The room is very quiet.
Adam sighs. It’s a long sigh, the kind that carries a lot of weight and sets some of it down. He looks at me with those kind, exasperated, completely seen-through-me eyes that he has been directing at me since we first became friends.
“I know you, Felix,” he says. “You’re prickly and difficult and you lie through your teeth when you’re scared, and you keep everything at arm’s length until you can’t anymore.” He glances at Dis. Then back at me. “And I know you wouldn’t have fallen in love with him if he was a jerk.”
Something loosens in my chest. Something that has been very tightly wound for a very long time.
“He’s still a bit of a jerk,” I say. “Objectively.”
“I am not a jerk,” Dis says, with considerable dignity. “I am direct.”
“He’s direct,” I tell Adam.
“Apparently,” Adam says, and the corner of his mouth moves, just slightly, in the way that means he’s decided something. He looks at Dis again. “You’re going to have to earn it. My trust. It’s not going to come for free and it’s not going to come quickly.”
“I would not expect otherwise,” Dis says. “Nor ask for it.”
“Good.” Adam nods once, the way he does when he’s settled something internally and is ready to move forward. Then he looks at me. “I’m still annoyed with you.”
Despite everything, pride blooms in my chest. When I first met Adam, he was such a doormat. Now look at him.My friendship has done him wonders. As has Hex’s love, I suppose.
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I actually am.”
“I know you actually are.” He sighs again. “Right. Are you going to offer me tea or what?”
I look at Dis. Dis looks at me. There is a very brief pause.
“I’ll make it,” I say.
“I will assist,” Dis says, standing with the gravity of someone who has decided that tea-making is a skill worth acquiring and is approaching it as such.
Adam watches Dis follow me to the kitchen with an expression that I think is going to take some time to fully resolve into something he has a name for.
Hex comes to stand beside him. I hear him, very quietly, say something I don’t catch. I hear Adam laugh, surprised and genuine.
In the kitchen, I put the kettle on. Dis stands beside me, close, and I lean into him slightly and he lets me, which is all I need right now.
“Thank you,” I say quietly. “For what you said.”
“It needed saying,” he says. “I should have said it sooner.”
The kettle boils. I make four cups of tea, properly, with the teabags out of the wrappers, and Dis watches with focused attention and I know he’s filing it all away for the next time he tries to do this on his own.
We take the tea back to the living room.
Adam is on the sofa. He looks up when we come in, and his eyes go to me and Dis and the tea, and he makes room.
It’s enough. For now, it’s enough.
Chapter 30
They Like Me, They Really Like Me!
TheEsbatisheld,as it always is, in Morgana’s front room in Easton, which smells of incense and old books and the particular quality of magic that accumulates in a space when the same people have been practicing in it for a long time. The crystals are all in their usual places. The altar cloth is the good one, the deep purple embroidered one that only comes out for proper meetings. Candles everywhere, which is a fire hazard and always has been, and nobody has ever addressed this.
I’m the last to arrive, which I did deliberately, because arriving early means making conversation before I’ve fortified myself, and I’m not there yet. The walk over from the flat was useful in that it gave me time to practice what I was going to say, which I did for most of it, running through various versions of the speech in my head while Bristol got on with its evening around me. I had a whole speech. Several, actually, in different registers. There was a dignified one, and a defiant one, and one that was mostly just explaining everything in exhaustive detail, which Idecided against on the grounds that some of it is none of their business.
I’m nervous. I’m trying not to be nervous. I have Dis, I remind myself, who is currently in my flat attempting to understand how a television remote works, as in the science and technology part, which is its own situation. I also have Adam and Hex, who are well on their way to forgiving me. I even have Bunny, who, while grating with his eternal optimism, would cheerfully follow me into any situation while wearing his ears.
