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Between seashells and other things | Jade Leech x reader pt 2

pt 1 | pt3 | this is pretty long, 15 pages on my google docs :o

You aren't sure what exactly is wrong with you. It's not bravery, not really, but a particular sense of recklessness that cannot be quantified. It's been exactly two hours since his apparition, and after eleven years of having no answers you refuse to sit around and wait. Which is what led you here, now, screaming like a madwoman on the beach shore for answers.

"I know you're here, I can feel it. Come out," your voice is almost raw by this point. "Please?… Oh come on, for goodness sake, you can't just appear and disappear without answers!"

Your knees give up making you fall rather graciously, all things considered, on the sand. You aren't really sure what you were expecting. For a magical creature to answer to you? A human? Quite bizarre, really.

And yet, as you keep your knees to your chest, eyes fixed on the sand beside you where you're drawing abstract shapes, something surfaces from the water and gets pushed by a deliberate wave right beside you. You don't move immediately. Your head shoots up, looking around for any trace of him, but he is nowhere to be found. There's just a vast expanse of dark water ahead of you, and hidden eyes most definitely settled upon your figure, waiting for you to pick up whatever had reached your slippers.

Opening the scallop shell, there was inside a delicate rose gold chain. The pendant, centred on a massive baroque pearl, was an asymmetrical shape that reminded one of a teardrop, its surface a mystical shimmer, home of iridescent lavender and sunset pink. On the top, it had a shiny golden swirl where a tiny hole connected to a delicate gold band necklace. It felt heavy in your hand, heavier than any jewellery you own. The look alone seemed bright enough to brighten the dark night, and you weren't sure what to make of it.

Your eyes looked around once again, in search of something, of him, but once again the place was seemingly empty. You closed the necklace around your neck and after a moment, unsure if it was needed but feeling the need to anyway, you muttered a quiet thank you to the wind. And as you made your way back to the cottage the waves moved in a sudden haste against the shore, in a peculiar way that felt, in its own small way, like an answer.

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°

The necklace became a fixture at your collarbone almost immediately, which was strange to admit even to yourself. You weren't the type to wear jewellery regularly, but this sat against your skin like it had always meant to be there. Like something returning rather than something new.

The second gift arrived the following morning. A sand dollar, left on the top step of the porch. You might have dismissed it as the tide's doing if it weren't for the distance between the cottage and the shore and the way it was sitting perfectly upright, propped against the leg of the old wooden chair your grandmother had kept outside since before you could remember.

You picked it up and turned it over. On its underside, someone or something, had wound a piece of dark kelp around it loosely, the way you might tie a ribbon. You attached it on the outside of the cottage, on the knob of the front door and didn't say anything to the ocean that night. But you did sit outside with your tea longer than necessary.

On the third day there was a smooth piece of sea glass, a colour you genuinely could not name. Not quite green, not quite grey, not quite the particular blue teal you were starting to associate with a specific pair of eyes.

The fourth day there were three flat stones, stacked with a precision that made your chest do something funny.

The fifth day nothing came and you were embarrassed by how acutely you noticed the absence.

The sixth day a small crab claw, lacquered somehow and threaded onto a thin cord alongside two small opaque beads. You held it for a long time, turning it in the morning light. Your grandmother had something almost identical hanging in the kitchen. You'd assumed it was decorative, bought from some seaside shop. You looked at it again now, then at hers. Then back. Oh, you thought. No other thought came after that.

You spent most of that evening reading through what little your grandmother had left behind; old journals, loose pages tucked into books, scraps of notes in her handwriting on anything she'd found nearby. Most of it was her usual blend of story and observation, the line between the two never entirely clear. But there was a passage, undated once again and written in pencil so faint you had to tilt the page to catch it:

They are not cruel, only careful. And they are particular about who they extend themselves toward. I think it took him some years to understand what he was doing, let alone why. She confirmed– his mother, I mean, confirmed it to me. She has been very gracious. I am not sure I deserve it. But I am rather grateful for all.

The seventh morning brought nothing to the doorstep. And your stomach felt funny, in a way that was close to disappointment and anxiety all at once. It was around 4pm when you stepped outside on the porch and he was there. Not close to the doorframe or near the cottage, but further down, on the white sand.

His body was, well, huge, despite the fact he was seated. Tall, broad somewhat and his tail was definitely around 13 feet long. Under the sunlight he looked… different. Less terrifying than nights before or the image that had been imprinted in your brain for the past eleven years now, but something between magical and strangely enough, human too. It’s the way he looked perfectly peaceful, or rather, real. Not because you ever doubted his existence, but because finally he was here. Present and solid, with that green blue hue that was even more concentrated now, in the way his scales were catching the light in shifting colours you hadn’t a word for.

