Chapter Eleven
Robin
Robin hated walking on eggshells. The silence in the library.
The stilted conversation when Zyr showed him to his room before making a hasty retreat.
He hadn’t felt this awkward in twenty years, and then, he’d had the excuse of being nine, with the brother he barely knew suddenly living in his playroom.
Set his damn teeth on edge.
But he’d fucked up, and no amount of trying to think about the hotness of claws and teeth got rid of the memory of Zyr stepping back, expression shuttered, as he left Robin alone in his library.
He’d woke to find a tray of breakfast food outside his door, and no Zyr. Not that the bastard was gone. Once Robin got to work, he’d caught glimpses of him, moving through the endless shelves. Flashes of royal-blue scales and broad shoulders.
Robin stared at the second floor ceiling, scowling, a stack of partially read books on the table next to him. Curled in the coziest armchair known to man, and all he could think about was Zyr’s hand leaving his.
He hated being left. (And whose fault was it, this time?)
“Fuck it,” Robin muttered, pushing himself off the chair and heading downstairs. “Zyr?”
“Here,” Zyr replied, stepping out from behind a bookshelf, looking tall and broad and nonplussed. Completely chill with his damn sweater vest and calm, assessing eyes. “Something you require help locating, Robin?”
Robin stared at him for a second too long, words mucked up on his tongue. Things were so much easier to start when they were for someone else.
“Ashamed,” Robin said. “Can we talk? About yesterday. Nothing bad.”
Zyr studied him, his blue-scaled tail twitching behind him. Robin didn’t know what that meant, except that it probably had to do with Zyr calling him Robin.
“Perplexed,” Zyr replied. “The rest aren’t on your wheel.”
“They don’t need to be. I’m just a little in my own head. Can we talk?”
“Of course.” Zyr set his book down with the same care and consideration he showed everything in the library, Robin included. “We can talk. And it can be bad. I don’t require you to shelter me.”
“I don’t sugarcoat. I just hate it when people ask to talk without context,” Robin said, glancing around for somewhere to sit. Something to do. “If I ask and don’t add a disclaimer that things aren’t going to shit, they’re absolutely going to shit.”
A pen that hadn’t existed a moment before appeared in Robin’s hand. Faerie being an absolute bro, fitted it to him perfectly so Robin could mess with it, keep his damn hands busy.
Maybe he needed to invest in kettlebells.
There was something familiar in the way Zyr watched him, all wary confusion. Been there, done that.
“I’m familiar with being caught within one’s thoughts.” Another twitch of that tail. “Will you tell me which of yours trouble you?”
Robin gave a sharp little laugh. Caught within one’s thoughts. Yeah. It was a bitch.
Calm the hell down, you antsy idiot. No life or death stakes, no pending audit. Just an apology and explanation for being rude. For fucking up.
“I owe you an apology. For how things left off yesterday. I’m not apologizing for saying what I did, just, how it came out.
How it—” Twitching tail, flicking pen, and if this were a movie, they’d be moving a table or something.
Why weren’t they moving a table? “Are there books that need to be moved? Organized? Dishes to be washed? Literally anything we can do while we talk that isn’t just staring and fidgeting. I will happily fold laundry.”
“No laundry.” The beithir scanned the shelves off to their left, his glance followed by the sound of books falling gently to the floor. “But some books to shelve. This way.”
Robin followed Zyr in silence, weaving between bookcase upon bookcase, until they reached a small pile of paperbacks from the other side of the veil. Old harlequins from the 50s with soft covers and the worn edges that came from reread after reread.
“How do you sort them?” Robin sat, cross-legged, on the floor. He reached for the books furthest from him as Zyr knelt just out of arms reach.
“Alphabetical, by authors’ last name, then title.”
Hopefully Zyr didn’t mind a change to alphabetical by authors’ last name, series, then title or number, depending. Robin refused to let him live in chaos.
“What I said, about not being able to process what you told me, that wasn’t a rejection,” Robin said, as he started to sort. “It was more a notice of where my head was at instead of standing in silence trying to figure things out.”
“There was nothing to reject,” Zyr said, nudging some of the books closer to him. “I explained how I see you. You cannot refuse or accept that. It made you uncomfortable. That is a reasonable reaction. I was not—am not—upset with you for it.”
The fucking eggshells, and only Robin’s many years of therapy and anger management, kept him from snapping at being told what he felt.
