You Can’t Always Get What You Want
You Can't Always Get What You Want
Icome downstairs, and Dark is in the corner. Amber eyes floating in a density of shadow in the far corner of the coffee shop that the morning light seems to slide off rather than illuminate.
He’s not invisible exactly, more like the human eye wants to skip past him, wants to find something more comfortable to land on. He’s large, in the way that shadow beings tend to be large, taking up space in a way that has nothing to do with physical dimensions.
Hex’s people. True to his word.
I nod at him. He inclines his head in return, establishing an understanding between us. He’s here. I know he’s here. We don’t need to discuss it.
I start the morning routine. Machine on.
Pastries out. The first customers trickle in, order their coffees, sit at their tables, and not one of them registers that there is a very large, very still shadow being occupying the corner booth with the intensity of someone who has been asked to guard something and takes that responsibility extremely seriously.
The door chimes at half-past seven. Bunny comes through it with his pink bunny ears already on, a reusable coffee cup in one hand and his law textbook tucked under his arm.
“Good morning, Felix!” he announces brightly. “Good morning, coffee shop!”
Some of the customers return his greeting, seemingly genuinely happy to be accosted by unnecessary cheer over their morning coffee.
Bunny beams back at them. He gives a little wave as if he’s some sort of celebrity.
Then he sees Dark.
He stops.
I brace myself. Dark is not a gentle presence. He’s nothing like Hex, who has spent enough time in the human world to know how to make himself palatable when he wants to. Dark is raw and blunt, and the kind of dangerous that doesn’t bother to soften its edges.
Dark is staring at Bunny.
I watch it happen, the precise moment it happens, an expression crossing Dark’s face that I’ve never seen on any shadow being before.
Not menace. Not assessment. Absolutely nothing, like something has wiped him clean of every response he’s ever learned and left him with no idea what to put there instead.
Bunny looks at Dark for a moment.
Then he smiles his enormous smile.
“Good morning to you too!” he says, cheerfully, and goes to put his apron on.
Dark doesn’t move. Dark doesn’t speak. Dark continues to sit in his corner with the expression of someone who has just walked into a door they didn’t see coming and is still working out what happened.
Two hours later, he’s still there. Bunny is still working.
The coffee shop is doing its mid morning thing, the quiet period between the breakfast rush and the lunch crowd, and I’m wiping down the machine and watching the whole situation with the combination of fascination and exhausted resignation that seems to be my default state these days.
Bunny can see Dark. That much is clear. Most humans can’t, the eye-skipping effect is reliable enough that I’ve watched people nearly sit on Hex before now, but Bunny looks over at the corner periodically with the easy acknowledgement of someone who is aware of a presence and simply isn’t bothered by it.
I have no idea why. I have a vague theory that people raised in cults, who have spent their formative years surrounded by things that most people would find deeply alarming and have learned to treat them as simply part of the landscape, develop a kind of supernatural awareness that more ordinarily raised people don’t have.
And then there were whatever rituals Bunny grew up participating in without really understanding them.
Maybe all of that leaves a residue. A sensitivity to things that exist outside the ordinary.
Or perhaps it’s simply because he’s already met Dis. His eyes have been opened to shadow beings. Or possibly Bunny is just Bunny, and Bunny contains multitudes, and I’ve stopped trying to fully explain him.
Dark, for his part, has clearly never encountered anything like Bunny before.
He watches Bunny the way you’d watch something you have no category for, something that doesn’t fit any of the frameworks you have available.
When Bunny is serving customers with absolute delight, Dark watches him.
When Bunny is restocking the pastry display, while humming joyfully, Dark watches him.
When Bunny drops something and laughs at himself and picks it up and keeps going, Dark watches that too, with the absorbed focus of someone studying a phenomenon they don’t understand but can’t look away from.
I should probably say something. I should probably explain that Bunny is a person, not a spectacle, and that staring is rude even when the person you’re staring at doesn’t mind, and that whatever Dark is doing in that corner he should probably dial it back a bit.
I think about the state of my own life. The unknown enemy with the amulet. The broken window. The Scrabble board. The hand through the circle.
I decide I have enough problems.
I’m still not entirely over my cold, for a start.
A woman comes up to the counter. Mid-forties, sharp blazer, the expression of someone who has already decided their day is not going well and is looking for somewhere to put that.
“I ordered a flat white ten minutes ago,” she says, with the particular emphasis of someone who feels strongly that this is a significant amount of time.
“I’ll check on that for you,” Bunny says, appearing from nowhere with his enormous smile.
“It should have been ready. I have a meeting.”
“Of course, I completely understand.” Bunny is already moving efficiently, checking the counter, producing the flat white from where it’s been sitting. “Here you go! I think I must not have called your name loud enough. I’m so sorry about that. I hope your meeting goes really well.”
The woman opens her mouth to say something else. Bunny’s smile doesn’t waver. It’s not a defensive smile or a placating smile, it’s just entirely genuine, like he actually does hope her meeting goes well, like he has no idea there was anything adversarial about this interaction.
