zeke trying to manipulate eren only to realize he's born crazy will never not be funny

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@nattie-smack
zeke trying to manipulate eren only to realize he's born crazy will never not be funny
breakspear in dorne 🌞
i know so so so so so many words. until it’s time to think of a title for the story. then I know 2 and a half
Taylor Swift // song titles that appear in other songs
OKAY this took me forever but here is a graphic that might be helpful for those trying to make oc's or various variant readers. I also included if there is any physical description listed in the canon besides the lords paramount since those are more known. also their general location so you can write relationships
this is also all lordly houses canon to the time from the tourney of ashford through roughly the reign of Maekar I
love yall let me know if anyone finds these useful
Maekar throughout the years
Baelor
I Try to Capture Every Minute
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Prince Maekar Targaryen x Lannister!reader
Rating: General (just a bunch of family fluff)
WC: 4.2k
A little follow up to Then I set fire to our bed
A/n: I was in the mood for something fluffy, and I just love Dad!Maekar. Comments and reblogs are appreciated. My inbox is always open for fun ideas, requests and general fangirling.
Summary: A collection of vignettes of Maekar and Lady Lannister's life raising their family at Summerhall.
Tyon nursed happily at your breast, his rounded cheeks flushed pink with happiness. The twins were now four moons old, growing well. Servants whirled around the chambers as they packed cases for the departure on the morrow to Summerhall. Maekar kept a sharp eye to ensure no one's gaze lingered on his wife's breast for too long.
"You have nursemaids for this very reason," he scolded you.
"I know, but I enjoy it. Besides, it hurts too much to dry up," you sighed. "His little face brings me so much happiness." You saw a small smile cross Maekar's face as he, too, found joy in the twins. Tyra slept in her wooden cradle, soft, red velvet beneath her, with the remnants of your milk on her small lips. She would only sleep after Maekar fussed over her for a proper amount of time, otherwise she would scream and cry until her whims were indulged. You patted Tyon's small back after he finished, bringing forth a small, satisfied burp from him.
"Let me see my boy," Maekar said, drawing his son into his arms. Tyon squealed with delight, happy to have his father's attention. Lady Jayne Arryn came over to clean up your leaking nipple and help you fix your gown. Maekar sat, bouncing the boy on his knee. Delighted noises filled the room. "I'd forgotten how enjoyable they are when they are this small. Before they grow up and cause headaches."
"I promise to remedy whatever headaches they may cause for you, husband," you laughed.
Maekar snorted. "You cause me many as well."
Servants filed out as Aegon, Daella, and Rhae came rushing in. Maekar was left in a momentary spell of bewilderment when Daella whisked Tyon from his arms and began to fuss over her baby brother.
"Can I wake her, please?" Aegon begged you.
"Go on, but be gentle about it," you smiled.
You watched as he carefully lifted Tyra from her cradle. Rhae gently tickled her little sister's feet, making the infant coo. It warmed your heart to see the family blend together so easily; even Daeron and Aerion seemed to find joy in their newest siblings. Good King Daeron threw a feast to send you and Maekar off to Summerhall with well wishes. The babes were in attendance, of course, as the court had been very delighted by their birth.
"Perhaps we should have another, husband," Jena teased as Baelor held Tyra in his arms.
"Well, I would be willing to try," Baelor said with a twinkle in his eyes.
Queen Myriah held Tyon in her lap. "I believe this one has markings of a little lion already," she cooed. "I see those golden curls springing forth."
"Mmm, but he has his father's eyes," you smiled, noting that Tyon's eyes held a violet hue. Your hand rested gently on Maekar's knee.
"Indeed, he does," Myriah agreed.
Rhae grew tired of the celebration noises and crawled into your lap. Egg and Daella seemed content to keep each other entertained with their dancing, though Egg was mostly demonstrating kicks. Valarr swooped in to dance properly with his young cousin, which delighted her.
The evening wound down, and you carried Rhae back to the nearly empty chambers, all belongings packed away into the carts for the trip tomorrow.
"I am almost sad to leave this place," you whispered as you maneuvered a sleeping Rhae into her nightclothes. Maekar tucked her beneath the blanket.
"And to think, you once hated it here," he teased.
You leaned in to kiss him. "I am happy to have been wrong."
You slept peacefully in Maekar's arms that evening, even with anticipation bubbling in your stomach.
"You will not be upset if I ride with Daeron and Aerion?" Maekar asked you as the family gathered in the courtyard.
"Not a bit, I only wish I could join," you assured him, kissing his cheek.
"Father, can I ride too?" Egg begged, tugging on Maekar's cloak. He was sweet, yet restless at times, but you supposed most young boys were.
"If you promise to stay in my sight and not wander off," Maekar told him sternly. "Now, make sure your horse is prepared."
"Thank you, Father!" Egg yelled as he ran off, gravel crunching beneath his boots.
The nursemaids and your ladies were settled in one of the wheelhouses with the twins and the girls. Once everyone was settled and mounted, the journey began. It was not terribly long, and luckily went fairly smoothly, with Egg only wandering off once. He was banished to the wheelhouse with you for the rest of the trip, which you heard plenty of complaining about, but you did your best to distract him with stories and card games. Maekar was there to help you from the carriage, and you turned to take a look at your new home, a smile crossing your face.
"It's perfect," you whispered.
~~
The twins kept you on your toes as they grew. They were fast and mischievous, always escaping the grasp of their handmaids and even managing to wriggle from yours. Their giggles echoed in the halls as they ran hand in hand with each other, with you dashing after them, skirts in hand. The scuffling of paws followed as two pugs scurried behind. you. The twins had requested a dog for their fourth nameday, and Maekar had been delighted, planning a meeting with the Kennelsmaster to procure a sleek hunting hound for them. When you informed him that they were delighted by your sister's pug when she visited Summerhall, the look that crossed his face was quite amusing. Yet he had gifted them the requested pup and gave you one as well.
"Come, it is time for your lessons," you scolded, but neither paid you any mind. Normally, you were up to the task of chasing them about, but this morning you felt rather nauseous.
"Who are these cubs running wild in my house?" Maekar asked, bending to scoop them into his arms. The pugs circled around his feet, yipping at him. "Noisy beasts."
You paused, taking a moment to catch your breath. "Why are the only cubs when they are misbehaving?" you complained, yet you were happy he managed to wrangle them.
Tyra snuggled her face into the crook of Maekar's neck, her golden curls pressed against his cheek.
"You know the answer to that," Maekar smirked, carrying the twins toward the nursery. "Now, your lessons are most important; you cannot escape them.
"Yes, Papa," Tyon said, eager to follow his father's instructions.
"Very good, no more running off," he told them, setting them down and giving each a gentle swat to the backside, and you watched the twins exchange a sly look with one another. They would follow that rule for all of an hour, if that. Their dog, Ser Eryk, trotted behind, while yours, Posy, curled up by the hearth.
Septa Lunelle was very patient with them, which you were thankful for, and sat with the twins to teach them their numbers and letters. Maekar lingered in the room to make sure they sat and behaved for her. Their round violet eyes would trail over to their father every so often, smiling toothily when they would get a nod of approval. You hated to admit that it made you a bit jealous.
"Mama, will you help me with the backstitch?" Rhae requested while sitting next to you, with her sewing in her lap.
At least some of the children found you useful. "Of course, my darling," you replied, threading a needle in preparation. She had taken to calling you Mama about six months after the return to Summerhall, and it warmed your heart. You assisted Rhae with her sewing while the twins finished their lessons. Maekar departed shortly after, but not before kissing his wife and children. His hands squeezed your shoulders pleasantly.
"Princess Rhae, it is time to work on your maths," Septa Lunelle said.
Rhae went to sit with the septa while you watched the twins play on the floor with their wooden toys. Aerion entered the nurserys and the twins made a beeline for him, attaching themselves to his legs.
"Father said we had two restless lions on our hands," Aerion smiled. "Shall I run them ragged for you, stepmother?"
"You are a godssend, yes please. Behave for your brother," you told them as Aerion took off with them.
You were thankful for a moment of peace, feeling rather drained this morning. You did not realize you had fallen asleep in the chair until Rhae shook you awake.
"Mama, should I fetch the Maester?" she asked kindly.
"No, I'm simply tired, perhaps it's time for tea," you smiled. Though you would pay him a visit later to be certain.
You took her hand, going to find Daella, who would be finishing up her dancing lessons. She was growing into a lovely young lady. You enjoyed a tea with them along with some fresh strawberries, cream, and apple tarts. Posy lapped cream from your fingertips as she curled in your lap. The sugar had you feeling in better spirits. Aerion, Egg, and the twins played outside, and you heard the familiar cracking of wooden swords. Egg sparred with Tyon while Tyra rested on Aerion's shoulders, cheering and clapping for her brothers. While all the children were distracted, you took your moment to sneak away and visit with Maester Vyman.
"Are you feeling unwell? You have not seemed yourself today," Maekar commented as he readied for bed. You were already tucked beneath the blankets.
"Maester Vyman says I am with child again," you told him softly.
He whirled around to face you, a smile spreading on his face. "Well, that is wonderful news."
"Is it? Is it not too much? Too many running around? Too many mouths to feed?"
"None of my children would ever starve, especially when we have Lannister coin." You threw a pillow at him. "Careful now, riling me up is how we got that babe in your belly."
"Oh, I remember well," you smirked. He joined you in bed, giving Posy a look of disdain from where she was curled up by your side.
"Must that beast share our bed?"
"She is not a beast!" you complained. Posy snorted her response before curling up at the end of the bed, allowing Maekar to pull you into his arms.
"We will be fine, my love," he assured you.
"Mmm, you do not worry about your age?" You squeaked when he swatted your bottom.
"I am a man barely forty, do not insult me." His hand pressed against your flat stomach. "I promise you this little cub will be as loved and well cherished as their brothers and sisters." He shifted, his head resting on your stomach as you combed your fingers through his hair.
Where there is celebration and joy, tragedy is wont to follow. You received a letter from your eldest brother that your father had died from a burst belly. Your tears stained the parchment as you staggered to your feet with one hand pressed to your rounded belly. Your knees gave way beneath you as you crashed to the floor, quickly surrounded by your husband and the children. Maekar lifted you with ease and carried you away, allowing you some privacy with your grief. You sobbed into his chest until your tears ran dry and your eyes were swollen. The babe growing inside you was the saving grace that kept you from toppling into the abyss of your grief. While you had hated your father for arranging this marriage at first, you came to view him as the man who ultimately orchestrated your happiness.
As summer dawned and admist you sadness, a new princess was welcomed into the world. Cerelle.
She was so quiet upon her birth that you feared she had not lived after delivery, but she was healthy. Simply wide eyed and silent as she was placed in your arms. You often wondered if she absorbed your sadness in the womb. She would become your silver shadow, clinging to your skirts or hands, but she was sweet as a summer rose. She could be found in Daeron's embrace, tenderly wiping damp brow or seated in Maekar's lap, holding his large hand as he scowled, his demeanor eventually softening under her touch. When Baelor visited, it was clear he favoured her, as she was often in his arms when not attached to you.
~~
Maekar Targaryen would be a father to ten children in total, as you gave birth to a fourth in the sweet bloom of spring two years after Cerelle. Five sons and five daughters. She was named Daera, in honor of the Good King Daeron, who passed away a mere three months before her birth. It was your turn to hold Maekar in your embrace as he wept. The good King was old, but losing one's father is never easy to bear. His cheek pressed against your swollen stomach as his tears soaked through your shift.
"He loved you so, my darling," you whispered, stroking his white hair, noticing the faint streaks of gray.
Baelor would inherit the crown, and you laboured on your own as Maekar attended the coronation.
"You must be there for your brother as he takes the throne. I will be fine, and in very good hands," you assured him, though you know it pained him to be away from you in such a state. Daeron stayed behind to manage the household and keep a close eye on you, but it was Aerion and Daella who were by your side as you laboured. You had encouraged Maekar to take his eldest under his wing more. Perhaps Daeron was not destined to be a knight, but possessed other skills instead.
When Maekar returned, he was barely seen without Daera in his arms, making up for the time he missed with her while in King's Landing. Your youngest daughters were the opposite of the twins in appearance, with silvery hair and pale green eyes. He did not scold you as you held Daera against your breast, nursing her from your engorged nipple. She would end up the most spoiled of the children. You knew Maekar would procure a pack of pugs for her if she desired it.
"She has a large appetite," you complained, but she was fickle and would not take to the nursemaid.
"She's the youngest, destined to consume all the attention around her," Maekar smiled. "My mother has inquired if she might come for a visit and stay for a while. I think being surrounded by her grandchildren may be beneficial to her."
"We shall make arrangements then," you smiled.
The dowager queen's grief seemed to lift as she spent time at Summerhall with the children. Cerelle would pull herself away from you to spend time in her grandmother's presence while Myriah taught her a Rhoynish song. She loved holding Daera in her arms and gazing into the twins' violet eyes. The eyes of her husband. Her dark eyes trailed over the family at the long table as everyone supped together.
"My dear boy, you have raised a wonderful family," she whispered.
You had never seen such a look of pride on Maekar's face before. The boy, once longing for his mother's love and approval, had received it.
~~
The next five years were a whirlwind as the children grew, with Daeron, Aerion, and Daella all in adulthood. Daella was lovely with her waist-length dark hair, and she caught many a Lord's eye.
"Will you help Father find a good match for me?" she asked, smiling as she walked arm in arm with you through the gardens, Cerelle holding your other hand.
"Of course, now is there a certain someone you have set your eyes on?" you asked. You noted the blush on her cheeks.
"Robell Arryn. He danced with me at the Red Keep, and we have been writing letters ever since. He is a good man and will inherit the Eyrie when his father passes," she explained.
"Then I will speak most highly of him, my dear," you assured her.
Prince Aerion wed Lady Alyssa Baratheon, a fierce archer and cousin of Lord Lyonel, from the Stag House, who was neither meek nor mild. She was a good match for him and seemed to have captured his attention greatly at the celebration of Princess Daera's birth. Prince Daeron wed Lady Evelyn Dondarrion, a match made for him by Queen Jena. Maekar arranged for two manors to be built on his land for his sons to reside in. Summerhall would still pass to Daeron upon Maekar's death. The following spring, Daella was married to Lord Robell and began her new life in the Vale. Children soon followed from each union.
Their presences were greatly missed, especially by the twins, who adored all their older siblings. Aemon was hailed and respected at the Citadel, serving alongside his uncle on Baelor's small council. Egg grew into a fine young knight, serving as a Gold Cloak, with streaming silver hair that he wore braided, and many said he resembled Maekar in his youth. You knew Maekar's pride for his youngest boys ran deep.
Rhae did not seem eager to be married off, contrasting with her youth when she was quite obsessed with boys, even her brothers, and often begged Maekar to marry her to one of them. Egg was usually the one she had her hopes set on. Your husband's eye would twitch, and he would shoo her away. There was a shift in her attitude when Daella got married.
"I want to say with you and Father and the little ones. I don't want to go away, Mama," she confided to you tearfully. "I would die if I were to be Daella trapped in the Vale."
"Now, now, your sister is very happy," you said softly, rubbing her back. Cerelle pressed herself against her elder sister's side, trying to comfort her as well. She was deeply empathetic, attuned to every family member's emotions.
"I know, but I don't want that," she wailed. She had been the youngest until the arrival of her half-siblings and was incredibly coddled. Not that you blamed Maekar in any way. He did his best, and Rhae was an easy one to baby. You found yourself doing the same with her. Even Aerion in his testy moods would carry Rhae about when she demanded it.
"No one is going to force you, my darling, but you might find your heart opening toward it one day. I assumed my life would be one for spinisterhood."
"But you were forced to marry Father," she whispered, not unkindly, simply speaking the truth.
"I was, yet look at what we became. Our love is deep and strong, reflected in all of our children," you smiled, petting her pale hair.
"I won't do it," she said stubbornly, and you dropped the matter for now.
"I will marry you, sister, and you will never have to leave Summerhall," Tyon said far too seriously for a boy his age.
Rhae lifted her head from your chest and sniffled. "Thank you, little brother."
Her mind would indeed change when she met Quentyn Blackwood, the brother of Betha, who became Egg's betrothed. She continued to bend those around her to her will, convincing Maekar to build a manor for her as well and getting Quentyn to agree to reside there.
~~
You watched as Maekar assisted Tyon with his armor on the twins' fifteenth name day. It was hard to believe such time had passed. Tyon's armor was black with red pauldrons sporting spikes that resembled dragon's teeth. His golden hair fell shoulder length, but it had been braided by Tyra to fit in his helm better. His helm resembled a roaring lion, with fangs curving down.
"What if I lose, Father?" Tyon asked nervously.
"To lose is part of life, so long as you fight honorably and to the best of your ability, then that's all that matters," Maekar told him.
"I will be cheering you on, brother," Tyra smiled.
"Not Ormund?" Tyon replied, his lips quirking.
"No, because it is not his name day," Tyra reasoned. "We share the day, brother, so you have double the luck on your side."
"Come, ready your horse," Maekar said, sending his youngest son off. Tyra took her father's arm as you all made your way to the boxes set up just outside the perimeter of Summerhall. You escorted Cerelle and Daera as they filed into the royal box reserved for the family.
Rhae was rosy-cheeked and glowing, round with another child. It seemed her love for Quentyn ran deep. Egg was trying to calm his rowdy sons, and you shielded your amused smile. It seemed destined for Egg to follow in Maekar's footsteps. Aerion had been blessed with a gaggle of daughters, constantly vying for his attention, and they seemed to have softened his edges. Daeron fathered two sons, and Daella had twins, both siblings stopping with two children. Which you could not blame them for.
You and Tyra sat on either side of Maekar, who was clothed in a rich crimson velvet with a three-headed black dragon pinned to his doublet. Daera took a seat on his lap while Cerelle curled against your side. Her favoritism toward you was undeniable, while Daera made no secret of her preference for Maekar, much like her older sister, Tyra. She clung to him and would sometimes go purple in the face from all the screaming when she was denied. Your husband's resolve softened as he aged, scooping her up into his arms and indulging her.
The melee began, and you gripped Maekar's hand as Tyon took his place for the joust, his twin's favour sitting on his lance. He competed against a Bracken boy. One lance was broken in the process before Tyon managed to unhorse his opponent. Tyon's siblings cheered for him, their choruses billowing over the area. Tyon held his own throughout the competition, but young Lord Bynden Stark proved victor, and you were proud as your son graciously congratulated him.
The celebrations began as wine and food flowed. Tyon was surrounded by his brothers, who slapped his back and bathed him in their praise. He had changed into a red outfit trimmed in gold, his golden hair streaming over his shoulders. You glanced around, taking note of where the rest of the children and grandchildren were. Tyra was missing. Snuck off with Ormund Baratheon, no doubt. Your suspicions were confirmed when she returned to the table with flushed cheeks and swollen lips. Maekar raised a pale brow in her direction. Rhae giggled, pulling her younger sister close so they could gossip. You enjoyed the moment of having most of the family together again.
~~
"Father, I wish to be a septa," Cerelle spoke softly, her delicate hand resting on Maekar's arm.
You were already aware of her wishes and were hardly surprised by them. Given her gentle nature and gift for soothing others, it seemed a good fit. She was now of an age to begin her training if Maekar agreed. He lifted her hand, pressing his mouth tenderly against her knuckles.
"Is that truly your wish, sweetling?" he asked, and she nodded, her green eyes wide and solemn. "Then I will make arrangements."
"You have gone soft in your old age, husband," you teased, glancing up from the letter Daella had sent.
His purple eyes narrowed at you. "Call me old again, wife," he grumbled as Cerelle scurried off. She had long been your little silver shadow, and you would miss her dearly. Yet you wanted nothing more for all your children to be happy and find their way in this world.
You stood from the desk, walking over and sliding into his lap. "My sweet, old husband," you smirked.
"I'll show you," he growled before kissing you passionately. He took you roughly that night, demonstrating that there was not an old bone to be found in his body. The scruff of his beard made your thighs raw and tingly.
~~
Aemon wrote weekly, updating you and Maekar on Cerelle's progress as the Sept, as he had offered to keep an eye on her as she studied in Oldtown. Daera was the last child left in the house, often found in Aerion's household playing with her nieces. Tyon had married a Redwyne and Tyra, her Ormund Baratheon.
"The house seems rather empty, does it not?" you asked Maekar, resting your head on his shoulder. You glanced down, concealing a small smile when you saw Apricot snoozing in his lap. He had grown partial to the little beasty pugs over the years.
"I once longed for the quiet, for the peace, but now I find myself missing the chaos," Maekar murmured. One ringed hand stroked down the sleeping dog's tan back.
"And what chaos it could be," you laughed softly.
"I am glad to have you by my side for it."
"And to think, we once wished to strangle each other."
"I never once wished that, but it is good to know where your head was," he teased. "My lovely little loiness." He lifted your hand to his lips, kissing the back of it softly.
"My fierce, protective dragon."
His lips melded against yours, the passion still there after all these years. The halls may have been empty, but the memories would forever be imprinted on every inch of Summerhall.
Taglist: @dixie-elocin @ghostlybfgf @merweleftthisbehind
The Softening of Daeron Targaryen
Daeron Targaryen x female reader
Sinopsis: In a quiet corner of the Targaryen legacy, a forgotten prince finds redemption not in war or glory, but in love. When a northern bride enters Daeron’s life, she transforms a man lost to wine into a devoted husband and father, reshaping the fate of a broken family.
Warnings: Alcohol abuse, emotional vulnerability, childbirth, mentions of difficult labor, mild suggestive content, canon-typical themes
WC: 5,500 words approx.
════ ∘◦❁◦∘ ════
Prince Maekar took a sip of wine and watched his son from across the hall. Daeron was slouched in a chair, his gaze unfocused, a nearly empty jug in his hand. The old prince shook his head.
He would have never imagined that Daeron would end up fathering daughters. In fact, a few years ago, Maekar had been certain that none of his sons would give him grandchildren. Aerion, with a pride too large to fit through doorways, spent his days picking fights and provoking everyone, even him. Sometimes Maekar swore Aerion was giving him red hairs, if such a thing even existed. And Aegon, the youngest, spent his time wandering the Seven Kingdoms with that Duncan fellow, the knight as large as a bull. As for Daeron… well, Daeron only drank. He drank and drank, and Maekar had already resigned himself to dying without ever hearing a grandchild’s laughter.
But then you arrived.
Your family came from the North, from cold lands where snow lingered well into spring. When you crossed the gates of his castle, wrapped in a thick fur cloak, your cheeks flushed red from the wind, Maekar felt something he did not expect. He smiled. You were a well-mannered girl; it showed in the way you greeted him, in how you held his gaze without lowering your head. For a moment, the old prince hesitated. Did he truly want to pair you with his drinking son? Daeron refused to marry—he had said it a thousand times. But he did it anyway. He arrived on the day of the wedding with his cup in hand, as always. You smiled, radiant in your gown, and Maekar watched you with a tight chest, wondering if he was giving a good girl to a man who loved only wine.
That night, however, did not unfold as everyone expected.
Daeron entered the room stumbling, his clothes disheveled, his eyes glassy. He reeked of red wine. You were already in bed, nearly asleep, wrapped in blankets. He stood still in the middle of the room, looking at you. He lowered his head, ashamed, and turned to leave.
“Come,” you whispered, without opening your eyes. “Lie down.”
Daeron hesitated. Then, as best he could, he climbed onto the bed. But he did not lie beside you as a husband would. He settled between your legs, rested his head on your stomach, and stayed there, unmoving. You, your back against the headboard, began to run your fingers through his hair, slowly, again and again.
That was how you came to know him. That was how everything began.
“Does your head hurt?” you asked softly.
“It always hurts,” he murmured, his voice rough.
“Then rest.”
And Daeron rested. For the first time in a long while, he slept without bad dreams.
The moons passed. One morning, a piercing cry tore through the castle’s silence. Maekar was having breakfast and nearly leapt to his feet, breaking all protocol, but he restrained himself. He clenched his fists beneath the table and waited. When you finally appeared, you were smiling from ear to ear, and Daeron… Daeron looked like a child with a new toy.
“What is it?” Maekar asked, feigning calm.
Daeron turned to him, his eyes shining.
“My wife, father. She is expecting a child.”
Maekar narrowed his eyes, studying his son’s face. The joy he saw was genuine. There was no trace of his usual weariness, nor of that distant gaze. Daeron kissed your forehead gently, as if you were made of glass, and you laughed softly.
