Chapter 14
Coffee Date
Iwake up to the sound of someone thumping and stomping around in my kitchen.
Oh no. I think Hex is rearranging things.
Not subtly. Not quietly. But with the particular energy of someone who has decided that everything is in the wrong place and appointed themselves to fix it. Cupboard doors opening and closing. The scrape of something along the counter. A pause. Then the unmistakable sound of judgement.
I lie very still and stare at the ceiling.
It has been seven days since a shadow prince materialised in my bedroom and turned my life upside down.
Four days since I accidentally nearly killed him with a salt shaker and then held out my hand anyway because apparently I cannot help myself.
Two days since he crashed my family dinner in a stranger’s body and made my mother giggle for the first time in recorded history.
And now he is in my kitchen. Rearranging things.
At seven in the morning.
On my day off.
How is this my life?
I close my eyes. I’m not ready to face the world. Not when it involves seven foot tall shadow princes who are incredibly hot in bed but utterly infuriating out of it.
“I know you’re awake,” says Hex from the kitchen.
Of course he knows.
I haul myself out of bed and shuffle to the kitchen in my pyjamas, hair doing something I am going to pretend is not happening.
Hex is standing at my counter, looking deeply unimpressed. He has rearranged the mugs. All of them. Arranged by size in a neat descending row, handles pointing the same direction, which is not how I organise them and is going to irritate me every morning for the foreseeable future.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Improving the system.”
“There was nothing wrong with the system.”
“You had a mug that says World’s Okayest Person next to one that says Hustle Harder.” He turns to look at me, red eyes glowing softly in the morning light. “I put them at the back.”
“I like those mugs.”
“That’s concerning.”
“They were gifts. Felix gave me the Okayest one.”
“I see.” He turns back to the counter. “The coffee jar was on the wrong side of the kettle. You’re right-handed.”
“I’ve been making coffee in this kitchen for six months.”
“Inefficiently.”
I press my fingers against my eyes. I need coffee before I can have this argument. “Move,” I say.
He steps aside with far more grace than is reasonable. I fill the kettle and reach for the coffee jar, which is now on the right and is, infuriatingly, easier to reach. I say nothing about this.
“The crystals on the windowsill are facing the wrong direction,” Hex says from behind me.
“The crystals are staying where they are.”
“They’re not doing anything. The wards faded days ago.”
“They’re decorative now. I’ve grown to like them.”
“They’re cluttered.”
I spin around. He is leaning against the opposite counter, arms crossed, head tilted, wearing that expression. The one that is somehow both insufferably smug and deeply entertained. The one that makes me want to slap him and also, traitorously, to smile.
I do not smile.
“Are you going to be like this all morning?” I snap.
“Like what?”
“Like...” I wave a hand at him, at all of him. “This.”
“I’m simply making observations.”
“You’re being annoying.”
“Annoyingly helpful.”
“Those aren’t the same thing!”
“They can be.” He smiles. It does terrible things to my already frayed sense of well-being. “You look very cute when you’re exasperated, by the way.”
“Don’t.” I point at him. “I’m not cute. I’m annoyed.”
“You can be both.” He sounds genuinely delighted. “You frequently are.”
I turn back to the kettle with great dignity and make my coffee with the focused energy of a man who is absolutely not affected by anything that was just said.
I take my mug to the table. Hex sits opposite me, the same as yesterday, same as the morning after the dinner party.
The morning light catches the edges of him, and he looks entirely solid, not flickering at all.
I remember the first time he appeared here, how I could see straight through him to the wall behind.
That doesn’t happen anymore.
I look down at my coffee.
“What are your plans today?” Hex asks.
“It’s my day off. I don’t have plans.”
“So we could do something.” He looks perfectly comfortable with this word. We.
“You want to go out there.” I gesture toward the window. “In public. In daylight.”
“Yes,” he says decisively. “I’m strong enough now.”
I sigh heavily. “How exactly are you planning to come with me? You can’t walk down the street. People will see you.”
Hex looks at me with the patient expression of someone explaining something to a small child. “I’ll travel as your shadow. Anyone who looks will only see a shadow, a slightly larger one perhaps, but nothing worth remarking on.”
“A slightly larger one.” I repeat like a parrot. A very dumb, very overwhelmed parrot.
“People don’t look at shadows, Adam.”
It is, irritatingly, a reasonable solution.
I shake my head in defeat. “Where do you want to go?”
“I thought we might go to your coffee shop. Felix will be there.”
“How do you know Felix is working today?”
“I checked his schedule.”
I set down my mug. “You checked his schedule.”
“You have it on the fridge.” He nods at the Welsh dragon magnet holding up the rota. “Monday. Early shift.”
There is something profoundly unsettling about the fact that Hex has studied my rota. There is also something profoundly domestic about it that I am not going to examine right now.
He reaches across the table and picks up the gold ring he gave me, which is now sitting by the sugar bowl where I dumped it.
He turns it over in his fingers with idle energy, the metal catching the light.
Then he sets it back down. “The blue jumper is nicer than whatever you’re planning to wear, by the way. ”
I look down at my pyjamas. The ancient grey ones with the bleach stain I have been meaning to throw away for two years. I’d like to say they aren’t an indictment of my general dress sense, but I’d be lying.
“I’ll wear whatever I want,” I say, attempting and failing to do that haughty thing Hex sometimes does.
“Of course you will.” He agrees affably.
I huff out a breath. “Why do you want to see Felix?”
“I have no wish to see the little witch. I wish to take you out for coffee, and you’ll be more comfortable if your friend is there.”
