Tell The Wolves I’m Home 🐺

Sunday arrived like an exhale.

It came in the way late mornings do when nothing is asking anything of anyone—slowly, without announcement, as the light pressed against curtains until the room behind them grew too warm and too gold to ignore any longer. The curtains themselves held the light rather than blocking it, thin enough that the whole bedroom seemed to glow at its edges.

She surfaced from sleep gradually. Not pulled up by an alarm but drifting upward on her own, one hand already reaching sideways before she was fully conscious of reaching, fingers closing around the familiar weight of her phone where it had been half-swallowed by the blankets. The sheets were still warm and slightly tangled. The apartment beyond the bedroom held the particular stillness of a place not yet asked to be anything. No notifications. No deadlines. The laptop on the coffee table had gone dark sometime in the night and stayed that way. Finally.

She lay there for a moment, just long enough to feel the quiet properly, before she looked at her phone.

Elia's messages sat near the top.

Don't be late

Then, twenty minutes after that: 

And wear something cute.

Not for Roland For me!!

She laughed, and her voice sounded strange and pleasant in the stillness of the empty room.

Just one day earlier, the whole thing had begun the way most of Elia's schemes did: with a casual sentence that should have been safe. She had mentioned the cake offhandedly as a story, as punctuation at the end of her long Friday. A funny thing. A strange delivery. A man at the door looked slightly apologetic about the hour. She had not considered what she was handing her friend. By the end of that same conversation, Elia had identified him, confirmed the connection, volunteered four separate embarrassing anecdotes from his high school years, and pivoted to lunch as naturally as one pivots to breathing. 

The whole sequence had taken perhaps fifteen minutes. The efficiency alone should have been alarming. It felt less like arranging a meal and more like watching a weather system form. By Thursday, there was a reservation. By Saturday noon, a group chat. By Saturday evening, resistance had become theoretical.

The café district was already busy when she arrived, moving at the particular pace that belongs to late mornings in neighbourhoods that have given themselves over to leisure. Outdoor tables had filled steadily along the narrow street with wide sidewalks and old stone and awnings in sun-faded colours that had been sun-faded for so long they looked intentional now. 

She spotted Elia before she was even looking for her. This was always how it worked.

Her friend occupied a corner table outside the most crowded café on the block, slightly separated from the neighbouring tables by a low iron railing threaded with something green and climbing. Sunglasses had been pushed up onto her head. One hand was wrapped around an iced coffee that had been sitting long enough to sweat against the tabletop. The other moved through the air in front of her as she spoke, punctuating a phone call that appeared to be consuming her entire attention—until it didn't. Elialooked up, saw her approaching, and ended the call.

The grin that followed made her suspicious before she had even reached the table.

"There she is."

"Why do you look pleased with yourself?"

"Because I'm always pleased with myself," Elia said it with the serenity of someone stating a fact about the weather.

That wasn't entirely incorrect. She slid into the chair opposite while Elia leaned forward immediately, elbows on the table, iced coffee forgotten.

"So."

The single word arrived carrying enough anticipatory energy that she sighed before anything else had been said.

"No."

"You haven't even heard the question."

"I know the question."

"You don't."

"I absolutely do."

Elia looked delighted. "Tell me again about the cake."

She groaned, and across the street, a couple glanced over briefly at the sound. Elia noticed, lowered her voice for approximately three seconds, then continued as though the interruption had never occurred. "No, because the more I think about it, the stranger it gets."

"It was a cake. Maekar told him to send it to my place."

"It was a lemon cake delivered to your apartment at ten o'clock at night by a mildly intoxicated man who apparently knows my entire high school social circle."

"He wasn't intoxicated."

"He told you that you were prettier than your photos."

"Elia."

"He did."

"He was being friendly."

"He was drunk!" Elia stared at her across the table for a long, deliberate moment. Then she laughed, shaking her head slowly. "God, you're hopeless."

Before she could mount any kind of defence, her phone buzzed softly against the tabletop. She glanced down. Not Roland in the group chat. Maekar. The simple arrangement of letters that made up his name still produced something in her chest that she preferred not to examine too closely in broad daylight, and especially not at a table currently occupied by Elia.

Elia, who noticed everything.

"No."

"Oh, absolutely."

"He just said good morning."

"You smiled."

"I did not."

"You did. Just now. A very small one, I saw it!"

She looked away toward the street, where the late-morning crowd continued its unhurried drifting, entirely indifferent to her current situation. Which, unfortunately, confirmed everything Elia needed to be confirmed.

Across the city, Sunday morning looked entirely different.

The morning had started before seven—not because Maekar had any particular reason to be awake at that hour, but because Aerion had made a unilateral decision about the world needing to be awake, and executed it with the commitment of someone who had never once questioned his own judgment. By eight-thirty, the kitchen had become a negotiation room. Aerion sat at the island, wrapped dramatically around his chair like a figure enduring some profound and specific suffering, rather than a five-year-old confronted by a small number of peas on an otherwise acceptable plate.

"They're green."

"They're peas."

"I don't like peas."

"You ate them last week."

Daeron, at ten, had long since perfected the art of appearing to eat while actually doing very little of it. He sat across the island in a state of practised stillness, fork moving with just enough periodic motion to suggest ongoing participation. 

Maekar sat between them with coffee in one hand and his phone in the other, moving through emails and messages, occasionally glancing up to confirm that food was still, somehow, slowly, being consumed. The apartment around them was comfortable and bright— shoes near the door, a jacket over a chair, morning light coming through windows that hadn't been dressed for it.

Aerion eventually abandoned his argument, as he abandoned most arguments once the energy required exceeded the available reward, and leaned his full weight sideways into his father's arm instead.

"Tired."

"You've been awake for three hours."

"Still tired."

"You woke everyone in this apartment."

"Tired."

Daeron made a sound into his juice that was almost certainly a snort. Aerion turned to look at him with an expression of profound betrayal. Maekar raised his coffee cup to his mouth and said nothing, which was the only dignified response available to him.

Somewhere between breakfast and leaving for Daeron's weekend practice, he found himself checking his phone. Not deliberately. Just the way a hand moves toward a familiar thing—something unconscious, habitual, the small gravity of something that had quietly become part of the texture of ordinary days. There was nothing new. Which was entirely normal, and meant nothing, and he set the phone down and helped Aerion locate a missing shoe from beneath the couch.

