer. Jimmy still doesn’t remember those months with a great deal of clarity, but Duncan had been there, early on, and just ... stayed. He’d taken Cassie when Fran needed Jimmy, and been there for shifts at Fran’s bedside when Jimmy needed to sleep. And together they’d stumbled through the final weeks of hospice care and the numbness that had engulfed everything after.
And at the end of it all, Duncan had followed Jimmy and Cassie home to Shetland.
That had been ten years ago, and Jimmy still doesn’t know what exactly it is that he and Duncan share -- beyond a daughter, and grief. They don’t talk about it, but it’s there, something vital, holding them together. Ten years of sharing a life and Jimmy has no idea if he has a right say: Don’t go to the pub tonight, I want you here. To say: I’m not seeing Asha because it’s you I really want. To say: Stay.
The last time Jimmy had been down to Glasgow for a meeting, and stayed overnight to see Fran’s parents, and then Cassie and Edison, he went by Asha’s flat with a bottle of Shetland Reel and some of his mother-in-law’s shortbread. Asha was still on medical leave, though he knew -- because they spoke every few days on the phone -- she was starting to ease back into work from her kitchen table. She’d been happy to see him when she opened the door, and they’d shared the whiskey at that same kitchen table piled high with files and empty teacups. But even before she’d told him about Tony, Jimmy knew she was seeing someone, and that that someone wasn’t him. He had realized, then, that he was happy for her -- happy in an unencumbered way that told him he had never seriously entertained the possibility of there being something more between them.
And when he’s asked himself why, on the flight back to Lerwick, the answer had been that the person who fit best in his life, who felt most like home, already had his own set of keys.
Jimmy drifts off on the sofa between one football match and the next, bothering only to pull up his feet and stretch out with lumpy throw pillow under his head. Not long after that -- at some point in the brief darkness of the midsummer night -- he wakes to the snick of a key in the lock and the soft noises of Duncan slipping off his shoes, a glass of water being filled at the sink, the toilet being flushed. He’s dreaming, confusedly, of a summer holiday he, Duncan, and Cassie had once taken to Edinburgh Fringe. They had spent a week crammed together in a tiny guest room, the three of them, like sardines in a tin. Only in the dream the festival has come to them and Jimmy is trying to fit all of Duncan’s musician friends into the cottage. He must mutter something in his half sleep because Duncan’s hand is on his shoulder and Jimmy smells the scent of chips and stale beer before Duncan pulls away and the weight of a wool blanket descends.
The over-crowded cottage full of unwanted strangers fades and he dreams instead of Duncan’s arms wrapped around him.
He wakes with a stiff neck and a stale tongue, having drooled on the sofa pillow wedged under his head. He has a disoriented moment of panic that the alarm on his phone hasn’t gone off before he remembers that he had offered to take second shift that day and wouldn’t be expected at the office before noon. He pushes himself up on his elbow and contemplates the wine glass and empty bottle on the table in front of him. It hadn’t been enough to give him a headache but he can tell he hasn’t brushed his teeth and definitely needs the toilet sooner rather than later. As the blanket slips down his shoulders, the memory of Duncan’s early morning return surfaces and with it the conscious recognition that Duncan is moving about the kitchen, accompanied by the sound and smell of fried food and fresh coffee.
He stands up with a soft groan and shuffles to the toilet, taking the chance to splash his face with water and run his toothbrush over his teeth before human interaction.
When Jimmy returns to the common room, Duncan looks up from the frying eggs and tomatoes and gestures to the counter where the French press stands, still three-quarters full, next to an empty mug. “Coffee?”
Jimmy pours himself a cup and turns to lean up against the counter, cradling the warm mug in both hands. It might be late June but the morning has a chill this close to the water and he’s only in jeans and a rumpled, rather threadbare jumper.
“Your night wasn’t a go after all, then?” He asks, cautiously.
Duncan shrugs, poking at the egg yolks with the corner of his spatula. “We had a pint or two, caught up on the gossip.”