“Congratulations,” Maekar said at last, his voice rougher than he expected.
The news spread through the castle like wildfire. And with the passing moons, your belly grew. Daeron spent the entire day trailing after you.
“Sit here, the chair is softer,” he would say, guiding you toward the armchair by the fireplace.
“What do you crave? Tell me, I’ll bring it.”
“Does your back hurt? Here, like this—better?”
At night, when you could not sleep, he stayed awake with you, telling you silly stories from when he was a child, about the mischief he got into with Aegon before his brother left. And one night, the maesters came to speak.
“Prince Daeron, if something were to happen during the night, your wife must be able to rise quickly. If you have been drinking, you would not be able to help her reach us. And if the baby…”
They did not finish the sentence. Daeron looked at them steadily, nodded, and from that night on, he never touched wine again.
“But you’ve always drunk,” you told him one night, stroking his cheek.
“Not anymore,” he replied with a shrug. “I won’t take that risk.”
He would lie beside you and rest his head on your chest, listening to your heartbeat. That was how he fell asleep, wrapped in that sound. The bad dreams no longer came for him. And when he felt a kick from the baby inside you, he would startle and place his hand on your belly, his eyes wide.
“Did you feel that? It moved again!”
“Easy,” you laughed. “It likes when you talk to it.”
And Daeron spoke. He told the baby things, whispered promises, while you smiled and ran your fingers through his hair, just like that first night.
When the time came for the birth, Daeron did not leave your side for a single moment. He ran back and forth fetching the maesters, asking for hot water, clean sheets, whatever was needed. Servants came and went without pause, and he barely noticed them. He only looked at you, his face pale, his hands trembling.
“Easy, my love, almost there, almost there,” he repeated endlessly, though he seemed the one on the verge of fainting.
You held his hands tightly, squeezing when the pain surged. Daeron bit his lips, as though he felt every stab with you. He did not let go of your hands for a moment.
Below, in his study, Maekar tried to read some scrolls, but he could not concentrate. The cries coming down from your chambers pierced his chest. Every half hour, he looked toward the door, expecting someone to come down and tell him something, but no one came. He stood, paced, sat again. Stood once more. He crumpled a scroll without realizing how tightly he had gripped it.
Hours passed. The cries rose and fell. Maekar no longer pretended to read. He only waited, his nerves tied in knots.
Until suddenly, a different cry was heard.
“It’s a girl!”
Daeron’s voice echoed throughout the castle. Maekar lifted his head so quickly he nearly hurt his neck. He dropped everything and climbed the stairs as he had not in years. He remained outside, waiting for them to finish cleaning you, not daring to enter.
When the doors finally opened, the sight before him filled his chest with something he had not felt in a long time.
You were in bed, exhausted but smiling, your hair stuck to your forehead with sweat. Daeron sat beside you, holding the little one in his arms with such care. He showed his daughter, pointing at your face.
“Look, little one, that’s your mother. The bravest woman in the world.”
You laughed weakly and reached out to brush the hair from Daeron’s forehead. He turned his head and kissed your palm.
Then both of you looked toward the door. There stood Maekar, his arms hanging at his sides, his mouth slightly open.
Daeron smiled and lifted the baby a little, as if showing her.
“Look, grandfather. She’s your granddaughter.”
Maekar approached slowly, as if afraid of breaking something. He looked at the little one, so wrinkled and tiny, her eyes closed, a hint of blond hair peeking through. He looked at his son, wearing a smile he had never seen before. He looked at you, exhausted and radiant.
And he smiled. A wide smile, the kind that wrinkled his eyes.
“She’s beautiful,” he whispered.
And the years flew by.
You had only one daughter. But that girl became everything to Daeron. She was just like you, with your same gaze and your same way of smiling, but with her father’s blond hair—a mane that shone in the sunlight as she ran through the castle halls.
“Grandfather! Grandfather, look what I found!” she would shout, and Maekar would lift her into his arms and ruffle her hair.
“What have you found, little thief?”
“A shiny stone! Could it be a diamond?”
“It could be,” Maekar would say, winking. “We’ll keep it in my chest, alright?”
And the girl would nod very seriously, as if they had just sealed an important pact.
With Daeron, it was another story. They spent hours together. He would take her on horseback in front of him, holding her tightly while she laughed and pointed at everything she saw.
“Papa, look, a cow!”
“I see it, little one.”
“And another! There are so many cows!”
“You’re right. A whole lot of cows.”
You watched them from the window or from the courtyard, leaning against a column, and you could not help but laugh. Daeron, who once only drank and slept, now spent his days chasing after his daughter, hugging her, making sure she did not fall, laughing with her.
When the girl saw him coming, she would drop whatever she had in her hands and run toward him.
“Papa!”
“That can’t be!” Daeron would exclaim, opening his arms and feigning surprise. “Is that my favorite daughter?”
“I’m your only daughter!” she laughed as he lifted her and held her tightly.
“Ah, is that so? Then you truly are my favorite.”
He kissed you when he arrived, quickly, and then looked at his daughter with mock seriousness.
“Have you obeyed your mother?”
The girl nodded eagerly, very convinced. You leaned in slightly and whispered:
“Tell him what you did for him.”
The little one laughed and brought her hands from behind her back. In them, she held a crumpled piece of cloth, full of colored threads, with a shape that was barely recognizable. It looked like a dragon—or perhaps a bird—or perhaps just a patch of colors.
“Look, Papa! I made you a dragon!”
Daeron took the embroidery with the same care with which he had once held his newborn daughter. He looked at it slowly, turned it over, and looked at it again.
You bit your lips to keep from laughing.
“Little one,” Daeron said, his voice trembling, “you are an artist. Just like your mother. Look at these colors, look at this… this… what a fierce dragon! Is it a horned dragon?”
“Yes!” the girl shouted, jumping with joy.
“You’ve even made your mother cry,” Daeron said, hugging you tightly while you hid your face in his chest to disguise your laughter. “With so much beauty, she couldn’t resist.”
The girl grabbed her dragon, incredibly proud, and ran off.
“Grandfather, grandfather, look what I made!”
You lifted your head and shook it, smiling.
“You’re a liar.”
“Me?” Daeron said, putting on an innocent expression. “I only speak the truth. My wife is a great artist. She has a special sensitivity.”
He wrapped his arms around you and kissed you slowly—on your lips, then your forehead, then the tip of your nose.
“I wish we could create another work of art,” he whispered, his mouth close to your ear. “Another like our little one.”
You blushed and lightly hit his chest.
“Daeron…”
“What? I’m just saying it would be nice. A little brother for her. Another sister. Whatever comes.”
You laughed and rested your forehead against his chest.
And so it was. That very year, your belly began to grow again. The maesters confirmed it with a smile, and Daeron lifted you into his arms and spun you around the room until you grew dizzy.
“Again! We’re going to have another baby!”
“Put me down, Daeron, you’re going to drop me…”
But he did not listen. He laughed like a child, with that laughter no one had known before and that now echoed through the castle at all hours.
Your eldest daughter, having just turned six, spent all day pressed against your belly.
“Is it moving yet, Mama? Can I talk to it? Can it hear me?”
“It can hear you,” you told her, running your hand through her blond hair. “Tell it something.”
And the girl would press her cheek to your stomach and whisper secrets that only she and the baby could know.
When the time came for the birth, Maekar took his granddaughter to walk through the gardens. He showed her the flowers, the trees, the birds. But both of them kept looking back toward the castle.
“Is Mama going to be alright, Grandfather?”
“Your mother is strong,” Maekar said, squeezing her little hand. “The strongest I know.”
Inside, everything was more complicated. The pains came one after another, without rest. The maesters frowned and whispered among themselves. Daeron did not take his eyes off them, pale as wax, gripping your hands without stopping.
“Easy, my love, almost there,” he said, though his voice trembled.
Hours passed. You cried out, and Daeron felt every cry like a blow to the chest. Until at last, two different cries were heard—two cries of life that filled the room.
“There are two,” said the maester with a smile. “Two girls, my prince.”
Daeron stood still. He looked at the little ones, wrapped in white cloths, so tiny, so perfect. He looked at their blond hair, their wrinkled little faces. He looked at the maesters, who cleaned and cut and stitched with practiced hands.
Then he looked at you.
You were exhausted—more than the first time. You breathed deeply, your eyes closed, your face pale as snow. The maesters had said it had been complicated. Dangerous, even.
“My love,” Daeron whispered, leaning close to your ear. “It’s over now. Everything is alright.”
You opened your eyes with effort and smiled weakly.
“Are they girls?”
“Two girls,” he said, his voice breaking. “Two more little ones.”
Some time passed. The twins were cleaned, dressed in soft cloths, and placed in your lap, one on each side. You looked at them, so alike, so small, and felt that the exhaustion no longer mattered.
Daeron sat on the bed, very close to you. He wrapped an arm around your shoulders, carefully, as if you might break. He looked at the girls, looked at your face, then at the girls again.
“Three is enough, my love,” he said softly, kissing your cheek slowly. “Thank you for giving me this family.”
His voice was a whisper, barely a breath.
“Thank you for giving me the happiness I could never find.”
You rested your head on his shoulder, too tired to speak, and he kissed your hair and stayed there, still, listening to your breathing and the soft sounds of his daughters.
The years passed, and the noise in the castle never ceased. But neither Maekar nor Daeron could complain.
The three girls ran through the halls like little whirlwinds. The eldest, now grown, taught the younger ones how to embroider, though the stitches always came out crooked and full of knots. The twins, who soon learned to speak and run, climbed onto Maekar’s knees when he tried to read his scrolls.
“Grandfather, read us a story!”
“Grandfather, why do you have wrinkles?”
“Grandfather, look, I can do this with my tongue!”
Maekar would sigh, close his scrolls, and smile.
With Daeron, it was worse. The girls chased him all over the castle. They asked him to take them riding, to lift them, to make them laugh. In the afternoons, they would sit him in a chair and do his hair, making braids and buns and tying colorful ribbons.
“Look, Papa, how handsome you are.”
“You look like a princess, Papa.”
Daeron would look at himself in the mirror, his head full of pink and blue ribbons, and nod very seriously.
“I am the most handsome prince in the castle, am I not?”
The girls laughed and laughed, and he hugged all three of them together, one against the other, and closed his eyes for a moment to remember it forever.
You watched them from the doorway, leaning against the frame, with a smile that never left your face. Sometimes you thought of that drunk man you met the first night, the one who rested his head on your stomach and fell asleep like a tired child. Now you saw him with ribbons in his hair, surrounded by laughter, and you could not help but laugh as well.
“Don’t you dare tell anyone about the ribbons,” Daeron would say at night, when the girls were asleep. “The soldiers can’t see me like this.”
“And what will you give me if I keep your secret?”
He would look at you with a mischievous smile and pull you close.
“Whatever you want. I’ll give you whatever you want.”
And it was true. Daeron was a father of daughters—and he loved it. As much as he loved you, as much as he loved that life he had never believed he deserved.
And on quiet nights, when the three little ones slept and the castle fell silent, he would rest his head on your chest, just like that first time, and listen to your heartbeat while you ran your fingers through his hair.
“Are you happy?” you would whisper.
“I never imagined one could be this happy,” he would reply, his eyes closed.
And you would smile in the darkness, grateful as well.
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This work is mine. Copying or translating this fic is strictly prohibited. Any issue must be notified directly to me. Thank you.
and i've been cold without you — b.t.
summary: as battle-hardened as baelor is, he is no match for his alluring young niece.
word count: 14k
pairing: baelor targaryen x niece!reader
tags: canon typical targcest (uncle x niece). reader is the daughter of an unnamed brother (not maekar!). typical aerion shenanigans, baelor is down bad and won't admit it, reader is a menace, smut—oral with f receiving, breeding (because yay! <3), it's all happy by the end. invented ladies in waiting for reader because it's fun and i wanted to talk about house mallister. valarr and kiera mentions <3. maekar knew all along...
original post that inspired this! | ao3 link
you are the worst challenger baelor targaryen has ever faced.
and unluckily for him, he does not get to meet you bloody and steeled on the battlefield. nor face your tongue in the cunning and wily words of the chambers where the small council gathers.
it would be easier, he imagines, if you were an adversary in that regard. anything else would be easier. he would rather ride back into war and rebellion than attempt to face your true nature.
as battle-hardened as baelor is, he is no match for his alluring young niece.
a lovelier girl, baelor thinks as he stares at you from across the hall, i have never seen.
it is hard enough to tear his eyes away from you at any given moment, though he forces himself to as soon as you meet his gaze.
he had not thought his brother’s death would have hoisted unto him an entirely new set of grievances. he had promised to keep you safe, promised his brother on the death bed that you would want for nothing, that you would always be cared for and watched over.
baelor did not realize when he made that promise that you had intended for him to be the one to fulfill it.
the responsibility falls solely on his shoulders—trying to honor the last wishes of his kin. you had been beside yourself with grief, he recalls, wearing those dark colors of mourning that did not suit you for months on end.
perhaps it was a bit selfish of him. he should have been preparing himself for the matter of your betrothal and the alliance it would create for the crown many moons in advance. it was not only his burden as hand but rather his duty as your uncle.
he had the power to ensure that the match he secured for you would not be one of misery and pain. he knew of several suitable candidates, and had thought he would, when the time was right, ensure that only the most genteel and kind would be introduced to you.
someone that you might wish to begin your new life with, far away from king’s landing.
perhaps it all went astray when he decided to delay the matter further and further. you were in no state to entertain suitors, not when you were grieving the loss of your father. and besides that, you had not expressed any interest in the issue when maekar had brought it up to you.
instead you had looked at him. and what was he to do once you did that?
you employed your strongest two soldiers, the most reliable ones standing at the front of the cavalry—your lovely, sad eyes that had all but blinked at him once or twice and that incorrigible pout. he was felled immediately.
you had come close to kiss maekar’s cheek first, as you bid them goodbye and took your leave for the evening.
and then you had come towards him, and it felt as though time itself had slowed down for mere moments. he watched as your soft hair fell against his shoulder, as the overwhelming scent of your skin turned his thoughts into dust. and then you pressed your soft lips to his cheek, smiled, and left.
black silk swished by your ankles as you left, the dark red stole you often wrapped around your arms covered by the cascade of your hair. he could make out the image of the three-headed dragon you had embroidered on the fabric yourself.
you had been so proud of your work that you’d come to show him and your father when you’d finished with it.
moments after he saw ser donnel leave to escort you back to your chambers, he had told maekar that the matter of your betrothal would be readied when baelor deemed it time.
“she must marry, eventually,” maekar had said, running a hand over his beard. “better to prepare her now than to indulge her.”
“i am not indulging,” baelor had quipped back, a little too aggressively. he takes a long drink of his wine.
maekar had stared at him in confusion, raising an eyebrow, perhaps even suspicious, he now thinks.
“of course not. you would never do such a thing.”
maekar’s thoughts go unsaid, surely something about you’re lucky the gods did not bless you with a daughter. you would never be able to say no to her.
he takes another lengthy sip from his cup.
of course he knew the matter of your marriage was important. so important that it had somehow usurped all his other responsibilities, had somehow become the only thing he thought of when his mind was left to wander.
but the idea of some haughty lannister or cold arryn getting their hands on you while you were still mourning seemed completely out of the question.
yes, he concludes, trying and failing to set the thought aside once and for all. it is more prudent to wait. to allow time for you and for him… to find you the best match he can.
another selfish thought rears its head inside of him, even when he merely notices you thanking a knight of the kingsguard or making polite conversation with the lords of the court during a feast.
you are a princess of their house. perhaps only a bargaining chip in the eyes of the small council, but he would not let them waste your chance for happiness on some alliance for soldiers and grain.
you are a princess of their house and he is a prince, the thought reminds him, traveling through until it has spread from the inside out. it was a tradition of their family to marry princes to princesses.
even from before the conqueror’s time—young ladies of the house could be wed to brothers and cousins and uncles, if it was so arranged—for honor, for their noble blood.
his father had never much cared for such traditions and nor had he. when it had come time to arrange valarr’s marriage, they had sought out an alliance to strengthen the crown’s relationships.
bloodraven whispers of slighted great houses, mulling over the stolen opportunity to put a noble daughter of the realm in the queen’s chair one day, when he was gone and valarr would rule.
they sought you as a consolement. for you to sit besides their sons, for their lineage to have royal blood, to establish a relationship that might advance their house for generations to come.
perhaps that is why he is so adamantly opposed to answering questions about the offers for your hand. he’ll not sell you off and send you away, the last piece he has of his brother, to acquiesce a petty lord.
if only he was, indeed, selfish.
he was not greedy either, though the thought of making you his wife so that he might protect you from all the world lingered in his mind almost daily. it was more potent, even, after two or three cups of wine. it would plague him when he tried to sleep, a tantalizing vision of you resting beside him.
naked and content, perhaps, the voice whispers in the back of his head. clear-headed or drunk, he cannot silence it. or wrapped in silks. sleeping soundly, with no tears or sadness. carrying his child, and thinking of a new life to bring into this world instead of those who have left it…
he has to tear himself away from the thought. it is entirely improper.
it does not leave him, and only comes back stronger when you are seated at the dinner table with your cousins.
baelor does not much like the way aerion has been looking at you as of late.
at these dinners, with his father at the head and baelor right beside him, you are seated between valarr and aerion on the other side of the table.
you talk politely with his son, asking no doubt of kiera, who is not present as she recovers from another babe she has lost. you smile gently at valarr, and tell him how you will pray for his wife’s fast recovery.
you ask aemon of the latest book he is reading, no doubt borrowed from the maester’s extensive collections. you ask aegon of his latest qualm with his brothers. you have even been so successful as to elicit a smile from your uncle maekar from time to time.
but when it comes to aerion, your smiles fade quickly. you try not to look at the boy if you can avoid it, even when he pesters you by touching your hand or interrupting you.
and baelor is staring again.
it is hard to look away as it is, even more so when he wishes he might do something to protect you. you avoid aerion’s gaze but baelor sees how lecherous it truly is.
another thought begins to haunt his mind—that of the day that aerion demands your hand for himself. even baelor could not deny that it would be a perfectly reasonable request—he is only your cousin, both borne of mothers from different houses. you would stay in king’s landing with your family, which would certainly ease your mind, he assumes.
but despite all of that, even in the face of logic and sense, baelor decides he shall never give aerion your hand. his nephew is entirely unworthy. unlike, perhaps—
the thoughts had been the hardest to bury when he is alone with you. as crown prince, baelor has always possessed a great deal of admirable traits.
immunity to your charm is not one of them.
the way you fixate your lovely eyes on him when he is speaking, as though nothing in this world could be more important than whatever he is saying.
the way he has your full attention whether it is to speak about the courses at dinner or the latest small council meeting and the headache he had after it, or of the new taxes imparted recently on grain in king’s landing and highgarden.
you do not care about grain, he knows, and yet, you reply eloquently, offering him some insight or perspective he has never considered, before awaiting his response as you blink at him.
and he has never been one to fluster and stutter his sentences. not even when he was but a green knight or a newlywed, when there was nothing that seemed so important to focus on as jena and what she was saying.
you must bring it out of him. you seem to be able to take possession of his mind and enter it in a way that he can only name as sorcery.
when you mention in passing that aerion has been bothering you, the boy is sent to summerhall within a matter of days. when aegon seeks your help convincing his father to allow him to squire, you are the first to bring it up at the dinner table, weaving the thought into conversation until you are sure that it has taken hold in his brother’s mind.
baelor even finds himself agreeing with you, being convinced easily and quickly, even more so when you smile so sweetly at him that it muddles his mind. you say uncle quietly and rest your hand on his shoulder and he all but runs from your solar, leaving you behind, giggling at him no doubt.
what’s worse is that whatever charm you possess, it is rivaled only by your tenderness.
he watches you play with rhae and daella, even though you have lady’s maids of your own to keep you company. you entertain your young cousins whenever they ask. you guide them away to the peace and quiet of your solar when his brother is yelling at his nephews, or when some violence has broken out in the training yard.
when you ask him for things, it is rarely for the purpose of your own satisfaction.
often it is silks and laces to make new dresses for the girls, some new toy for the children of the ladies at court, a commissioned painting to gift to kiera for her nameday, depicting the scenery of the tyrosh for her personal solar.
and for everything he thinks and knows of you, he should have guessed that he would be unable to deny your request.
not when you recall the anniversary of jena’s passing each year and try to ease the pain his family still feels so deeply. you have the lemon cakes she so loved made and served with dinner, smiling with his sons, and then at him, and just for a few moments, a day that has always been so terrible is made slightly better.
but marriage has made you into another creature entirely.
it has been only three moons since baelor had stood with you in the sept and covered your shoulders with the black and red cloak.
you had told him at the feast later in the day that you had been working on your wedding cloak, embroidering glimmering red dragons and the words of the house in high valyrian, for almost the turn of a moon.
“were you pleased with my work, husband?” you had asked, blinking those lovely eyes at him and watching as he lost all train of thought.
baelor had nodded, picking up his goblet and nearly draining the entire thing empty. he did not realize how quickly you would adjust.
he had gone from uncle to husband in a matter of hours. your father might roll over in his grave if he could see you now, looking like a true targaryen bride, seated beside him at the high table, his father and mother only a few seats away.
they had simply been pleased that baelor wished to marry again at all. he would assume something else—though perhaps it was obvious to others that you were among their favorite of the grandchildren and their prized eldest granddaughter—but their contentment had seemed genuine.
they ate and drank and laughed, and the lords and ladies danced, and baelor swallowed hard as he was persuaded to lead you to the floor of the hall. you dance beautifully, you always have, and he recalls a time where you had begged your father for an foreign instructor. he had not listened, and you had come to ask your uncle baelor instead.
needless to say, the new instructor was on their way to king’s landing before the turn of the week—
“husband?” you had quietly asked then, gazing upon him with a sort of expression that he has never seen on your pretty features before. “what are you so lost in thought about?”
“nothing of importance, niece,” he had replied curtly, before spinning you around the room as was expected of him.
baelor tried to deny it—he tried to deny all of it.
how beautiful you looked as you danced in his arms, how warm your skin felt against his, how sweet your scent was. you spoke to him sincerely and he responded in half-sentences and frayed thoughts, the wine taking over his senses, perhaps.
but as he returned you to your seat, breathless and giggling, he had decided then and there. he could not be swayed by your charm when it came to the matter of marriage.
maekar had come to claim your next dance, and you had glanced at baelor quickly before accepting his hand, your eyes silently asking for permission. he had nodded, watching you then turn to your other uncle with a beaming smile.
no, baelor had thought, this marriage cannot truly be of your own choosing. he did know the full length of the truth, and he would not ask you, but he knew you well enough to ascertain that some part of this was a farce.
perhaps you wished to avoid the grim future that awaited you—for there was no doubt in baelor’s mind that aerion would have pestered him for your hand one day. or you wished not to leave the comfort of the red keep and your beloved cousins, abandoning them all to join your husband and your new family.
of the options presented to you, he knew you misliked both. he had not expected you to some up with another alternative entirely, nor had he thought that he would accept it so easily.
persuasion, it seemed, was your esteemed general.
you talked your way into and out of most anything you desired, and reflecting back, baelor believes he should have been more prudent. he cannot escape your charm, but he could have left the matter to maekar to sort out.
perhaps he would have had an easier time convincing you that a marriage in the reach or riverlands would be much more suitable than what you had proposed.
or perhaps, the thought he cannot escape pipes up to remind him, you would have asked for maekar’s hand in marriage instead. then you would have been no longer his niece, not his wife, but rather his goodsister.
his fist had tightened around the neck of the goblet at the mere thought, his eyes watching maekar dance with you. you were smiling at him, but as soon as baelor’s gaze found you, your eyes locked with his in an instant.
baelor looked away quickly.
no, he decides in that very moment, he will not torment you by making you fulfill whatever duties you believed you had as his wife. he would allow you your freedom, leave you to do whatever pleased you, and he would not make you suffer because of his own uncontrollable lust and lechery.
you were his niece before you were his wife. his duty, as he promised your father, was to protect you, not to force you to an early death in the birthing bed by giving you his seed.
the thought was difficult enough to remember that night—the men of the feast had hoisted you up, carrying you to his chambers while shouting bawdy words of ribald. they had delivered you in just your tattered smallclothes, and you had been waiting for him on the bed.
you had not seemed so nervous as he thought, but perhaps only because you knew he would never harm you.
at least, he supposes, he can find peace in that thought, that he protected you from a worse fate on your marriage night that many others suffered through.
even drunk on the sweet nectar of your cunt, baelor had forced himself to remember his vow from earlier. it was hard to do so, and perhaps the only thing harder was his cock, but he set aside the thought entirely.
that night, the first night as husband and wife, he had felt you peak against his mouth once, and on his fingers second. and finally once you were completely exhausted and boneless, sunken into the messy, wet sheets and gripping onto his arm as though you might fall away without him steadying you, he had slowly entered your weeping cunt and claimed your maidenhood for himself.
even that night, he had finished on the soft skin of your belly, refusing to fill you with his seed.
in your exhaustion, he thinks perhaps you did not even notice. by the time he had helped to clean you and bring you a cup of water, you had drank but a sip and fallen fast asleep against him.
that night, he had laid awake, staring at the ceiling of his chambers, listening to the slow rustling of the wood burning in the fireplace, and decided this would very well be the first and last time he bedded you.
he had two healthy children and an heir and he had no need for another, especially not when it could be so dangerous for you.
maekar’s beloved dyanna had perished bringing young rhae into this world, and she had been perfectly healthy during her previous five births. even jena had struggled bringing valarr into this world, and the maesters had told him it was scarcely an easy thing, even worse when it was the lady’s first child.
he looked over you, asleep in his arms, snoring softly with your hair spread out over his pillows. the scent of you might never truly leave these sheets and furs.
and he vowed that he would fulfill his duty as your uncle and set aside his desires as your husband.
baelor never spells out his decision to you fully. if you are hurt by it, you do not show it.
