There was the feeling in the air of something unfinished, of potential, of things that could happen. He'd been waiting to see if it resolved itself into something definite and concrete and small. It easily could have. She could have brushed past his saying her name, and moved the conversation along to something less consequential than the crossroads they were standing in. The moment might have simply collapsed in on itself, buried under the weight of its own possibility without any action from either of them at all. But Jo looked over at him and said nothing, and the air crackled between them with something that defied names. Alfred slid one hand along the countertop until it brushed against the top of hers, and he thought of all the times he'd touched her before: the day she'd shown him her tattoos because he was dying and desperate for distraction, and sitting on the sofa with their shoulders and knees rubbing because they were too intoxicated to mind, and grabbing her wrist when she was looking for the floo powder in the same spot it had always been, and pulling her out of the Thames and having to ask before he patted her back to help dislodge the water in her lungs.
"Let's stop all this," he said.
"Let's stop all this," he said.
MJ made the most Alfredy of sets and then two years later she made it EVEN BETTER