He checked again at the traffic light.

Again, from the edge of the tennis courts, while Daeron joined his coach at the baseline, the morning opened up around him. It was only the second week—Baelor had suggested that Daeron try to pick up their childhood habits, see if he got a knack for it—and there was still something very new about the whole arrangement. The courts were set into a park, open on one side to a path where joggers passed at intervals, and the sound of the ball was clean and sharp in the late morning air.

He stood at the low fence with his coffee going cold, watching Daeron receive instructions. A few other parents stood nearby in the loose, semi-acquainted clusters that formed wherever adults waited together without quite knowing each other—close enough to suggest community, spaced enough to preserve the option of not talking.

Maekar stood slightly apart, as he generally did.

His phone was in his pocket. He was not checking it this time. He was watching his son attempt a forehand with the over-corrected stiffness of someone who had been told where to put their elbow and was now thinking about their elbow constantly, which was the wrong way to stop thinking about one’s elbow. Somehow, this is not an unfamiliar sight, quite some fifteen-something years ago.

Back at the café, Elia was still talking. She had moved on from the cake and arrived at a new theory, which she was presenting with the focused intensity of someone who had given it genuine thought.

"You know what bothers me?"

"I'm afraid to ask."

"He agreed too fast."

She looked up from her coffee. "What?"

"The lunch." Elia pointed at her. "Roland. When I invited him."

"That's not suspicious."

"It is slightly suspicious."

"You invited him."

"I invited both of you."

"That's still just—inviting him."

Elia narrowed her eyes. "No, because when I mentioned lunch, he replied in twelve seconds."

"You're making that up."

"I am not making that up."

"Twelve seconds?"

"Eleven, actually. I counted."

That finally did it. The laugh came out before she could stop it—a real one, the second of the morning, and it surprised her a little with how easily it arrived. It escaped into the warm air of the street and dissolved there, and for a moment, everything felt exactly as light as it sounded. Sunlight on the tabletop. The easy noise of a Sunday morning crowd drifting past. Her coffee was cooling slowly between both hands, and Elia was already halfway through the next chapter of her latest theory, and the whole of the previous week receding to a comfortable distance that made it feel like someone else's week entirely.

She noticed him before Elia did, which was unusual enough to be worth remarking on internally.

Roland was coming from the direction of the side street, hands in the pockets of a jacket that had nothing in common with the way she had last seen him—no particular straightness to the shoulders, no uniform, none of that quality he carried at work that made a room feel slightly more organised just by his presence in it. He was simply a young adult walking toward a café on a Sunday morning, slightly late, looking around at the tables with the unhurried patience of someone who trusted they would be found eventually.

She recognised him a full three seconds before her brain fully reconciled the two versions. Elia looked up, followed her eyeline, and her expression shifted into something that could only be described as professionally satisfied.

"Roland! Over here!" 

He reached the table, pulled out the remaining chair without ceremony, and sat. "You said eleven-thirty."

"I said eleven-thirty twenty minutes ago."

"Gah, time blindness. My humblest apologies," He glanced across the table, and something in his expression loosened slightly in the way that happens when you encounter someone in an unexpected context, and it turns out to be fine. "Hi."

"Hi," she said.

Elia looked between them with the barely suppressed energy of someone watching the opening of something she had personally arranged and was very pleased about. She lasted approximately four seconds.

"So," she said, turning to Roland with the easy confidence of someone who had decided in advance how this would go. "You two have clearly met under interesting circumstances."

"She told you about the cake," he said. It wasn't a question.

"She told me about the cake." Elia picked up her iced coffee. "And several other things."

There was a brief, specific quality to the pause that followed. Elia looked at both of them with the serenity of someone holding a hand they have no intention of showing yet.

"For what it's worth," Elia continued pleasantly, "I thought it was a very thoughtful gesture. On behalf of your employer."

Roland said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

"Elia," she said.

"I'm just saying." Elia set her glass down. "A lemon cake. At ten o'clock at night. Personally delivered." She paused. "He could have used a courier."

The observation landed and stayed there.

Roland looked at the menu with the focused attention of a man reading something extremely interesting. He could’ve said something about offering to deliver it. He could also speculate about Maekar not wanting some stranger to appear at her doorstep that late into the night. Unfortunately, silence was his answer this time.

She had told Elia more than she'd intended to, which was always what happened. The story had come out in pieces across two separate phone calls—the cake, Roland showing up at her door looking faintly apologetic about the hour, looking slightly, well, intoxicated, and then the part she'd mentioned almost as an aside, the part that had made Elia go very quiet in the particular way that meant she was not quiet at all internally. That Roland worked for Maekar. That it had been a Friday night. That she was even on a call with Maekar when the cake arrived.

Elia had asked very few follow-up questions, which was how she knew she'd said enough.

The waiter came, and they ordered. Elia required three modifications. Roland ordered without looking up. She ordered in the middle, and when the waiter left, Roland glanced at her choice and said, "Good," very simply, without apparent awareness of saying it, and the conversation moved on before she could do anything with it.

Elia, to her credit, did not push. She redirected instead, which was her preferred method: not forcing a door but finding a window and leaving it open.

"So you two were at the same school," she said, mostly to hear what Roland would do with it.

"Different years," he said. "I knew who Elia was. Vaguely."

Elia pointed at him. "Chemistry. One term. Year ten."

"Half a term."

"You were there for the explosion."

She looked between them.

"There was an explosion," Elia confirmed. "Entirely my fault. Roland was two benches away and still got sent to the office. Along with some others."

"I laughed."

"You laughed very loudly."

"It was funny."

"The teacher didn't think so."

"The teacher had no sense of humour."

Elia turned to her with an expression of great satisfaction. "They got sent out for laughing, sat in the hallway for forty minutes, and when the teacher eventually came to collect him, he was somehow eating a sandwich. To this day, no one has explained the sandwich or where he got it."

She looked at Roland.

"I was hungry," he said, with complete seriousness.

They weren't old friends—she'd understood that within the first few minutes. The ease between them was thinner than friendship, the specific comfort of people who had briefly occupied the same spaces at an impressionable age without ever becoming close. They remembered each other with the low-level recognition of shared context. Though she, too, would not refuse a connection with someone she might slightly know from her hometown in the big city.