(or rather, he does not notice.)
baelor keeps your interactions concise when he can. with maekar and his children off at summerhall shortly after the wedding, you had taken to eating meals in the solar with him.
he would arrive shortly before the maids began serving food, removing his cloak and sitting beside you as a serving girl pours him a cup of wine.
“how was the small council today? do you have another headache?” you ask gently, and thank the servant as she pours wine into your goblet next. the girl—who you addressed by name, as willa—smiles brightly at you before resuming her place by the wall.
“no, i am well.”
the briefer baelor’s words are, the less you have to go off of. he does not wish you keep you engaged in conversation, or make the time longer than it needs to be. surely you wish to retire or partake in one of those activities you loved before your marriage.
he often sees your latest embroidery project perched on a table by the fire in your solar. there are books there as well, thick volumes of targaryen history and a thinner book he recognizes as daeron the first’s retelling of the conquest of dorne. it is a favorite of his, the first account of dorne, his mother’s homeland, and he has read it cover to cover several times over.
a thought creeps in and he pushes it away—perhaps resting in bed with the fire blazing, since you are certain to get cold without it. you resting in his arms and breathing softly, resting your lovely eyes and keeping them hidden from him as he reads to you. he wonders what it would take to—
baelor blinks.
perhaps you merely wish to fill your time with other company. he often saw you with kiera in her solar when he is searching for valarr or with your lady’s maids in the gardens. it is not surprising to him that you would prefer their company.
“husband?” you ask quietly, and he turns his head.
he has been so lost in his thoughts that he had not noticed you awaiting another response from him. when he looks at you, his heart begins to beat faster.
you are always lovely, but perhaps lovelier still when your expression is filled with concern for him. you look as though there is nothing more important than understanding whatever thought is plaguing baelor, and discussing it until his mind is at ease. he thinks of the many ways you might be able to help ease him, and yet—
but he cannot let the thought linger for long. he asks of your day and listens to you recount it—filled with the very same activities and people that he suspected.
you sound perhaps a touch lonelier without maekar’s children to help fill your day, but the quiet of the keep is enjoyable in its own way.
once you have finished eating, he kisses your forehead chastely, and tells you that he is returning to his work in his study.
even there, you continue to plague him. the way the yellow silk of your dress clung to your skin. how your hair fell around your face. the way you held his hand for a mere moment before he moved it away, your skin warm and soft, your breasts heaving with each breath—
he pushes his chair and stands up, taking a turn of the room and ending up breathing in the cool night air on the balcony. he thinks he might be able to relieve the hot tension and desire building in his chest and traveling lower with the distraction, but to no avail. his work sits incomplete on his desk.
it’s not until he takes himself in his hand later that night, in the darkness of his private chambers, thinking of the night of the wedding, stroking his manhood faster and faster as he thinks of how you had mewled under him as he took you—
he finds release, but he feels no relief. only a sense of propriety that seems to be fading the longer he thinks of you. and then, in the sheets that still smell of your skin, he sleeps.
-
“i require but a moment of your time, niece,” baelor says as he enters your solar.
you are seated in the armchair by the fireplace, but you put down your embroidery—another dragon, he imagines—at the sound of his voice. you do not stand up, but you look towards him.
your maids look wide-eyed with concern, until he waves his hand to dismiss them. the door shuts as they step outside.
“good morrow, husband,” you reply sweetly as always, smiling. “would you like tea? it is too early for wine but i can request-”
“no, i require nothing but an explanation. what is the meaning of this?” he clutches in his hand a piece of parchment, spelling out a list of your latest expenses, given to him by the master of coin at the small council meeting in the morning
lord penrose had looked at him with an odd sort of expression, a mixture of pity and amusement, when he had handed him the rolled up letter.
baelor was not an impatient man. he was not prone to anger, either, but he felt his fist tighten around the paper and his jaw clench as he read the scribbled ink.
“the meaning of what, husband?” you ask innocently. you rise from your chair, setting aside your embroidery. you walk closer to him and he feels his resolve beginning to quiver.
you wear a pretty gown of blue silk, a color that seems familiar to him for some reason, with a low neckline that he cannot remove his eyes form. he would not deem such a dress appropriate, but you are in the peace and quiet of your solar, with no one but maids for company. baelor’s jaw tenses again at the thought of ser donnel watching your skirts swish behind you as you had entered the room today, as he stood guard by the doors.
usually, you cover your shoulders with that stole he is most familiar with. it does not seem to be found today. he stares at the bare skin there for entirely too long before looking upon your face again. you are standing closer than he realized.
he takes a step backwards, and he notices displeasure flick over your normally warm expression, if only for a moment, before returning to the sweet smile he is so familiar with.
if he had blinked, he would have missed it.
“lord penrose gave me a detailed account of your recent expenses,” he begins, the words coming out sternly. “two hundred gold dragons on white silk and myrish lace? another hefty amount on a seamstress and tailor in king’s landing? my niece, i-”
your face changes at once. the lovely smile melts away, replaced with a mispleased pout of your perfect lips. your eyebrows furrow and your eyes look at his with a mixture of concern and sadness.
baelor begins to regret his words instantly.
“are you cross with me?” you ask quietly, taking another step closer to him. your hands rests by your side but they move slowly, until your palms are pressed flat against the velvet of his doublet. “i did not mean to upset you.”
he can feel the warmth of your skin through the layers of cloth, he thinks. you are so close that the familiar, fragrant scent of your skin has taken hold of all his senses. the last time had been the night of—
he moves his head, trying to shake it slightly before looking back at your doleful eyes. his resolve begins to slip away slowly.
“not… upset, entirely. i-i spoke harshly. i only meant that-” baelor loses track of the thought as he stares at you. you look as though you are a child being scolded. “it is not proper, princess, to spend such an amount on clothes.”
“i understand, husband,” you reply solemnly, your expression unwavering.
“if you desired something, i merely wish you had told me first.”
“i did not wish to bother you with such frivolous requests. i thought that perhaps you would be pleased with my new gowns.”
“i…” baelor trails off. the one you wear now is particularly captivating. how can he be upset, when you had done it for him?
yes, something in his mind tells him, a princess of the court, wife of the crown prince, no less, should not only be clothed in old dresses.
it is a small thing to him, but perhaps an entirely different matter for you. there are ladies of the court, perhaps who might be your ladies in waiting one day in the distant future. he supposes you have to have something new to share with them, and take part in influencing some of the fashions of court.
though, he admits plainly, the lords of the court would thank him if their wives began dressing in this fashion.
he would thank himself, if you began dressing like this—
“husband?” you ask again, your eyes widened while you await another answer.
“forgive me. i was… distracted,” he confesses, and your seize your opportunity.
you press your hands further into his chest, taking another step closer.
“i did not mean any harm,” you begin, locking eyes with him. “i sought the merchants in king’s landing for a reason. i wanted different silks that i might support a great deal more families than just the ones the steward prefers. and i thought, perhaps, by commissioning new dressmakers, the ladies of court might seek them out too. i only wanted to help…”
well, he had not thought of it in that manner.
there was no harm in the action. a bit of gold in exchange for the goodwill and support of the crafters and vendors of the city. you were right—the ladies of court would follow in your example, giving work to feed hungry families.
“i… forgive me. i should not have taken that tone with you.”
“you should not apologize, husband. in fact, i am most grateful for an opportunity to speak with you before we dine. might i show you some of my new dresses? i would like to wear it at supper,” you say, but he swallows uncomfortably.
resisting you when you are fully clothed with your stole is a task he deems difficult enough. listening to you change your dresses behind a partition while you come out to show him the many options, each more revealing than the last is…
near impossible.
“i must return to my study for another meeting, niece. but i will see you at dinner,” he says, and presses another kiss to your forehead, his hands coming up to cup your cheek before departing.
you bite the skin of the inside of your cheek, deep in thought as he leaves.
+
perhaps a few days later, baelor is seated in the armchair of his study. there is still dozens of documents for him to review, a proposal for the small council that needs to be finished before the afternoon meeting tomorrow, and it is nearing the hour of the owl.
he has finally been able to rid himself of the image of you and whatever silky smallclothes you might be wearing underneath your new dresses, in order to finish some of his work.
they must be even smaller than he imagines, though, if your dresses reveal so much soft, flawless skin to him without them making an appearance.
(rid himself of it, he thinks, by releasing into his hand every night since. you are a haunting vision of blue silk, and he imagines how you might look wearing that very dress while he fucks you over the table in—)
there is a knock on the door. it is late, too late to be anyone but a knight of the kingsguard or his manservant preparing his chambers for sleep.
“enter,” baelor says, not looking up from the parchment spread across the desk. he reads the small words slowly, sleep growing heavy in his body. something about new taxes on imported fabrics and treaties between—
“it is very late, husband.” baelor turns to look at you in an instant.
his shoulders relax as he sinks further into his chair. you look just as he would have imagined at this hour—your hair slightly mussed, your expression sweet yet tired. in the dim candlelight that illuminates his study, you look closer to a goddess paying him a visit.
but he is no praying man.
his eyes travel down from your face, where you bite your lip hesitantly while awaiting his reply, to your nightgown and the soft, pale robe that covers it. with it untied, he can see what waits underneath—pure white silk, the color of stars, with lace around the neck. it stops just before your ankles, and he can see the slippers you wear if he sits up a little taller.
the fabric feels delicate just from gazing upon it. you would be comfortable to sleep in it, no doubt. this must be one of the new gowns you had commissioned, because he has never seen clothing for sleep look so lovely and enticing.
you make your way closer, stopping beside his desk.
“it is almost the hour of the owl, niece. what are you doing awake?”
“i could not sleep,” you confess, running your fingers across some of the papers that lay cluttered on the surface of the bureau. “it evades me. i am not sufficiently tired.”
you glance up towards him, and the resolve, which has already been battered and beaten to near death by the strength of your forces—namely your bleary, beautiful eyes—begins to shake, as a newly anointed knight facing battle for the first time might.
“you should rest, princess.”
“i do not wish to rest.”
perhaps the silence of the castle and the lull of the night has made you braver and bolder than the young woman he thought he knew so well.
you move quickly, to perch yourself against his lap seamlessly, as though he was a seat made for you only.
your hand comes to stabilize yourself against baelor, fingers wrapping around the thickness of his muscled arm. he moves faster than you, wrapping both of his hands securely around your waist to steady you, taking in, finally, how thin the fabric of your nightgown truly is. he releases a shuddery, painful breath at the thought that follows.
he can feel the heat of your skin and how your flesh yields in his grip.
he has not felt you in so very long. your soft skin in his hands and the aroma of your hair, jasmine and something else he cannot name, make him dizzy with want.
he has tried so hard to make all the interactions chaste and short, and here you are, offering yourself to the predator, a misguided, sleepy creature of prey.
his prey.
you trace the skin of his cheek with your soft fingers.
“you are not eating enough,” you say quietly. baelor holds back a quiet laugh.
“spoken like a true wife.”
“i am your true wife,” you reply with a tone he cannot quite place. “will you not come to bed with me? i have so missed your company, husband,” you purr.
he very nearly shuts his eyes at the sound. when his eyelids open again, you are staring at him with wide, doe-like eyes, blinking in eager anticipation.
“niece,” baelor warns in a low voice. “i-”
“wife,” you correct again.
“i have much work to complete before i can retire,” he lies, knowing that the moment you leave him, he will be unable to finish writing even another sentence.
such is the strength of your power over him. even when you are not beside him, his mind can think of nothing else.
“can it not wait until the morning? i should like to sleep beside you,” you whisper, laying your head down on his shoulder.
he looks down the length of your back, your thin excuse of a robe abandoned on the ground, the silk of your nightgown shining and shimmering in the candlelight. he notices how it stretches across your skin, revealing curves that he should not be looking at, how easily the fabric might be torn into two if he only pulled—
reality floods his veins as though someone had emptied a barrel of ice water on his skin.
perhaps you are lonely, and truly, that is his mistake—he has tried his best to resist temptation by limiting the tempting interactions entirely.
with maekar and his children gone, you have no one to keep you company. it’s only natural you would seek him out, even in this state, because you wish to speak with someone else besides your maids. you have always been a unifying feature of their family, preferring to spend time with them rather than alone.
yes, that must be it, he concludes as you rest against his body, adjusting your legs to get more comfortable.
your smooth skin brushes against his manhood—which is only growing harder with each passing moment—and he brings one hand to your thigh to stop you from moving any further. he soaks in the satisfied feeling when he feels your limb still under his touch.
this must all be borne of a loneliness you possess and a desire for company. he can easily remedy that—many of the lords of the court have daughters and wives and sisters who could be brought along to be your companions.
it does not quite feel as though his idea will work when you are curled up so comfortably against him, fitting together as though you and he are two parts of a whole.
but he shall have to try, regardless. he will not defile and debase you any further. you shall be allowed at least that much respect.
you make a soft, sweet noise of sleep against him. he feels you nuzzle your head against his shoulder further. you end up burying it into the crook of his neck, sighing softly, and he soaks in how your breath feels against his skin.
“you should sleep, princess,” baelor says quietly into your ear.
he cannot help it—everything seems much more intimate under the veil of darkness. all that he has tried so hard to push away in the daylight returns with a tenacity he did not expect.
something speaks up, the part he tries to keep silent. it calls him a fool—reminds him that he has a lovely creature, bound to him before the gods, that seems to desire him, desire his company. and all he has done is push her away time and time again.
the two sides begin to battle it out—his moral thoughts that somehow always travel back to the day he promised your father he would protect you and the perverse ones that tell the others to be quiet and please his wife, to give in and make her every wish come to fruition.
“i will,” you begin softly, the words said into his ear, a lustful shiver rolling over his muscles at the sound. “if you join me.”
he exhales a deep breath, filled with both guilt and regret, and he knows you can hear it.
“i cannot. come, i shall escort you back to your chambers.”
you sigh too—one of pure frustration, as he helps you stand up.
baelor’s fingers barely skim the bare skin of your shoulder, bringing the fallen strap that was hovering on your arm back to its rightful place. then he picks up your robe and wraps it around you gently.
he offers you his arm to lead you back to your chambers. you have a difficult time letting go.
“husband, i-”
“sleep now, niece. we shall talk during the day tomorrow.”
“but i-” baelor turns his beautiful, mis-matched eyes towards you and the sentence dies on your tongue. you shall still have the last word, however, and so you hold onto his arm and lean in for a kiss before he can turn away from you.
he makes your knees weak without even trying.
baelor’s mouth is warm and his lips taste of sweet wine, no doubt the cup he was nursing before you entered his study.
in truth, you had slumbered hours ago, falling into sleep after baelor had left your chambers following supper. you wanted to be awake at such a time that you knew he would still be in his study, all alone.
your plan had, for the most part, failed. though you had gotten closer than previous attempts, and though it had been wonderful to feel his hands on your skin once more, he was still being too pious for your liking, too reminiscent of his namesake.
your hands are still wrapped around his arms, digging into the muscles as you feel baelor returning your kiss. you whimper into his mouth, surprised by the rough feel of his beard against your skin and his tongue touching yours. but the kiss itself is still surprisingly gentle, just as the ones on your wedding night had been.
you had thought your teasing might earn you a glimpse of a different side of your husband, but it seems that you were mistaken.
no matter. you will accept each victory, no matter how small.
and most unsurprisingly, he pulls away first.
his lips look swollen and pink, and your own tug into a pleased smile at the image before you. baelor runs a hand over his beard, sighing, looking at you as though he is unsure of what he will do with you.
good, you think. let me be plagued with dreams of my kisses.
“i bid you goodnight, my husband,” you sing sweetly, leaning your feet forward on your toes so that you can press one of those chaste kisses he so loves to his cheek.
then you enter your chambers, leaving him in the corridor.
-
baelor thinks of nothing but your startling kiss and how your nightgown looked in the dim light of his study.
the gown—if it can even be called that, since it was merely a few scraps of thin fabric stitched together—has been the only thing on his mind for days on end.
he tries ardently to distract himself by setting up meetings with lords mallister and santagar and tyrell to have them bring ladies of their family to court to serve as your companions. he speaks with the men for too long, asks questions that are irrelevant, and tries to prolong the encounter just so he is not left alone with this thoughts.
one thought in particular—namely the softness of your lips, a soldier rising through the ranks as he wins battle after battle.
and despite all of that effort, even days later, he finds himself unable to think of anything but the scent of your skin and the ease with which you climbed into his lap.
a lesser man might even think that you wanted him.
he tries, and fails, to cast the thought aside entirely.
you, on the other hand, have not been thinking of anything else. baelor tells you when he joins you for dinner later in the week that he has arranged for your ladies-in-waiting to come to court earlier than he had planned.
he tells you their names and their lineages, their relation to his small council and the relationships their families wish to maintain with the crown.
but you pay little attention.
again, your husband has spurned you.
you thought you were strong enough to deal with this rationally. that baelor was only being distant because you were newlyweds, because he did not want to seem eager.
but you’re no fool, either. your little stunt in his study proved what you already knew to be true. your husband desired you, he just wouldn't allow himself to act on his desires.
now he wishes to keep you complacent with noble ladies that will no doubt ask you questions that you have no answer for—such as when your husband planned on getting you with child and when the court would have another little prince or princess running around.
no matter what else happened, you knew you needed to take the issue into your own hands if you wanted a resolution.
if you wanted your husband’s seed, you will have to go seek him out and make him give it to you.
baelor does not meet you for dinner the following evening. he is in his study with his father and maekar, who is visiting from summerhall.
he left the children behind, much to your displeasure, but brought along daeron and aerion. hardly a fair trade, you think, though the thought feels tainted. you have nothing against the elder, but the second-born is another deal entirely.
the boys had begun their morning sparring with your other cousins—or rather, your step-sons—in the training yard. you had walked by on the way to the gardens with your ladies, the lot of them giggling at the muscles and sweat of the boys below.
it is only aerion and matarys doing the sparring now.
in the garden, daeron seems to be taking a nap in the sun, perched on one of the benches by the trees. valarr is taking a turn about the gardens with kiera, who is finally feeling well enough to come outside and enjoy the fresh air.
seeing the way the two of them hold each other, the way their love and admiration for the other was so palpable to all of you, made your heart ache.
yes, you wanted your husband to please you and give you a child of your own. but you also wanted that.
love and affection and tenderness.
the worst of it, perhaps, was that you knew baelor was incredibly capable of it. he was not at all like the lords you feared you would have been married off too—cold and cruel and devoid of kindness. baelor was overflowing with love for his children and his family.
you were spoiled, perhaps, you think as you sulk in the shade with your new ladies. you were so used to his love and compassion growing up that you had only expected it to further grow as the moons of your marriage passed.
now your husband seems to have nothing but proper concern for you. everything he does, everything he says, it is apparent that he wishes you to stay safe and well. he will not even touch you, perhaps for fear that he will break you, living up to his nickname after all, you suppose.
you bite into cherry and let the tartness linger on your tongue. lady bethany mallister, the daughter of the lord of ships, picks up a piece of fruit as well.
you are tired of them, though not because they are not enjoyable company. it is your own situation that feeds your sadness.
aly tyrell is funny beyond all measure. lady bethany is sweet and gentle and always compliments your dresses. lord santagar’s sister, sarena, is young and excited and reminds you of the innocent hope all girls possess at that age. you feel towards her perhaps that which an elder sister might feel towards the younger.
though your frustrations are targeted to your husband and his lack of action, you do not wish to take it out on them.
“at least,” you begin after taking another bite and chewing your cherry until your lips and tongue are red, “the fruit is sweet and the sun is warm.”
“i wonder if we will have another long spring,” bethany comments, picking up another slice of apple.
“perhaps,” you mull. “it would bode well for the small folk. i know they dread winter so.”
“bethy, i cannot imagine what winter must be like at seagard. how do you survive the cold?” sarena asks, selecting a slice of blood orange for herself.
“the same way everyone else does,” aly answers for her, “by staying warm in their husband’s beds.”
you laugh first, though it stings. the others follow.
“you shall be safe then, princess,” sarena says with a wide-eyed smile. “the prince would never let you be cold.”
“right you are, my lady. he would never.” you bite on your cheek, listening as aly begins another tale.
she is interrupted by a pale hand reaching towards the fruit, picking up a cluster of grapes.
“cousin,” you greet, faking a sweet smile the way you are used to in his company.
“princess. ladies,” aerion says, narrowing his violet eyes towards you. “do your prince a favor, my ladies, and take a turn about the garden. i require a word with my dear aunt.”
the girls look toward you for permission first and you nod your head, something you know aerion did not appreciate, and they each get up and leave.
sarena turns to look back at him twice, until aly steps to intentionally block her view, making her focus in front of her.
aerion looks a sweaty mess, slumping into bethany’s seat, next to you.
“so,” he starts. “how fares your marriage?”
“perfectly well,” you reply quickly. “baelor is a most thoughtful husband.”
“baelor,” aerion mimics with a scoff. he pops a grape into his mouth, chewing obnoxiously. “four moons ago you called him uncle.”
“a lot can change in four months, aerion. now he is my husband.”
“and some husband he is, i am sure. tell me, has he gotten a child on you yet? given his age, you can never know…”
you head snaps towards him, your fingers twitching as you try your hardest to refrain from slapping him.
“i will not dignify you with an answer. mind your tongue or i will-”
“you will what?” he questions, eating another grape, looking at you with a feigned, innocent expression.
you cannot think of anything to say.
“you seem to forget that i am no longer your cousin. i am the crown prince’s wife now,” you finally reply, hoping he cannot see through your angry words, the saddened, lonely girl that sits beneath your visage.
“of course not. i am merely looking out for you. well, if you require me… you know where i shall be.”
“i do not require-“
“good day, aunt.” he picks up your tightened fist and presses a kiss to the skin of your hand. you pull your hand back instantly.
+
aerion’s words do not leave you for the rest of the day.
your ladies continue to chatter and gossip, but your thoughts are far away. you pick only bits and pieces, speaking when there is a silence meant for your reply.
“prince aerion is so handsome, is he not?” sarena says breathlessly, and bethany looks towards you with a concerned expression. aly rolls her eyes.
“as pretty as he is violent. i beg you to find literally anyone else to fancy. his older brother’s just over there-”
sarena scrunches her freckled nose in disagreement. you’ll warn her about pursuing aerion before he leaves once again for summerhall, but your mind cannot think of anything but your own plight.
it’s not until the sun has almost set and the air is much cooler that you are finally granted the opportunity to be alone with your thoughts.
alone, that you might finally concoct your plan.
you work quickly, before your mind has time to stop and think too much of your actions. your maid is confused when dismiss her after your bath, but you do not need her noticing that you do not plan to spend the evening in your chambers.
you dress yourself in the smallest of the newly-made nightgowns, not tying and lacing it where it ought to be, leaving it hanging off your shoulder and exposing the skin of your neck and chest more than you should.
part of the plan from the other night had worked—baelor had been susceptible to the charm of your new gowns, which seemed now to be worth every penny. perhaps that one was not the true victor, however.
you were confident that the one you donned now would be.
you forgo the robe entirely this time, knowing that baelor is not in his study across the corridor. he’s only in his chambers, only a door away. you step out into the hall and put a finger to your lips when ser donnel of the kingsguard sees you, standing in between the two doors for his watch until morning.
though his eyes are wide at your clothes—or rather mostly lack of—he does not say anything.
