Well, that was better than the tears he’d had in his eyes last night, I supposed.
“I didn’t realize that box in the back of the water closet was a shower.” He announced it like he’d discovered a continent. “I was trying to sponge bathe myself in the sink! You might havementioned that there was a legit rainwater shower head right behind the wall.”
I watched a bead of water trail down over a pectoral muscle that was far more defined than I’d been expecting, then cleared my throat, unable to remember what he’d been saying. “Ah. Well, yes.”
“It’s hot and it has such good water pressure. How? How do you have plumbing?”
“We have—” I paused, frowning. “Do you not have plumbing?”
“We have electricity. Cell phones. Televisions. Plumbing comes with all of that.” He tilted his head. “Okay, if we’re being honest, I’m not super educated on how plumbing works, but, you know, I’m pretty sure there’s like, pumps or something.”
I wasn’t much more aware of how plumbing worked than he was, but I tried to pretend to be. “The palace has a pipe-house. It works with steam, elemental magic, and pumps too, I suppose.”
“Steam and magic?”
“Essentially.” I studied him, confused. “Last night—“
“Thank you for the art supplies! Look, I made the trousers you gave me into shorts!” He spun and picked up a pair of tiny trousers off of his bed. “You’ve inspired me to embrace the adventure.”
“Ah.” His towel had slipped and my eyes were fixed on the dimples at the base of his lower back, which seemed to be robbing me of my ability to speak.
He turned back around. “So! What’s up?”
“I came to check on you and discuss next steps.”
“I’m clean, so I suppose the next step would be breakfast. Oh! and coffee. Do you have coffee? It’s a hot drink that perks you up. I’ve had nothing but water since I got here!”
“We have tea.”
His face cycled through the five stages of grief in three seconds. Then he rallied. “Tea is fine. I’m adaptable. What’s for breakfast?”
“Get dressed first.”
“Already handled.” Pip grabbed the shorts and another scrap of fabric and disappeared into his washroom.
He emerged ten minutes later, and I understood immediately that “handled” didn’t mean what he thought it meant.
He had taken the perfectly sensible black trousers that I’d found for him, and cut them considerably shorter. He had paired these with a dark waistcoat from the same wardrobe, worn unbuttoned over nothing: no shirt, no undershirt. Just thewaistcoat hanging open to reveal the same flat, toned stomach I had been attempting not to look at since the moment I’d found him on a country road.
“You destroyed the clothing,” I said.
“I improved the clothing.”
“Those were perfectly functional trousers.”
“And now they’re perfectly functional shorts. It’s an upgrade. You’re welcome.” He did a small turn, and I watched the waistcoat swing open wider, revealing more skin, and the shorts were—they were very short. Shorter than the sparkly ones he’d arrived in, if such a thing was possible. “How do I look?”
Like a problem I was not equipped to solve.
“You’re supposed to wear a shirt under that waistcoat,” I said.
“Only if you have no imagination!”
There was no point in arguing, so I led him to the officers’ kitchen for a morning meal, his first outside of my quarters. It was a compromise, he got to leave his room, but didn’t expose too many others to his questionable fashion choices.
The kitchen staff had left bread, cheese, cured meat, and fruit, and Pip fell upon it with the enthusiasm of a man who had not eaten a proper meal in days, which made me wonder if I neededto feed him something else at our dinners. Perhaps he didn’t like stew as much as he liked cheese.
He’d been quiet during every meal I’d had with him, but today, something had shifted, and he began to talk. He talked while he ate. He talked between bites, during bites, and occasionally through bites, and by the time he was on his third helping, I had learned more about his life than my formal interrogation had extracted in an hour.