And then his face turned and his mismatched eyes found yours, and they held the same expression as that first night. Assessing. Patient. And something else underneath that you didn't have enough information yet to read. You did not scream. You considered it briefly and then decided against it.

"You could have knocked," you said, which was possibly the least useful thing you could have offered, but it came out before you could stop it.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile.

"I have been," he said, "for rather longer than a week."

The words land somewhere between your heart and your throat and stay there, lodged uncomfortably, while your brain attempts to do something useful with them.

"For rather longer than a week," you repeat.

"Yes."

"The shells. When I was— those were from you."

"Yes."

You look at him. He looks back at you with the particular patience of something that has genuinely nowhere else to be and no interest in rushing this along for your comfort.

"The necklace."

"Also yes."

There's a pause. A wave breaks against the shore behind him with poor comedic timing.

"What," you say slowly, carefully, like someone picking their way across ice, "exactly, would you call what you've been doing. For longer than a week."

Something in his expression shifts, so slight you almost miss it. The corner of his mouth does the almost smile thing again.

"Courting," he says. Simply. Plainly. Like it is the most natural thing to drop on a Tuesday afternoon.

There is a silence. A very long silence.

"I'm sorry," you say, and your voice comes out remarkably level all things considered, "you have been what."

"Courting you." He tilts his head slightly, and something in the gesture is genuinely curious, like he's watching something far too interesting. "Were the intentions not clear?"

"I was twelve."

"I was also young," he says, with a calm that borders on offensive. "It began as curiosity. You were an unusual child." A pause. "You stared at the ocean past midnight when your grandmother told you not to. I found that notable."

"Notable," you echo.

"Notable," he confirms.

You press your fingers to your mouth. You are not sure if you want to laugh or lie down in the sand and simply cease to exist for a few minutes. The baroque pearl at your collarbone feels, suddenly, very heavy.

"I have been wearing a courtship necklace," you say, mostly to yourself.

"For several days now, yes. Almost a week, in actuality."

"And you watched me put it on."

"You thanked the wind for it," he says, a hint of mockery mixed with something that felt too real and definitely like something he hadn't entirely meant to let out. "I found that charming."

"I am going to need a moment," you tell him.

"Take as many as you need."

You walk back to sit down on the porch step. He remains seated exactly where he is, apparently content to simply exist there while you process what is, frankly, a significant amount of new information. The sea ahead of him is very blue. He is very real. The crab claw is hanging on your windowsill next to five other gifts you accepted without question because some part of you, some deeply irrational and apparently very romantically oblivious part of you, simply thought a magical sea creature was being friendly. You suddenly feel very, and utterly, fucking foolish.

"Does my grandmother know," you say eventually. Voice loud enough for him to hear without the necessity to move back beside him.

"My mother told her." He replied after a moment.

Your head snaps up.

"My mother was quite fond of your grandmother" he says smoothly. "They had an understanding."

"An understanding."

"Your grandmother was a gracious woman. And perceptive." He pauses. "She asked my mother, once, to look after you. When you stayed here during the summer, I believe you were 7 back then." Another pause, quieter. "My mother agreed. I think she considered it a fair arrangement, given the circumstances.”

You stare at him. And slowly that note your grandma had left you was starting to make much more sense.

“She knew,” you say slowly. “She knew and she left me a cryptic note in the cutlery drawer instead of– instead of just…”

“She seemed to believe you would understand when the time came.”

“I didn’t understand, I thought the shells were a coincidence—”

“You kept them,” he points out.

“I— that’s… that’s beside the point,”

“You hung them on the windows.”

You open your mouth. Close it. Look at the shells hanging in your grandmother’s teal framed windows, which you had not moved, not a single one, in the five days since you arrived.

“That’s beside the point,” you say again, weakly. He says nothing. He doesn’t need to. The expression on his face is doing quite enough on its own. You look back at the ocean. Then at him. Then at the pearl sitting at your collarbone that you have not taken off once in a week, not even to sleep, because it felt strange to.

“We have things to discuss,” you say.

“We have a great many things to discuss,” he agrees, and his tone is lighter now.“But I find I am not in a particular hurry.”

You look at him for a moment. Then, without entirely deciding to, you get up from the porch step and go sit on the sand a few feet away from him. The ocean moves quietly ahead of them.

