Harriet tucked her legs up under her on the seat with a satisfied smile while Nate shuffled away and shrugged. “Do you mean to say that my voice ends up being the voice of reason in your head? That’s flattering, but also disappointing since you don’t seem to listen to it very often.” Nate must be hearing a younger version of her in his head– when she was younger and he adored her but still thought she was annoying and would purposely do the opposite of what she asked just to get a rise out of her.
When their drinks were dropped off at their table, Harriet finished her first one off before reaching for the new one only to snort indelicately and sputter with an accusing glare when Nate sprouts lies. “Don’t like talking …” she mutters then used her sleeve to wipe off her chin. Nate, as usual, spoke more just now than Harriet had in the last 12 hours.
“You’ve essentially answered your own question,” she pointed out clinking her second shot against his and waited for the dumbfounded expression to slip on his face when it clicks. “You asked why you can’t just have the fun part and then talked your self around all the reasons you shouldn’t. Just face it. If you want to get to do the dirty with Isaac - fuck boy - Ortega you’re gonna have to talk to him.”
And then there was Xi. Harriet noticed that her brother and Xi had gotten closer while she had been … traveling. She shifted in her seat as she tried to push down the jealous feeling that bubbled up when Nate mentioned the shift in his relationship with Xi and wondered again why she hadn’t felt threatened by Nate’s relationship with Isaac but started feeling some prickly feelings towards Xi at the moment. She supposed it probably had something to do with it being so sudden to her. At school they had been friends, although then their friendship had been on and off with barbs of jealousy sprinkled into random bouts of affection for each other. Harriet left and when she came back, his relationship with Xi had changed– she didn’t want to know all the details … it would just add to the guilt she felt for leaving him.
“You’ll have to talk to both of them,” Harriet admitted with a sigh. “Maybe talk to Isaac first. Find out if he’s serious before even bothering with checking in with Xiomara. If he didn’t intend on it getting any further than whats the point in talking to Xi about it?”
Nate smirked and rolled his eyes, folding his arms on top of the table and leaning against his elbows. “Slow down, Jiminy Cricket—I just meant that I trust you…” He probably should have heeded Harriet’s advice, or at least her example, much more often than he did, but somehow Nate always found himself nudged right up to that reckless edge in every situation, forever drawn to the idea of just choosing the path of least resistance and falling into the familiar, preordained path that was laid out before him; playing the role everyone expected of him, because facing the idea that he could be anything other than the Nathaniel Pinnock persona was, frankly, terrifying.
But Harriet had always seen something different in Nate. Even at his absolute worst she knew who he was beneath all the layers of pretense, she was perhaps the only person in the world who came close to knowing every awful thing Nate had ever done and every weak, shameful part of himself he tried desperately to keep hidden (or if there was another, Nate wouldn’t dare to consider it; not yet), and she loved him, anyway. It was more than he deserved.
And perhaps that was really where his hangups with the whole Isaac-thing were rooted, loath as Nate was to admit it; that he would give into his ineradicable want and he’d exhume some more secrets just as he’d been convinced to last night, and that as soon as Nate allowed himself to let go Isaac would see this horrid, needy thing that lived inside him, this insatiable vacuum of longing and of fucking feelings that Nate had worked hard to keep buried lest it break free and ruin everything.
Fuck, he did want the sex though, he couldn’t deny that. At least before Nate was limited by not knowing what went on inside Isaac’s head, but now that the other had described it all in lurid detail it was even more agonizing to consider not having him. That fucking tease. Nate grinned at the nickname his sister gave to Isaac, and just at how unbelievably, annoyingly clever she was; she knew Nate well enough to know he was going to do what he was going to do regardless of what anyone said—a trait they shared, unfortunately—and that all he really needed in situations like this was someone willing to tolerate Nate talking himself through every exhausting detail of a problem until he talked himself into a dead end, where the answer usually lied. “…ugh, you’re right.”
Nate watched her face intently as she processed what he said. He was in tune with his sister’s subtlest tells; a half-second flash of her eyes, a slight tightness in her mouth as she considered an answer. He knew what jealousy looked like on Harriet because Nate could relate deeply to the feeling, and it was also why he knew there was not much that could be done about the surfacing of those inevitable feelings besides recognizing them. At least it was some concrete proof that not everything had changed between the Pinnock siblings; they may be going through individual and collective transitions, but Harriet still cared, and Nate clung tightly to that.
And then when she spoke it was Nate’s turn to shift with discomfort. Harriet wasn’t wrong; in fact, her suggestion was incredibly practical and well-reasoned, though no surprise there. It’s just… How could Nate possibly explain just how fragile the situation with Xiomara was, how skittish Xi was already without Nate pushing at their wobbly stability before it had a chance to really settle, and why? Nate wasn’t used to having to keep things from Harriet and it felt fucking weird; he didn’t want to do it, but what sort of friend (or whatever) would he be to Xi if he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about things that weren’t his to tell, things that Xi had reluctantly entrusted in him with her life? And the shittiest part about it was that at the time, when Nate was in it way over his head and he’d nearly watched Xiomara die in front of him, the only person he’d wanted to go to for help was Harriet. He’d had to settle for Tyler, and that had miraculously turned out to be the right move, but if it had just been Harriet from the start?…Well, if she’d been an option none of the events that had thrown Nate and Xi back into each other’s lives would have been set into motion; Nate might have still been stuck in that comfortable numbing indifferent stasis, and Xi on her own, with no one to help carry her trauma… Nate couldn’t think about that. He wouldn’t.
Still, he didn’t need Harriet to know everything; she was the type of person who could make a goddamn five-course meal out of crumbs. And any opportunity for Nate to put off him and Xi having to talk about real shit—like, maybe forever—he was going to take it. So Nate rolled the empty shot glass along the tabletop, dancing it deftly between his fingers, and said with calculated nonchalance, “It’s good advice. Talking to Xi about anything should be, like—a last resort. For now, anyway. I could be wildly misreading things, for starters, in which case I’ll just be hexing myself in the fucking foot. And Xi is just…you probably don’t know this about her, but she’s always kind of gotten off on being withholding…” Nate glanced up at Harriet, a smirk playing on his lips before his tone turned just slightly serious. “…and now…She’s been through some shit, Harry. Fucking horrific. And if I’m all she’s got to help her get through it, even if she’d rather it be anyone else, I’m not gonna fuck it up by complicating things just to get some answers that I honestly don’t really need. I’m just gonna…let her drive, I think, on this one. Try not to be a selfish asshole for once in my goddamn life.” Nate gave his sister a self-effacing smile, then blew some air out of his lips and said, “Okay, enough of that—can we talk about something else? Like, on a scale of one to savage, how intensely are you going to mock me if I tell you I need your skills in illusion magic to help me spiff up a CV before I do some actual fucking job interviews…?”
