Remember all the ways they had touched each other in the thirty year span of their marriage. Covert, careful.

The world has changed around them. Louis could lean across the bench and kiss Lestat if he wanted. Maybe someone would jeer. It would be a lesser thing than it was once.

Louis had leaned in and kissed Armand in Paris, ignored the sour shout the act had provoked. He and Armand had touched each other in public since. Louis had touched men in public since.

Lestat draws his knuckles down Louis' shoulder and Louis feels it again, the weight of all their years apart. All that they'd missed.

Tell me invites so much that Louis is briefly overwhelmed thinking of all that Lestat doesn't know. And so he says nothing right away, instead settling himself on the bench, crossing his legs, stretching an arm across the back of the bench.

"I asked him if he saved me, and he said yes," Louis relates. This first thing. The bedrock upon which almost eighty years of companionship had been built. "We left together, after speaking to you."

Things Lestat must have known, must have understood.

"I didn't know he'd lied to me. I didn't know what he'd done before. I didn't know it was his script and his direction."

There are other transgressions. Louis doesn't care to speak them aloud just now.