“Alright,” you say.

“Alright,” he agrees.

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°

You don’t end up talking that afternoon, not as much as you wanted really. It’s not that the conversation goes badly, it’s more that it doesn’t quite know how to start. There is too much to say and nowhere sensible to begin and you are still, frankly, metabolising the courtship thing.

He doesn’t seem to mind. He watches the water the way you imagine he always does, with the particular patience of something that measures time differently than you do, and occasionally he looks at you, and when he does you look away, and when you look back he has returned to watching the water as if nothing happened. Eventually you say

“I need to think.”

“I know,” he says.

“I’m not— this isn’t me telling you to leave.” A pause.

“I know that too.” You nod, which feels absurd, and then you get up and go back inside.

At the door you stop, hand on the frame, and turn back. He’s still sitting there, facing the water, the green blue of him perfectly still against the morning light.

“Same time?” you ask outloud, and you aren’t entirely sure why.

He turns his head just slightly. “I’ll be here,” he says.

You don’t go back out the next day. Or the next after that. Not because you’re avoiding him exactly, or maybe you’re avoiding him a little; if you’re being honest. It’s more that every time you think about walking down to the shore you feel the pearl at your collarbone and your brain short circuits somewhere between this is insane and why am I kinda into it?

And thus, you clean the cottage instead. Methodically, room by room, the way that keeps your hands busy and gives your mind something to chew on quietly in the background. The guest room. The little pink bathroom. Your grandmother’s bedroom, where nothing is thrown away yet because it doesn’t feel like the right time. It’s only on the third day, elbow deep in the bottom of her old writing desk, that while clearing out a drawer that had been shut for far too long you find something addressed to you. An envelope. And on the front, in her handwriting, her best handwriting, the kind she used for things that mattered.

For you, my darling. When you’re ready. It was written in neat cursive on the front, and for a moment the little note you found the first day came to mind. You sit down on the floor right there, back against the desk, and hold it for a long moment. Then you open it.

My dearest, I imagine you’ve had quite a few days by the time you’re reading this. Forgive an old woman for finding that a little funny. Only a little. I will start with the most important thing first: I am sorry I did not tell you sooner. I thought, for a long time, that there was a right moment to say it. That I would find the words and the circumstances would be correct and it would all make a kind of sense. I kept waiting for that moment and then I ran out of time, which I think serves me right for being precious about it. Here is what I should have said years ago. His name is Jade. His mother, I won’t try to write down her full name here. We settled on something shorter between the two of us over the years, is a remarkable creature and one of the truest friends I have had in my long life, which I do not say lightly. We met when I first came to this cottage, newly widowed and rather at sea, if you’ll forgive the expression. She found me sitting on the shore at three in the morning talking to the waves, which she later told me she found either very brave or very foolish, and she has never committed to which. I think that is why we got along. We talked through many nights over many years. I told her about this family, about your mother, about you. She told me about her sons, about the ocean, about things I will not write down because they are not mine to share. She was honest with me in ways I had not expected, and I tried to return that. It was she who told me about Jade and the shells. I had noticed them, of course, I am not so old I can’t spot a pattern, but she confirmed it for me the summer you were fourteen. She was not embarrassed about it exactly. More matter of fact. She said he had been watching you since you were twelve, that he found you curious, and that it had become something more than curiosity in the way that these things sometimes do, and that she thought I should know. I will admit I had feelings about it. Several of them, over several nights, some of which I expressed to the ocean rather than to her directly out of what I told myself was politeness and was more accurately cowardice. But she was patient with me. And she was honest: she said that nothing would happen that you did not want, that he understood the difference between your world and his, and that she trusted him to be careful. She also said, quite plainly, that she thought you already knew, on some level. That children who stare at the ocean past midnight when they’ve been told not to are usually looking for something. I think she was right. I think you knew something was there, even if you didn’t have the shape of it yet. As for why I didn’t tell you, I have asked myself that for many years and here is the most honest answer I have: I was afraid that if I named it, something would break. That you would get frightened, or sensible, or your mother’s voice would get too loud in your head. That I would give you a reason to stop looking at the ocean. And I did not want to be the person who gave you that reason. Perhaps I was wrong to make that choice for you. Almost certainly I was. But I made it with everything I had, which is the best and worst thing I can say about it. What I know, and what I have known for a long time, is this: he has been careful. He has been patient in ways I do not think you fully understand yet. And whatever happens next is entirely yours to decide, it always was, it always will be. That has never been in question. His mother asked me once, near the end of one of our nights, what I thought you would do when you finally understood. I told her I thought you would sit with it for a few days and drive yourself quietly mad and then go back to the shore anyway, because you have never been the kind of person to leave a thing unfinished. I hope I know you as well as I think I do. Be open, my darling. And be careful. And if you get the chance, tell him his mother has very good taste in friends. All my love, always.

