👀 for catching your muse in/leaving/entering someone else’s room (Theo)
11:52pm Stop eating. 11:53pm But the pakora will go soggy overnight! xx 11:53pm STOP eating. 11:53 Say please. xx 11:54pm You are ri--
“Oh, sorry.” Julia murmured, narrowly avoiding a collision as she walked down the hallway. The carpet was plush, here, which her tired feet rejoiced for momentarily before realizing that her heels sunk into it, making each step a little more difficult than the last. Texting helped. Ben helped. Thinking of pakora helped.
She glanced up and gave a tight, polite smile. Her eyes didn’t focus right away, and it wasn’t thanks to too much drink, she was sure of it. But pakora sounded good. And malai kofta. And those honey pastry rounds. And --
“Oh, hey.”
Hi would have been better. A little less casual. Or hello! Hello was properly formal. At the sight of Theo, her spine stacked straight. Uneasiness filled the space between them, her gaze flitting quickly from him to the wall behind him. The room number glinted gold, and she twisted -- barely more than a twitch -- to glance at the room behind her. 254. Hers was 254-- no, 245. Thank fuck, she was almost there.
“Are you-- you’re not staying--”
Lines crossed her brow, she bobbed her head side to side and made a quick face. Rewind. What was she trying to say? Was it important?
Finger over her shoulder, she pointed to the room he’d just exited. “Are you here?”
@theo-henriksen
wtheo-henriksen:
The scene was all too familiar. One, the other, or someone a little bleary-eyed and trying to make it home. The gestures, the grinding of the gear shift into reverse in the middle of a sentence. Theo remembered, but as a person who had heard the story second hand. They weren’t so close anymore, if they ever were to begin with. Theo might have been the only one to think so at the time.
“Hey.” Confiding in Rykard hadn’t changed. Only the other man’s title had, to official staff. Theo had likely told Lotte more than she ever cared to know about his past.
It was a long time ago.
He still laughed quietly under a smile, pleased to see Julia having fun. “Yes.” Theo wasn’t sure why he said yes. He shook his head, the smile turning apologetic, glancing again at the door as if it anything had changed. “Oh, uh. No. I meant to say no. Not exactly. My parents are supposed to be here. There is some confusion downstairs. I was trying to find them and sort it out.”
Theo hadn’t much to worry about at Cambridge. Julia probably would not see the worry in his expression. “I wanted to say hi earlier. Every time I had the chance, you were gone. Is everything okay? Ben is doing well too I hope?”
There was a latent sort of anger that bubbled up in her at the sight of him, and then a secondary sort of anger, at herself. She’d watched him charm others, for ages, and had been so confident that what lay between them was real that she hadn’t ever considered that he may, too, hold her at a distance.
And even then, only part of her believed it.
She had spent every waking hour for two weeks in hospital when news of his return had broken out. Two weeks of uncomfortable hospital beds, of coffee in styrofoam cups, of making herself scarce whenever another visitor were to arrive. Two weeks of watching the sun rise and climb and set from a pair of hospital windows, of trying to talk to him at first, of sitting silence, after. It was only after the tenth day that she’d asked the room, full of silence and little else, if he wanted her to go.
If pressed, Julia didn’t know the answer. She hadn’t gotten one, certainly not verbally, and if there had been any other way, it had escaped her notice. Finally, she left the hospital, promised to return. And her visits got shorter and Ben’s got longer until there wasn’t really any space for either of them, there. He was once-prince, now future king. And he’d always been a charmer.
“Oh,” she made a small noise as she came back into the present, as the world filled and she rewound the last several seconds. His parents. It was strange to think of Theo as having parents. Confusion. “Really?” Julia twisted, as though she could see commotion at the end of the hall when it was several floors below. “That’s strange. Do you want to go down there?”
And then, she really didn’t wait, which was partially a byproduct of being Julia Lauridsen, and partially due to the aperol she had right before coming upstairs. She was back to the elevator, and calling it within a handful of seconds. It was then her turn to look back at him.
“Thought you might be with the blonde.”