I stare at Hex. I concentrate on not letting my jaw drop.
“You want to take me for coffee?” I somehow manage to squeak.
Hex unleashes one of his devastating smiles. “Tis a human custom, is it not?”
I nod weakly.
“Then go get ready, My Love.”
I push back from the table. I am almost at the door when I stop. My gaze has fallen on the bookshelf in the hallway.
“Did you move my books?”
A pause. “They’re alphabetical now.”
“Hex.”
“Yes?”
“I organised them by genre.”
“That’s not an efficient system.”
I walk away before I say something I’ll regret. Behind me, I can hear him laugh. Low and warm and rich, rolling through the flat like it belongs there.
After my shower, I put on the blue jumper. My own decision. Nothing to do with anything.
Iwalk into Coffeelicious and my shadow walks in with me, slightly larger than it should be, slightly darker than the light warrants. Nobody glances at it.
Felix looks up from the espresso machine. His eyes go to me, then down to my shadow, then back up to me.
“The usual?” he says with studied casualness.
“Please.”
His eyes drop to my shadow briefly. “Just the one coffee, then.”
“Just the one.”
I take the table at the back. My shadow stretches out in front of me. I glance frantically around the busy coffee shop. Nobody is paying the slightest bit of attention. Even though I’m sure that my shadow should be behind me, not joining me for coffee.
But I guess people really aren’t observant. And actually, come to think of it, when was the last time I paid attention to shadows? I don’t think I ever have. I don’t even usually see them. It’s as if my mind doesn’t even register them.
Which come to think of it, is deeply unsettling. What if that’s a whole shadow being thing? A collective curse on humanity so that we don’t see them?
I take a deep breath and force myself to relax. I am not going to spiral into panic and conspiracy theories.
I’m going to enjoy coffee with my… not-date. That’s what I’m going to do.
If I peer very intently, I can just about make out Hex’s face, and he is looking around with the expression of someone visiting a foreign country and finding it charming in ways they hadn’t anticipated. It’s oddly endearing and exactly what I should be focusing on.
Felix arrives with my flat white, pulls out the chair next to me uninvited, and peers at the space where Hex is with the focused attention of someone trying to tune a radio to the right frequency. I get the sudden, uncanny feeling that Hex is far more visible to me than he is to anyone else.
“So,” he says, addressing the air with admirable confidence. “You’re the shadow prince.”
“I am,” rumbles Hex, sounding pleased.
Felix doesn’t jump scare at all. In fact, he looks completely non-plussed at having a shadow talk back to him.
He purses his lips. “You crashed the family dinner. In someone else’s body.”
“A temporary arrangement.”
Felix considers this. “That’s incredibly unhinged.”
“Thank you,” says Hex warmly.
Felix points at approximately the right place. “I like him,” he tells me.
“That’s because you’re both menaces,” I groan. I’m really not sure what I have done to deserve these two.
Felix’s eyes narrow as he stares at the shadow sitting in the chair opposite me. “Your aura is intense. You’re building back up fast.” A pause. “How long until you’re at full strength?”
Hex looks at me. I look at my coffee. “Hard to say,” he says, his voice perfectly even.
Felix looks between me and the not so empty chair. He opens his mouth, then closes it again, which is unusual for Felix. He stands up. “Right. Customers.” He pauses. “Adam. You’re wearing the blue jumper.”
“I know.”
Felix looks at the space where Hex is sitting. The space where Hex is sitting looks back with an expression of complete serenity that Felix somehow apparently perceives, because he makes a small, knowing sound and goes back to the counter.
The coffee shop hums around us. I watch Hex watch the room with that easy, proprietorial air he brings to every space he occupies. Like he owns it. Like he owns everything, just by being in it.
It’s incredibly irritating. Extroverted, overly confident people are the worst. Why couldn’t it have been a shy shadow prince who needed to feed on me?
I sigh and sip my coffee. I pretend I’m not looking at anything in particular, when in fact I’m very much looking at him.
He is hiding right now. Masquerading as my shadow.
Choosing to be all wispy and ill-defined.
But I saw his true form this morning. He was more solid than yesterday.
The light wasn’t passing through him at all anymore.
A few days ago he was barely there. This morning he was there, completely, like he’s always been there.
He’s recovering. Getting his strength back. That’s good. That’s what I wanted when I broke the salt line and held out my hand.
It’s good. It’s fine.
“Stop thinking so loudly,” Hex says, looking at me with his unnerving level of attention.
“I’m thinking about coffee,” I say breezily.
“You’re not thinking about coffee,” he states.
I ignore him and look out the window. The grey Bristol morning carries on, a woman walking a dog, a cyclist weaving between parked cars, ordinary weekday business. Then something catches my eye in the glass. In the shadow of the doorway across the street.
A shape. Just for a second. There and then gone.
“Hex,” I say quietly.
“I know.” His voice has shifted, not alarmed but attentive in a way that is different from his usual lazy watchfulness.
“What was that?”
He’s quiet for a moment. Then that easy smile slides back onto his face, and he starts reading the seasonal specials card as if nothing happened. “Nothing to worry about today.”
Today.
I look at him. He doesn’t look back. He’s reading about the winter spiced latte with the focused attention of someone with absolutely no thoughts about anything else.
I wrap both hands around my mug and look back out at the perfectly ordinary street.
Today, he said.
I file that away somewhere I’m not going to look at directly. Right next to the thought about how solid he was this morning. Right next to the thought about how easily he said we.
Outside, the Bristol morning carries on. Entirely normal. Entirely fine.
Probably.