You fold the letter back along its creases very slowly. The pearl at your collarbone catches the late afternoon light coming through the window. Outside, you can hear the water. You sit there for a long time, just you and the room and the letter in your hands and the particular feeling of being known by someone who is no longer here to tell.

Then you wipe your eyes, which you hadn’t entirely noticed had gotten wet, and you put the letter carefully in your pocket. You look at the window. The shore is going gold in the last of the day’s light. Same time, you had said. And he had said I’ll be here. You get up, and you go put your shoes on.

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°

He’s there. Of course he is. Sitting exactly where he was three mornings ago, watching the water with that same unhurried stillness. Like he has simply been here the whole time, which you are beginning to suspect might not be entirely metaphorical.

He hears you coming or senses you, you’re not sure which and turns his head. He doesn’t say anything. He just looks at you with those mismatched eyes, steady and patient, and waits. You sit down. Closer than last time, though you don’t remark on it and neither does he.

You hold the letter in both hands, in your lap, and look at the ocean for a moment before you look at him.

“Your mother’s name,” you say. “What do I call her.” Something in his expression shifts, just slightly. Like he hadn’t expected that to be the first thing.

“Georgina,” he says, after a moment. Then, quieter, almost careful: “You found the letter.”

“Bottom drawer of her writing desk.” You look down at it. “It was sealed. She wrote when you’re ready on the front, which I think was very optimistic of her considering I have not felt ready for a single second of the past week.”

“And yet you’re here.”

“And yet I’m here,” you agree.

The wave that comes in is a slow one, spreading thin and white across the sand before it pulls back. You watch it go.

“She said—” you start, and then stop, and then try again. “The letter said that your mother told her. When I was fourteen. About the—” you gesture vaguely, “—the shells. The courting. All of it.”

“Yes.”

“And your mother knew since I was twelve.”

“She noticed before I did, I think,” he says, and there is something in his tone that is not quite dry but close to it.

“She has always been perceptive. It is occasionally inconvenient.” Despite everything you almost smile.

“And you— when did you know? That it had become—” you pause, “—whatever it became.”

He is quiet for a moment. Not evasively, more like someone choosing the precise right word from a very long list.

“Gradually,” he says. “And then not gradually at all.” He glances at you briefly. “You were sixteen. You came back that summer and you sat on this shore and you read the same book three days in a row because you kept falling asleep right in this spot, and every time you woke up you looked at the water first before you looked at anything else.” A pause. “I found I was— waiting for that. The looking.”

You stare at him. “You watched me sleep,” you say.

“I watched the shore,” he corrects. “You were on the shore.” “That is a very fine distinction.”

“Okay, I need to ask you something and I need you to be honest with me.”

“I will do my best.” You turn to look at him properly, which you haven’t done yet, not fully, not since you sat down. Up close the colours of him are even more difficult to name. You make yourself focus.

“The five years,” you say. “When I stopped coming.” Something changes in his face. Small, but you catch it.

“Yes,” he says.

“You thought—” you stop. You look at the letter in your hands. “What did you think happened.”

A long pause. The longest one yet.

“The shells kept being left,” he says, quietly. “For the first year. Then the cottage was empty and stayed empty and there was no word and no— presence.” He says the word like it means something specific. “I thought perhaps something had happened to you. Or—” he stops.

“Or I wasn’t coming back,” you finish. He doesn’t confirm it. He doesn’t have to.

“I was, I am technically, in uni,” you say, and you are aware of how ordinary that sounds against the weight of what he isn’t saying.

“And then after that I was just— living. Working. I didn’t come back because it hurt, after she got sick. Being here without her felt—” you search for it, “—wrong. Like wearing a coat that doesn’t fit anymore.” He listens. He is very good at listening, you’re realising.

“I didn’t know,” you say. “About any of this. I want you to know that. I wasn’t—” you feel oddly, fiercely important about this part, “I wasn’t ignoring you. I genuinely did not know.”

He looks at you for a long moment. “I know that now,” he says. And then, carefully: “I think part of me knew it then too. But knowing a thing and” he pauses, “and feeling the absence of it are not always the same.”

The honesty of that sits between you, quiet and a little raw.