“no interruptions, ser donnel, if you can manage it. the prince and i have a most urgent matter to discuss.”
he nods, and you smile, knocking on the door.
baelor’s gentle, deep voice echoes as he tells whomever it is to enter.
it’s not until you step inside, gently closing the door behind you and padding barefoot to the desk and armchair by the fireplace where he works when he is tired of his study, that he notices you.
he looks up quickly, his gaze returning to the assortment of papers before him, before suddenly returning his eyes towards you, his head almost spinning. you bite back a smile.
“niece. what are you-”
“husband,” you greet, ignoring his use of your former title. “i require a moment of your time.”
his mismatched eyes, deep in a distracted thought, travel from your face, slowly raking downwards.
he stops to observe your bared shoulder and the sheer silk that reveals the curve of your breasts and hips before making his way to your legs, and then back up when you clear your throat.
“what?” he questions, meeting your eyes once again. “did you say something?”
“no,” you lie, shaking your head innocently, putting one step in front of the other until you are much closer to him and the fire. it provides warmth to your exposed skin but it is not nearly warm enough.
nothing but the heat of your husband on top of you will cure your coldness, you think, thinking back to what aly had said in the garden.
“you should return to bed. and wear something warmer. there is a chill in the air tonight.”
“i do not wish to sleep alone,” you reply, taking yet another step closer. he does not have anywhere to escape to, seated in his chair with the fireplace on one side and you on the other.
“we have discussed this, princess-”
“not princess,” you say, feeling bolder than ever before.
you perch yourself against his desk, the silk slipping aside and baring your thighs to him. his eyes are fixated on the skin until you speak again, when he moves to meet your eyes again. you hold back another laugh at his attempts to be stoic and polite, even when you are vexing him so deeply.
“niece-”
“not niece, either. wife. it is the only name i shall respond to,” you say quietly, hoping he can also feel the sincerity of your words.
you watch as baelor swallows, tension thick in the air between the two of you. he runs a hand over his beard as he does when he is frustrated and trying not to show it.
from so close, you can see all the gray hairs that litter his face. they blend together with the dark hair seamlessly. that, along with the wrinkles by his eyes and the absolute temptation in his eyes, is enough to make butterflies erupt in your chest.
“you do not know what you are asking for,” baelor says, and you smile.
“i do know. i have had many moons to think about it.”
“you-” baelor stops himself, releasing a deep breath. “you do not want me. you simply desire company. that is why i arranged-”
“my ladies are lovely. kind and funny and good at conversing.”
“i am pleased to hear it. perhaps they-”
you move slowly, shifting from your position near his desk until you are settling yourself in his lap, just as the other night.
and just like then, baelor’s hands come to secure you. always worried about your safety, he holds on tightly, his fingers sinking into the flesh of your waist as yours wrap around his neck.
“as lovely as they are, they cannot give me what i want.”
you lean in to kiss the hollow of his cheek again, working your way down until you can nestle your face into his neck, littering a handful of kisses there too. baelor’s hands tighten on your body as you feel him suck in a deep breath.
you breathe in the scent of his skin, calming and soothing as it is, leather and amber and something else that is uniquely your husband.
“what is it that you want?” he questions quietly, with a soft groan that is music to your ears. you stir against his lap and feel his hardness growing against your thighs, warm and firm.
you must be well and truly deprived, you think, since the thought of his manhood against you is enough to make your mouth water.
“i want you. i have wanted you for as long as i can remember. now i have you but in name only.”
“sweet girl, i am only-”
“tell me, husband, am i so awful that you will not spend time with me? am i not the same niece that you so doted on before our marriage?”
“that is precisely why i cannot-”
you lean in to silence him with a kiss, your lips hot and wet against each other. you moan into his open mouth, gripping onto his shoulder fiercely, not pulling away even as you feel baelor try and resist you.
he too gives in—his hand weaving into your hair, his huge palm holding your head in place. the other hand stays by your waist, adamantly about not straying, though you can feel the heat of his skin through your silk.
and beneath you is an entirely different story than whatever baelor claims to be the truth—he grows harder and hotter as you move ever so slightly against him, adjusting yourself until you sit atop his manhood.
you rock gently, your eyes rolling back at the sensation between your legs, one you have not felt so intensely since the night of your wedding.
you believe you could even find your pleasure like this, drowning in his kisses and moving your hips faster until you both feel that shuddery release that you have so longed for—
and then baelor stops, pulling away. his hand stays on the back of your head, cupping and pulling you gently to look at him.
breathless, flushed in every way possible, with a familiar yet distant ache growing hot and tight in your belly, your swollen lips turn into a pout as you bat your eyelashes at him.
“why do you deny me, husband? why do you deny yourself? you cannot hide the truth. i know you desire me,” you say, rocking yourself against him once more.
baelor’s lovely eyes are hidden from you as he shuts them tightly, holding back a moan.
“i am trying to protect you,” he says quietly, his eyes opening again. they are filled with pain, something that you detest. it fills you with an immense sadness.
you lean forwards, pressing your forehead against his.
“you cannot protect me from everything,” you whisper. “and if you must, let us start with the rumors of the court. it wounds me every time someone questions why i am not yet with child.”
“who has said it? i will-”
“it does not matter who. i know they all think it.”
“let them, sweet girl,” baelor says, bringing his hand to hold your cheek tenderly instead. tears—born mostly of sadness and frustration—begin to well up in your eyes. “i am trying to keep you safe and yet you are attempting to force my hand at every turn.”
all you have ever wanted is before you—baelor as your husband, talking of how he wishes to keep you safe, as you always knew he would. and yet, somehow, it is a terrifying thing altogether to imagine a life such as the one you have been living forever.
far away from him, detached and alone, sharing nothing but a meal on occasion instead of days filled with the love you know he harbors inside.
“keep me safe from what?”
“everything,” he replies, his hand tightening around your waist. a tear runs down your cheek and he wipes it away with his thumb. “the childbed, for one. you are too young to leave this world because of my own selfish desire-”
“baelor,” you whisper, your pout magnifying in intensity, if possible. “there is no telling what the gods have planned for us. i have learned that lesson with enough pain. should we not enjoy our marriage for as long as we are blessed enough to do so?”
you bite your lower lip, blinking slowly at him, wondering if this might be where the tide finally turns. you lean in for another kiss, only getting a soft, hesitant one before he pulls you away with his hand on your face.
baelor turns his head away from you.
“go to bed, niece. it grows late.”
you feel a selfish sort of anger burning in your chest. you have tried to reason with him—and the gods know your husband a reasonable man, more than most. but you are not content with this life, and you never will be, not until you have your husband the way you want him.
the way you know he wants you.
you do not move. a rational side of you tries to argue that you’ve made more progress than before. perhaps one more plan needs to be made, and you will have convinced him of your own accord to heed you.
however, the irrational side wins, the words spilling out before you can think twice about it.
“you know, aerion visited me today. he said that i only need find him if my uncle is having too much trouble getting me with child.”
baelor snaps his head towards you in an instant, his dark and light eyes blazing with a hidden fury. even so, he keeps his composure more than you wished he would.
“and what did you tell him, hm?”
“i told him to leave. i should have told him that i would have his tongue cut out if he spoke in that way again. because-” you breathe, your entire body trembling in his grip. “because i know my husband can please me. i know he can give me the child we both desire. please baelor… do not let them win.”
you fiddle with the tied ribbon by the collar of your neck, pulling it until it falls flatly around you. he can make out your heaving breasts under the sheer fabric.
you move your head slowly, just to meet his eyes again, blinking quickly. perhaps it is past your time to admit defeat, that you were simply not armored enough today.
baelor brings both his hands to either side of your face and crashes his mouth onto yours.
you release a squeal in surprise, returning the force of his kiss with an intensity you have never felt before. baelor’s hands hold you tightly in place, with no opportunity to move, his mouth hard against yours.
and yet, his lips are soft. he kisses you as though he wishes to cherish the memory, trying to learn the curves and divots of your face with his fingers. you moan against him as his hands move down, dragging slowly past your past, tracing down your back until he finally lands at your hips.
he squeezes, as though he is trying to make certain you are truly there before him. the position is not nearly as comfortable as before, but you have no complaints, allowing him to explore your mouth with his tongue, breathing him in through your every sense.
baelor does not pull away, even as he reads your mind and hoists you up as he stands from the armchair. he sets you on the edge of his desk, using his other hand to brush papers and books out of the way so there is a clearing for you to lay on.
you giggle against his mouth at the sound, only wondering what ser donnel may be thinking from his post outside the door.
but then baelor pulls away, and the thought is lost, replaced instead with regret. you let out a greedy whine, your fingers pulling at his doublet, wishing for his lips on yours again.
“patience, sweet girl,” he says, and you feel a shiver work its way through your entire body.
you are many things. patient is not one of them.
your fingers work deftly at the buttons of his doublet, undoing most of them easily, but before you can get the bloody thing off of his shoulders, baelor brings his hand to your jaw, cupping it and squishing your cheeks together.
“i said to be patient,” he reminds you, and you comply instantly, an eagerness to please him rolling smoothly through your body.
something aches between your legs at his tone, but you are not stupid enough to be defiant now, when you are finally getting what you want.
you remember the night of your wedding as though it was yesterday—how gentle he’d been and how much pleasure he gave you, as though your pleasure mattered more than his. it had been—
the thought is distracted as you hear the sound of silk being torn. you gasp, looking up at baelor instantly.
“baelor, my gown—!” you cry out, though it is hard to care that much. you are mostly being dramatic because you want to see his reaction.
“it has served its purpose,” baelor says calmly.
he does not meet your eyes, rather, he stays focused on your newly exposed skin. the silk falls on either side of your body, revealing your breasts and the skin of your belly and legs to him completely. the air hardens your nipples further, and he stares, stares until you begin to tremble and shake with anticipation.
“husband,” you plead, wondering why he is only looking when he has you like this—a slavish position, bared completely for him while he still has all of his clothes on.
his eyes wander further down, until he stops to stare at your cunt. you feel yourself burn with hotness at his gaze, wondering why he will not just get on with it. he has you exactly how he might want you—splayed out on his desk, your legs wrapped around him loosely. he need only—
baelor kneels. you almost sit up, wanting to know what he is thinking, but one of his huge hands on your stomach tells you, silently, to stay as you are.
“oh,” you sigh, feeling baelor’s hot breath on the sensitive skin of your thighs. his beard is scratchy, deliciously so, as he lines your inner thighs with kisses. when he takes a piece of the delicate skin between his teeth, you yelp, your hand weaving into his hair.
he looks up at you from the position—your legs almost wrapped around his head, his beautiful eyes—one blue, one brown, both dark with lust—looking up at you.
and you do not need him to speak to understand what he is saying. you lay back, keeping your eyes on him.
he dives in between your legs as though he is a man starved.
the first lick makes your entire body tremble, and the second makes you moan out as though there is no one else in the castle save for the two of you. you feel his hot tongue work up and down your leaking cunt, focused on that one part that makes you see stars as his tongue teases it over and over again.
he trails down, prodding against your sensitive hole with his tongue, lapping up your wetness, as your fingers grow tighter in his hair, pulling as you try to move your hips, a silent signal that you need more.
baelor holds your hips down and his tongue returns to your sensitive pearl, simultaneously thrusting in two fingers. your eyes roll all the way back. you moan wantonly—it is all you have wanted.
no amount of your own fingers or folded pillows or thoughts of your husband could ever replace this. his tongue moves against you, flicking and sucking, the noises obscene as they fill the chamber. you cannot hold yourself back, certain someone can hear you, though it is hard to care.
your back arches, rising off of his uncomfortable desk, but you know the feeling that grows deep in your belly. it’s tight and hot and wound up, but it loosens and stretches with every lick of your husband’s tongue.
but it’s different than the night of your wedding. this is so much better, not as gentle and sweet as that night.. no, this is rougher and more deliberate and filled with a fervor that you have unknowingly been creating in your husband all these moons.
the thought is enough to make you reach your peak instantly, but you hold back, wanting to bask in the sheer pleasure for a moment longer. baelor wraps his mouth around your pearl and continues thrusting his fingers in and out, the squelch of your soaking cunt making your entire body feel as though a flame has consumed you whole.
how—how could you have ever been satisfied by yourself? nothing could ever replace this feeling, you think dreamily, drunk on your husband’s affection. he enjoys it, you can tell, being the reason for your complete undoing.
baelor’s other hand reaches towards you, groping your exposed breast from his position. his fingers tease your nipple and you cry out, the pleasure close to unbearable.
he says something, his lips vibrating around you, and it makes your mouth gape open. you cannot understand him, but you guess it all the same, crying out his name over and over again.
“good, sweet girl. perfect girl. let me feel your release on my tongue,” he murmurs against your cunt, and with a final thrust of his fingers and pinch of your nipples, you give in to the pleasure, succumb to your husband.
the sheer bliss that washes over you is unlike anything you have ever felt before. it scorches through your body, a feeling something like lightening striking you, as the heat deep inside of you unwinds, and then snaps altogether.
the shockwaves continue as you moan out baelor’s name, and he does not let up. your body continues to shake in his grip, his tongue rough and almost painful against you, your sensitive cunt pulsing around his fingers.
it’s not until you are completely boneless, slack-jawed and exhausted, collapsing against his desk, that you feel him slide his fingers out of you.
you cannot imagine what a mess he has made of your thighs, though when he stands, groaning, you smile before you can help it.
your juices linger on his beard, and the very thought makes you feel as though you are on fire.
using your hands on his doublet, you push him closer to your for a kiss, feeling the taste of yourself on his tongue and mouth, not receding until he finally uses his hands on your face to guide you away gently.
“that was incredible,” you whisper, leaning your head against his chest. his broad hands on your back support you, otherwise you are certain you would collapse back down.
“i am glad to hear it,” baelor says, polite as ever. “i shall escort you back to your chambers. let me retrieve my-”
“my chambers?” you question, pulling away to look up at him in confusion. “but we have not-”
“you are tired, sweet girl. i will not-”
you make a low, frustrated sound.
“i am not tired. i do not want to go back to my chambers. i want you, all of you. i want you to claim me, as is your right as my husband.”
“claim you?” baelor repeats slowly, watching you with his intense, consuming gaze.
“will you not give me your seed, husband? as your wife, am i not entitled to it?” you ask, armed with that alluring pout that he is so mad for.
it is not even so much your words, but rather how you say them, and how you look at him. as though there is nothing you desire more than him.
baelor leans in for another kiss, your sweet mouth eager for his.
and then he picks you up by the waist, your sore legs wrapping around his easily. he carries you over to his bed, placing you down with a gentle thud.
his time, when your hands come to his doublet, he lets you take it off of him. you remove it and the cloth falls somewhere behind him, just as your scraps of silk now lie on the ground by his desk.
his shirt is next, even as you paw at his breeches and their laces. he pulls the cotton from the back and yanks it off over his head, while he stares down at you. you are biting your lip in anticipation to claim the spoils of your victory.
sweet, eager girl. you have no idea what you are truly asking for. but he will give it to you all the same.
as soon as your fingers successfully untie the laces, he pulls them off, taking his hardened, throbbing cock into his hands. he strokes it as you watch wide-eyed, your chest heaving and breasts bouncing as you wait patiently for him to give you what you so desire.
he hovers over you, pressing a quick kiss to your mouth before working across to your jaw and then down the column of your neck. he goes over your collarbone, over where your heart beats under your skin, and onto your breasts.
baelor feels your fingers tighten around his arm and watches as your eyes roll back in your head as he takes your nipple into his hot mouth. he flicks his tongue against the sensitive skin, still stroking himself, his cock pulsing with every sweet sound you make.
he switches to the other breast, lavishing it with attention while he moves your legs as though you are but a gift for him, positioning you until his cock is lined up against your drenched cunt.
“husband,” you whimper, and he lets go of your tender nipple with a soft noise. “please… please take me,” you say, hot tears of frustration and overwhelmed pleasure running down the side of your face.
he abandons your breast and moves, nudging the thick head of his cock so it slowly slips inside of you. your tight cunt sucks him in instantly, pleading for more as your face twists into a gasp, mouth falling open, eyes shutting tightly.
baelor comes close to your face, kissing your tears softly, until those lovely eyes flutter open to meet his. he groans, burying his face into your neck as you smile, teasing and sweet and yet so hungry for him.
“please, husband,” you moan again, a soft question this time. he answers by thrusting his length into you, all in one swift motion.
the sound of the bedframe thudding against the wall fills the chambers, followed by the lewd, wet sound of baelor moving in and out of your cunt. then there is your cries and pleas, your sweet moans that he cannot believe he has denied himself for so long.
“there, sweet girl,” he says, as he moves your pliable legs easily. he feels that soft spot inside of you that makes you lose all train of thought, makes your eyes shut and squeal louder than he has ever heard before. “this is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“yes, yes, baelor-” you continue, and brings himself all the way out, just to push back in.
you take him as though you were made for him. and perhaps you were.
“i know, sweet girl. i will give you want you need. i will give you everything-”
but he lets go of the thought, focusing instead on the way your cunt pulses and tenses around him every time you hear his voice. and who is he to deny you, when he has already denied so much?
this overwhelming pleasure, this sensation that lights his very bones aflame. he could have had this every single night since the day he took as you as his wife in the sept, if only he had not been so—
“baelor!” you cry out, whining and panting as he pulls himself out of you, using every last bit of strength he possesses.
your sweet cunt clenches around nothing, pulsating as he flips you over onto your belly, folding your legs until you’re exactly how he wants you. he keeps his hands on the soft flesh of your ass, digging in his fingers until he’s sure he’s marked you.
and then he slides back in, feeling the grip you have on his cock, his own eyes rolling back for a moment.
his muscles tense and his bodies shudders, the new position allowing him to feel every last inch of himself buried deep inside of you.
it’s when you turn your head, attempting to look back at him, that he truly loses all sense of control.
this is all your fault—of course.
how could any red-blooded man, even one as patient as he, resist your charms and temptation? resist your sweet smiles and your devious plans to make him lose his composure?
it had worked, he thinks, worked too well. there’s only so much a man can take before he must give in, before he has to please his wife—a duty given to him by the gods.
yes, baelor thinks, watching your lovely features tighten up, as your body mimics the very same around his cock, you are a gift from the gods.
gifts are not meant to be ignored. they are meant to be cherished.
baelor leans forward, gripping the back of your neck, pushing his body weight on top of you, fucking you harder than before.
all that he hears is your cries, all that he feels is the sweat and slick of flesh hitting flesh, and all he can focus is on how your cunt swallows him so perfectly. he knows he cannot last much longer, not when you flutter around him as if you are doing it on purpose.
he pulls out once again, flipping you back over easily. his arms come around either side of your head, boxing you in, as your legs end up spread atop his shoulders. baelor folds you in half, his nose brushing yours, leaning in for another hot kiss as he slides back inside.
it is all he can do not to spill instantly at the very site of your hiccuped moans with each and every thrust. you are so perfect, your body tensing up again, ready for another release, he knows.
i know because i am your husband. your body speaks only to me.
his fingers do not tease this time—flicking over your pearl repeatedly as you weep, perhaps wanting more, perhaps wanting him to slow down. he does not listen.
your back attempts to rise off the bed again, arching as he does not give up his ministrations on your most sensitive part.
baelor feels you begin to peak before your mind has even begun to process it. you clamp around him, the tension increasing and building until it snaps. he leans in for a kiss as he works you through it, not stopping any motion, swallowing your gasps and your damp tears.
your entire body is limp by the time you have finished your pleasure.
it feels as though that alone is more than enough for him, baelor thinks. he slows down his thrusts, coming to cup your face gently, pressing a light kiss to you.
“how do you feel, sweet girl? are you well?”
“no,” you say, to his immediate alarm. if he was not already completely pressed against you, he would adjust until he had you in his arms entirely.
“no?” he repeats. “what can i-”
“you have not given me your seed yet,” you say, blinking those pretty, bleary eyes at him.
you look ruined in every sense of the word—your face sparkling with tears, lips bruised and swollen, your entire body marked by him in some way or another.
“please,” you continue, and baelor begins thrusting back into you, almost without even thinking of it. it must feel incredibly sensitive for you, as you shiver and tremble under him, but you do not give up on your goal. “i want it, husband. i want your seed. please, will you not give it to me?”
it does not take much.
baelor moans loudly against the skin of your neck, the brunt of his release hitting him squarely in the chest. his hips begin to stutter, losing his control as he feels the hot spend fill your pulsating cunt. even that does not stop, not until you have milked his cock completely dry.
you are maddening. a creature sent to torment him in the world of the living and in the land of dreams.
you giggle at the sensation, likely pleased with your victory. you pull on baelor’s neck until he gives you another kiss—this one long and lingering, your tongues playing together until finally baelor’s muscles give out from sheer exhaustion.
he collapses next to you, an arm sprawled across your body.
you end up curled against his chest, mewling like a satisfied kitten might after receiving a fair serving of milk. he can feel the heat of your body radiating onto him, the sweat that coated both of your skin and your soft, tired breaths as your body melts into his.
finally satisfied, he thinks, a smug feeling rolling over him lazily.
this is what you needed, he knows, and now the sedition has slowly seeped out of you, as his seed is seeping out of your cunt.
“now, wife,” he says, the words a steady whisper into your ear. “sleep. we shall talk in the morning.”
“mmh,” you make a sweet, pleasant noise and he feels your body still as you enter your slumber.
hopefully a peaceful one, such as that after a fiercely fought battle has been won he thinks, his own eyes beginning to shut.
it could only be moments later—he has not even felt himself descend into sleep—that you stir in his grip. your soft lips begin littering kisses up the column of his neck, over the hair of his beard that grows there, all the way up until you find the lobe of his ear.
you kiss there too, teasing the skin between your teeth until you finally release it, his eyes almost fluttering open again.
“husband,” you whisper into his ear, “can we go again?”
“seven hells-”
♡ thanks for reading! if you enjoyed this, please consider reblogging from me (op) lol because i love to see everyone's comments! okay that's it ♡
cooking: from zero to proficiency - modern!baelor targaryen x reader
summary: baelor targaryen excelled in most things in life - he had a wonderful job, a beautiful house, and two very competent sons. where he did not excel? cooking. it was time to change that. - aka "baelor signs up for cooking class and meets a pretty girl" word count: 22.6k tags: age gap relationship, this is really just a cute little fic
read on ao3 | my masterlist
The notification came through at half past seven on a Tuesday evening, while Baelor was eating pad thai out of the container at his kitchen island and reading a deposition summary he had already read twice.
He almost did not see it. The little red badge on his phone screen - MyChart: New message from your care team - sat there blinking at the edge of his peripheral vision for a full three minutes before he set down the deposition, picked up the phone, and opened the app with the particular brisk efficiency he brought to all things.
Good afternoon, Mr. Targaryen. Your recent lab results are in and have been reviewed. Overall, everything looks great! Your blood pressure is excellent, CBC is within normal range, metabolic panel is unremarkable, and your thyroid levels are right where we want them. One small note: your LDL cholesterol has come in slightly elevated at 128 mg/dL - not in the concerning range, but just nudging above optimal. Something to be aware of and to keep an eye on. We can discuss strategies at your next visit, but in the meantime, diet adjustments can make a real difference! Have a wonderful week.
Baelor read the message twice.
Then he set his phone face-down on the counter and looked at the container of pad thai.
Then he picked his phone back up and read it again.
One hundred and twenty-eight. He pulled up the browser - old habit, he preferred to look things up himself before asking anyone - and read the ranges. Optimal was below one hundred. Near optimal, one hundred to one-twenty-nine. Borderline high started at one-thirty.
So he was, technically, in the near optimal range. One single point below borderline high.
He set the phone down again.
Diet adjustments can make a real difference.