Zyr didn’t mean it in the presumptuous way Robin’s mind first heard it. Clever dragon, sure. But not in the EQ department. Logical. Worked with what he knew and saw alone. Robin’d put money on it.
It’d taken Robin a decade to know his own mind. He and Zyr had only just met.
“My biological parents told the world Bo was special. Put him on display and I got sent to live with my great-aunt. They said special Bo kept them from visiting, or a trip, or from calling. Both of us getting gaslit until it came out they were lying. Fuckers left this teenager in pieces until he came to live with us. They messed him up good.” Robin turned his attention to the largest pile, taking his time to shuffle them into their different series order.
“Antonio got snatched away as a kid because he’s Hollow.
Ended up misdiagnosed and more marginalized than he would’ve been.
And then everything with Nimai and the duel…
Shit, Everil and Bo are Solstice Kings now, and if what some of your books say is accurate, either they’ve got to pull out the big guns or we need to find bigger. ”
The barb on Zyr’s tail dragged against the wooden floor, gouging it deep enough Robin could have fit his thumb to the knuckle. The beithir’s large, clawed hands flexed, curling into fists before relaxing. But he didn’t say anything, so Robin kept talking.
“When I was a kid, I thought the stuff going on my head set me apart. Broken, or weak, or just the one person in the world who couldn’t take it.
Turns out, not so much. Not being alone, being a number, helped a lot.
Being one of many. It’s safe.” Unlike the woman being wooed by a tentacle sea creature on the cover of the book in his hands, what in the world.
“It minimizes the damage. If something goes sideways, it’s not all on you. ”
That dull thud and sharp scrape again. Barb and wood.
“Helpless,” Zyr said finally, with a hiss to his words. Frustration. Anger. Something frayed, too. “I cannot, Robin. I would do much, for you. I wish you to feel safe. But I cannot see you as unremarkable.”
He was usually better with explaining than this. He was.
“God, no, I’m— That’s not what I meant.” Robin never said the words were elegant or coherent. Or even in complete sentences. “It’s context. I’m not asking you to change. Or saying you need to. It’s just… It’s backstory to try and make it make sense while I ramble. Learning me.”
Robin shrugged, sharp and awkward. He didn’t let himself study the books. This felt like a look-him-in-the-face kind of moment. So he did.
“Context,” Zyr echoed, drawing another hissing breath through his teeth.
Frustration writ itself across his handsome features, a there-and-gone flicker.
“I appreciate context. I think this is a chapter I should allow to conclude before attempting to make notes in the margins. Ramble, please. And I’ll demonstrate that I can, in fact, shut up and listen. ”
“You’re being really hard on yourself,” said Robin, king of the hypocrites.
“This is probably the part where I should make an excuse about needing help reading titles or something, but fuck it. Can we pretend I did, and you sit next to me? Unless you’d rather not.
Then I’ll remember I have glasses on for a reason. ”
“Of course.” Clear relief rang in Zyr’s voice, and he shifted closer, so they almost touched. “I prefer directness to excuses.”
One more thing they had in common.
That, and more Nora Roberts than Robin would care to admit to. The man had at least three family trees worth of series hanging around, but still on the shelf. In order of trilogy and book number. The correct way.)
Robin didn’t push for closer. This was as daring as he could manage.
“Same,” Robin said, looking back down at the books.
Sorting them again. “Prologue. Backstory. I told you about my,” Robin waved idly at his head with a Judith McNaught, “stuff. It’s not just feelings wheels and medication.
I’ve had to learn that my knee jerk reaction to some situations isn’t great.
Like, not wrong, exactly, but not what I want it to be, when I have a few to think on it.
I need time to step away and sort stuff out, thus the whole ‘I don’t know how to process this right now.
’ In this case, I went to harass the hell out of someone who might be able to help me with that. ”
A beat of quiet. “May I ask where you went?”
“Antonio. We’re friends. He helped me figure out where some of the fuckery was coming from.
Mine. Not yours.” Robin didn’t look at Zyr.
He leaned over to start shelving the first books, and his knee bumped against Zyr’s, but he didn’t look.
“Why me? Like, why obsess over me, to the point that I’m on the same level as your entire middle finger to genocide collection? ”
“I’ll attempt to explain. Only,” Zyr tapped his tail lightly against the floor between them, “may I touch you?”
Robin looked at him, then.
Not a cost. Not ‘if you do this, I’ll explain.’ A request and a promise to try.