“Ah,” Jimmy takes a sip of coffee and scrubs a hand over his face, hoping the caffeine will work its magic and wake up his brain. He’s aware that something made Duncan change his plans -- or, at least the plans as Jimmy had understood them. He just doesn’t have the key piece of information. “I didn’t realize she was a friend of yours.”
Another of Duncan’s shrugs. “Our paths cross from time to time.” Duncan’s network of musicians and associates is extensive and fluid. Jimmy has long ago given up trying to parse the many meanings of paths crossing “from time to time.” And he’s deliberately avoided asking for details when it comes to Duncan’s romantic entanglements a wide berth. At first because Duncan himself rarely brought the women -- and, less often, men -- up in conversation with Jimmy and Fran, and more recently because he couldn’t untangle his own motivations for asking.
Duncan scoops up the sizzling eggs and tomatoes and slides them deftly onto the waiting toast, then hands a plate to Jimmy before picking up his own coffee and walking over to the table. “I had a text from Cassie,” he says, and for a moment Jimmy thinks this is a new topic of conversation.
“She’s landed and through customs all right then?” He should have checked his phone, he realizes, as soon as he woke. He looks around for it.
“She has,” Duncan says around a mouthful of coffee. “But I meant last night.” He puts down his plate and reaches into his back pocket for his phone before sliding into his chair. He thumbs in the passcode, fiddles for a moment and then turns it around and slides it across the table to Jimmy.
Dad IS NOT dating Asha. The text reads. Can’t believe you didn’t know. You live with him do you never talk???
Jimmy immediately wishes this were his second cup of coffee. He takes a generous mouthful and re-reads the texts again (Yes, they still say what he thinks they said. Thank you ever so much, Cassie, for your timing. Really appreciate it.)
He can feel Duncan watching him. He shakes his head, unable to look up just yet, trying to formulate a response. He wonders what sort of reaction Duncan is expecting. He wonders what sort of reaction Duncan is hoping for.
He sets down his own coffee and reaches out to push the phone back toward Duncan. Then he forces himself to look up at Duncan’s face, his cheeks burning.
“All right, yes, you two win again. I’m not dating Asha -- which, you will recall, I have never claimed to be doing. She’s got a boyfriend, okay? His name is Tony. I met him last time I was in Glasgow.”
“And yet neglected to mention to me when I suggested you call her last night.” Duncan raises an eloquent eyebrow. He picks up his fork and pokes at one of his egg yolks until it runs yellow across his toast, studying Jimmy’s expression.
“What do you care about my personal life?” Jimmy mutters crossly, aware of the absurdity of the question as soon as it leaves his mouth. They both know Duncan has as much a claim as anyone does, except Cassie, and since she has clearly decided to stick her oar in --
Duncan just looks at him and takes a bite of egg and toast.
“And, what, you think I’m incapable of …. asking someone out on a date without a push?” His irritation over the way Duncan has kept at him about Asha wells up in his chest and he glares across the table at the one person he actually wants to ask out on a date, currently chewing his egg and toast with a smug expression.
“In the eleven years since Fran died you’ve had how many lovers?” Duncan knows the answer and Jimmy refuses to give it to him again.
“Not all of us put sex up as high on their list of priorities as you do.” It comes out with more censure than Jimmy had intended. He must be more tired and distracted, and hurt, than he thought he was.
“It’s not about the sex. You know that,” Duncan sighs. “It’s about not being lonely at the end of the day, aye?”
“So that’s what all your --” Jimmy waves a hand, attempting to wordlessly cover every person Duncan has ever slept with. There must have been dozens. “-- were about.”
Duncan shrugs and takes another bite. “Most of them. Yes.”
Jimmy sighs. “Well I don’t ...work like that.”
Duncan snorts and rolls his eyes, mouth full.
The moment of silence stretches out and Jimmy puts down his coffee and picks up his fork, hoping that eating the meal Duncan’s made will cover for all of the things he can’t figure out how to say. Things he probably should be saying. Things Duncan came home last night, apparently, to hear.