He turned the phrase over in his mind the way he turned over language in contracts, looking for the clause that mattered. Diet adjustments. His diet. He ate reasonably well, or he thought he did. He did not smoke - had never smoked, had always found the habit uselessly self-destructive. He drank, but moderately; a glass of wine with dinner when he remembered to have dinner at the table, the occasional scotch after a difficult week. He ran four mornings a week, thirty-five minutes, without fail, regardless of weather or workload. He kept his weight stable. He slept adequately.
So what, exactly, was the problem?
He looked at the pad thai.
He thought about what he had had for lunch. A sandwich from the deli on the corner. Yesterday's dinner had been the leftover half of a burrito bowl from the place down the street. Sunday he had ordered sushi. Saturday - he had to actually think about Saturday - Saturday had been the Thai place again, actually. Different dish.
He pulled up his phone's order history, almost against his will, and scrolled back through three weeks.
There was not a single meal he had cooked himself.
Not one.
He thought about this with the same calm, systematic attention he gave to a problem in a case. He was not alarmed, exactly - one hundred and twenty-eight was not a crisis - it was a nudge - a yellow flag, not a red one. But Baelor Targaryen had not built his father's firm into what it was today by ignoring yellow flags. You caught things early, or you did not catch them at all.
The issue was simple, he did not cook. He had never particularly needed to. Growing up in his parents' house, there had been household staff. He had gone to university, where there was a dining hall. He had met Jena his second year of law school, and she had loved to cook - genuinely loved it, in the way some people love a craft and not a chore. She had cooked for him with the same pleasure that he argued cases, and he had let her, gladly, because it made her happy and because he was hopeless in a kitchen and had known it. After she died, when the boys were still small and the house still felt like a wound, there had been Mrs. Shapiro, the nanny, who had cooked alongside everything else she did for them. She had stayed until Matarys started secondary school and declared himself old enough to fend for himself, and Baelor had not had the heart to keep her on for his own sake alone.
And then there was nothing. Takeout. Delivery apps. The occasional sad sandwich assembled at his own counter with whatever was left in the refrigerator.
He was fifty years old, he thought. He had passed the bar in two jurisdictions. He had argued in front of federal judges and won. He had raised two sons, more or less alone, and they had turned out to be decent, intelligent, kind young men. He had run the firm for eleven years.
He could learn to cook.
He picked the phone back up and typed cooking classes near me into the search bar.
The results were, frankly, grim. There were the expensive recreational ones - date-night pasta evenings, weekend sushi workshops, private lessons that cost more per hour than he billed at the firm's standard rate. There were the community center offerings, which appeared to be oriented toward children and retirees. And then, somewhere in the middle, there was a twelve-week adult evening course at the culinary center on State Street.
COOKING: FROM ZERO TO PROFICIENCY - A comprehensive twelve-week course for adults seeking to build a foundational cooking skill set. Monday evenings, 6–9pm. Enrollment now open.
He stared at the name for a moment. From Zero to Proficiency. He had no particular objection to being a zero, having always believed that accurate self-assessment was the beginning of all improvement, but whoever had named this course had clearly spent very little time thinking about how to make adults feel welcome in their inadequacy.
Still.
He scrolled down to the enrollment form and filled it out before he could change his mind.
He picked up the pad thai again, and finished it, and told himself it would be the last time.
It was not the last time. But it was, at least, the beginning.
WEEK ONE
The culinary center on State Street was the kind of place that had been there for years without you ever noticing it, sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a stationery shop, its window displaying a modest hand-lettered sign that said CLASSES CURRENTLY ENROLLING - ENQUIRE WITHIN. You had passed it dozens of times on your way to the coffee shop at the end of the block without once registering it, and then last month your friend Julia had sent you the link to the Monday evening course with a message that said you keep saying you want to cook better, here's your excuse, I already looked up parking.Julia was not enrolled in the course. She had signed up and then decided twelve weeks was too long of a commitment.
You had signed up anyway, because you had already paid the deposit before she bailed, and also because, if you were being honest with yourself, you had been saying you wanted to cook better for almost two years, and it was beginning to feel like the kind of thing you would say for another twenty years without ever doing anything about it unless you forced your own hand.
You were not a bad cook. You could make pasta, a few stir-fries, roasted vegetables, the chicken recipe your mother had written out on an index card that you kept folded in your wallet like a talisman against adulthood. But that was roughly the extent of it, and somewhere around the third month of your office job, you had realized that your repertoire had a ceiling, and the ceiling was low, and you would eat the same six dinners on rotation until you died unless you did something about it. You had a year before your master's program started. You had evenings. You had no excuse not to.
The class started at six. You arrived at five fifty-two, later than you had meant to because the train had stalled, and you pushed through the door into a narrow reception area that smelled wonderfully and specifically of garlic, and warm metal, and something sweet underneath - vanilla, maybe, or brown sugar caramelizing somewhere in the back. A woman at the desk directed you through to the main kitchen with a wave and a smile, and you went.
The kitchen was not what you had expected. You had pictured something institutional - rows of identical stations, fluorescent lighting, the grim functionality of a school lab. Instead it was warm, the lighting amber and directional, the stations spaced generously around a central demonstration counter. There were ten workstations in all, each with a two-burner cooktop, a chopping board, a rack of basic tools, and two stools pulled up opposite each other. Most of them were already occupied, pairs of people shuffling around each other and introducing themselves and examining the tools with the cheerful uncertainty of a first night.
You looked for an empty station.
There was one left - second from the end, nearest the window that looked out onto the dark street. One of the two stools had a person already on it, and that person had their back to you, examining something on their phone with the unhurried attention of someone who had been early and settled and was perfectly comfortable waiting.
He was wearing a navy jacket over a grey shirt, no tie - the jacket had the quality of being expensive without trying to announce itself, slightly worn at one cuff in a way that suggested it was a favorite rather than a new purchase. Dark hair, cut short, neat. His posture was good in the quietly natural way that meant it was not something he thought about.
You crossed to the station, pulled out the empty stool, and sat.
He looked up from his phone.
The first thing you noticed, before anything else, was his eyes - not because of the color, though that registered a moment later, one brown and one a striking pale blue, the kind of heterochromia that made you want to look and feel slightly rude for looking. It was the expression in them, easy and attentive and very direct, the look of someone who gave you their full attention without making it feel like an examination.
"Hi," you greeted. "Looks like we're partners."
"Looks like it," he said, and put his phone away. His voice was unhurried, low. "Baelor." He offered his hand across the station.
"Hi, Baelor," you said, and shook it. His hand was warm, the grip straightforward and brief. You gave him your name.
"Good to meet you," he smiled, and he meant it, you could tell - not in the reflexive, performative way people said it, but with a kind of simple sincerity that did not dress itself up. "Have you taken something like this before?"
"No, first time." You looked around at the other stations, the organized equipment, the demonstration counter at the front where a large whiteboard announced the twelve-week curriculum in colorful marker. "You?"
"Also a first." He glanced at the whiteboard, and something shifted briefly at the corner of his mouth - not quite a smile, more like the private acknowledgment of something mildly absurd. "I'm not sure the name of this course was particularly well thought through."
You had had the same thought when you enrolled. "Zero to Proficiency," you agreed. "Bold claim."
"Ambitious," he said. "We shall see."
Before you could say anything else, the door at the back of the kitchen swung open, and your instructor arrived.
She was - there was no other way to put it - extraordinary. She was somewhere in her thirties, compact and energetic, wearing a printed wrap dress in a pattern of small green apples over mustard yellow, a color combination that should not have worked and somehow did, and her hair was a vivid, unapologetic red. She carried a large tote bag over one shoulder and a clipboard in the other hand, and she moved through the kitchen with the proprietary ease of someone who had been walking this particular room for years.
"Good evening, everyone!" she said, in a voice that was warm and slightly louder than necessary, the voice of someone used to speaking over the sounds of several working stoves at once. "I'm Rowan Fossoway - you can just call me Rowan, everyone does - and welcome to Cooking: From Zero to Proficiency! I know, I know, the name is terrible, I've been saying that to the program coordinator for four years, we're all just living with it now."
Beside you, you heard a very small, quiet exhale that might have been a laugh.
You turned to look at Baelor, and he was looking at the instructor with an expression of such careful, composed neutrality that you had to press your lips together to keep from smiling.
"Before we start," Rowan continued, setting her clipboard down on the demonstration counter with a decisive clap, "I want to say something that I say every single cohort, and I mean it every time; there is no such thing as a stupid question in this kitchen. There is no shame in not knowing something. That is why you are here. The only mistake you can make in this room is not asking when you are confused, so please - ask. We start, tonight, with knife skills. Everything else we do in the next twelve weeks is downstream of this, so let’s make sure we are doing it right." She paused, and smiled, and it transformed her face entirely. "Let's get started."
There was a general rustling as people straightened on their stools, and the kitchen attendant - a young boy, perhaps a teenager, in an apron who had been waiting quietly near the wall - began moving through the stations distributing cutting boards and knives in neat kits.
You opened yours and looked at the chef's knife, which was heavier than you expected.
"Can you use one of these well?" you asked Baelor, without quite deciding to.
He looked at the knife on his side of the station. "Passably," he said. "I suspect we are about to discover that I have been doing it wrong."
"What makes you say that?"
He looked up. "Because most things have a right way to do them, and the right way usually is not the way you arrive at by yourself." There was nothing superior in it, just the steady, matter-of-fact delivery of someone who had made their peace with not knowing things. "I grew up in a house with a cook. Then I was married, and my wife cooked. Then I had a nanny. Well, my sons had a nanny." A small pause. "I realize that sounds like an evasion of personal responsibility."
You shook your head. "Not really. Circumstances." You picked up your own knife, felt the unfamiliar weight of the handle. "I can cook some things, but my repertoire ran out around the time I graduated."
"When was that?"
"Last year.”
He nodded, absorbing this without any particular reaction. You liked that - the way he took information at face value, without the slightly performative calculation you sometimes got from people when they found out your age in the context of adult competence.
Rowan's voice cut through the ambient noise of the room, calling everyone's attention to the front, and you both turned to face the demonstration counter. She was working swiftly and fluidly through a grip demonstration, the knife moving under her hands with an ease that made it look like a natural extension of her fingers.
"The curl," she was saying. "Curl your fingers, keep your knuckles forward - the blade guides against the knuckle, the fingertip stays back. Like this. Now you try."
You tried. The knife felt unwieldy. You got the curl mostly right but your grip was too tight and you could feel it.
Baelor, beside you, was working through the motion with focused attention, his jaw set slightly, moving slowly. After three or four passes he stopped and adjusted his grip of his own accord, and tried again.
"Better," you said, without thinking about it.
He glanced sideways at you. "Thank you," he said, mildly. "You are still holding too tight."
You looked down at your hand. He was correct. You relaxed your grip, and tried again, and it was immediately better.
"Better," he said, in the same tone you had used.
The class ran from six to nine, and it went - with the particular swiftness of something that holds your attention - very fast. Rowan moved the group through knife skills and then through a brief first exercise, just a simple vegetable prep to get everyone oriented - dicing onion, julienning carrot, mincing garlic. Nothing complicated, deliberately not complicated, but involving enough that you were both concentrating more than talking, which was fine. You worked alongside each other with a natural, unforced ease, the way you might with a stranger on a project where the task was clear enough to make conversation optional.
When the onion made your eyes water, Baelor wordlessly traded stations with you so that you were further from the fan draft blowing the vapors toward your side. You thanked him.
At the end of class, Rowan assembled everyone to taste the small salad of prepped vegetables in a simple vinaigrette, declared it a fine start, and dismissed them. There was the pleasant noise of people gathering their things, brief conversations exchanged between stations, the kitchen attendants beginning to wipe down surfaces.
You packed up your bag and stood, and Baelor stood beside you, straightening his jacket with the unhurried efficiency of someone who had somewhere to be.
"Good first night," you said.
"Agreed." He glanced at you briefly. "See you next Monday."
"See you next Monday," you said.
You walked out into the evening air, which was cool and smelled of the bakery two doors down, and you were already, without quite realizing it, looking forward to the following week
WEEK TWO
He had thought about it. A little.
He would not say more than that, and only admitted even that much to himself with the careful reluctance of a man examining an unexpected line item in an otherwise clean accounting. He had thought about it a little, during the week. Not obsessively - he had been busy, the Wednesday motion had eaten most of his Wednesday and a healthy portion of his Thursday, and he had a meeting with a new client on Friday morning, and dinner with his father on Friday evening - but in the interstitial moments, waiting for the kettle, staring at the ceiling before sleep, he had thought about it a little.
About the class, he told himself. The class, and the knife grip, and whether twelve weeks would be genuinely sufficient to learn anything useful. That was what he had been thinking about.
He drove to State Street on Monday at ten past five, which was earlier than he needed to be there, and told himself he was coming from the office anyway and there was no point going home and coming back. He sat in the car for ten minutes reading emails on his phone, told himself he was being ridiculous, and went inside.
She was already there.
Not at their station - she was at the front, talking to Rowan, laughing at something the instructor had said, her head tilted back slightly with the laugh. She was wearing a green jacket over a white shirt, and when she laughed, she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth in a gesture that was entirely natural and entirely unconscious.
Baelor walked to their station and sat down.
He had a reason for arriving early. He had wanted to look at the week's posted curriculum - Rowan had posted a handwritten card at each station previewing the night's lesson - and review it before they began, in the same way he reviewed materials before any meeting. That was the reason.
The card said, Week Two: Heat Fundamentals - sautéing, searing, understanding your pan.
He read it twice.
She came over a few minutes later, settling onto her stool with the comfortable ease of someone who had decided they liked this place, and said, "You're early."
"I was in the area," he said.
She considered him for a moment, and there was something in her expression - a slight, amused intelligence - that gave him the feeling she did not quite believe him. But she let it go, which he appreciated. "I was talking to Rowan," she said instead, nodding toward the front. Rowan was no longer there, presumably having stepped out for some water or a bathroom break before class started. "Did you know she has a degree in chemical engineering? She spent a few years in industry and then quit to open this place. She said she missed working with her hands."
He found this unexpectedly interesting. "That is a substantial career change."
"I thought so, too. She said the chemistry of cooking and the chemistry of industry are more similar than most people think." She picked up the preview card from the station and read it. "Searing. I always end up with things stuck to the pan."
"I imagine that is a temperature issue."
"Probably. I always panic and touch things too early." She put the card down. "Do you cook anything? At all?"
"Toast," he said.
She looked at him.
"Competently," he added. "I make very competent toast."
She laughed - not the loud, tilted-back laugh he had seen across the room, but a quieter one, a little surprised, as though she had not expected him to be funny. He had not particularly expected it either.
Rowan reentered with her customary entrance, as though she hadn’t just been in the room - the swinging door, the tote bag, the clipboard - and launched immediately into the evening's introduction, drawing the group's attention to the demonstration counter where two pans had been set up side by side, one cast iron, one stainless. She had a piece of salmon and a chicken breast ready, and she was already talking about the Maillard reaction with the enthusiasm of someone who had explained this many times and had never gotten tired of it.
"Protein plus heat plus time," she was saying. "But - and here is where everyone goes wrong - you cannot rush the first two minutes. You add your protein to the pan and then you leave it alone. You do not poke it, you do not prod it, you do not try to move it to see if it is done. Trust your pan. Trust your heat. When it is ready to release, it will release."
She made it look effortless. She always made everything look effortless, which was either inspiring or demoralizing depending on your frame of mind.
The kitchen attendant came around with the prep materials for the evening - chicken thighs, seasoned, and the components for a pan sauce to go alongside. This was more involved than last week, and Baelor could feel the group's collective energy shift from the relative ease of vegetable prep into something slightly more alert.
"Alright," he said, surveying the station. "Who takes the pan first?"
"I will," she said, already off the stool and moving to the cooktop. "I need to practice the not-touching thing. It’s my problem."
He was content to take the preparation tasks - measuring the components for the sauce, reducing them in the small saucepan Rowan had set up on the secondary burner - while she managed the sear. He worked through the sauce with careful attention, following the steps in the order Rowan had outlined them, asking one question when he was uncertain about the timing.
"It’s smelling good," she said, from the cooktop.
He looked up. The chicken was in the pan, and she was standing back from it with her arms slightly out from her sides, like a person actively restraining herself from interference, staring at it with focused intensity.
"You look like you are watching a particularly tense legal proceeding," he said.
"That is exactly what it feels like," she replied, without looking away from the pan. "I want to touch it so badly."
"Don't."
"I know." A pause. "How long has it been?"
He checked his watch. "Two and a half minutes."
"Is that enough?"
"Rowan said four for this."
"Right." Another pause. "Okay. Okay, this is fine."
"You are fine," he agreed, and returned to the sauce.
It took almost the rest of the class to get through the recipe, between the explanations, and the demonstrations, and the inevitable moment when one of the other stations produced a small amount of smoke and Rowan descended on them with cheerful authority. But the result - the chicken, seared correctly and finished in the oven, the pan sauce glossy and dark with the reduced stock - was genuinely good. Better than good, actually, for a second class in a twelve-week course.
"That's good," she said, when she tasted it. Her expression was openly pleased, the uncomplicated pleasure of something coming out right.
He ate his portion and had to agree. "The sauce," he said.
"Right? The sauce is the thing."
"The chicken is also improved by having not been touched."
"I touched it once," she said, slightly defensive.
"I know. I saw."
"The once did not count."
"The sear would suggest otherwise."
She pointed her fork at him. "You are very particular."
"Lawyer," he said, mildly.
Something shifted in her face - the small, involuntary thing that happened when people processed unexpected information. "Oh," she said. "Is that your job? Or were you making a joke about your personality?"
"Both," he said. "I am a lawyer. It has also, over time, become my personality. I am told they are difficult to separate."
"Who told you that?"
He thought about it. "My sons," he answered. "Fairly regularly."
Her expression did the thing again - the brief processing beat, recalibrating. He was aware, with a clinical detachment that he tried to maintain, that what he had just given her was information. Sons. Plural. That was not the profile of a person who had been doing only some things with their adult years.
But she took it smoothly, the way she had taken last week's information about the cook and the nanny. "How many?" she asked.
"Two," he said. "Twenty-two and twenty."
There was a fraction of a pause - not long, not uncomfortable, just a breath - and then she smiled, easy and unremarkable. "I bet they’re used to you being right about things."
"They would say that I’m used to thinking I am right about things," he said. "There is a distinction."
"Is there?"
"I have yet to convince them there is."
She laughed again, and the class was breaking up around them, and he helped stack the used equipment in the designated bins and made the mental note, somewhere at the back of his mind, that three hours had gone very quickly.
He drove home, made himself a cup of tea, and did another forty minutes of reading before bed, and he did not think about the class again.
Not particularly.
WEEK THREE
You noticed it on the Thursday of the second week.
You were on the train home from work, reading nothing, the book in your lap unopened, watching the underground stations scroll past in their flickering dark, and the thought arrived without fanfare, that you were looking forward to Monday.
Not in a generic, the-week-is-long way. Specifically Monday. Specifically six o'clock, State Street, second station from the end.
You sat with this thought for a moment and then opened your book and read the same paragraph three times without it going in, and you admitted to yourself what you already knew, which was that this was going to be marginally complicated.
He was not your type, exactly. Or rather, he was nobody's type, because nobody had a type that specific. He was fifty years old, which was twenty-seven years older than you, which was - well, it was a lot. He had grown sons who were much, much closer to your age than he was. He was a lawyer, which explained nothing about his character except that he was precise, and direct, and had probably been like that before he ever passed the bar. He had a dead wife somewhere in his biography that he had mentioned once, briefly, in the way you might mention a geography that shaped you - not with performance or deflection, just with the flat, settled weight of something that had become part of the landscape.
He was also terribly easy to talk to. In the way that very few people were. Not in the performative way of someone who had cultivated conversational ease as a social tool, but in the way that happened when someone was genuinely interested in what was in front of them - when they listened the way he listened, with their full attention and no visible agenda.
You were twenty-three years old, you thought. You were allowed to notice things.
You were not, however, going to do anything about it. You were just going to go to class on Monday, and make food, and have a conversation, and be perfectly fine about everything.
You got off the train and walked home and made the chicken recipe from week two, and it came out correctly, and you ate it and were quietly pleased with yourself, and you texted Julia, making progress. you really should have stayed enrolled.
She sent back a shrugging emoji.
You put your phone face-down on the table and went to bed.
—
Class on Monday was bread.
Specifically, a simple no-knead bread, which Rowan introduced with the reverence she seemed to reserve for things she felt were underestimated. "People think bread is difficult," she said, at the front of the room, her red hair extraordinarily bright under the kitchen lights. "Bread is not difficult. Bread is patient. Bread asks only for time and a little faith. The rest it does itself."
The recipe had been prepared in advance - or rather, Rowan had prepared demonstration dough twenty-four hours prior to show you all the result - and the evening's task was mixing the dough, understanding the ratios, and reviewing the baking method so everyone could practice at home during the week. This made the class structurally different from the previous two - more demonstration, more talking, less active cooking. More time, therefore, for conversation.
"I made the chicken," you told Baelor, while Rowan walked the class through the flour measurement on the demonstration counter.
He glanced at you sideways. "Did it work?"
"Perfectly. I did not touch it."
"Not even once?"
"Not even once." You paused. "I touched the sauce a lot, though."
"The sauce can be touched."
"That’s what I told myself."
There was a small quiet while Rowan demonstrated the water temperature - lukewarm, not hot, she was emphatic about this - and then Baelor said, "I tried the sauce on its own. Without the chicken."
You looked at him. "On what?"
"Pasta." A brief, slightly self-conscious pause that was unusual on him - he wore most silences with ease but this one had a faint awareness to it. "It was good."
"That is resourceful."
"I thought so." He reached for the measuring cup at your station and checked the water level with the same careful attention he gave everything. "I have been reading about it, actually. Cooking. During the week."
"Reading about it?"
"Books. There is a good one on the fundamentals of heat and protein - written by a food scientist, not a chef. More technical." He glanced at the side of your face. "I find I need to understand why something works before I can do it reliably."
You thought about this. It seemed like him, entirely consistent with everything you had come to expect in two weeks - the methodical approach, the insistence on the underlying logic, the way he moved through new information like it was a brief he was building from the bottom up. "Does that work?" You asked. "For cooking?"
"So far." He paused. "I have not tried anything ambitious yet."
"What counts as ambitious?"
"Anything with more than four components."
"That is a low bar."
"I am a beginner," he said, plainly and without any apparent self-deprecation. "The bar should be where the bar is."
Rowan called everyone’s attention back to the front, and you returned to the demonstration, but the conversation picked up again in the interstices - while you measured, while you mixed, while the dough sat under its cloth and Rowan talked about gluten development, and why it mattered, and what it had to do with the holes in a finished loaf.
At one point, measuring flour, you got the level wrong by a significant margin and he caught it - not by pointing it out immediately but by glancing at your measuring cup, and then at the recipe card, and then back at your cup in a sequence that was so deliberately neutral you would have missed it entirely if you had not been paying attention.
"How much did I put in?" you asked.
"About thirty grams over."
You looked at the cup, then at him. "You measured that visually."
"I’ve been reading," he said.
"That’s alarming."
"I prefer thorough."
You corrected the measurement. You were, you realized, smiling, and had been for most of the last hour.
The class ended with everyone taking home a small packet of flour and a printed copy of the recipe, along with Rowan's instruction that they try the bread at home before next week.
Outside, the evening was cool and clear, the street lamp putting a ring of amber light on the pavement in front of the culinary center. You were both pulling on your coats, the small population of the class dispersing in different directions around you.
"Are you going to try it?" you asked him, nodding at the packet of flour.
"This week," he nodded. "Thursday, maybe. I have a reasonably clear evening Thursday."
"Same." You shifted your bag on your shoulder. "It seems simple."
"Most good things are," he said. He said it without particular emphasis, the way he said most things - as though he had thought it for long enough that it had simply become a fact, requiring no decoration.
You looked at him for a moment, there in the amber-lit street, and the whole evening was quiet around you, and the thing you had identified on Thursday on the train sat in your chest with a warmth that was entirely disproportionate to the situation, and entirely unhelpful, and entirely present regardless.
"Good night, Baelor," you said.
"Good night," he said. "See you next week."
You walked to the station, and you did not look back, and you were looking forward to the following Monday from approximately the moment you turned the corner.
WEEK FOUR
He had made the bread.
