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Of all the self-indulgent, manipulative, ego-stroking, validation-seeking, immature, cruel and heartless--

Shut the ******** up, Fiona.

No! That was completely unacceptable. Leading the poor girl on. You know good and damn well she gets flustered every time you're even remotely affectionate.

Taym, who'd been angrily stripping tags off purchases and folding them with meticulous neatness to stow them away, hesitated.

He hadn't actually known that. And Fiona fell silent, furious now at herself, apparently, for divulging something he'd failed to notice.

Slowly, carefully, he smoothed the sleeve of a shirt and tucked it into the drawer, before methodically moving on to the next.

In the grey world between realities Coyote had rested her face against his shoulders and he hadn't understood why. It had troubled him on and off since, and he'd had suspicions but always relegated them, in a wash of self-hatred, to a bin for stupid ideas. Probably she'd remembered something wrong; a misleading scrap of memory, or a desperate need for any kind of familiarity and history in that place of no context. He himself had been drawn to the Blue Rose and the theme park because of their crumbling sense of past. Maybe, in a strange way, he had been that for her: an anchor. That's what he'd told himself, and he believed it. It had been a long time since Taym could see himself as anything other than unwanted, unneeded, undesirable, and unfit.

Which of course was how he'd ended up where he'd ended up tonight.

It had been a long time: a painfully long time. He could barely remember now what it looked like to have a woman smile at him with intention, or what it felt like to be close to someone; trying to recall how it felt to sneak a kiss felt like an excavation through deep, unpleasant strata of memory. He knew that Fiona was right; he knew that he felt nothing for Peyton particularly besides a suspicion that she was an easy target, and too kind to shun him outright.

But she'd flushed and she hadn't pulled away, and he thought of Solomon and even though he didn't want her, he didn't want him to have her, either.

He folded up another shirt, slowly and with care.

You don't need the distraction right now, Fiona said sharply. And this, too, was undeniable. The thought of entangling himself with a girl--let alone a girl he honestly didn't care too much for beyond a useful and obliging source of attention and favors--was unpleasant and seemed vastly complicated.

He remembered telling her, of his overwork: it isn't a long term strategy.

So what was this?

He'd ******** up. He knew it, even without Fiona saying so.

Later that night he'd pick up his phone, and he'd start to draft a text, but he wouldn't send it. But he would, late the next morning, during a lull between scrubbing down toilets.



And that was it. A snatching little attempt at normalcy.

Too little, too late.