This is exactly what he had worried (hoped) would happen when Duncan moved in. That Duncan’s presence would give him a sense of rightness, lend a sense of ease to the end of each day when he came home (at six, at seven, at nine, past midnight) to a house that was inhabited by someone familiar. Someone beloved. Underneath the scent of fried food, toasted bread, and coffee he can smell Duncan’s aftershave and the warmth of his skin. Duncan’s hand is curled around his coffee mug and if Jimmy reached out from where he is sitting, he could lay a hand on Duncan’s wrist, just where it emerges from the frayed cuff of his button-down.
Maybe it really is that simple, Jimmy thinks, squeezing his eyes shut against the temptation. How did people do this? Before he can bend and break beneath all of the reasons he shouldn’t he slides his hand across the space between them and lays his fingers at the warm pulse-point of Duncan’s wrist.
He can feel Duncan’s gaze on him, can feel the slight twitch of Duncan’s wrist beneath his hand -- but Duncan doesn’t say anything and he’s still beneath Jimmy’s palm. Neither pulling away or moving in to the touch. Jimmy can feel the heat of the coffee mug against the side of his own wrist, can feel his own pulse beating a bit wildly inside his throat. He forces himself to look up and meet Duncan’s gaze. Duncan doesn’t look away. He puts down his fork and reaches over with the freed hand to place it over Jimmy’s, holding Jimmy’s hand against his own wrist like he’s holding a compress to a wound.
“I don’t -- work like that.” Jimmy says again, because it’s all he can think to say. Because it’s often come down to this, in his mind, to the way Duncan seems to roll so easily from one bed to another: generous, kind, extravagant with what he has to give and matter-of-fact about his limits. Except … in the almost-a-year since Duncan moved in with Jimmy he’s never brought a partner home. Jimmy realizes that maybe he’s seen this all wrong from the start, been too close to see the patterns and probabilities, assuming too much and too little at the same time.
“I know you don’t, man,” Duncan says, softly.
Jimmy licks his lips and opens his mouth to say -- something. Duncan’s thumb slides under his wrist, though, nudging back the cuff of his jumper. He can feel the callous on the side of Duncan’s thumb catch at the cloth and hears the hitch in his own breathe at the intimacy of it.
“Why did you come home? Last night?” Jimmy finally asks, finding he has to close his eyes to get the words out. Without sight, the feeling of Duncan’s touch at his wrist becomes even more all-consuming. Duncan’s small, circling caresses continue for a breath, then another, before he speaks.
“I thought … I thought what you wanted was a friendly nudge,” he says, finally. “You didn’t seem to -- seem to want more than that. From me. Thought I should make myself scarce.”
Jimmy opens his mouth to protest but Duncan squeezes his wrist and keeps talking. “I didn't want to get in the way.”
“You aren’t -- you’ve never been --” Jimmy objects. He can feel the shrug in Duncan’s shoulder even with his eyes closed. He makes himself blink them open again. Duncan is watching his face with a soft intensity that makes him want to pull away and sink closer all at the same time.
“But I could have been,” Duncan says.
Jimmy just shakes his head, mutely, because he can’t find words to explain how it has never worked like that between them.
“And then Cassie sent me the text -- there I am, sitting at the bar nursing a beer while Tara plays a set -- and at first I thought, ‘Well, he's letting me think it’s that way between them because he doesn't --’ ”
Jimmy digs his fingers into Duncan’s wrist. “No, I just --”
“ -- I know, I know love, just let me -- I thought, ‘Maybe he wants --’ maybe it was just your way of letting me down gentle.”
“I didn’t know what to --” Jimmy stumbles again. “We’ve spent so many years --"”
“And that’s when I realized it was you,” Duncan rolls his eyes but can’t hide the grin that’s twitching at the corner of his mouth. “If it was up to you, I could cook you breakfast every day for the rest of our lives and you’d still worry about taking advantage the first time we did this.” Duncan releases his hold on the coffee mug and gives Jimmy’s hand a gentle tug. They’re sitting nearly knee to knee at the corner of the worn oak table and all it takes is Jimmy shifting forward in his chair, and Duncan leaning in, to bring their mouths together.