It had come out well - not perfectly, the crust had been slightly thicker on one side, the result of an uneven heat distribution in his oven that he had not anticipated and would account for next time - but well enough that he had eaten two slices standing at the kitchen counter on Thursday night and felt something he had not felt about food he had prepared in a very long time, if ever, which was quiet satisfaction.
He had brought it to the office on Friday. His assistant, Clara, had eaten a slice and had told him that it was good with a sincerity that suggested she had expected to be polite about it and found she did not need to be. His partner had had two slices and said he would take a loaf if Baelor was ever making one to spare, and Baelor had said he would let him know, and then gone back to his office and found himself, briefly and somewhat to his own surprise, planning to make another one.
He thought about telling her this on Monday.
He stopped thinking about it by evening, and thought about the Henderson brief instead, which needed his attention far more urgently than the question of whether he was going to voluntarily disclose his baking progress to a twenty-three-year-old.
The number sat in his mind with a quiet insistence on Saturday evening, as he was eating leftover soup - he had made soup when he was making the bread, from a basic recipe he had found in the food scientist's book, and it was adequate - and looking at nothing in particular.
Twenty-three.
He was fifty. He had turned fifty just over a month ago, with a low-key dinner that Valarr had organized, just the two of them at the restaurant Valarr knew he liked, the one on the waterfront. They had not made a fuss of it, because he had specifically requested they not make a fuss of it, and his sons were generally good about respecting his preferences. Matarys had called from his dormitory to sing happy birthday in a way that suggested he had not been entirely sober when he made the call, and Baelor had been quietly amused and quietly relieved that his sons were, on the whole, functional and happy.
Fifty. Twenty-three.
He was being, he told himself, entirely ridiculous. He was not doing anything. He was going to a cooking class. He was making conversation with his table partner. The fact that their conversation was - he searched, with professional rigor, for the right word - easy, the fact that three hours went quickly in her company, the fact that he had once or twice in the past week thought of something and had the fleeting thought that he should mention that on Monday - none of this amounted to anything. None of this required examination or response.
He was fifty years old. He had better things to do with his interior life.
He went to the class on Monday and did not arrive early.
He arrived at three minutes to six, and she was already at their station, her flour packet and a recipe card in front of her, wearing a sweater and looking at her phone with the half-focused attention of someone waiting for something to start.
"The bread worked," she said, before he had fully sat down, looking up from her phone.
He found, against his better judgment, that this pleased him. "The crust?"
"One side was thicker."
"Me too," he said. "Uneven heat in the oven."
She slipped her phone into her pocket. "Yes, exactly." Something lit briefly in her expression - the pleasure of having a suspicion confirmed. "I put the next one on the middle rack and it was better."
"I will try that," he said.
He had not known she was making a second loaf.
I will try that was, in retrospect, further than he needed to go, given that it implied a continuation, an ongoing exchange of bread-baking notes. But she was already talking about the week's posted topic - eggs, the card said, which covered a remarkable amount of ground according to Rowan's neat handwriting - and the moment passed naturally.
Class tonight was eggs - the full spectrum, from soft scramble to poached to proper omelette technique, and it was - Baelor had to admit - both more demanding and more immediately satisfying than anything they had done yet. The omelette technique in particular required a specific wrist motion while shaking the pan that he could not, for the first twenty minutes, get his hands to do in the way Rowan demonstrated. His first two attempts were scrambled eggs he had had the optimism to call an omelette. His third was closer but folded unevenly.
"Your wrist," she said, watching him.
"I’m aware."
"You’re not rotating it enough."
"I know."
"It’s like -" she paused, clearly trying to describe something physical in words. "It’s like you’re trying to control it. The shake. You’re breaking the motion into pieces."
He tried it again. The same result.
She put her own pan down and stood slightly behind and to his left, and asked, "May I?" and made a gesture that clearly indicated she wanted to guide his wrist through the motion. He nodded, and she reached across and curved her hand lightly around his wrist, and moved it through the motion - the rotation, the forward flick, the recovery - twice, slowly.
It was a purely instructional gesture. There was nothing in it beyond the practical. She was focused on the pan, not on him, her attention entirely on the motion she was demonstrating.
He was aware of her hand on his wrist for approximately one second past the end of the demonstration, and then she had moved back to her station, and he tried the motion again, and it was significantly better.
"That’s it," she grinned.
"Yes," he said.
He did it again, correctly, and the omelette folded. It was not perfect - there was a small tear at one end - but it was unmistakably an omelette.
He turned from the cooktop, and she was watching him from her stool, and there was something in her expression that he clocked and then put away, very deliberately, without looking at it.
She was twenty-three. She was one year older than Valarr. When she was born, he had been twenty-seven, already out of law school, already working at the firm, already more or less the person he still was. She had learned to walk around the time he was becoming a father for the first time.
This was not a thought he allowed himself to dwell on. It was not a thought that led anywhere useful. It was simply, factually, true, the way so many things were true that you did not need to examine at length.
He plated the omelette. It looked reasonable.
"It looks good," she told him.
"Adequate," he corrected.
"You’re very hard on yourself."
"I am precise," he said. "There is a distinction."
She gave him the look she gave him when she thought he was splitting hairs - he had seen it last week. The look that was more amused than anything else, a slight narrowing of the eyes. "Right," she said. "Precise."
"My sons would agree with you," he admitted. "In your current tone."
"Smart sons."
He thought about Valarr, who had his mother's stubbornness and his own methodical precision and the combined result was someone who was very good at being right and only moderately good at tolerating the same quality in other people. He thought about Matarys, who had more of Jena's warmth, her instinct for people, the ease with which she had moved through a room full of strangers. They were good young men. He was lucky.
"They have their moments," he said.
He wondered, not for the first time and not with any particular intention, what they would make of her. The thought arrived and he let it go, firmly, the way you put a file back in the cabinet when it had been retrieved by mistake.
Not applicable. Beside the point.
He ate the omelette, which was, if he was being honest and not merely precise, actually quite good. She ate hers and agreed, and Rowan made the rounds of the room collecting comments and offering praise and corrections in equal measure, and the class moved into its final half hour, and the evening was perfectly fine, and he was completely fine, and everything was fine.
WEEK FIVE
It rained on Monday.
A real rain, the October kind, with wind coming off the street in sharp, cold, sideways gusts that turned umbrellas inside out and made the walk from the station to the culinary center feel twice as long. You arrived with wet ankles and your umbrella slightly bent, and you stood in the entrance lobby shaking water off your coat and trying to restore the umbrella to something resembling its original shape, and you were in a fairly good mood about all of it, because rain had never particularly bothered you.
The class was on stocks and soups, which Rowan described as "the foundation of foundations, the place everything begins," with the fervent conviction of someone delivering a personal manifesto. There was a simmering stock already on the demonstration counter when you came in, and the kitchen smelled of it - deep, and savory, and warm in the way that cut through a cold October evening with unusual efficiency. Half the room visibly relaxed when the smell hit them.
You sat down. Baelor arrived a few minutes later, coat damp at the shoulders, and you noticed he had made an error with his umbrella that he was too pragmatic or too proud to acknowledge - he folded it neatly, set it by the station, and said nothing about the state of it, which had been comprehensively defeated by the weather.
"Your umbrella," you said.
He looked at it. "I’m aware."
"Mine too," you said, laying your own tragic wreck beside his. They sat together like two very defeated soldiers.
Something shifted at the corner of his mouth.
The class worked through the theory of stocks - the difference between stock and broth, which turned out to be more consequential than you had previously given any thought to - and then moved into an exercise building a simple chicken stock from scratch, which was meditative in the way long-simmering things always were. You were tending more than actively cooking, and that left room to talk.
"How’s your week been?" you asked him, not because you needed to know but because five weeks of Monday evenings had established a rhythm, a particular register of conversation that you both fell into naturally, and it had begun to feel strange to sit in silence when there was a forty-minute simmer to get through.
"Long," he admitted. He was watching the stock with the same patient attention he gave most things. "There’s this case that has become more complicated than it should be."
"What kind of case?"
"Family law," he said. "A custody dispute." He paused, and she saw him pick the word with care. "Those are always the most wearing. Criminal cases have a clarity that family law often does not. There are usually two people who both believe entirely that they are right, and the damage accrues to everyone around them while they maintain that belief."
"Including you?"
He glanced at you sideways. "I represented one of them. So in a limited sense, yes." He paused. "What I mean is that I find them emotionally costly in a way that other case types are not."
You thought about him as a family lawyer. It fit, actually - not the way you might have guessed if you had met him and had to guess his profession, which was that he would be a corporate litigator, something sufficiently removed from the human mess of things - but in a way that made sense once you knew him slightly. He was precise, yes, and careful, and unsentimental in the way of someone who had thought through the sentiment and processed it and arrived on the other side. But underneath that was something genuinely decent, something that took the people in front of him seriously. A custody dispute needed that.
"Do you win?" you asked.
"Often enough," he said. He paused, and then added, "More importantly, my clients - the ones I take - are usually right. I am choosy about that."
"You get to be choosy?"
"I’ve been doing this for twenty-four years," he said. "And I run the firm. So yes." Another pause, a slight dry tone, "I’m aware that that sounds arrogant."
"It sounds like a fact."
He looked at you briefly. "Same thing, sometimes."
"Not the same thing," you said.
He considered this. "Fair," he said, eventually.
The stock simmered, and you talked about other things - a documentary you had seen the week prior, which he had not seen but had read about, a book he was reading, a legal history, which was far enough outside your usual reading territory that you had to ask him to explain the context. He explained it without condescension, without the slight impatience that sometimes accompanied having to explain something you found obvious. He treated your questions like good questions, which they were, and gave them real answers, which you appreciated.
At some point - somewhere in the long middle of the evening, the stock simmering, the room warm against the rain outside - you became aware that you were both angled slightly toward each other on your stools, leaning in the marginal way that happened when a conversation was working, when both people were paying genuine attention. It was not significant. It was the body's unconscious adjustment to signal interest. You knew this. You had studied enough psychology in your undergrad to recognize it and still be unable to do anything about it.
He was telling you about the Henderson case - not the confidential parts, but the structural problem of it, the specific legal challenge, with the pleasure he took in articulating a complex problem clearly. And he was good at it. He had the lawyer's gift for the analogy, the clear line from abstract to concrete, and he talked about it the way he talked about cooking, with a combination of precision and genuine engagement that was entirely consistent and entirely, inconveniently, compelling.
You ate the soup when it was done, and it was very good - Rowan's base stock had been cooking for eight hours and you had only added to it, built on the foundations she had established, but still. The results were satisfying.
The class ended at nine. Most people filtered out quickly, collars up against the rain. You were both slower, taking your time gathering things, and you ended up outside at nearly the same moment, sheltering in the covered doorway of the culinary center while the rain came down.
"Taxi?" He asked, not quite at you.
"I take the train," you said.
He looked at the rain. Then at you. "I can drop you. I drove here."
"It’s fine," you said. "I don’t mind rain."
"Your umbrella disagrees."
You looked down at the wreck of it. "My umbrella and I are not on speaking terms, at the moment."
There was a beat, and he exhaled quietly - the quiet laugh that was his laugh, the one you had noted by now, the one he gave when something amused him that he had not quite prepared for.
"The station is two streets down," you told him. "I’ll be fine."
"Alright," he said, after a moment. He did not push it, which you appreciated. "Goodnight, then."
"Goodnight." You opened the umbrella - it was functional, barely - and stepped out into the rain, and you made it to the end of the block before you gave in and turned around, just for a second.
He was still in the doorway, looking at his phone. His face was lit by the screen, and the rain was coming down around the warm light of the entrance behind him, and he was just a person, you told yourself. Just a person waiting for a cab in the rain.
You turned back around and walked to the station.
You did not text Julia about it.
You thought about texting Julia about it the entire way home.
WEEK SIX
He was perfectly fine.
He would like to state, for the record - his own internal record, the one he kept with the same rigorous honesty he brought to anything - that he was perfectly fine, that everything was perfectly fine, and that the last five weeks of Monday evenings had been a pleasantly instructive exercise in culinary fundamentals with no additional significance whatsoever.
He was making good progress. That was the relevant fact. He had made the bread, twice successfully and once with a minor textural error he had diagnosed and corrected. He had made the chicken correctly, the pan sauce clean and glossy and better the second time than the first. He had made soup three times - a chicken stock, a simple vegetable, and an attempt at a French onion that had been moderately successful on the first attempt and very good on the second. He had mastered the omelette. He had made soft-scrambled eggs for himself on a Sunday morning and eaten them at the table, with toast, which had felt like an achievement worth noting, though he had not noted it to anyone.
His cholesterol was not, presumably, doing anything dramatic in either direction - he would get his next panel in February, and he would not be getting takeout seven nights a week in the meantime, and that was the point, that was why he had enrolled, and the course was serving that purpose admirably.
He was not thinking about the rain last Monday, or the two useless umbrellas standing side by side by the station leg, or the documentary she had mentioned that he had, in fact, gone and watched on Wednesday evening and found better than he had expected and wanted to tell her about.
He was not thinking about any of this.
He was thinking about the Morrison case, which had taken a complicated turn, and about the deposition scheduled for Thursday, and about whether Valarr's acceptance to law school was going to become a subject of significant family dinner conversation at the next gathering or could be managed with individual conversations, one at a time, which was his preference.
He called Valarr on Sunday.
"Dad." Valarr's voice had the ambient note of someone doing something else - a keyboard in the background, the click and shift of a productive person tolerating an interruption. "What's up?"
"Nothing’s up," Baelor said. "I’m calling."
"You don't usually call on Sundays."
"I can call on Sundays."
A pause. "Are you okay?"
"I’m fine," he said. "I made French onion soup."
Another pause, this one with a different silence. "You made it? Yourself?"
"I’ve been taking a cooking class," Baelor said. "I believe that I mentioned this."
"You mentioned signing up for one. I didn't know if you'd actually gone."
"I’ve been going for the last five weeks."
"And you're making French onion soup."
"Successfully, yes."
"Huh." He could hear Valarr processing this. "That's - actually, that's great, Dad. Why didn't you say anything?"
Because I was not sure it would work, he thought. Because admitting you have started something and then failing at it, in front of your children, was a particular species of humiliation he would rather avoid. Because he had not wanted anyone to make a fuss. "I told you that I signed up for it.”
"Fair enough. How's the class?"
"Good," he said. "The instructor is - " and he paused, and thought of Rowan with her clipboard and her extraordinary hair and her conviction about bread, "- enthusiastic. The format is reasonable. I have a table partner."
"Yeah? Are they decent?"
"Yes," he said. A pause that lasted, he judged, approximately one beat too long. "She’s good company."
He did not know why he had said she specifically. It added nothing to the sentence.
"Oh," he heard Valarr say, through the phone. There was something in the syllable that Baelor recognized and chose not to engage with.
"It’s a paired format," he clarified, in a tone that closed the subject.
"Right," there was something in Valarr’s response that led Baelor to believe he had something more to say, but was, for now, not testing it.
They talked about law school for twenty minutes - the orientation process, the specific requirements that Valarr was already reviewing with characteristic preparedness that Baelor found familiar and mildly funny - and then Valarr said he had to get back to it, and Baelor said of course, and they said goodbye.
He sat in the kitchen for a moment after the call, in the silence of his house on a Sunday evening, which was a silence he had been living with for years and had made his peace with.
He was not, in any serious sense, lonely. He had his work, which was genuinely satisfying. He had his sons, who were doing well. He had his father, now retired, who called every two weeks, and came for dinner once a month, and remained as sharp at seventy-eight as he had been at fifty. He had friends, or what passed for friends after decades of a demanding career and a period of grief that had somewhat reorganized his social architecture. He had the firm, which was peopled with people he respected and several he was genuinely fond of.
He was not lonely. He was simply sometimes aware of the silence in the evenings, when the work was done and there was no particular reason to be in one place rather than another.
He went back to the Morrison deposition notes.
—
On Monday, week six, the class was on roasting.
Rowan was, if possible, even more emphatic than usual - she had strong feelings about oven temperature, about resting times, about the criminal misuse of a good piece of protein through impatience. "You have worked hard," she told the room, with a severity that was entirely warm. "You have bought something worth cooking. The least you can do is let it rest."
The exercise was a roast chicken. The whole thing spatchcocked for even cooking, which required a technique with kitchen shears that Rowan demonstrated with slightly alarming efficiency, then roasted with herbs and butter under the skin and a tray of vegetables beneath to catch the drippings.
There was something unexpectedly satisfying about the whole process. The physical work of it. The smell of the butter and the herbs in the hot oven at the thirty-minute mark, the skin going golden in increments visible through the oven door, the vegetables underneath softening and beginning to caramelize in the pooling drippings. The kitchen was warm and the rain that had come back this evening was hitting the windows, and the room smelled extraordinarily good.
His bench partner was narrating the drippings situation with quiet enthusiasm, crouched slightly to look through the oven door without opening it, her hands on her knees. "Look at the color on those carrots," she said, to no one in particular, or possibly to the carrots. "That is exactly it. That is exactly what it’s supposed to look like."
"Do not open the oven," he reminded.
"I know," she said. She did not open the oven.
He stood beside her for a moment, looking through the glass at the bird and the vegetables and the glossy pooling fat, and he was struck, with a sudden clarity that he did not particularly want, by how entirely and uncomplicatedly pleasant it was to stand in a warm kitchen on a rainy evening and watch something cook with another person.
He moved back to the station. He checked the timer. He said nothing.
Perfectly fine, he told himself. Everything is perfectly fine.
He believed it, roughly.
The chicken came out correctly, which Rowan confirmed with a satisfied press of the thermometer and the declaration that they had done it right the first time. They ate it at the station, with the roasted vegetables and a simple sauce made from the deglazed pan, and it was very good - the kind of good that had an obviousness to it, the uncomplicated rightness of a thing made correctly with patience.
"I’m going to make this for my sons the next time they come over,” he decided aloud.
She looked up from her plate. "Yeah?"
"One of them is coming home in a few weeks. Valarr. He’s just about done with his degree." He picked up his fork. "He called me out once, years ago, for never cooking when he was growing up… It was fair, I suppose.”
She thought about this. "Will he be surprised?"
"Considerably." A pause. "I’m looking forward to that part."
She smiled at this - the full one, not the contained one, the one that reached her eyes. "That’s actually a really sweet reason to learn to cook."
"I had a medical reason," he admitted. "Cholesterol."
"Sure," she said. "But that’s not the reason you just gave."
He looked at her. She looked back at him, calm, and level, and entirely right.
He said nothing. He ate his chicken.
She was, he thought, with the resigned accuracy of a man who had been arguing with himself for six weeks and was beginning to lose the argument in very small increments - she was very much not the simplest thing that had ever happened to him.
He drove home in the rain.
He did not think about next Monday.
He was, entirely and completely, fine.
WEEK SEVEN
The class was on pasta.
Fresh pasta, specifically - Rowan had arrived that Monday with a small mountain of flour, a bowl of eggs, and the energy of someone who had been looking forward to this particular lesson since the course began.
"This," she announced, pressing both palms flat on the demonstration counter, "is the week people remember. Every cohort. This is always the one." She looked around the room with the satisfied certainty of someone who had been proven right enough times to stop hedging. "You are going to make something with your hands tonight, and you are going to eat it, and it is going to be the best thing you have eaten in recent memory. I promise you that."
You were inclined to believe her. You had been inclined to believe Rowan since week one, when she had said there is no such thing as a stupid question in this kitchen with a sincerity that made the room settle. Seven weeks of being right about things had only reinforced the inclination.
The prep stations had been cleared of their usual cooktop-first setup and reorganized around the work surfaces, each station given a clean stretch of counter, a well of flour, and a small bowl of eggs. The kitchen smelled different tonight - lighter, more floury, the warm dusty smell of something that had not yet become food. You stood at your station, and put your hand flat on the counter, and felt the cleanliness of it, the deliberate blankness, and thought, we are going to make something from scratch tonight. From the actual beginning.
Baelor arrived at four minutes past six, which was the latest you had ever seen him arrive. He sat down with the slightly compressed efficiency, as though he had had a longer day than he had intended and was choosing not to mention it, and looked at the station setup with brief, assessing attention.
"Pasta," you informed him.
"So I see." He picked up the recipe card. Read it. Set it down. "By hand."
"By hand," you confirmed.
Something moved across his expression that might, in a less composed person, have been apprehension.
"Rowan says that this is the one everyone remembers," you offered.
"That is either encouraging or ominous," he said.
Rowan launched into the demonstration with characteristic force, working the flour into a mound on the counter and making a well in the center with practiced ease, cracking eggs into the hollow and beginning to work them in from the inside out with her fingers. She narrated the whole thing as she went - the feeling you were looking for, the way the dough would resist and then relent, the specific moment when it became something rather than a mess.
"You will feel it change," she said. "Trust that. Your hands know before your eyes do."
You started your own dough. The flour went down, the well went in, the eggs cracked cleanly - you had, at least, gotten good at cracking eggs over the past six weeks - and then you began working, and immediately understood that this was going to be harder than it looked.
The dough was sticky and resistant, and it wanted to tear rather than stretch, and within two minutes your hands were thoroughly coated and it was not entirely clear that things were going in the right direction.
Beside you, Baelor had encountered the same situation and was addressing it with a focused quiet, jaw set, working methodically. His sleeves were rolled up - he did this most weeks, somewhere in the first half hour, a practical concession to the business of cooking - and there was already a streak of flour on his forearm that he had not noticed.
You had noticed it.
You had been keeping a private, entirely unnecessary collection of things like that - the flour on the forearm, the way he pushed his sleeves up, the way he held a wooden spoon versus a whisk versus a knife, each tool handled with the same fundamental steadiness adjusted for the particular demand of the thing.
"It feels like it’s fighting me," you said.
"It is fighting you," he replied, without looking up from his dough. "Keep going."
"How do you know to keep going?"
"Because stopping would be worse." A brief pause, hands still working. "The recipe says eight minutes. We’re only at two."
"Eight minutes of this feels like a long time."
"It’s eight minutes of kneading dough," he said, with a mildness that was not dismissive, just accurate. "It’s not eight minutes of anything difficult."
You kept going.
Rowan circulated the room, stopping at each station with comments and small corrections, occasionally physically demonstrating by taking someone's dough for thirty seconds and returning it noticeably improved. When she reached your station, she watched you both for a moment, declared your technique passable and Baelor's surprisingly good, and moved on.
"Surprisingly good," you repeated, once she was out of earshot.
"I’ll take it," he said. He had found his rhythm now, the dough beginning to smooth under his hands, beginning to look like the thing it was supposed to be. There was something about watching him work - the unhurried attention, the steadiness, the way he committed to the task completely without making it into something it was not - that you had started to think of as specifically his. Something you associated only with him and with this room, on these Monday evenings, in this amber-lit kitchen that smelled of flour, and garlic, and whatever that week's lesson was bringing into the air.
You looked back at your own dough.
By the time Rowan called time on the kneading, both of your doughs had arrived at something approximating what the recipe described - smooth, slightly tacky, holding their shape. You wrapped them in cling film and set them aside to rest, and Rowan spent the resting period walking through the pasta shape you would be making tonight - tagliatelle, cut by hand into long ribbons, and a simple sauce of butter and sage and good parmesan.
"The sauce should not be complicated," Rowan said, with the firmness of a woman who had fought this battle many times. "The pasta is the thing. The sauce exists to honor the pasta, not to dominate it."
"Words to live by," you said, under your breath.
Baelor, beside you, looked at the side of your face with an expression that was trying not to be amused and was failing slightly.
The rolling was harder than the kneading in a different way - it required a sustained, even pressure across the whole surface of the dough, and you found out that you had the tendency to push harder in the center than the edges, which produced uneven thickness, which, in turn, produced uneven cooking. You had to slow down to do it correctly, and slowing down ran against the grain of someone who wanted the thing to be done.
Baelor, by contrast, was meticulous about it. He went over the same section three times if it was not even, with a patience that was characteristic rather than performed. You had never seen him rush anything. You had never seen him treat any task as beneath the attention it required. It was one of the things about him - one of the things you had noted under the heading you were trying not to have, the heading that said reasons, the heading that kept growing regardless of your effort to keep it small.
"You’ve done this before," you said, watching his hands.
"I have not," he said.
"Then how are you so good at it?"
He considered the question with apparent seriousness. "It’s just a process," he decided. "It has steps. The steps lead somewhere. There’s no benefit to rushing." He paused. "And I read the pasta chapter. There are apparently only three ways to go wrong, and two of them are avoidable with preparation."
