Willan
“I can’t believe all this drama happened and I missed it.” Lusce pouts, putting his hand to his forehead and slumping in his chair. From across the small table, Finn rolls his eyes, but I can see the embarrassed smile pulling at the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah, well. Not entirely unhappy that you missed me making a drunken ass of myself. It wasn’t exactly my finest moment.”
It’s been two weeks since that night at Hearts Gate and with how busy we’ve been with classes here at the shop we haven’t been able to catch up with our usual post night debrief.
Jax couldn’t even make it tonight, something about having to stay late at work for some client thing, and Bedeer and Jesminda have gone away to go visit her parents on the other side of the country. Getting older really does suck.
Though, after Finn’s story about getting wasted on assassin shots—partially my fault—and having an absolute meltdown over his relationship status with Kai—something that could have been resolved long ago with the simple conversation we kept telling him to have—and Lusce being extra squirrely about what he and Jax got up to, maybe it has nothing to do with getting older.
Maybe we’ve all just been avoiding having to come clean about our bullshit.
Even now the memory of Nikki’s cutting rejection makes my cheeks burn and my stomach turn.
“At least Nikolo helped you out. That was nice of him.” Lusce manages to say Nikolo’s name without any of his usual horniness, but I’m too busy reacting to give him credit.
“Pah!” I smack the table so hard it makes my hand sting. “Fucking Nikolo. Stuck up dickhead. Fuck him.”
Two sets of eyes swing to me, confused.
“What? It’s true! He was a dick all night, from start to finish. Letting you stay at Hearts Gate on his membership or whatever doesn’t make him some shining fucking hero.”
“Um. You know I hate to defend Nikolo, on account of him being a dick to me. But, uh, you okay bud?” Finn’s head cocks to the side and he winces, accidentally baring his blood covered fang.
“Finn has a point. You’re kind of, uh, intense about him?” Lusce phrases it like a question to ‘ease’ the blow of his correct observation. “Is this about some shit from when you were kids?”
I really don’t like when Lusce is astute about things. It’s unnerving.
“No.” I say emphatically, covering the partial truth by taking a sip of my tea.
It’s scalding hot still and I burn my tongue.
A ridiculous rookie mistake. At least it gives me something to look at, focusing on chilling the air around the cup rather than my friend’s eyes while I correct myself.
“A little bit. It’s complicated. I wanted to talk to him, but he shut me down.
Was really fucking rude about it, too. And the people he was with—absolute wankers! Just who the fuck do they think—oh.”
My tea is now rock solid ice in the cup, and I really haven’t done anything to clear up Finn and Lusce’s confusion.
“Okay then.” Lusce says slowly, drawing out the syllables as he drags my cup away from me.
He sits up straighter and flips his long hair over his shoulder.
“I’m not saying that I’m not entirely on your side, because I am, of course.
But are you sure you’re not, I don’t know? Being unreasonable or something?”
“How is this my fault?” I’m aware that my voice has gone high pitched, but I can’t bring it down.
“I was nice! I’m always nice—shut up, Finn.
” I jab a finger at our unfortunate third who’s been caught in the crossfire here.
It’s his own fault for pulling that face.
I am nice, Godsdammit. “Nikolo was a first-class jerk to Finn—to all of us. You’re just defending him because you want to get in his pants. ”
Lusce refuses to look away as we stare each other down, not even when the table rattles with Finn’s uncomfortable fidgeting. After several long moments, Lusce leans across the table on one elbow, getting in nice and close. The smirk on his face is like a warning siren for destruction.
“Kinda sounds like you wanna get in his pants, too, Willy.”
My glare is so narrow I can barely see him.
“You wanna go there?” I grit out. “Why don’t we chat about what happened with you and Jax at the club? And where he’s been and why your magic’s been so off since we went out?”
Lusce pulls back like I’ve slapped him, gasping and clasping his chest. The air between us crackles with magic, pouring completely uncontrolled from Lusce.
That’s the thing with him, when he’s emotional, he gets erratic and uncontrolled, just like his magic.
Which is why when he tried to brew up a simple hair elixir the other day, not only did he spill the fucking thing, but the classroom floor looked like we’d just laid down a lovely chestnut shag rug.