The woman closes her mouth. Takes her coffee. Leaves.
From the corner, there is a very low sound. The kind of sound that isn’t quite a word but is definitely an opinion. I glance over. Dark is watching the door the woman went through with an expression that suggests he found her wanting.
Bunny looks over at the corner. “It’s fine,” he tells Dark, pleasantly. “She was just having a bad day.”
Dark stares at him.
Bunny smiles and goes back to wiping down the counter.
I watch this exchange and feel something shifting in my chest, something that takes me a moment to identify.
I’m watching Dark watch Bunny, and there is something in the way Dark is looking at him, in the moments when he thinks nobody is paying attention, in the unguarded seconds between one customer leaving and the next arriving.
It’s the look of someone encountering something they didn’t know they were missing.
The look of someone trying to work out if they’re allowed to want the thing they’re looking at.
Nobody has ever looked at me like that.
The thought arrives without warning, quiet and absolutely certain, and it sits in my chest with the particular weight of things that are true and unwelcome.
Nobody has ever looked at me the way Dark is looking at Bunny right now.
Not with that quality of helpless, astonished attention.
Not like I’m something they’ve walked into unexpectedly in the dark and can’t stop reaching for.
I think about what that would feel like. To be on the receiving end of that kind of attention. To have someone look at you in their unguarded moments with something that isn’t strategy or amusement or careful composure but just pure, undisguised wanting.
It would be nice. I imagine it would be remarkably, stupidly nice. The kind of nice that rearranges things.
I turn back to the machine. I clean something that doesn’t need cleaning. I have a fully functional life and I am absolutely fine, and I am not going to stand in my own coffee shop feeling sorry for myself because a shadow being I barely know is making eyes at my employee.
I’m fine.
The door opens. A group of students. Bunny goes to serve them with his usual enthusiasm and somewhere in the process manages to make one of them laugh, properly laugh, the surprised kind.
Dark watches this. Something moves across his face that he almost immediately suppresses, but not quite fast enough.
Hopeless, I think. Absolutely hopeless. And I mean that with the warmth of someone who recognises the condition.
The students leave with their takeaway cups, and a new customer comes in, a young man, harried and fraught. He glares up at the menu as if it is displaying crimes against humanity rather than coffee options.
“I don’t understand why you don’t have oat milk,” he says, gesturing at the board with the irritation of someone who finds everything inconvenient. “Every other coffee shop has oat milk.”
“We absolutely do have oat milk!” Bunny says. “It’s not on the main board, but it’s always available, I’m so sorry for the confusion…”
“It should be on the board.”
“You’re completely right, we should make that clearer…”
“I’ve wasted five minutes trying to find it.”
From the corner comes a sound. Not a word. More of a rumble. The kind of sound that large things make when they are exercising considerable restraint.
Bunny’s head swivels to the corner. He points. “Stay,” he says, with the pleasant firmness of someone who means it.
Dark goes still.
I stare.
The customer, who cannot see Dark and has therefore not registered any of this, continues to explain his feelings about menu boards.
Bunny turns back to him with his full attention, smiling, patient, completely unbothered.
He makes an oat milk latte. He charms the man into a grudging civility by the time the transaction is over.
The man leaves looking slightly better than he came in, which is peak Bunny and frankly a miracle.
Bunny glances over at the corner. “Well done,” he says, approvingly.
Dark looks at him with those fathomless amber eyes.
There’s something in them I don’t think Dark would want me to see, something that has nothing to do with guard duty or tactical positioning or any of the official reasons he’s here.
Something that is entirely about the person in the pink bunny ears who just pointed at an ancient shadow being and told him to stay and then thanked him for doing it.
Then, very slowly, with the dignity of someone making a considered decision, he nods.
I put down my cloth. I look at the ceiling.
I think about everything and nothing and the specific quality of being someone that nobody has ever looked at like that, and the specific further quality of suspecting, in some basement level of myself I haven’t examined recently, that someone might be starting to, a bit, and not knowing what to do with that information.
Someone who is currently upstairs in a summoning circle, watching television, who backed me up in front of Hex and Adam without being asked.
Who tucked a blanket around me. Who placed himself in the palm of my hand when he was sad.
Who said it is worth more than you know in a voice that I have been trying not to think about ever since.
Someone who wanted to stay trapped in my circle. Possibly because they need my protection and are far too proud to admit it. Possibly because of other reasons.
I sigh heavily and pinch the bridge of my nose.
I have enough problems. So many problems. I really don’t need to be adding to them. What I need is to ignore whatever it is I’m witnessing between Dark and Bunny. And to ignore any complicated feelings about Dis.
The day passes as days at work often do. Slow. Dull. The routine of it all grinding on my soul.
We reach the post-lunch lull. Bunny is chatting away to Mrs Edwards. Dark is in his corner. Everything is fine and under control.
I’m going to go upstairs to check on Dis, which is entirely routine and not at all pointed, and I’m not at all thinking about the way Dark has been looking at Bunny, and I’m absolutely not still wondering how that kind of attention would feel if it were directed at you.
I’m simply going to check on my captive.