"What is the third?"
"Rushing," he said. "Which is also avoidable."
"I read nothing in advance," you sighed. "I should’ve read something in advance, I suppose."
"You can next time," he said. "If you make it at home."
"I’m going to make it at home," you said, with the certainty of someone who had already decided.
Something shifted in his expression - a small, quiet pleasure at this, the kind of pleasure you got from something that had worked the way it was meant to work, from seeing something take hold. He looked back at his dough, and you looked back at yours, and the kitchen was warm, and seven weeks of Mondays sat in the room around you like a comfortable thing.
"I would make it more challenging at home," he told you, after a moment. "The shapes. Orecchiette, perhaps, or something folded."
"Ambitious," you said.
"My bar has moved since week one," he glanced at you sideways, and the look had the particularity of something shared between two people who had both been there for the thing being referenced, the particular intimacy of shared history, and it settled in your chest and stayed there.
The pasta, once cut, went into the pot in long pale ribbons and came back out glossy and perfect, and the butter-sage sauce was made in the pan with a speed and simplicity that felt almost too easy after the forty minutes of physical work before it. But the result - the pasta gleaming, the butter brown and nutty, the sage crisped at the edges, the parmesan falling in light curls over everything - was extraordinary. Simple and extraordinary, in the exact way that Rowan had promised.
"She was right," you said.
"She usually is," Baelor agreed.
You ate in a comfortable quiet, the kind that had built itself over seven weeks of Monday evenings without either of you particularly designing it. The class around you was louder than usual - pasta night had a celebratory energy, people pleased with themselves in the way of having made something with their hands that tasted this good. Rowan moved through the room accepting compliments with gracious deflection, redirecting them back at the people who had made the food.
"I’m going to make this at home," you repeated your earlier sentiment.
"It’s significantly more labor-intensive than anything else we’ve covered so far."
"I know." You twisted pasta around your fork. "That’s kinda the point."
He looked at you.
"There’s something satisfying about food that takes effort," you said. "Not every night. But sometimes. It makes it mean something."
He was quiet for a moment. "Yes," he said. Just that, and nothing more. But the word had a weight to it, an agreement that went slightly beyond pasta, and you both knew it, and neither of you said so, and the kitchen was very warm.
The class ended, and you packed up, and you walked out together into a night that had turned genuinely cold, the first real cold of November settling over the street with authority. You pulled your coat close and he buttoned his jacket - he had not brought a coat, which was, you thought, very typical of him, the particular stubbornness of someone who had decided the evening was not cold enough to require one and was now committed to that position entirely.
"You’re cold,” you noticed.
"I’m fine.”
"You buttoned your jacket."
"It’s more practical," he said.
You smiled, and he caught it, and the corner of his mouth did the thing it did, and you stood there for a moment on the lit pavement outside the culinary center with the cold coming off the street and seven weeks behind you and five ahead, and it was just a moment - just a perfectly ordinary moment on a perfectly ordinary street - but it sat in your chest with a warmth that had nothing to do with the class or the pasta or the butter-sage sauce.
"Goodnight," you said.
"Goodnight," he responded. "See you next week."
You walked to the station. The cold was sharp and clean and you did not mind it at all.
WEEK EIGHT
Valarr came home on the Saturday before the eighth class.
He arrived in the way he always arrived - with more bags than strictly necessary, a stack of books under one arm, talking before he had fully come through the door, filling the house with a warm energy that Baelor had missed without quite acknowledging that he had missed it.
He was tall, with his mother’s nose, but the set of his jaw and the precision of his speech were Baelor's, refined by twenty-two years of watching the same habits and absorbing them without meaning to. He had his mother's stubbornness married to his father's logic, and the combination made him formidable in arguments and sometimes wearing at breakfast.
Baelor had always been not-so-quietly, immeasurably proud of him.
"Something smells good," Valarr said, dropping his bags at the foot of the stairs.
"Roast chicken," Baelor answered, from the kitchen.
A pause. Then footsteps. Then Valarr appeared in the kitchen doorway with the expression of someone revising an assumption. He looked at the oven. At the counter, where the prep had left its evidence - the remnants of herbs, the butter dish, the small saucepan for the pan sauce already rinsed and drying beside it. At Baelor, who was moving between the counter and the stove with the ease of someone who had made this specific dish three times and knew where everything was.
"You actually cooked," Valarr’s eyes were fixed on the saucepan.
"I told you that I was taking a class," Baelor said.
"You told me a lot of things." Valarr came further into the kitchen, peered through the oven glass at the bird with undisguised interest. "That looks right."
"It is right."
"How do you know?"
"Because I’ve made it before," Baelor told him, "and I know what it’s supposed to look like at this stage." He checked the thermometer. Set it down. "The skin should be darker at the edge of the breast by now. It is."
Valarr turned to look at him with an expression that was somewhere between impressed and amused, the expression he got when his father did something that violated his established model of his father. "Three times," he repeated, a hint of entertainment in his voice.
"The first time is never fully reliable," Baelor said. "You need repetition before you can trust the result."
"That is the most you thing you have ever said about cooking." Valarr pulled out a kitchen stool and sat. He watched his father move around the kitchen for a moment. "So the class is actually going well."
"It’s going well."
"And your -" a pause, carefully placed, "- table partner." He said it with the studied neutrality of someone who had prepared the neutrality in advance and was deploying it with deliberate precision. Baelor recognized the technique. He had, after all, taught the technique, though not for this purpose.
Baelor removed the chicken from the oven, set it on the rest, and said nothing for a moment. He checked the thermometer again, not because he needed to but because the action gave him something to do with his hands that was not answering the question. He set it down. He moved to the stove to start the pan sauce.
"She’s good company," he said. "As I told you."
"Right." Valarr watched him work. He was quiet in the way Baelor recognized - the way Baelor was quiet, the silence that gathered information. "You know what's interesting? You never mentioned the woman from your pickleball club. Went there every week for two years. Never once came up. You've mentioned this class every time we've spoken."
"The class has been very instructive," Baelor said.
"Dad."
"Valarr."
A silence. The pan sauce began, the stock going in, the fond releasing in the heat with a hiss and a rush of steam. Baelor focused on it with the attention it deserved and perhaps a fraction more. The smell of it was good - it was always good, this particular stage, the caramelized chicken fond lifting from the bottom of the pan in the liquid and becoming something richer than either thing alone.
"How old is she?" Valarr asked.
The question was not aggressive. It was quiet, and genuine, and his son had the good sense and the good character to ask it that way - not as an accusation, not with the edge of judgment, but as a real question from someone who knew him and was paying careful attention. It was, Baelor thought, exactly the question Jena would have asked first, in exactly that tone.
Baelor stirred the sauce. "Twenty-three," he answered.
The kitchen was quiet for a moment except for the sound of the sauce reducing and the low tick of the cooling oven behind him.
"Right," Valarr said. He stretched the vowels. He paused. "And - and so you’re friends now? Is that it?"
"No," Baelor said, immediately.
Valarr said nothing. He had learned, somewhere in his twenty-two years, the particular power of saying nothing in response to an answer that had come too fast. He had learned it from his father, in fact, who had used the same technique in enough depositions that it had become second nature, and now here his son was, using it back at him across the kitchen counter, and Baelor found himself in the very specific discomfort of being outmaneuvered by his own methods.
"She’s a student," Baelor said. "She’s taking a year off before her master's program. She’s twenty-three years old." He reduced the heat under the sauce. "There is nothing there."
"Okay," Valarr said, in a tone that was neither agreement nor disagreement. He picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter and turned it in his hands, "I'm not saying it would be a problem, necessarily. I just want you to be honest with yourself. That's all."
"There’s nothing to be honest with myself about," Baelor said.
"Okay," Valarr said again, with the same equanimity.
They ate the chicken at the kitchen table, and it was very good - better, in fact, than the version from class, because Baelor had learned what to correct, had run the temperature a fraction lower and pulled it from the oven slightly earlier, and the result was a bird that was perfectly juicy and perfectly rested and plated with the simple competence that Rowan had spent eight weeks building toward.
Valarr ate two helpings. He said, with complete and obvious sincerity, that it was excellent, and asked how the sauce was made, and they spent twenty minutes talking through the technique with the pleasure of a conversation between two precise people about something they were both interested in. Baelor found himself using Rowan's language - the fond is the thing, the liquid just lifts it, the rest is patience - and heard it in his own voice as someone else's vocabulary made his, absorbed over seven Mondays and now simply part of how he thought about it.
They talked about law school, about the autumn semester, about Matarys who had sent a stream of barely coherent texts that week that together suggested he was having a good time and studying sufficiently. They talked about the firm, about the Morrison case which had finally resolved, about the new client that had been brought in that Baelor was cautiously optimistic about. They talked until the plates were cleared, and the wine was mostly gone, and the kitchen was warm and easy and lit the way it was lit on the evenings when it was used, and Baelor was aware of how long it had been since the kitchen had been this warm on a Saturday.
At no point did they talk about the class again.
It was only when Valarr had gone to bed, and the kitchen was clean, and Baelor was sitting in the front room with his book open to a page he had not been reading for twenty minutes that he let himself think about it - about the question, and his answer, and how fast the answer had come.
No.
Immediately. Reflexively. The way you answered when you already knew what the correct answer was supposed to be, when the answer was less about truth than about propriety, about the right thing, the sensible thing, the thing that a man of fifty should be able to say clearly and mean without effort.
He closed the book.
He thought about the fact that she was twenty-three. He thought about it with the same rigorous honesty he had tried to bring to all the other times he had thought about it, the same refusal to dress it up in either direction. She was twenty-three, and he was fifty, and Valarr was twenty-two, and Matarys was twenty, and those were the facts, and the facts did not become less true because he had spent seven Mondays finding her easy to be with, and three hours at a time going quickly in her company, and his mind drifting, in the interstitial moments, toward things he had decided not to think about.
He thought about Jena. He did this sometimes, not with grief exactly - grief had long since composted itself into something quieter, something closer to permanence, to the steady presence of a person who was not there but who had shaped everything about the world they'd left behind - but with a kind of conversation. Not out loud. Just the sense of putting something in front of her and waiting to see what came back.
Jena, he thought, would not have wanted him to be alone. She had been, in the deepest way, a person who believed in not wasting things. In not letting good things go unused. He knew this about her. He had known it while she was alive and he knew it now, the knowledge layered into him over fifteen years of marriage, and grief, and the long aftermath.
He also knew, with the same certainty, that there was a difference between not wasting good things and not thinking clearly. Between allowing yourself something and being reckless with someone else.
She was twenty-three. She had her whole life in front of her, unformed and full of possibilities he could not predict and should not limit. A man his age, with his particular set of complications - the firm, the sons, the history, the particular character of a person who had been alone for so many years and had made something of the aloneness - was not a simple proposition for anyone. Was, probably, a very complicated proposition for someone who was just beginning.
He went to bed.
He laid in the dark and thought about the Morrison estate case, which needed his attention on Monday before class. He thought about the deposition on Thursday. He thought about his father coming for dinner on Friday.
He thought, briefly and against his better judgment, about seven weeks of Mondays, and flour on a forearm he had not noticed, and the two umbrellas that had stood next to each other.
He closed his eyes.
—
He arrived at the class the following Monday in the mood of a man who had made a series of firm internal decisions and intended to hold them.
The class was on fish. Rowan had arranged the stations with fillets of salmon and sea bass and the tools for both pan-searing and en papillote preparation - cooking in a sealed parcel of parchment, she explained, which trapped moisture and steam and produced a result that was impossible to achieve in an open pan. She moved through the introduction with her characteristic enthusiasm, talking about heat, and moisture, and the cruelty of overcooked fish in a way that was both genuinely funny and genuinely useful.
She was already at the station when he arrived. Deep blue today, a jumper with the sleeves pushed up. She looked up when he sat, said "fish," in a tone that was half greeting and half mild apprehension, and pushed the recipe card toward him.
"I’ve overcooked fish every time I’ve cooked it," she said. "Every single time."
"Same principle as the chicken," he said. "Heat and patience."
"I know the principle. The execution is the problem."
"The execution is always the problem," he said.
She looked at him for a moment. "You sound like Rowan."
"Rowan is usually right."
"You are usually right," she said. "You are both insufferable about it."
Something in his chest did the thing it did. He looked at the recipe card.
He was, for most of the evening, fine. They worked together with the ease that eight weeks had built, the comfortable instinctive division of tasks, the shorthand that had developed without either of them designing it. He took the salmon; she took the bass en papillote, and they talked about the technique as they worked, and Rowan came by twice with approving comments, and the fish came out well - the salmon with a sear that would have satisfied week two's standards considerably, the bass unwrapped from its parcel in a cloud of fragrant steam that made several people at nearby stations look over with undisguised interest.
"That is beautiful," she grinned, looking at the bass.
"The steam does the work," he said.
"It smells incredible."
"The lemon and the thyme," he agreed. "They compound in the sealed environment."
She tasted it. Her expression did the thing it did when food came out right - the unself-conscious pleasure of it, the way she was always entirely present in good moments without announcing them. It was, he had noticed over eight weeks, one of the things he -
He did not finish the thought.
"Baelor," she said, after a moment.
"Yes."
"Can I ask you something?"
He set down his fork. The question had a different register to it than the usual current of their conversation. He recognized the register. "Yes.”
She took a breath. In the way she did things - directly, without excessive prelude, having already decided to say the thing and simply saying it. "How old were you when you got married?"
He had not expected that. He looked at her for a moment, and then answered honestly, because he had decided a long time ago that honesty was always the correct starting position. "Twenty-six," he said. "We married young."
"And your wife - you mentioned she passed away. Were you the same age?"
"She was a year younger,” he answered.
She was quiet for a moment, looking at her plate with the attention of someone gathering something. Then, with the particular directness that had been a consistent thing about her, one of the things he had noted from the very beginning, "You are fifty and I am twenty-three. I’ve been thinking about that. About the fact that it’s a lot of years."
The kitchen noise moved around them, the other stations carrying on their own conversations, Rowan's voice from the far end of the room talking someone through a timing issue. Here, at the second station from the end, things were very still.
"Yes," he agreed. "It is."
She looked up at him. "Does it seem strange to you? Talking to me?"
He thought about the honest answer. He had been giving this conversation the answer it deserved, inside his own head, for eight weeks. "No," he said. "It doesn’t."
"It doesn’t seem strange to me either," she said. "Which is interesting, considering."
He said nothing.
"I’m not saying anything," she added, quickly, with a slight rueful quality that he thought was more self-aware than defensive - as though she were acknowledging her own boldness in real time. "I’m just - I’m naming it, I suppose, because it seems strange not to… It’s clearly in the room.”
"I understand," he said.
"It’s just a lot of years," she said again. Quietly. Not with grief or accusation, just with careful honesty. She was simply putting something into the open air that had been existing in the room already, unnamed, for longer than either of them had been fully acknowledging.
"Twenty-seven," he said. "For accuracy."
She absorbed this. "Twenty-seven," she repeated, trying the number.
"You would have been -" he did the arithmetic with the swift automatic precision of a habit formed over decades of needing numbers quickly "- negative nine years old when I graduated from high school.”
Something crossed her face that was not quite a smile and not quite anything else, some expression that occupied the space between registering the weight of something and choosing to stay with it rather than retreat. "You would have been forty-five when I graduated high school," she said. "I worked that out too."
"I can see.”
They sat with that for a moment. The honest version of the thing, laid out plainly between them on the station counter alongside the fish and the recipe card and the two glasses of water. Twenty-seven years. A lot of living on his side. A life freshly started on hers. The arithmetic of it, not softened.
"Okay," she said, eventually. Not as a conclusion, not as a verdict, just as an acknowledgment.
"Okay," he echoed, carefully.
Rowan called the room's attention back to the front for the end-of-class notes, and they both turned toward her, and the conversation closed in the natural way that conversations closed when the room required it, and neither of them referenced it again that evening.
But it was different now - not worse, not better, just different. The way a room was different once a window had been opened, once the outside air had come in and mixed with the inside air, even after you closed the window again. You could not un-open it. The air was changed.
He drove home, and made tea, and sat at the kitchen table for longer than he usually sat anywhere without a purpose, and thought about twenty-seven years, and what they meant, and what they did not mean, and what it was that a man was supposed to do with a feeling that was inconvenient and persistent and entirely, stubbornly unwilling to be reasoned into something manageable.
He had no satisfying answer.
He drank the tea. He went to bed.
WEEK NINE
Week nine was sauces.
Not the simple pan sauces that you had already covered as supporting work in earlier lessons, but sauces in full - béchamel, hollandaise, a simple vinaigrette built from ratios rather than instinct. Rowan described them as "the moment when cooking stops being assembly and starts being understanding," and the distinction, as she drew it, made a kind of sense that you were still thinking about on the way home afterward. A sauce was not a recipe so much as a relationship - between fat and liquid, between acid and richness, between the cook's patience and the thing that was trying to split or seize or break. You either understood it or you were guessing.
"Hollandaise is the terrifying one," the woman at the next station said, when she overheard you reading the recipe card. She said it with the resigned warmth of someone who had been burned before and had made a certain kind of peace with it.
You relayed this to Baelor when he sat down.
"I read about hollandaise," he told you.
“When?"
"Thursday." He picked up the recipe card and read it with the focused attention he gave written things, the slight forward lean that was his reading posture. "It requires continuous movement and precise temperature control. The emulsion is the whole thing - if it breaks, you have to start over or rescue it with cold water and a great deal of patience."
"That sounds exactly like something you would read about in advance," you said.
"I read about everything in advance," he said. "It’s how I function."
"I know," you smiled. "I find it very funny."
He looked at you. Not sharply - he rarely looked at anything sharply, his attention tended toward the considered rather than the reactive - just with the mild assessing quality that meant he was deciding how to take something. He settled, as he usually did, on something that was quietly both amused and undeterred. "It has served me reasonably well," he said, finally.
"Very well," you agreed. "I didn’t mean it as a criticism."
The dynamic between you had been different since last week. Not worse - genuinely not worse, you had been careful to feel that accurately and not project what you feared onto it - but different in the way that honest conversations changed things. Something had been named. The arithmetic had been spoken aloud between you, plainly and without decoration, and now it existed in the space between you the way facts existed, neither removable nor requiring constant acknowledgment, just present.
You were aware of it more or less constantly, if you were being entirely truthful with yourself. But it was a clean awareness, not an anxious one. The thing had been named, and you had both sat with it, and neither of you had done anything dramatic, and the world had continued in its general direction, and here you were on a Monday evening about to attempt hollandaise.
The béchamel went well - it was the most forgiving of the sauces, a roux with patience and warm milk added slowly, and if you went slowly enough and stirred consistently enough there was very little that could go wrong. You did yours competently; Baelor did his with the focused steadiness that characterized everything he did, and the result was smooth, and thick, and exactly right.
The vinaigrette was a revelation in the straightforward way that things were revelatory when you realized they were a ratio and not a recipe - three to one, oil to acid, and anything beyond that was preference. You had made vinaigrettes your whole adult life by guessing, and the knowledge that the thing had a logic, a consistency you could rely on, was oddly satisfying.
The hollandaise was the hollandaise.
Rowan demonstrated it first, working over the double boiler with the unhurried confidence of someone who had made hollandaise hundreds of times and had long since stopped fearing it. The whisk moved constantly, the bowl sitting barely above the steam with precision, the butter going in in a thin, disciplined stream with an incrementalism that required the kind of patience that could not be faked.
"The enemy of hollandaise," she said, as she worked, "is impatience. Nothing else. The egg can do this. The butter wants to cooperate. You simply have to let the process take the time it takes and trust that the time is not wasted." She looked up from the bowl with the expression she got when she was saying something she meant twice over. "That applies to more than hollandaise, I suspect."
You wrote that down in the margin of your recipe card.
You and Baelor split the tasks - he managed the double boiler while you prepared the clarified butter, and then you switched so he could whisk while you monitored the temperature with the probe thermometer, and you had been working together long enough now that this kind of division happened with a naturalness that felt less like coordination and more like habit. The accumulated habit of nine Mondays. The fluency of two people who had learned each other's rhythms without setting out to.
"Temperature?" He asked.
"Sixty-two," you answered, watching the probe.
"Still within range."
"Still within range."
The whisk moved. The sauce thickened, very gradually, from something liquid and doubtful into something that began to coat the back of a spoon with a glossy, pale yellow weight. You watched it with the focused attention that the task required, and you watched his hands too, the movement of the whisk that was constant and even, the patience of it.
"It’s working," you grinned, and you heard the note of genuine surprise in your own voice and did not bother to conceal it.
"Don’t congratulate it yet," he said, the whisk still moving.
"I wasn’t congratulating it, I was simply making an observation."
"Observation acknowledged." He did not look up. "Temperature?"
"Sixty-three."
"Good." A pause. The butter went in, very slowly. "Tell me when the consistency changes."
You watched. The sauce built itself slowly, the emulsion holding with the fragile confidence of something that knew how close the edge was but was choosing, moment by moment, not to go over it. You watched it, and you watched his hands, and the kitchen was warm and very nearly quiet at your station, just the sound of the whisk and the low roll of the water in the double boiler below.
"Now," you said. "It’s there."
He looked. Ran the back of the spoon through it. Checked the consistency with the efficiency of someone who had read about this and knew what he was looking for.
"Yes," he said. He took it off the heat. Set it aside carefully, wiped the base of the bowl. And then he looked up at you.
It was the look from the previous week and the week before that. The look that had been there, in various registers of the same quality, since around week four or five - present, very still, carrying more than the surface of things. He looked at you, directly, with the expression he had when something had come out right and he was letting himself be simply and honestly pleased about it - and you were close, closer than usual because of the double boiler, both of you leaning toward the work, and the kitchen was warm, and the light was amber and steady, and he looked at you and the look lasted one beat, two beats, and in those two beats something happened that was not a word, and not a touch, and not anything that could have been named in a deposition or a report, but that was entirely real and entirely there and entirely, unambiguously mutual.
You looked away first.
"Good," you said, to the sauce.
"Yes.” His voice was even. He stepped back, slightly, and reached for a spoon.
You looked at the sauce. It sat there in the bowl, pale yellow, and glossy, and perfectly achieved, entirely indifferent to what was happening on either side of it.
Rowan came by, tasted it with the unstudied efficiency of someone who had tasted a great deal of hollandaise, and declared it excellent. She moved on.
Neither of you mentioned the two beats. You talked about the sauce, and about next week's lesson, and about a minor disaster at the far end of the room where someone's béchamel had seized irreparably and Rowan was conducting a cheerful post-mortem on where things had gone wrong, and you were both fine, and the conversation flowed in the register it always flowed in, and the evening ended the way evenings ended, with coats and bags and the cold outside and good nights said in the doorway.
You went home and stood in your kitchen with your coat still on and thought about the look and the two beats and the specific fact that you had looked away and whether he would have, if you had not.
You thought about it for a long time.
WEEK TEN
He had looked away first.
This was factually incorrect. He was aware of it being factually incorrect, and yet he had spent a not-insignificant portion of the ten days since week nine's class telling himself, with the dogged revisionism of a man arguing a case he knew was losing, that he had looked away first. That it had been him. That the moment - whatever it had been, if it had been anything, if it had not simply been the warm and close proximity of a small kitchen, and an unusual task, and nine weeks of accumulated familiarity - had been resolved on his side, by him, before anything could be said to have happened.
She had looked away first.
He knew this. He had the precision of a man who did not misremember things that mattered, who filed facts accurately even when the facts were inconvenient, especially when the facts were inconvenient, because inconvenient facts were the ones you had to know most clearly if you were going to navigate around them. She had looked away first, and the look had lasted two beats, and in those two beats he had not looked away, and that was a data point.
He ran five mornings that week instead of four. It did not resolve anything, but it helped slightly, and he had always been a firm believer in doing what helped slightly.
The week was demanding, which was a mercy. The Morrison estate case required two late nights and a call with opposing counsel that went forty minutes longer than he had expected and was nonetheless productive. He had a deposition on Thursday that required preparation. Someone wanted to discuss the firm's Q4 schedule on Wednesday, and his father came for dinner on Friday, and the week was structured enough that the spaces in which thoughts went uninvited were genuinely limited.
