Best Tuesday Ever
Adam and Hex’s dining room 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 Dis have 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.
Bunny tells us about his studies with the particular enthusiasm he brings to everything he finds interesting, which is everything.
Dark listens to Bunny the way he always listens to Bunny, with the complete, focused attention of someone who has decided that whatever Bunny says is worth hearing.
It is, if I’m honest, very sweet. I’m choosing not to think about how sweet I find it.
Dis and Adam talk about the coffee shop and the repairs and what needs doing, because Dis has developed opinions about the coffee shop that he did not previously have and is apparently not shy about sharing them, and Adam is nodding along in the way he does when he’s both listening and quietly delighted.
It occurs to me, not for the first time, that this is my life.
This specific configuration of people around this specific table.
A former shadow king, and an ex-shadow prince, and a shadow guardian who is learning to eat bread rolls, and my best friend, and Bunny in his ears, all of us eating lamb and drinking wine in Clifton on a Tuesday.
I’ve had worse Tuesdays.
At the end of the evening, when the plates have been pushed to the side, and the wine is being finished and we’re at the comfortable stage of a dinner party where nobody quite wants to be the first to leave, Dis sets down his glass and looks at Adam.
“Thank you,” he says, with the gravity he brings to everything. “This has been a genuinely lovely evening.”
“You’re always welcome,” Adam says, and means it, because he is Adam.
“Felix and I must return the favour,” Dis says. “Once we are settled.”
I look at him. “Once we’re settled where?”
“In the house,” Dis says.
I look at him more.
“The house on the corner of this street,” Dis says, with the mild patience of someone clarifying something they assumed was already understood. “I have purchased it.”
A silence falls over the table.
Hex’s eyes narrow very slightly. He looks in the direction of the corner of the street, which is not visible from where he is sitting but which he can presumably sense in whatever way ancient shadow beings sense property boundaries, or see through walls.
“That house,” he says, “is significantly larger than this one.”
“Indeed,” Dis agrees, pleasantly.
I stare at Dis. “How?” I say.
“I am incredibly wealthy, Little Witch,” Dis says, with the serenity of someone stating an obvious fact.
“That’s not what I meant. I meant you’ve been free for less than a month. You can barely make tea. How did you handle buying a house?”
Dis is quiet for a moment that is slightly too dignified to be called a pause. “I ordered the cheerful human to assist me,” he says.
Everyone looks at Bunny.
Bunny looks up from the last of his dessert, registers that he is the subject of attention, and smiles the enormous smile.
“It was brilliant!” he says. “Dis came to me with the property details and I handled the conveyancing and actually I think I might want to specialise in property law now, it’s terribly exciting. The searches alone…”
“Bunny,” I say.
“Sorry, Felix.”
“I’m so sorry he made you do that,” I say. “He absolutely should not have...”
“Oh, I don’t mind at all,” Bunny says, waving this off with the easy generosity of someone who genuinely doesn’t.
“It was good practice. And Dis was very clear about exactly what he wanted, and by the time we’d finished all the paperwork I felt quite confident about the whole process.
” He pauses. “Also, he’s buying me a coffee machine as a thank you. A proper one.”
I look at Dis.
“The cheerful human worked very hard,” Dis says, without a trace of guilt.
“You bought him a coffee machine.”
“It seemed appropriate.”
“You bought a house and you bought Bunny a coffee machine.”
“Yes.”
“And you can’t make tea.”
“I am learning,” Dis says, with considerable dignity, “to make tea. The tea is a work in progress. The house is simply a practical necessity.”
“A practical necessity,” I repeat.
“We live above a coffee shop,” Dis says. “Which is charming, and I have no objection to the coffee shop. But we will benefit from more space. I certainly have been missing it. Living in a summoning circle was cramped.”
“You had a futon.”
“That is not the same as a house,” Dis says. “We deserve a house.”
I open my mouth. Close it. Think about the corner house, which I have walked past a hundred times and which has three floors and a garden and original sash windows and which has been empty for the better part of a year.
“We,” I say carefully. “You said we.”
“Of course,” says Dis. “We are a we.”
I look at him. He looks at me with those blue eyes, warm and steady and completely certain, the same eyes that looked at me across a summoning circle and found me pleasant.
“Fine,” I say. “Okay. We’re getting a house.”
Adam makes a small sound. I choose not to look at him.
The evening resumes.
I lean back in my chair and look around the table.
Dark, who has eaten five bread rolls in total and is sitting with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has completed an assignment successfully.
Bunny, who is telling Adam something about conveyancing with the enthusiasm he brings to everything.
Hex, who is listening to Bunny with the expression of someone who finds the specific texture of human enthusiasm genuinely fascinating.
Adam, who is warm and content and exactly where he should be.
Dis, beside me. His hand still in mine under the table.
This really is my life now. And it has become, without qualification, the best Tuesday I’ve ever had.
I look at Dis. “Hey,” I say. “On the way home, can you scare anyone who deserves it? It’s hilarious and never gets old.”
“That,” Dis says, with great dignity, “is precisely the kind of undignified behaviour more suited to Hex.”
Hex chuckles, not seeming the least bit offended.
I shrug. “Fair enough. Hex, fancy it? For old times’ sake?”
“No,” says Dis, immediately, with a sharpness that is entirely at odds with the dignity he was claiming thirty seconds ago.
I look at him. “No?”
He meets my eyes. Something settles in his expression, that particular quality that means he has decided something. “If my Little Witch’s heart is set on it,” he says, “it shall be done. By me.”
Across the table, Adam makes a noise that might be relief. Hex’s mouth moves in that way that might be disappointment, might be smug amusement. Could quite possibly be both.
Bunny clasps his hands together. “That,” he breathes, “is so romantic.”
Dis’s jaw tightens very slightly. He does not look at Bunny. He looks at the middle distance with the studied composure of someone who is absolutely not squirming and would like everyone to know this.
I grin. Big and warm and completely unguarded.
“You’re very cute, Disney,” I tell him.
“I am ancient and formidable,” he says.
“You’re adorable.”
“I was the king of the Shadow Realm.”
“You bought us a house,” I say. “And a coffee machine. For Bunny.”
He is quiet for a moment. Then, with the grace of someone making a concession they have decided is acceptable, “That doesn’t mean I’m cute.”
“It absolutely does,” I say.
Hex, at the other end of the table, makes a sound that is definitely a laugh, quickly and not entirely successfully suppressed. Adam doesn’t bother suppressing his at all.
Later, when we leave, Dis scares two people on the walk back. Both of them deserve it. The sound they make will never get old.
Life is very, very good.