“Why don’t we talk about none of those things, and we talk about literally anything else.
” Finn interjects, waving his hand between our stare off and immediately regretting it when his fingers get fried by the magic.
“Ouch!” He hisses and waves his hands to shake off the sting.
“I’m getting fucking sick of talking about Nikki and his bullshit lately anyway. ”
Before I can ask what he means, he smiles broadly at Lusce. “Lusce! What about Oggy? How’s the toilet training going?”
Oggy is the chermode pup recently adopted by Jax, and therefore by Lusce, too, because they live together. The thing is the ugliest, most adorable abomination to plague the earth, and their home.
“Fine.” Lusce grunts, then softens, adding reluctantly, “he’s learning to use the little dog door that Jax put in.”
“That’s good!” Finn’s feigned, over the top enthusiasm carries the conversation for the next hour or so, meaning they leave without us getting into another argument. But the whole thing still bothers me—especially the comment about Nikolo’s bullshit.
It kills me how much I want to know. And how much I care after he was such a raging dickhead at Hearts Gate.
Fucking Nikolo, I stew later when my friends have left.
It’s all his fault. I just wanted to… reconnect.
But no, he had to make it a big awkward deal.
I channel my anger into washing up our dishes with more force than necessary, almost breaking my favourite tea cup.
It has the perfect sized handle for my fingers.
“I don’t say it often. But Lusce is right, you know.
” Egbert shocks the shit out of me, appearing out of seemingly nowhere, even though I was probably too distracted scrubbing the bench within an inch of its life to notice.
I jump when he appears, knocking the cups off the bench where they were drying.
They smash on the floor, scattering into a thousand pieces.
Rather than bend down and pick them up, I stare at my uncle in openmouthed shock.
“What? You too? The fucking betrayal.”
Egbert tsks and squats down, calling the broken shards into the palms of his hands.
“Bit rich claiming betrayal when we’re talking about Nikki, ain’t it Willan?” Egbert groans as he stands, using his magic to recraft the remains of the cups into their former shape as a cover to not look at me.
I throw the damp towel onto the bench and lean against it, crossing my arms over my chest.
“It’s not like I was the one that betrayed him. I didn’t even know what happened until, like, two years after he left! No one told me anything. I thought he just abandoned m–us. Us.” I catch myself at the last second, but Egbert heard my slip up.
He looks up from the half-formed tea cup, smiling sadly and sympathetically. The flower pattern on the side is slightly out of place. Reformation isn’t always perfect, sometimes the jigsaw doesn’t always go back together perfectly. And isn’t that a metaphor for something?
“He doesn’t know that now, does he?” Egbert says gently, eyes back on the cup slowly re-piecing itself in his hands.
“Well, how can he when he won’t talk to me?”
“Do you blame him? Now you know what happened? Do you blame him?”
“Well. No. Not really. I just—”
“If you wanna make it right. If you want to rebuild that bridge, Willan, it’s got to be for the right reasons. You have to accept that the old bridge is gone, and that the shores on either side have changed in the years since it disappeared.”
Fucking mages and their roundabout way of speaking. Even I get sick of it sometimes.
“Well, it’s all a moot point now isn’t it? He made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“So, you going to respect that?”
“Do I have a choice?”
Egbert looks at me, the cups all but forgotten in his hands. Reforming them in his hands was a big mistake, because they are about to topple right back off again.
“I’ll see what I can do.” The cups fall to the floor, smashing everywhere once again. “Ah, bugger.”
“I’ll deal with it.” My attention to detail’s always been better than Egberts anyway. I crouch down, the magic singing through my arm and out my palm as I round up the re-smashed bits, along with the couple of chunks Egbert missed the first time. “So you speak to him? Have you always, or?”
I dump the scraps on the counter and focus on energy that remains in the pieces until they weave themselves back together.
“We’ve spoken. But the ball’s in his court. Always has been. I’ll get your number to him. But Willan,” Egbert waits in the door until I look at him. “Don’t hold your breath.”
He pushes off the door frame with a final goodnight before making his way to his apartment on the top floor.
I watch him make his way up the stairs until the tinkling of the cups draws my attention back to them.
Just as they are about to crumble once again, I renew my focus, forcing the spell into completion.