Which meant Elia had found him, reached out to someone she barely knew from fifteen years ago, and arranged an entire lunch, for the sole purpose of watching her sit across a table from him.

She looked at her friend.

Elia met her gaze over the rim of her glass with an expression of complete serenity.

She looked away.

Food arrived, and they ate without the conversation stopping. Roland knew the neighbourhood in the way of someone who had grown up nearby rather than moved there intentionally—not a curated list of recommendations but a collection of specific, slightly obscure details. A place down a back street that had been making the same pastry since before any of them were born. A shortcut that only worked on weekday mornings. Something about his job with Maekar that needs an extensive knowledge of parts of the city.

She had arrived half-expecting something—some architecture beneath the afternoon, some moment Elia would engineer and then step back from with her arms crossed and her sunglasses pushed up and her expression of someone who had been right about everything all along. But the afternoon had simply been an afternoon. The street beyond the railing had gone through its quiet day changes—the midday crowd thinning into the looser drift of early afternoon, the light dropping from clean blue-white into something lower and warmer and amber at the edges.

She had not checked her phone once.

The bill arrived. Elia reached for it.

 "I'll get it," she said.

"I've got it," Roland said at the same moment.

But Elia already had it. She set her card down before sitting down and was simply executing it now. Then she pushed her chair back, gathered her things, lifted her bag onto her shoulder, and stood up.

Both of them looked at her.

"You're leaving?" she said.

"I have a … thing." Elia slid her sunglasses down from her head and onto her face in one smooth movement.

"What thing?"

"A thing I just remembered." She bent and kissed the top of her head, then straightened and looked across the table. "Roland. Lovely to see you. Genuinely. We should catch up with some others, you know? Maybe there are some other strays in this city, too!"

"You're leaving," Roland said, ignoring the rest of the words that Elia had just said. It came out less like a question and more like a man confirming the terms of something he had not agreed to.

"Yes. I’m terribly sorry. But the afternoon is beautiful," Elia said pleasantly, gesturing at nothing in particular—the street, the light, the still-warm tabletop with its two remaining coffees. "It would be a shame to waste it." She smiled at them both with the specific warmth of someone who is very pleased with themselves and has decided not to hide it. "Take your time."

And then she was gone, moving through the café tables with the confidence of someone who had somewhere to be and also no intention of explaining where, the crown of her sunglasses catching the afternoon light once before she turned the corner and disappeared entirely.

The table was quiet. Someone nearby laughed at something. A chair scraped. The waiter appeared briefly, removed an empty glass, and departed.

She looked at the space where Elia had been.

Roland looked at it too.

After a moment, he picked up his coffee. "She planned that," he said.

"From the beginning," she agreed.

A beat.

"The explosion story," he said. "She didn't need to tell you that."

"No," she said. "But she has this thing where her first introduction of anyone is to tell the most embarrassing thing that she knows."

The afternoon light lay warm and unhurried across the table between them. Neither of them moved to leave. Neither of them suggested it.

That was the thing she would notice later, turning the afternoon over in her mind—there had been no moment where one of them said “...shall we or do you want to…” or anything that constituted a decision. The bill had been paid, the chairs had been pushed back, and they had both simply stood up and moved in the same direction, out through the café's low iron gate and onto the pavement, and somehow that had become a walk.

The street ran parallel to a long stretch of park, the kind that urban planners put between shopping blocks and residential roads as a kind of apology for all the concrete. It wasn't a grand park. Just a wide path between old trees, benches at irregular intervals, patches of grass where people had arranged themselves with the specific territorial ease of people who had found a good spot and intended to keep it. A man was asleep under a tree with a hat over his face. Two small children were engaged in a project involving sticks that appeared to have rules neither of them had agreed on.

They walked without particular purpose, which was its own kind of purpose.

"Where did you grow up?" she asked, not because it was the next logical question but because it was the one that came out.

"About forty minutes from here by train." He said it the way people say things about the places they grew up—not with nostalgia exactly, just with the flat familiarity of something that is simply true. 

"Huh? How long was the commute?"

"To school? An hour twenty, door to door." He paused. "I did that for four years."

"That's bleak."

"It was character-building."

"I’m sure there are closer schools to this area...."

He looked sideways at her with something that wasn't quite a smile but was in that vicinity. "My dad insists on that one school. Can’t say I hate it. It’s like a little adventure every day."

"I moved three times in four years," he continues. "Every time I thought I'd found somewhere that was a reasonable distance from work and a reasonable price, one of those two things changed."

"Which one usually changed?"

"Both, eventually. But the price first."

They passed a cluster of benches where a group of older men were playing cards at a folding table with the focused intensity of people conducting serious business. One of them glanced up as they passed. The rest did not.

She had been turning a question over since somewhere around the second coffee at the café, and eventually, the walk made it easier to ask than holding onto it.

"How did you end up working for Maekar?"

Roland was quiet for a moment—not evasively, just in the way of someone locating the beginning of something. "I was doing driving work. Private hire, mostly corporate. He was a client for about a year before he asked if I wanted something more regular." He paused. "The money was significantly better. The hours were longer but more predictable. It made sense at the time."

"And now?"

"It still makes sense." He said it evenly, without either enthusiasm or complaint, which she was beginning to understand was simply how he said most things. "Six years is a long time to do something that doesn't make sense."

"What was he like? When you first started."

"Focused," Roland said, after a moment. "Very focused. The kind of person where you can tell that most of what's happening is happening somewhere you can't see." He glanced at her briefly. "He's different from what people tend to assume, though. Outside of work. Quieter than the version people have of him. More ordinary."

"Ordinary seems like a strange word for him."

"Maybe." He considered. "But there's a version of him that's just—I don't know, I think the responsibilities he has to manage are far greater than just the position he has. That part doesn't make the papers."

She thought about that. The image sat strangely alongside the other images she'd accumulated—the ones she'd formed before she met him and the ones that had arrived since, which were less clear and therefore more difficult to arrange into anything coherent.

Roland seemed on the verge of something for a moment, a question forming and then reconsidered. She caught the edge of it, the slight shift in his posture, the way he looked ahead rather than at her.

"You can ask," she said.

"I wasn't—" He stopped. "How did you meet him?"

