I walk home through Bristol in the dark, hands in my pockets, and I think about the thirteen-year-old who didn’t have this, who learned too young that belonging was something you could lose, who has spent the years since then building walls and keeping distances and managing everything alone because it was easier than risking being found wanting again.
I think about the coven in Morgana’s front room, eating Dave’s biscuits and debating fields in Somerset, and the complete absence of drama in the thing I had been dreading.
I think about Dis in my kitchen this morning, making tea wrong again with absolute confidence. The way he looked at me when I laughed. The way he has always looked at me when I laugh, from the very beginning, cataloguing it, finding it pleasant, never pretending he didn’t.
I think about “you were forged in the brightest of stars” said in a kitchen over a wrapped teabag, and how I’ve been carrying it around like something warm in my pocket.
I’m getting better at understanding that being wanted isn’t something you have to earn every single day against the odds.
It’s a work in progress. But then, most things worth doing are.
The flat is lit when I can see it from the street, warm yellow light in the windows, and something in my chest does a quiet, complicated thing at the sight of it.
Home.
I take the stairs two at a time.
Chapter 31
Best Tuesday Ever
AdamandHex’sdiningroom is exactly as good as it always is, which is to say unreasonably good, because Hex has thoughts about interior spaces and acts on them, and the results are always infuriating in their excellence. The table is set beautifully. The food smells incredible. The wine is already open and breathing on the sideboard.
Dark is here already when we arrive, sitting at the table like a person, which is something he has been working on. He is sitting very still and looking at the bread rolls in the basket in front of him with the focused attention of someone encountering something they have been briefed about but not yet experienced firsthand.
The door opens behind us. Bunny comes in, slightly flushed, wearing his bunny ears because of course he is. “So sorry I’m late!” he says. “The bus was…” He stops. He sees Dark. His face does its thing, the enormous smile, entirely genuine. “Oh, hello Dark! I didn’t know you were coming!”
Dark looks at him. Dark’s expression does the thing it does when it encounters Bunny, which is the thing of someone walking into a wall they didn’t see coming and finding the wall unexpectedly pleasant.
“I was invited,” he says in a low, barely perceptible rumble.
“How wonderful!” Bunny says, and finds his seat. It is next to Dark. He sits in it with the cheerful ease of someone who finds this entirely natural, and he clocks Dark’s focused attention on the bread basket, and without any preamble picks up a roll, tears it open, butters it, and takes a bite. Then he looks at Dark with an encouraging nod.
Dark picks up a bread roll. He examines it briefly. He does what Bunny did, with the careful precision of someone following a demonstration, and takes a bite.
He chews. He considers.
He takes another bread roll.
He eats two more bread rolls with the focused concentration of someone completing an assignment. Eating is technically unnecessary for him, but Bunny demonstrated, and Dark has clearly decided that eating at a dinner table is simply what one does at a dinner table, and he is doing it.
I look at Adam.
Adam sips his wine. He looks at the fancy tablecloth. He is wearing the expression of someone who has orchestrated something and is pleased with how it’s going and is absolutely not going to confess any of this.
“Adam,” I say.
“The lamb is nearly ready,” he says.
I look at Hex. Hex looks back at me with those red eyes, and the corner of his mouth moves, and I decide to let it go because the alternative is making a fuss at a dinner table, and I’ve had a character development arc.
The lamb is excellent, and I’ve reached the stage of the evening where I’m feeling genuinely content. Tonight it’s easier than usual because Dis is beside me and his hand finds mine occasionally in the way it has started doing, quietly and without announcement, like it’s simply where his hand goes.
I would not normally be a hand-holding person. I’m revising this position.
Hex is at the opposite end of the table from Adam, holding a glass of wine he doesn’t drink, with the easy familiarity of someone who has been in the human realm long enough to understand the texture of it. He and Dishave been civil to each other all evening, which I was prepared to be anxious about and have instead found oddly natural.
I should have known, actually. They’re both royalty. They’ve spent centuries being polite to people they’ve tried to kill. The arch-nemesis thing is apparently not a mood killer when you have the social training of an ancient ruling class. They’ve been discussing something with the mannered interest of two people who have history and have decided, for this evening at least, to set it on a high shelf and leave it there.