It’s a feather-light touch, a brushing of lips. Jimmy inhales, breathing Duncan deep into his lungs as if he’s surfacing for air -- almost a gasp -- and Duncan accepts the invitation with a flick of his tongue. Jimmy feels the smile spread from the corner of Duncan’s mouth as he inches closer, wanting more.
It’s awkward, and Jimmy nearly spills his coffee and does put his elbow into his breakfast, but despite -- or perhaps because -- of this, kissing Duncan is the first completely right thing he’s done this morning. He untangles his fingers from Duncan’s -- that they’re tangled together in the first place a thing he thinks he could never tire of -- and feels his way up the length of Duncan’s forearm to his elbow, then to his shoulder, pushing fingers into Duncan’s hair. Duncan melts under his touch and only then does Jimmy realize how hard, how full of continual effort, a year -- perhaps a decade -- of not doing this has been. How foolish all of his hesitations seem on the other side of the breach.
Duncan makes a small, needy sound that Jimmy feels more than hears, vibrations that tease at his lips and tongue and fingers where he cups the back of Duncan’s skull. “Here -- come here,” he murmurs, pushing himself back from the table and dragging at Duncan until Duncan -- laughing, unresisting -- understands what Jimmy wants and lets himself be pulled out of his chair and around the corner of the table until he can straddle Jimmy’s lap.
“Is this --?” He drags his hands down Duncan’s back, feeling flesh over muscle over bone.
“God, yes,” is Duncan’s reply, half a groan, as he digs his fingers into Jimmy’s shoulders and lifts himself to encourage Jimmy’s hands lower over the curve of his backside, where Jimmy digs his fingers in -- an echo of Duncan’s grip -- and thinks about how long he has wanted (and felt guilty about wanting) Duncan to be his in this way, too, in addition to all of the other ways they’re entangled together.
Across the room, somewhere in the direction of the sofa, his phone emits the buzz buzz buzz that means work is calling. Damn damn damn. He breaks away from Duncan's mouth and presses his forehead against Duncan’s shoulder. “Shit. Shit shit shit -- I have to get this --”
Duncan’s laugh is gratifyingly breathless. “Don’t worry. I know what being married to a DCI is like. I’m not gonna get cold feet just because you’ve a break-in to see to."
Jimmy kisses him one more time for the being married bit and then reluctantly lets Duncan slide back to his feet and stands himself so he can go dig up the mobile and see whether he’ll have time for a shower or if he’s needed more urgently than cleanliness will allow.
When he unearths the mobile from between the sofa cushions the missed call is from Sandy. There’s a message but he just hits the callback option and Sandy picks up on the second ring. There’s been a break-in up at Scudder’s farm and elderly Evelyn Scudder -- who has dementia -- has been assaulted. “Her son’s away to Aberdeen on business, boss,” Sandy says. “And I wouldn’t have called except --”
“No, Sandy, I’ll meet them at the A & E. Has someone called--” he fumbles through his memory “ -- the daughter. Helen, I think. She moved to -- yes. Give her my number and have her call when the ferry docks. I’m sure we’ll still be at hospital.”
He hangs up and turns back toward the kitchen. Duncan is at the counter topping up his coffee.
“You’ll have heard. God, Duncan, I’m sorry I --” He wants nothing more than to say fuck it and drag Duncan off to the bedroom and not leave the warm cosy nest of a shared bed for the rest of the day, the week, the month, the year.
“Go on,” Duncan says, gesturing with his coffee. “Go clean yourself up before I give in to the temptation to distract you from the very important business of interrogating pensioners.”
Jimmy goes over to him, needing to touch him again, to make sure this is real. Duncan let’s Jimmy crowd him back up against the kitchen counter, sets his coffee down the better to catch Jimmy’s hips with his coffee-warmed hands and pull him into an easy embrace. Like they've been doing this dance for years already.
“When I get home --” Jimmy starts, not even sure where the sentence ends.
“--I’ll be here,” Duncan says, tipping his head and angling in for a kiss. "That's a promise."