She smiled despite herself, because the care with which he'd almost not asked it was somehow more telling than the question. "The grocery store," she said. "I saved him from buying actual cooking wine to cook, and he paid for my cheese, chips, and a bottle of cheap wine."

Roland nodded and did not ask anything further, and she appreciated that too.

They had reached the point where the path curved toward a small shopping street. Independent shops, a hardware store that had clearly been there since before the surrounding buildings were built, a bookshop with a display someone had put genuine thought into. A bakery with its door propped open, exhaling something warm and faintly spiced onto the pavement.

She slowed without meaning to in front of a small shop window—stationery, beautiful and entirely unnecessary. Notebooks in colours that had been given serious names. Pens arranged by weight. 

"I never buy anything," she said, mostly to herself. "I just look. I really can’t justify buying another notebook to sit on my desk and another pen that I’m not gonna use because it’s ‘too nice’."

Roland stood beside her, hands still in his pockets. "What would you do with another notebook?"

"Nothing. I have one at home, one at the office. And I think one as a spare."

"And yet."

"And yet." She looked at a particularly nice one in a deep greenish blue. "There's something about the idea of them. A fresh one. Like you could start something in it."

"You could start something in one of the three."

"Take it off my hands, and I might ‘start something in one of the two’."

"I’d be happy to help," he said pleasantly, which made her laugh, and they moved on.

They continued down the street slowly. She stopped again briefly at a shop selling plants in small terracotta pots, lined up along a low shelf outside the door. Roland waited patiently. Perhaps he had become someone who had correctly identified that this was going to be that kind of walk and had made his peace with it.

"Do you have plants?" he asked.

"I have one. It seemed to thrive on my negligence."

He almost smiled. The almost-smile was becoming familiar — she was learning to recognise the version of his face that meant something was funny to him, which looked almost identical to the version that meant nothing in particular, except for something very slight at the corners. "What kind?"

"I genuinely don't know. It was given to me. You?"

“Nah. If you know the state of my apartment, you wouldn’t even want to be a plant there.”

The shopping street opened into a small square, and on the far side of it, slightly apart from the other shopfronts, was a place selling ice cream from a long glass case. The queue outside it was modest—a few families, a couple, a pair of teenagers reading the flavours menu.

She stopped.

Roland stopped beside her.

"Do you want—" she started.

"Yes," he said, before she'd finished.

The queue moved quickly. She simply asked for the best-selling flavour, and then Roland asked for the second best-selling flavour.  They found a bench at the edge of the square, not quite in the sun, not quite in the shade.

"This city is actually fine," Roland said, looking out at the square, "when you're not trying to get somewhere."

"That's the secret," she said. "You have to stop trying to get somewhere."

"Difficult on a Tuesday morning."

"Impossible on a Tuesday morning." She looked at the fountain in the centre of the square, currently not running, a pigeon conducting an investigation along its edge. "But on a Sunday—"

"On a lucky Sunday," he agreed, partially. “Sometimes I work on Sunday. Just not on this Sunday.”

They ate their ice cream in companionable quiet. The square went about its afternoon business around them.

She was aware, in the gradual way that awareness sometimes arrives, that she was comfortable. Not the performed comfort of someone trying to seem at ease, but the actual thing. Roland sat beside her without requiring anything from the silence, which was, she had learned today, a quality he carried consistently. It made her think, perhaps this is why Maekar had chosen him.

He was looking at the square with the same attention he seemed to bring to most things. Not performing thoughtfulness. Just actually present in the place where he was, which was rarer than it should have been.

She thought about the way he'd asked how she'd met Maekar. The care of it. The way he'd almost not asked at all. There was something in that which she found she kept returning to without quite meaning to—the consideration in it, the deliberate giving of space. She had met a lot of people who asked questions like they were owed the answers. Roland asked as if the answer was hers to give or keep.

"You're easy to talk to," she said, and it came out more directly than she'd intended. “I thought it’d be awkward, you know. And turns out you are Elia’s friend.”

He looked at her briefly. Something moved across his face that he didn't quite manage and didn't quite try to—something attentive, and a little careful, and quickly replaced by the more familiar steadiness. "You're not bad yourself," he said, which was such an understated response that she laughed, and he looked away at the square again, and she thought she detected the very faint beginning of colour at the side of his neck but could not have sworn to it.

They stayed on the bench a little longer than necessary. The afternoon did its slow gold tilting toward evening, light going warm and long across the square's old stone, the shadows of the trees reaching further than they had an hour ago. The ice cream finished, the bench continued to be occupied.

Eventually, they walked back through the park the way they had come, slower than before. The light had changed while they weren't paying attention, going from the clean brightness of midday into something lower and more golden, the kind that made the park look like a different park than the one they'd entered.

She stopped at the bookshop on the way back without planning to. He stopped beside her without being asked. The window display was the same as it had been an hour ago, but she looked at it differently now. She pointed to a title on the middle shelf—not the one that was obviously displayed, but one tucked behind it, its spine just visible from where they stood.

"That one," she said. "It's strange and slow, and I kept thinking I wasn't enjoying it, and then I finished it in two days."

Roland looked at it for a moment. "That's a recommendation?"

"Perhaps."

He considered this, then pushed open the shop door. The small bell above it announced them to a shop that smelled of paper and something faintly woody, the particular indoor warmth of a place that had been accumulating books for a long time. The shelves were close together and slightly unpredictable.

She found the book quickly, suggesting familiarity with this particular store. Roland took it when she handed it to him and read the synopsis on the back almost immediately.

She browsed while he read, running her fingers along a row of spines, picking things up and setting them back down. Roland drifted to the history section, predictably, and she left him to it and found herself in front of a table of paperbacks with a small handwritten sign that said staff picks, surprise yourself! She picked one up on the basis of the cover alone, which she knew was not a method but which had never entirely failed her either.

They paid separately and left the store just as quickly.

Outside, the street had gone golden.

"I'm that way," she said, gesturing.

"I know," Roland said, and then seemed to register what he'd said, and looked briefly elsewhere. "I’ve been on your doorstep."

"Right," she said.

He fell into step beside her anyway, which neither of them commented on.

They walked without much conversation, which was different from the earlier silence—less full of things being said and more full of the afternoon winding down. The streets were quieter than they'd been at noon, the Sunday crowd having dispersed toward home or dinner or the particular mild inertia of late afternoon. 