His father, over dinner Friday evening - roast lamb, which Baelor had attempted for the first time on the strength of the week six technique, and which had come out better than he had any right to expect - looked at him for a long moment when the class came up.
"Still going?" His father asked.
"Two remaining," Baelor said. "Ten of twelve done."
"And you are learning." It wasn’t a question - his father had the lamb right in front of him, he could see the evidence for himself.
"Considerably." Baelor picked up his wine glass. "I made hollandaise last week."
His father raised an eyebrow. The eyebrow was one of the few places where his father's age showed - the skin had loosened slightly around the eyes, and the brow movement had taken on an expressiveness it had not had in his fifties, as though the face had decided, having held itself in composed restraint for seven decades, that it had earned a little more latitude. "Hollandaise," his father said. "Your mother made hollandaise. It took her twenty years to not be afraid of it."
"It requires patience," Baelor said. "Which I apparently have."
"You have always had patience," his father noted. "Whether you have always known what to be patient about is another matter." He picked up his own glass, and said nothing further, and looked at his son with the mild, oblique quality that meant he was saying more than he was saying, which had always been one of his most useful and most irritating qualities, and which Baelor had apparently passed to Valarr with the same precision he had passed everything else.
"The class ends in two weeks," Baelor told him, and moved the conversation elsewhere.
His father let him move it, which was a gift, and they talked about other things, and the lamb was very good, and the evening was pleasant.
—
Week ten was desserts - specifically tarts, which Rowan described as "the intersection of discipline and reward," and which required a shortcrust pastry that needed cold butter and cold hands and a practiced restraint with the amount of working you gave the dough.
"Cold is the word of the evening," Rowan announced at the demonstration counter. "Cold butter, cold water, cold hands. If your hands are warm, run them under cold water first. The enemy of pastry is warmth. The butter must remain distinct, in small pieces, throughout. The moment it melts into the flour is the moment the pastry becomes dense rather than shattering. Remember that."
She paused, looked around the room with a considering expression, and added, "This is a different kind of patience than the hollandaise. The hollandaise asked you to keep moving. The pastry is asking you to keep still - to do less, to trust that less is more. Both are necessary. Both are difficult in their own way. The best cooks learn to hold both."
Baelor filed this away with the attention he gave Rowan's more considered observations. She had a habit, roughly once per class, of saying something that was ostensibly about cooking and was also, without apparent self-consciousness, about something else entirely. He had not mentioned this to anyone. It seemed like the kind of thing that, if mentioned, would sound odd, and that was better appreciated privately.
She was already at the station when he arrived - she was there first now, or sometimes he was, and the alternation had become its own small thing, quietly established. The first arrival got the water glasses, read the recipe card, set the station in order. He did not know exactly when this had started or which of them had started it, but it had become as natural as everything else, accumulated over ten weeks of the same Monday evening in the same room.
She had the butter out, cubed, and had put it back in the refrigerator to keep it cold before he sat down.
"Smart," he said.
"I read about it," she winked, in his cadence, with the slight dry note that meant she was doing it deliberately.
He sat down. The corner of his mouth did the thing it did.
They made the pastry in measured stages - the rubbing in of the butter, the addition of iced water a spoonful at a time, the point at which you stopped working it because stopping was everything - and it was tactile in a way that much of the cooking was not, demanding the direct language of hands. Baelor found himself oddly comfortable with it, with the task of working the cold butter into the flour until it looked like rough breadcrumbs, with feeling the temperature under his palms and calibrating accordingly.
"You’re doing it right, I think," she said, watching his hands.
"The texture’s correct," he agreed.
"It’s very fine. Some of the others are overworked -" she nodded toward a neighboring station, where the pastry had the slightly greasy sheen of butter that had melted into the flour rather than remaining distinct. "You can see the difference."
"I can," he said. "Yours is good as well."
She looked at her own bowl. "I keep wanting to do more," she said. "I have to actively stop myself."
"Why?"
"Because it feels underdone. It looks like it needs more attention."
"It doesn’t need more," he said. "The oven will do the rest. What it needs now is to stop being touched."
She looked at him, and her expression was briefly, vividly amused in a way that suggested she had made the same association he had made and was choosing, with characteristic lightness, not to say it. He chose not to say it either. But the awareness of the parallel sat between them with a faint quality - not quite tension, not quite humor, some compound of the two - and for a moment the kitchen was warm, and the edge of a smile was very close to the surface on both of them.
He looked at his bowl.
"Add the water," he said.
"Adding the water.”
They refrigerated the pastry, and while it chilled they prepped the filling - a lemon curd that required the same careful heat management as the hollandaise, eggs, and butter, and lemon juice coaxed over gentle heat into a glossy, bright cohesion. He made the curd, she watched the pastry cooling and reported on its firmness with an investment in its welfare that he found - damn, there it was, the finding of things he had decided not to find, reliable and entirely outside his control.
He focused on the curd.
The rolling was careful work, and he was careful with it, and she watched him with the certain attention that she had when she was observing something rather than thinking about what to say next. He was used to being observed with that kind of attention now. He was not entirely sure when he had become used to it.
"You’re very good at this," she noted.
"I’ve been practicing," he said.
"All of it, I mean." She told him. Not the rolling, specifically. Just - all of it, the gesture taking in something larger.
He looked at her briefly. The lemon curd sat on the stove behind him, cooling to the right temperature in the bowl of ice water, doing exactly what it was supposed to do. "I had good reason to start," he said. "And good reason to continue."
She looked at him for a moment in the way she sometimes looked at him when he said something that meant more than it said. Then she looked back at the pastry. "I’m glad you enrolled.”
"As am I.”
He meant it with a precision that, if he examined it, was about considerably more than his cholesterol.
He did not examine it. He rolled the pastry.
The tart went into the oven and came out with the particular beauty of a thing made correctly - pale gold and shattering-crisp, the lemon curd set to a trembling, glossy finish that caught the kitchen light. They plated it carefully and tasted it, and it was very good, the lemon bright and clean against the richness of the pastry, the curd clinging exactly as it should.
"That," she smiled, "is genuinely excellent."
"It is," he agreed.
They ate it standing, because the tart warranted standing - this was a Rowan principle from several weeks ago, the idea that some things deserved to be eaten fully present, not sitting and eating and thinking about something else - and the kitchen was winding down around them, the class moving into its final half hour.
"Two more weeks," she said, at some point in the comfortable quiet. Not with a particular tone. Just naming it.
"Two more weeks," he nodded.
He thought about what two weeks meant. He thought about Monday evenings, and what they had been, and what they would be after the twelfth one. He thought about the second station from the end, and the amber light, and three hours that went quickly, and a conversation that he could have at no other station with no other person, that had built itself so naturally over ten Mondays that the idea of not having it had a shape to it now, a recognizable absence.
He thought about all of this and then he put it away, with the same effort it took every time, and slightly more, and he finished his tart, and the class ended, and he said goodnight.
She went left. He went right.
He sat in the car for a moment before starting the engine, in the stillness of a November night, and thought about two weeks, and what came after, and what he was going to do with all the Monday evenings that came after that.
He did not answer the question.
He drove home.
WEEK ELEVEN
You almost did not go.
Not in a serious way - you were always going to go, you had missed not one class in eleven weeks and you were not going to ruin the record now - but on the Monday of week eleven you stood in your bathroom getting ready and looked at yourself in the mirror for longer than was strictly necessary and thought about the fact that there was only one more week after this.
One more Monday. One more evening. One more three hours in that warm kitchen with its amber lights, and Rowan's extraordinary hair, and the comfortable, particular ease of the station second from the end, and then it was over. Twelve weeks done. You would have your certificate and you would know how to make pasta, and bread, and roast chicken, and hollandaise, and lemon tart, and pan-seared fish, and you would go home, and Monday evenings would go back to being Monday evenings, unremarkable and ordinary, and that would be that.
The thought sat in your chest with a weight you had been trying, not very successfully, not to fully feel.
You finished getting ready and went.
The class was on a self-directed project night - Rowan's term for the penultimate session, in which each station was given a set of ingredients and a general direction, and asked to cook something of their own choosing from the skills accumulated over eleven weeks. An exercise in integration rather than instruction. A chance to see what had actually been built.
"I am not teaching tonight," Rowan told the room with the pleasure of releasing a class she trusted. "I am watching. You know what you know. I want to see you use it."
Your station had been set up with chicken thighs, aromatics, white wine, cream, and stock. A range of possible directions. You and Baelor looked at the ingredients together, and then at each other, and the conversation that followed - rapid, practical, the shorthand of eleven Mondays - resolved itself in about ninety seconds into a plan - the chicken seared and finished in the oven, the sauce built from the fond and the wine and the cream, aromatics softened first, stock to extend it, reduced to the right consistency.
Nothing you had not done before, in components. Everything you had built, in one complete dish. A choice, not an instruction.
"Right," you nodded.
"Right," he nodded.
You worked.
It was the best cooking you had done in the class, and you knew it while it was happening, which was the quality of integration - the way accumulated skill felt different from following a recipe, the way knowledge that lived in your hands was different from knowledge that lived in your head. The chicken went into the pan with a confidence that only came from having done it enough times that the sound and the smell were information. The fond came up with the wine and you both leaned in slightly to watch it, the way you had learned to pay that kind of attention, the way Rowan had been saying for eleven weeks that attention made things better, and you believed her now in a way you had not believed her in week one.
The sauce built itself with the glossy, compounding richness that happened when you did every step correctly and did not rush.
"Taste it," he said.
You tasted it. "Salt," you suggested.
"A little," he agreed.
The salt went in. You tasted again. "That is it," you grinned.
"Yes," he said.
He plated - he had, over eleven weeks, become the better plater of the two of you, having applied the same aesthetic precision to presentation that he applied to everything else - and the dish looked, genuinely, like something that had been made on purpose and made well.
Rowan came to your station last, which was either coincidence or an instinct for drama, and either way it was appropriate. She tasted the sauce. She tasted the chicken. She tasted the sauce again with the silence of actual consideration.
"This," she declared, "is what eleven weeks looks like." She looked at both of you in turn, with the warm, clear satisfaction of a person who had watched people arrive at the other end of something and was always glad to see them make it. "Well done."
She moved on.
You looked at the dish. You thought about week one, the vegetable prep, the knife you had held too tight. You thought about all the distance between there and here, and all the Mondays that had made it up, and the particular fact that none of them had felt long.
"Rowan is right," you said. "That is very good."
"We made it well," he said.
We. Three weeks ago you would have let that land and moved on. Tonight you sat with it for a moment before you did.
You ate, and the room around you was at its most comfortable, the group having relaxed into the final stretch with the ease of people who had eaten together enough times to know how to be in each other's company. Rowan circulated, talking with everyone, her laugh ringing across the kitchen from the far end at something someone had said. The kitchen attendant had clearly been told to let things run a little longer tonight; nobody was moving to clean up.
You talked less than usual. Not because there was nothing to say but because something about the evening made conversation feel slightly beside the point, the way very comfortable silences sometimes did. You were aware of the week ahead of this one, and what came after it, and you were aware of him beside you, and of the question you had been turning over since before tonight began.
You thought about Julia. About the phone call two days ago in which you had told her, I think I am going to ask him. After the last class. And she had said finally, and you had said it might go nowhere, and she had said it might, and you had said he might say no, and she had said he might, and then she had said, but you want to ask him and you had said, yes. Yes, I do.
And that had been the conversation, more or less. Not a pep talk. Not a resolution of uncertainty. Just the honest acknowledgment of what you wanted to do, said out loud to someone who would tell you the truth about it. The decision was not dramatic. It was just real.
He was fifty years old. He had two sons and a whole life that predated you by nearly three decades and a character that had been formed and tested in ways you could not fully know. He might look at you asking him and see, with the clear-eyed practicality that was so essentially him, someone too young, someone who did not fit the shape of anything he had made room for, and say so, and that would be painful, certainly, but it would be honest, and it would be his right, and you would respect it.
But he had looked at you, in week nine and in week seven and in the weeks before that, with something that was not nothing. You were not inventing it. You had been careful not to invent it, had been rigorous with yourself about the difference between what was there and what you were projecting onto it, and what was there was real.
And you were not going to stand at the end of twelve Mondays without saying it. Without at least trying. Whatever happened after.
You looked at him. He was looking at his plate, slightly more still than usual, the particular quality of someone who was also thinking about something they were not saying.
One more Monday.
You could do this.
The class ended, and you said goodnight, and you walked to the station, and the decision sat in your chest - not light and not heavy, just steady. Real. Already made.
WEEK TWELVE
The last class.
He drove to State Street in the mood that arrived at the end of things - not grief, not quite, but the certain attention you gave to something when you knew you were doing it for the last time. The route had become familiar over twelve weeks, the turn off the main road, the corner with the bakery two doors down from the culinary center, the street that was always slightly quieter than the surrounding ones, as though some local geography directed the noise elsewhere. He had not noticed these things consciously before. He noticed them now.
He parked. He sat in the car for considerably longer than he usually sat in the car, looking at the hand-lettered sign in the culinary center window - COOKING: FROM ZERO TO PROFICIENCY - FINAL WEEK - in a different colored marker than the rest, someone's small concession to ceremony.
He went in.
She was there.
Already at the station, jacket over the back of her stool, something small and wrapped in tissue paper set on the counter beside the recipe card. She looked up when he came through, and smiled the full smile, the one that reached her eyes, and said, "Last one."
"Last one," he repeated, and sat.
She picked up the wrapped thing and pushed it toward him with the slight self-consciousness of someone who had made a decision and was committed to it but was not entirely sure how it would land. "I brought you something," she said. "You’re always reading when I come in, or when we’re waiting for something. I thought - well, it seemed like the kind of thing. It might be odd."
He opened it. The tissue paper came away to reveal a bookmark - leather, dark green, good quality, with a small embossed pattern of leaves along one edge, the craftsmanship of something made rather than bought in a chain shop.
He looked at it for a moment.
Something in his chest performed an action he had been determinedly not noticing for roughly ten weeks.
"It’s not odd," it was almost a whisper. He turned it in his hands. The leather was warm from her hands through the tissue paper. "Thank you."
"It’s a small thing," she said.
"Small things count," he told her. He put it in his coat pocket, carefully.
She looked at him for a moment - the brief, clear look she sometimes gave him when he said something that landed differently than she had anticipated - and then Rowan arrived, and the last class began.
It was celebratory, which was appropriate and which Rowan had clearly planned with the kind of careful attention she brought to all things. The lesson was a full menu - an amuse-bouche, a main, a dessert, working through all three as a cohesive meal rather than isolated techniques, each component calling on something learned in the previous eleven weeks. It was ambitious for three hours and Rowan knew it, and had structured it with the precision of someone who had run this final class many times and knew exactly where the margins were.
The kitchen had a different energy. People who had barely spoken across twelve weeks were saying goodbye with the warmth of people who had shared something, even something as modest as flour on their hands and a Monday evening for three months. The woman at the next station - the one who had warned you about hollandaise in week nine - caught his eye and raised her glass of water in a small toast, which he returned. He had not learned her name. He found himself briefly, mildly regretful about this.
He and she worked with the integration that week eleven had demonstrated, the easy instinctive fluency that had built itself over twelve weeks without either of them designing it. The amuse-bouche - a small crostini with a finely made mushroom duxelles that required the kind of patient, precise chopping that week one's knife skills had been building toward all along - came together in twenty minutes. He did the chopping, she built the duxelles in the pan with the patience that had been her week two problem and had somewhere along the way become one of her strengths.
He noticed this. He had been noticing the development of her skills over twelve weeks the way you noticed the development of something you had been present for - with a particular invested attention, the pleasure of watching someone get better at something, the satisfaction of having been there for the whole of it.
The main was a pan-seared duck breast with a red wine reduction - the most technically demanding thing that they had attempted, save for the pastry, calling on the sear from week two, the oven finish from week six, the sauce technique from every sauce lesson since. He did the sear and oven, she did the reduction, which she had become very good at, the sauce darkening in the pan with the controlled patience of someone who trusted the process and was not going to hurry it.
"It looks right," she stated, watching the reduction.
"It is right," he said. "You know it is."
She looked at him sideways. "You sound very sure."
"I am," he said. "I’ve been watching you get better at this for twelve weeks. I know what right looks like on you.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she looked back at the reduction. "On me," she said, and the words had a slight quality to them, a weight she was turning over.
"The way you look when it’s right," he corrected, with the precision of accuracy. "You look a certain way. It’s generally a reliable indicator."
She said nothing to that. The sauce reduced. He plated the duck with the care he brought to plating, the same care he brought to everything, and the result was clean and simple and quite good, and Rowan came by and tasted it and looked very pleased and said nothing, which from Rowan was its own form of high praise.
The dessert was a simple chocolate mousse that had been pre-made and chilled - Rowan's small mercy on a full-menu night, the component that required assembly rather than construction. She did the plating, he made the small garnishes, which were finicky and required patience, which he had.
At some point in the final half hour, while the mousse was being assembled, and the kitchen was winding down, and Rowan was beginning to circulate with the certificates - which were real, printed on good card stock and signed in her distinctive looping hand - he allowed himself to be conscious of the fact that this was the last time. The last time in this kitchen. The last time at this station. The last three hours of twelve Mondays.
He allowed himself to feel this fully, without looking away from it, for approximately thirty seconds.
Then Rowan was at their station with the certificates, and she handed them over with a warmth that was characteristically her - genuine, and direct, and not given to excessive ceremony, which he had always respected about her - and he read his.
Baelor Targaryen has completed the twelve-week Cooking: From Zero to Proficiency course.
She leaned slightly to look at it. "It’s a good name, I guess," she said.
"It’s a reasonable name.”
"Baelor." She said it the way she occasionally said it, with the slight, private enjoyment of an unusual name. He had never, in his fifty years, heard his name used by anyone quite the way she used it, and he was not going to pursue that thought further.
"Yes?”
Rowan gathered everyone for the end - brief words, warm and measured, without sentimentality but not without feeling. She talked about what the class had covered, what it was for, what she hoped they would do with it. She thanked them for their attention and their patience and their willingness to not know things, which she said was the hardest skill of all and the one nobody ever thought to practice.
People began to say their goodbyes. There was the exchange of numbers at some stations, the warm, brief conversations of people closing something out. He stayed with her slightly longer than most, talking with Rowan for ten minutes about nothing in particular - about the course, about bread, about the food scientist's book he had mentioned to Rowan in an earlier week and which she had apparently gone and read - and then Rowan had other students to say farewell to, and they gathered their things, and the kitchen emptied around them, and it was the last time.
—
Outside, the night was clear and very cold, the deep cold of late November, the kind that settled in your chest when you breathed and reminded you that the year was nearly done. The street was quiet. The culinary center's warm light fell in a rectangle on the pavement, the familiar bakery two doors down dark at this hour. The hand-lettered sign was visible through the glass behind them.
He had his coat. She had her scarf, wound twice around her neck.
They stood in the way people stood when a thing was ending and the ending had not quite finished - the suspension of a goodbye not yet spoken, the last moment before the shape of things changed irrevocably.
"Well," she said.
"Well," he said.
A pause. The cold moved between them, patient and even.
"I want to ask you something.”
He looked at her. The register was different - he knew this register, had heard it before from clients who were about to say the thing that mattered, from witnesses at a deposition right before the question they had been building toward. It was the register of something real. Something considered and decided. "Alright," he said.
She took a breath, and the cold air made it visible for a moment, and she looked at him with the full directness that had been one of the first things he had noticed about her and had never once gotten used to.
"I would like to get dinner with you," she said. "Not a class. Not a cooking exercise. Dinner. With you." A brief pause. "If that is something you want."
He said nothing.
Not because he did not have anything to say. Because he had - with the clarity of a thing you have been deliberately not looking at directly suddenly being placed directly in front of you - a great deal to say, and none of it was simple, and the night was cold, and she was standing there with the composed vulnerability of someone who had decided to do something and had done it, and she had been honest, and he had always believed that honesty deserved to be met with honesty, regardless of whether the honest answer was the comfortable one.
"You are twenty-three years old," he said.
"Yes," she agreed. She did not say it defensively. She said it the way he had said twenty-seven years in week eight - plainly, as a fact she had already accounted for.
"I am fifty," he said.
"I know."
"My oldest son," he said, "is twenty-two years old." He watched her face as he said it, because this was the part that was not academic, this was the part that was real and specific and could not be softened into abstraction. "One year younger than you."
"I know that too," she confirmed. Still steady. Still there.
The cold settled around them. The street lamp above them put its ring of light on the pavement, pale gold on dark stone, and beyond it the street was very quiet, and the bakery two doors down was dark, and the culinary center window was lit behind them for possibly the last time.
He looked at her. He thought about Valarr's question, asked in the warm kitchen over a pan sauce on a Saturday evening, with the careful gentleness of someone who loved him and was paying attention. He thought about his father's oblique observation over the dinner table, the raised eyebrow that had said more than the words around it. He thought about the Morrison estate case, and the deposition, and the Q4 schedule, and all the machinery of his life that ran on its own reliable rails.
And then he thought about Monday evenings, and three hours that went quickly, and the ease of this particular conversation with this particular person, the ease that he had not found since he could not remember when, that he had spent twelve weeks insisting was not what it was.
He thought about the silence in his house on Sunday evenings. Not with self-pity - he had long since made his peace with the silence, had built a life inside it that was full and functional and genuinely good. But he thought about it with the clear-eyed honesty that the moment demanded, the honest accounting of what was true. The silence was real. The ease of these Monday evenings was also real. Both things were simultaneously and irrevocably true.
He thought about Jena, in the way he sometimes thought about her - still not with grief, just with conversation. Putting something in front of her and waiting to see what came back. Jena, who had never wasted anything she valued. Who had believed with a completeness he had always admired that good things were for using, not preserving. Who would have looked at him standing in a cold street arguing with himself and said, almost certainly, something pithy and completely accurate that he would not have been able to disagree with.
She was twenty-three years old. That was a fact and it would remain a fact. Twenty-seven years between them - that would not get smaller, would not become simpler, would be a thing they carried. He was not a simple person. He had complications she did not yet know the full measure of, the particular complications of a man who had built his adult life largely alone and had organized himself around the aloneness. He was not certain he knew how to be otherwise.
But she was standing in front of him in the cold, having said the honest thing, and she had done it with a composure and a directness that he - he found things, that was the persistent problem, he had been finding things for twelve weeks - that he admired without reservation.
And he had not been able, in twelve weeks of concerted effort, to make her smaller than she was. Had not been able to file her under a category, something that would stay where he put it. Had not once looked at her and not seen her clearly.
He thought about what his father had said over the lamb, which was, essentially, you have patience. The question is whether you know what to be patient about. And he thought about what Rowan had said over the hollandaise, you simply have to let the process take the time it takes and trust that the time is not wasted.
She was still standing there. Patient in the way she was patient - not waiting for the right answer, just waiting for the honest one.
"I need you to understand," he said, carefully, the way he said things he really meant, "that I am not - that this is not something uncomplicated. Twenty-seven years is not a small thing. It will not become a small thing. I am not a simple person to -" he stopped. The sentence was going somewhere he had not fully figured out yet.
"Baelor," she said, gently.
He stopped.
"I know," she said. Quietly, clearly. "I have been paying attention for twelve weeks. I know."
He looked at her. The cold was very still. The street was very quiet.
The word came from somewhere that had stopped arguing. From somewhere deeper and quieter and more honest than the twelve weeks of careful internal management. From the place where things were simply, irrevocably true.
"Alright.”
THE END
---
a/n: @dododix suggested a fanfic with a questionably young reader and older baelor or maekar. here it is. (also credit to them for naming julia lol) they meet in a cooking class because it is the most mundane place that people can meet, and i can't see baelor being okay with an age gap and a power dynamic. also, sorry for the pov changes - i dont know how i feel about them, but i wanted to give baelor his own space to shine. this is my first time writing for him and i found it unexpectedly difficult to characterize him. i'm not sure how this will read, but i hope that it's just a silly, goofy fic that makes someone smile.
if you ever find yourself writing fanfiction and thinking "this is too indulgent" that is the devil talking and he can go ahead and shut the fuck up
Guys they’re literally fine what is everyone talking abt 🥀🥀🥀
march 4th? unto where?
Keeping Up With The Targaryens: Episode 1 (The Family Arrives At Ashford)
House Targaryen makes its way to an otherwise unremarkable region, and the boys have some thoughts on the matter.
surely the conses wont quence
peer reviewed