You look back at the water. “I’m sorry,” you say. “For the five years. Even if I didn’t know. I’m still sorry.”

He is quiet for a moment. Then: “You’re here now.”

“I’m here now,” you agree.

The sky has gone mostly dark, the first few stars doing their thing above the waterline. The pearl at your collarbone is faintly warm in a way you cannot entirely attribute to body heat and have decided not to examine too closely right now.

“I have more questions,” you tell him.

“I would expect nothing less.”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Then start anywhere,” he says, and his voice is lighter now. “We have time.”

“The book,” you say. “The one I kept falling asleep reading. When I was sixteen.” You pause. “What was it?”

A moment of silence passed. Then, and you hear it clearly this time, a real quiet laugh, low and genuine, the first one. “I wondered when you’d ask something like that,” he says.

“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” he says. “You had underlined things in it.”

You close your eyes briefly. “Of course you noticed it.”

“I found it charming.”

“You find everything charming.”

“Not everything,” he says, simply. “Only the things that are.”

You don’t have an answer for that. You sit with it instead, let it settle somewhere alongside the letter and the necklace and eleven years of shells left on a doorstep, and you watch the water together in a silence that is finally, for the first time, exactly the right size.

°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･°

It had been four days of talking. Not continuously, he still left when the tide pulled a certain way, or when something in the water called him back that you didn’t have the vocabulary to understand yet. But he came back. Every time, he came back, and every time you found yourself outside before you’d consciously decided to be, tea in hand, pretending you’d just happened to be there.

You’d covered a lot of ground in four days. His brother, Floyd and close friend Azul, he’d said, with an affect that landed somewhere between fond and deeply tired. The fact that he’d attended a school on land, which had come up almost incidentally one random night.

“Wait,” you’d said.

“Yes?”

“A school.”

“Night Raven College, yes.”

“You,” you said slowly, “went to school. On land. With humans.”

“Mostly not humans, actually. They were fae and merfolk alike present,” he’d said, in the tone of someone making a helpful correction.

You’d stared at him for a long moment. “I have so many questions.”

“I’m aware,” he’d said, and left it there.

Which was how you ended up, four days later, here in your cottage at 7pm. He had called out for you, you called back by saying to come in, as you prepared tea in the kitchen. And then you turned around and he stepped inside and you almost choked on your own saliva, for how embarrassing that was.

Because the thing was you had only ever seen him as himself. The green blue eel, the fins, the particular way he existed in his natural form that was already difficult enough to be normal around.

You had not, in all of your recent conversations, seen him like this. He had to duck slightly to clear the doorframe. 6ft of long legs and a human form, apparently, that was unfairly handsome. Dark hair, the same heterochromia, the sharp, composed features that were somehow both familiar and completely new.

He was wearing something simple and dark and he stood in your grandmother’s teal and white kitchen looking like a photograph that had been put in the wrong frame, except somehow it worked, except somehow he looked completely at ease, except somehow you were the one who felt out of place in your own home.

“Tea,” you said.

“Please,” he said. You turned around and faced the kettle and had a very quiet, very private moment.

Totally fine, you told yourself. Completely normal. You have been talking to him for four days. This is the same person. Entity. Individual. This is fine. You filled the kettle with slightly more force than necessary. “

So,” you said, to the counter. “Night Raven College.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What would you like to know?”

“Start from the beginning.”

You heard him pull out a chair and sit down at the kitchen table, unhurried, like he had sat at that table a hundred times before. Something about that made your chest do a thing you filed away for later.

“I was selected by the Dark Mirror,” he said. You turned around.

“The what.”

“The Dark Mirror. It sorts students into dormitories.”

“You have a— it’s a mirror that sorts you.”

“It speaks,” he added, helpfully.

“The mirror speaks.”

“It’s quite authoritative about it.” A pause. “I was placed in Octavinelle.” “And what’s— actually you know what, one thing at a time.”

You leaned against the counter and looked at him. This was a mistake , your mind screamed, because he was looking back at you with that expression, the patient one, the one that had started to feel like something specific and directed. You looked at the mugs instead.

“Was it normal? The school.”

“Define normal.”

“You know what normal means.”

“I do,” he agreed.

“Which is why I’m asking you to define it, in this context.” You gave him a look. He received it with complete serenity.

“Were there,” you tried, “regular classes. Regular students. A cafeteria.”

“Yes, yes, and yes. There was also a labyrinth.”

“A—”

“And a random student, human at that, from another world was transported into the school for a short period of time.” You stared at him. “They were fine– mostly, I suppose,” he clarified.