She slowed when she reached her building. It was an ordinary building on an ordinary street, not too far from the crowds. Roland stopped at the foot of the short step up to the entrance. Not coming further. Just stopping there, which she noticed and found she appreciated in a way she couldn't have fully explained.

"Thanks for the book recommendation," he said.

"You haven't read it yet."

"Preemptive thanks."

"Very optimistic of you."

"Character-building," he said, and she laughed because it was the same thing he'd said about the commute, and he clearly remembered too, and for a moment neither of them said anything, standing in the late afternoon outside her door with their respective paper bags from the bookshop, the light going amber and long on the pavement around them.

“I’ll let you know when I finish reading it.”

“And compare notes?”

“... I am not writing anything down.” He raised one hand in the way she was already beginning to recognise—not quite a wave, more an acknowledgement. And she lifted hers back, so Roland turned and walked away down the street.

She let herself in. The apartment was exactly as she'd left it—quiet and warm, the curtains still holding the tail end of the afternoon light. She set her bag down, put the kettle on out of habit, and stood in the kitchen for a moment, doing nothing in particular.

Then she picked up her phone.

lunch went longer just got back :)

She set the phone on the counter and went to change out of her shoes.

Maekar was standing at the low fence beside Daeron's tennis court when the message arrived, hands in his pockets, and Aerion pressed firmly against his side in the specific way Aerion pressed against people when he was trying to communicate tiredness without admitting to it directly. On the court, Daeron was midway through what appeared to be a serving drill, still working out the geometry of it—second week, and the stiffness was loosening in small increments that were only visible if one was watching carefully, which Maekar was. The session was running a few minutes over, the coach offering individual corrections to each child in turn, and the small cluster of parents along the fence.

How was it?

really good actually!! but elia disappeared the second the bill was paid

He could hear her tone in it—the lightness of it, the particular ease of someone recounting something that had gone well and hadn't cost them anything.

roland apparently has a whole history with her same school!! can u believe it she caused some kind of explosion in chemistry and he got sent out for laughing LOL

He read that one twice. Not the content of it. Just the name. Not your driver or the person you sent or the careful, slight distance she'd maintained around it before. Just his name, dropped naturally into the middle of a sentence.

we ended up walking around afterwards!!! the weather was too nice to go home he's very funny outside work im guessing

Aerion tugged at his sleeve. He glanced down, then back at the screen.

did you know there's a bookshop on my street that does staff picks with no explanation?  i bought something completely on faith

Sounds like a good afternoon.

it was!! :)  

He put his phone in his pocket.

Daeron jogged in from the far end, slightly out of breath, and Aerion detached from his side and went to the fence to shout something encouraging that was mostly just noise.

He stood where he was for a moment.

Roland was, in Maekar's mind, categorised with a clarity he had never had cause to question—capable, reliable, trusted within a specific and well-defined set of parameters. Someone whose judgment he depended on in a particular lane and whose presence he had never thought about outside of it. A working relationship that functioned well precisely because it knew its own shape.

He tried to locate where the discomfort was coming from and found it quickly enough, which was almost worse. It wasn't anything she had said. Nothing she'd written was inappropriate, or surprising, or anything other than exactly what it was—a pleasant account of a pleasant afternoon.

It was how effortless it sounded.

The ease of it. The way the afternoon had simply expanded around her without requiring anything, without the specific weight that he knew he carried and couldn't entirely set down even when he wanted to. She had laughed at something Roland had said and walked around a city and bought a book on faith, and the whole of it had cost her nothing.

He watched Daeron find his bag at the edge of the pitch and sling it over one shoulder.

The feeling didn't have a clean name. He wasn't certain he wanted to give it one.

Aerion came barreling back from the fence at speed and collided with his leg with the confidence of someone who had never once considered that this might not be welcome.

"Can we get food?"

"We have food at home."

"Different food."

Daeron arrived, slightly sweaty, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had done something physical and felt better for it. He looked up at his father and then at his brother and correctly read the situation.

"You can just ask them to cook whatever you want," Daeron said.

"Fries!" Aerion said, with great dignity.

Maekar put his phone away and looked at both of his sons.

"Fine," he said. "Let’s go."

Aerion celebrated this in the manner of someone who had won something significantly larger, and they walked toward the car in the long gold light of the late afternoon, and he kept his expression even and his attention on his children, and did not think about the bookshop or the ease in her voice.

Or tried not to.

Maekar got the boys home by early evening.

Dinner was simple. Aerion managed to get just chicken tenders and fries on his plate. Daeron ate the same food as his father, just in a smaller portion, as he was telling the story of his practice earlier, and Maekar listened and responded in the right places and was, for all visible purposes, entirely present.

He was also thinking about something else. Not continuously. Just in the way that something sits at the edge of a room.

He cleared the plates. Then he helped Aerion through a bath. Then he sat on the edge of Daeron's bed while his older son read for a while as the room went quiet around them. By the time both boys were down, it was nearly nine.

He poured a glass of water he didn't particularly want earlier, and stood at the kitchen counter while looking at his phone.

She had texted once more in the early evening—something brief about the book she'd bought, a line she'd already found that she thought was either very good or completely ridiculous and hadn't yet decided which. He'd replied. She'd sent a single laughing response and gone quiet.

Maekar looked at the message for a moment.

Then he called her. There was no particular reason. He was aware of this as the phone rang—aware that he didn't have one, that he hadn't constructed one, that he had simply picked up the phone and dialled in the way you reach for something without deciding to reach. It rang three times.

"Hi."

"Hi. How's the book?"

"Confusing so far. Not the kind of book I’d usually read."

"Well, you’re trying something new."

"That's what I told Roland. He said he read this one a long time ago."

"Did he?"

"We ended up in the bookshop on the way back, I told you. I think Elia would take this as a successful reunion of some kind."

"That sounds like Elia."

"You know her?"

"Briefly. Through you." He paused. "She seems like someone who gets what she wants."

"Always," she said, and he could hear the smile in it. "She was gone before the bill was fully settled. Just vanished. Left us both sitting there looking at her empty chair."

Left us both. He registered the phrasing without meaning to—again, the natural ease of it, the way she'd placed them in the same frame without any apparent awareness of having done so. A plural that had formed without effort.

