“I mean, you might need to convince your mother it’s a good idea,” he acknowledged. “Otherwise,I’ll be the one scaling the wall outside your window, and I don’t think that’s my best skill.”
“While carrying a picnic basket,” she pointed out.
“I would like to live to see next week,” he requested.
She grinned at him. “I’ll convince Mother.”
“Tell her the food tastes better if it comes out of a basket,” he suggested.
“And if I have good company,” she added.
He grinned at her, leaning in to give her a quick hug, and she hugged him back, hard.
He pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to her, and she wiped at her face.
“Let’s get you sitting up more comfortably, shall we?” he suggested.
He plopped pillows behind Renny and helped arrange her until she was fully supported but sitting up.
“If you get tired, you can still nap,” he assured her, “but I think that’s got to be a little more pleasant than lying on your back staring at the ceiling, right?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s so boring! But everyone says I can’t doanything. Like they’re worried I’m going to have a dizzy spell and fall overlying down in bed.”
He laughed but felt compelled to point out, “Everyone wants you to be safe.”
“I won’t be safe if I expire from boredom!” she returned promptly.
That was kind of what Perian thought, to be honest.
Now that she was upright, he did make her start drinking the tonic. To perpetuate the ruse that he wasn’t even sure they needed, she just took a sip at a time, made a face, told him it tasted terrible, and had him fetch her water.
Unless this was a tonic that was made specifically for her and especially horrible, Perian didn’t think it could possibly taste that bad, but he didn’t try to argue with her.
Although she still looked a little tired, her eyes were sparkling, and it seemed to him that a lot of life had already come back into her.
“How was your weekend?” she asked.
“You won’t mind me telling you about the most amazingly wonderful weekend that has ever existed when you weren’t having such a great one?”
She laughed. “No, I won’t mind. Tell me all about it.”
And so Perian proceeded to give her a highly edited version of his days away. She wrinkled her nose every time he talked widely around a certain topic, until she finally said, “Just how much sex did you have?”
“We didn’t actually count,” he said, grinning. “But a lot.”
She rolled her eyes. “What else did you do? Leave that part out!”
“I was trying to!” he agreed with a laugh, and tried to resume talking about all the things he and Brannal had done that weren’t having sex.
There was actually more of it than he thought, given just how much sex they’d had, but it had been all entwined nearly inextricably with the sex, so it took work to try to unpick it enough to make it an entertaining story for a twelve-year-old.
He told her about the charming inn, and he made her laugh about the horror of making people bring him bath water bucket by bucket every time he wanted to get clean. He regaled her with the budding romance of the stable hand and the server, his well-behaved horse, and the beautiful nature surrounding them. He told her about the picnic, though he promised her that he liked the ones with her just as much.
Renny eyed him skeptically. “Justas much?”
“I liked them equally for very different reasons?” he tried.
She snorted, but he could see the corners of her lips tipping up, so he didn’t think she was too upset.