Not that made much more sense to you, he moved on quickly from that conversation however.

“There was also a student who caused a significant magical disruption in my third year and had to be talked down from the roof of the astronomy tower.”

“And this was,” you gestured vaguely, “a regular Tuesday.”

“A Thursday, I believe.” He considered. “There were several unusual Thursdays.”

You put the mug down on the table in front of him, sat across from him, and looked at him very seriously.

“Jade,” you said.

“Hm.”

“You are describing what sounds like a genuinely unhinged educational environment in the same tone you used to tell me about tidal patterns.”

“I suppose I am,” he agreed, and picked up the mug, and looked perfectly content about it.

“Did anything about it strike you as I don’t know unusual. At the time.” He thought about this with what appeared to be genuine consideration.

“Floyd,” he continued, “set something on fire in the second week. Deliberately. The Housewarden was annoyed.”

“Only annoyed?”

“He had a high tolerance by that point.”

The laugh that came out of you was not elegant. It was the kind that happens before you can stop it, genuine and a little helpless, and you had to set down your own mug so you didn’t slosh tea on your grandmother’s table.

When you looked up, wiping the corner of your eye, he was watching you with that expression again except there was something warmer underneath it now, something that sat quietly and didn’t announce itself.

“You’re laughing,” he observed.

“Sorry. It’s just— you went to a school where mirrors spoke, humans got teleported in and apparently your brother committed arson—”

“Minor arson—”

“—and you are telling me this like you’re reading from a very dull catalogue—”

“I didn’t say it was dull,” he said. “I said it was mostly resolved.”

It felt, suddenly and unexpectedly, very easy. Sitting here. Him across the table in your grandmother’s kitchen, in her teal and white cottage that smelled of citrus and salt, talking about a school with too many mirrors and Floyd’s minor arson.

“What was your favourite part,” you asked, and you meant it genuinely. He considered this for a moment, turning the mug slightly in his hands.

“The forest,” he said. “There was a forest at the edge of the grounds. Restricted, technically.” The corner of his mouth moved. “I found that less of a deterrent than intended.”

“Shocking,” you said.

“There were mushrooms there,” he continued, and his voice shifted slightly, warmer,

“that I had never encountered before. Several entirely new species. I spent a considerable amount of my third year documenting them.”

“Of course you did,” you said softly. He looked at you.

“You’re smiling.”

“You went to a magical school,” you said, “and your highlight was the forest mushrooms.”

“They were remarkable mushrooms.”

“I don’t doubt it.” He held your gaze for a moment, and you held it back, and the kitchen was very quiet except for the distant sound of the water and the small comfortable settling sounds of an old house in the evening.

Then he stood up, and you thought he was going to bring his mug to the sink, which was a very normal and reasonable thing to do, except he didn’t go toward the sink. He came around the table instead. Unhurried. With the particular deliberateness of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing and is giving you every opportunity to say so if you’d like.

He stopped beside you not in front, just beside, close enough that you had to tilt your head slightly to look at him, which from sitting down was a lot. The gold eye caught the last of the window light.

“You have a piece of shell,” he said, “caught in your hair.” His hand reached and lifted a strand of your hair between two fingers, drawing out a small fragment of something pale and curved.

He held it up briefly, then set it on the table next to your mug. He didn’t step back. You were acutely, specifically aware of approximately everything: the warmth of him, the fact that you were still sitting down, the pearl at your collarbone that suddenly felt like it was made of something heavier than pearl, the distance between his face and yours which was not very much distance at all.

“Jade,” you said, and your voice came out considerably more even than you felt.

“Hm,” he said, quiet and low.

“You did that on purpose.”

“The shell was genuinely there,” he said.

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

“I know,” he said. Simply and didn’t move. You looked at him for a long moment, heart doing something stupid, loud and inconvenient, and he looked back at you with that expression that you had spent the better part of two weeks learning the edges of and still didn’t fully have the language for.

“Okay,” you said, eventually, very quietly.

“Okay,” he agreed, just as quietly. Neither of you moved for another moment.

Then he stepped back, just slightly, just enough, and picked up his mug from the table and carried it to the sink like absolutely nothing had happened, except the line of his shoulders was doing something that you were fairly certain was the closest he got to flustered, which you were going to think about for a very long time. You stared at the table.

“More tea?” he said, from the sink.

“Yes,” you said. “Please. Immediately.”

pt 3

tags: @tohrusribbon @mousedit @soramcduckahyucky

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