Maekar asked about the walk. He wasn't sure why—he already knew about it from her texts, the general shape of it—but he asked anyway, and she told him again in more detail, and her voice had that quality throughout that he had first noticed in her messages and could not stop noticing now. So light. Unguarded. Chirpy.

He listened and asked questions and kept her talking longer than he needed to, which he was aware of, distantly, from somewhere behind the part of him that was simply wanting to hear her voice remain that way—warm and present and close.

She asked about his day. He told her about Aerion's five-minute campaign for junk food. Maekar also told her about Daeron's practice and the drill story, and she asked a follow-up question that surprised him with its specificity, something she had remembered from something he'd mentioned weeks ago.

He had not expected her to remember. He found he had no adequate response to the fact that she had.

"It's getting late," she said. Not as a goodbye exactly. 

"It is." He didn't move toward ending it.

A small quiet settled between them. She could hear the particular quality of his apartment at night through the phone—the low, settled stillness of a place where children were asleep and the day had finally stopped asking things of people.

"You should sleep," Maekar said, and there was something in the way he said it—not dismissive. The opposite of dismissive, actually, the careful tone of someone saying one thing while being aware of several others.

"So should you. Monday tomorrow."

A breath on his end. The specific, understated exhale of someone registering an unwelcome truth. "Yes."

"Early?"

"Seven. I got a meeting. You?"

"Eight-thirty if I can beat the rush hour."

"It's a Monday. There's no virtue in suffering early."

She laughed softly. "That's very reasonable advice for someone who probably hasn't slept past six in years."

“I try to get some more on the way.”

“Right, well … goodnight, Maekar. I’ll text you tomorrow?”

“Looking forward to it. Goodnight.”

The room went very quiet immediately. Maekar set the phone down on the coffee table and looked at it with the even, considering expression he brought to problems he hadn't yet named. Because that was what was happening, he supposed. Something had moved from one category to another without his permission, and he was only now beginning to take the full measure of it.

Roland was her age. He knew this because he knew most basic facts about the people who worked for him. Young, and from a neighbourhood forty minutes outside the city, and someone who apparently read knows the ins and outs and the new places and the next silly trend, which she had found funny in the particular way she found dry things funny, which meant he had made her laugh in that specific register that Maekar knew the sound of.

He thought about Roland choosing a book for her. Walking beside her through a park on a Sunday afternoon. Stopping at a window because she had stopped. Existing inside the same scale of things she existed inside—the same commutes, the same way of living, perhaps. Fitting into her afternoon so naturally that the afternoon had simply expanded to accommodate him.

It wasn't distrust. Maekar understood that clearly enough. She had told him everything—openly, lightly, with no awareness that there was anything in it that required management. And there wasn't, from her perspective, because there hadn't been anything in it. Just a pleasant afternoon with a person who was easy company. Just like every other day, when she would hang out with her other friends.

The problem was precisely that.

Maekar had thought about the distance between them—the ten-ish years, the particular weight of his life, his name, the boys, the work, all of it—as a thing that was simply true, a set of facts that required navigation but not grief. He had thought about it practically, the way he thought about most things. The gap existed. They worked with it.

What he hadn't thought about, not properly, was that the gap meant she had an entire ordinary world that he moved through as a visitor at best. That someone like Roland didn't have to navigate it, didn't have to set anything down or translate anything or manage the distance between who he was publicly and who he was trying to be in a quiet apartment on a Sunday night.

And for the first time, that difference felt like something other than a fact.

He picked his phone up once. Put it down. Picked it up again and typed,

Let me know if it’s worth the time. I might try it too.

He stared at it for a moment, then sent it.

The reply came faster than he expected, which meant she hadn't gone to sleep yet.

the book? or something else?

He looked at that for a long moment, at her sitting somewhere across the city with her unsettled verdict and her Sunday-afternoon, and he felt something shift in him—the inconvenient movement of something that had been theoretical becoming, without warning, entirely real. And for an unknown reason, to a man like Maekar Targaryen, it’s terrifying.

The book.

sure :) 

He set the phone face down on the coffee table.

Outside, the city continued. Somewhere in his apartment, the refrigerator made its small domestic sound. The night settled around him in its ordinary way, and he sat in it, and did not examine the feeling further because he was not yet ready to, but he did not pretend it wasn't there.

That, at least, Maekar owed himself the honesty of.

tbc.

tag list:

and you notice it, it’s obvious, the way his nostrils flare and he can’t stay put for longer than ten seconds, so you decide to pull him into you, urging him inside and to relax, or at least not to be on his own. he grumbles, turning to face you for a moment but he listens— he wouldn’t refuse you. and he folds in your arms, forehead knocking against yours as you climb up into his lap from where he sits. you’re aware of what you’re doing and be can feel it, heavy and charged hands coming to palm at your back, holding you to him though he freezes when you start to kiss him, knowing what you want.

“Don’t know if I can be gentle right now, love..”

his voice is pleading, almost whining as he breathes against your lips, blue eyes wandering to your own, strained but blown. and he means it, it’s not that he doesn’t want to touch you, gods he wants you.. but there is still a rage there, a rugged need. so you take it into your own hands, giving him the word without saying it. take me.. you kiss him again, telling him it’s alright, that he’s still a gentleman, still your dunk, and he lets go just a little.

his lips are rougher on yours, consuming as he switches places with you, scooping you up into his arms and laying you down onto the mattress of your shared room. he shrugs his shirts off over his shoulders as you rest back onto the furs, and he slides up your body, pressing open mouthed kisses up your legs to your thighs and coasting over your clothed core. he lets out a breath, resting against you as his fingers curl around your skirts, ruffling them until they sit at your middle, baring your cunt to him.

he waits there for a second, eyes flicking up yours as you attempt to shuffle closer to him, his arm coming down to rest over your waist— locking you in place and he shoves his face into you. dunk sucks lightly groaning into you as he gathers the wetness with his tongue, wet muscle lapping at your hole in a frenzy. your hands fly out and into his hair, back arching into him as you fuck your self into his tongue. you’re beautiful like this.. your moans filling the room as you coat him, juices flowing at his mouth as his lips attach at your clit. and by the time you’re close, he’s rocking himself against the mattress, soothing the ache of you beneath him. his arm curls tighter, your hands fisting the sheets as your climax nears, body convulsing with every pull of his mouth, tongue fucking in and out of your hole as you arch once more, letting go onto him with a cry.

he guides you through it with every convulse and jerk your body makes, finally releasing you with a pop, your hair mussed and eyes lidded as he rises. pulling at the seam of his trousers, his knees press into the mattress, glancing your way in a break in the fever— meaningful.

“Are you sure..?” you only nod, breath already ragged and uneven, tugging him toward you by his wrist and he follows, “I’am.. please..”

he undoes them, freeing his cock into his hand, long and hard rocking against his stomach, and he leans back down to you, torso touching your through thin cotton, lips capturing yours like a fire. and in one steady push, gliding into your wetness that pooled between your folds from his tongue. your mouth fell open, gasping as he took you, his hand bracing down at the pit of your stomach, where his length dragged in and out, punching up into your cervix like it was nothing, working you open. but he was steady, propped up on his free arm and elbow and still towering over you, the blondes of his hair dampened at his forehead.

“Gods.. you’re everything.. I can’t hold it.”

his hand reaches down to your clit, watching your face all the while as you twist in his hold, your back arching off of the sheets and into him from the pleasure building. his thrusts were relentless, sloppy and needy as he grunted, with every slam foiling you tighter, and his thumb working gentle circles at your wetness. dunk rested his head against your shoulder with your arms tightened around the length of his back, stretching around him as you moaned.

“Let go for me.. I’ve got you.”

he held his own peak until you snapped, clenching around him with a cry and he groaned, holding it no longer, hips straining into your own where his rhythm faltered, lasting only seconds after you before he broke. white hot cum filling you while he rocked into you, his body falling into yours before he caught himself, palm stroking your temple.

“I love you..”

dunk was softer then, sniffing lightly as he looked back down at you and your blissed out smile, “Well that was new..” he huffed a laugh, nose twitching at yours affectionately, his hand soothing your hip with his other hand.

“I didn’t want to hurt you..”

The Prince is also very fond of being close to you. Where other lords, and certainly some of the Princes, would find it unfitting or childish, Daeron will not shy away from holding your hand, tucking his head against your shoulder, or putting an arm around you. Several times, you’ve had to giggle and step away, playfully chiding him about his public image. He is well aware of how people see him, and if that means he can stand with you pressed against him in a crowd, he doesn’t mind in the slightest. 

I had this vision of him that struck me while writing this: Daeron, drunk out of his mind, lost in the dark outside of a tavern, halfway to Ashford with no brother in sight. He’s upset, confused, stumbling around in the woods, and falls against a tree when his legs can no longer keep himself up. He falls into restless sleep, visions of dragons spinning in his head. When he wakes, there’s only a dim light on the horizon, and a warmth pressed against his hip. It's a cat, ragged fur and a notched ear, sleeping soundly against him. He’s extremely confused in his drunk, half-asleep state, but scratches its head as it purrs, and falls back into slumber with a hand protectively on its back. Even when he thinks the worst of himself, others can sense the innate goodness, deep down. 

Maekar: 

Maekar is loyal to a fault. He’s a soldier, trained from a young age to take orders as the youngest son of a King. As an adult, it shows in his dedication to the people he loves. He is Baelor’s shadow, on and off the battlefield. The expendable spare, ready to take a hit for the brother he looks up to so fondly. There's a discipline in him; training, learning, listening to what he’s told and executing it with efficiency and competence. 

It is the same in his marriage; even if there isn’t love right away, he would never think to break an oath. He may not be soft or warm or cuddly but make no mistake, you can feel how much he cares peeking through his incessant need to keep you safe. He feels the need to do things for you himself. Yes you have an escort of guards around you, but he insists on being the one to take a turn with you in the gardens alone. If you’re planning on a ride, he checks your saddle before you mount, ensuring it will not fail. Maekar learns quickly to anticipate your needs; a new gown when you tear a hem, the next volume before you’ve finished a book, his cloak around your shoulders before you even realize you’re chilly. 

He’s not one for poetry or song, often he doesn’t even verbalize his love for you, but you feel it all the same. You know it's hard for him to admit his feelings, years of forcing down opinions in favor of those who give orders has made him unsure of how to open up. And Maekar hates feeling unsure of himself. Instead, he’ll avoid awkward confessions and scrambled musings of love, the unwavering faithfulness all the admission you need to know he feels the same. 

I touched on this in the other post, but he does secretly love attention and affection, especially physical. If you ask him to snuggle up to you in bed, he’ll grumble about how undignified it is for a prince to do something so silly, but he pulls you against his chest and tucks you under his chin. Part of it is a protection aspect: where would you be safer than in his arms? He also just loves the feeling of your hand holding his head or rubbing his back. 

Despite most of his life being an exercise in strength, brutality, and honing the ability to turn off emotions, Maekar loves hard. It doesn’t really look like it to people who don’t know him well, and that’s by design. For the first time in his life, he does not care what anyone but the person he loves thinks of him. He’s stern and grouchy, tough and crass, but he would follow you to hell and back if you asked him. 

Aerion:

For all his faults, and there are many, Aerion is extremely protective over what he deems as his. This can be toxic, at times, possessive, but there is a fierceness in which he would defend anyone or anything that he loves. He takes pride in the feeling of keeping someone safe, a true dragon defending his hoard. There are no lengths he would not go to defend someone if he truly loves them. He’s easily the most skilled warrior of his brothers, something else he takes pride in, spending hours training and dedicating himself to the task. He’s strong, wiry and tough, and able to stand up to men much bigger than himself without hesitation. Of course, it gets him into trouble.

He cares, very deeply, about a great many things; what you think of him, if he’s strong enough to warrant a reputation,  his own standing in the dragon house, but he has an ability to mask any insecurity, and turn it into confidence. It frightens most, lords and commonfolk alike keeping their distance. He revels in the fear, but he also knows it keeps you safe. He’s obsessive: a word spoken in jest about you, an eye staring too long at your neck, a hand offered to help you to your seat, and he’s losing it. It's his job to help you, to leer at your decolletage and to tease you mercilessly. Gods help any man who tries, they’ll suddenly find themselves at his mercy, and we’ve all seen where that leads. Bloody knuckles, broken bones, bruised eyes and egos. He’ll fight and fight until he feels like whatever wrongdoing has been fully paid back. Aerion doesn’t care how injured he gets, his eyes see red and feeling leaves his body as the adrenaline rushes. After, as long as you’re safe in his arms, kissing his face and cleaning his wounds, he’s content to keep fighting. 

Dunk:

Dunk is the very truest of knights. Honor, integrity, truth, these are the traits he knows are baked into the oath every knight swears, and he’ll be damned if he doesn’t follow them. He’s chivalrous, but not in a way where it feels condescending. You know when he offers to carry your basket, he’s doing it to be kind, not because he thinks you can’t do it yourself. When he wraps his cloak around your shoulders, it's because he wants you to be warm, not because he expects anything in return. When he steps in front of you at the sight of danger, it's because the thought of you hurt makes him so angry that his body moves before his brain has fully formed the thought. He wants to help people, to be useful, needed. Helping old ladies up stairs, teaching a young squire a sword trick, giving the crust of his bread to a curious bird. It's purely out of the goodness of his heart. 

He’s the most lovesick puppy of a man. Following close behind you, dopey grin on his face, while you go about your day. He preens when you ask him to get something down from a high shelf, his shoulders shift back and his spine straightens when you thank him for helping you. Helping you up on a horse, tying your boot laces, giving you the warmer blanket, he’s just so pleased to have someone to take care of, and the way he knows how to show his love is to help. He does the same for Egg, though he does try to be sterner with the boy. His sweet, brotherly affection he shows for the child is heartwarming. There’s no end to threats of clouts on the ear, bed without supper, tending to the horses alone, but you, Egg, and even Dunk himself knows it's all in vain. The fond look on his face when the little Prince disarms him gives him away instantly. 

Dunk is well aware of how large he is, how if someone didn't know his kind heart, they might find him daunting. He goes out of his way to be smaller and softer, to move slowly so as not to spook people. I’ve mentioned it before, but Gwin Ashford picks at him, gets in his face, and feels no fear. She’s literally a tween girl, but immediately senses that he won’t retaliate if she jabs at him. It takes a lot to provoke him to real anger, and anything less means he tries hard to be unintimidating. 

He almost dies from happiness when you give the same attention back to him. Mending holes in his clothes, chatting with the horses as you feed them, gently pulling his giant form out of the way so he doesn't trip over tree roots. It's the simplest things, but he covets the attention you give him. Dunk adores you, and shows you by acts of service, so when you do something for him, it tells him how much you love him back. 

Baelor:

Despite being raised in King’s Landing, years of heavy strength and swordsmanship training, and countless bouts on the battlefield, Baelor remains gentle and kind in a way so few men in Westeros are. It's not weakness by any means, rather he fights all his instincts; the lessons engrained in him, his hot Targaryen dragon blood. For the realm, it means an even-headed, calm, intelligent man ruling with both compassion and tenacity. 

For you, it means a man who will listen to you speak for hours so that he can better understand every part of you. A man who will take a deep breath and apologize instead of escalating an argument. A man who, in spite of his status, treats you as an equal and insists on you calling him Baelor; not my Prince, or eventually my King, just the name he was given. Of course duty is important to him, he works himself to the bone to try and live up to his own standards, but he also yearns for a connection with you and to know you wholly, and for you to know him. 

Baelor works diligently on any task. Whether it's planning logistics for grain distribution, or helping you clip a necklace, he treats any duty like a chance to prove himself, and to execute said task with completeness. He does not not understand when you giggle to yourself in the mirror when he braids your hair with the same concentration he plans battle strategy, both are equally important to get right for him. 

He is also remarkably bright, focusing on his political and historical intelligence to better prepare himself when he ascends the throne. Baelor never makes you feel stupid, however. Intellect is something he covets, and he is more than interested in hearing what you know, and explaining what you ask him in a way that shows he thinks of you as academically equal. 

He’s not a show-off type, rather he knows his strengths, and is content to let them speak for themselves. Not one to brag, confident but with the poise of someone who knows his worth. You wouldn’t often see him on a tourney field, not only would it be unsafe for the heir, but he doesn't find he needs the satisfaction of winning. Why risk an injury, or frightening you, to knock some fresh boy off his horse? Baelor would much rather use that energy to practice and perfect his skill in a yard, sparring with experts he could actually learn something from. He’s not the proud sort. Rather, he’s a good man, with a good heart, who longs to take care of someone. 

Lyonel:

Lyonel is the type of man who never really cared about marriage; didn’t want a tidy wife to have to look after, and he certainly didn’t want to end his gallivanting and carnality. So when he does marry, he’s not the type to force a wife into the strict standards of a noblewoman. That doesn’t necessarily mean he needs someone who will get up and dance on a table with him (though he would certainly enjoy it), but he would never understand why some men want silence and subservience from a partner. 

Instead, he’s excited to hear you talk about your interests; he may cut in and ask questions or add his own commentary, but he’ll also sit and listen with his chin in his hand while you tell him about a book you read or a bit of gossip you heard. When you laugh loudly at a crude joke he makes, or make an even cruder one yourself, he’s grinning ear to ear. If you eagerly tell him how much you love dancing, he’s finding the nearest tavern to spin you in immediately. Lyonel has a way of making friends with anyone, and you are no exception. If the two of you will be living together, expected to make heirs and rule the Stormlands, he is determined to make you like him. He’s too busy trying to make you laugh with his antics, or impress you with a hunt, or regale you with stories of adventure, to realize he’s fallen head over heels, deeply, wildly in love. 

He’s not a serious person, and while that can have its faults, his lust for adventure and intense need for companionship mean that he wants to be around you constantly, and is in desperate desire for your pleasure. If you like to read, he’s sitting beside you in the gardens, fidgeting in his seat but trying to pay attention to the story. If you like to ride, he’s lifting you up onto a horse and following you out into the glen. You get the picture. It's not so much about the activity, as it is about getting to make you happy. 

At his core, Lyonel would do anything for the people he loves. I know I’ve said this before, but he literally joins a fight to the death for Dunk after knowing him for like a day. He is fiercely loyal, would step in front of an arrow for someone he cares for. It borders on crazy, certainly, but you cannot deny his devotion.