They were Lucas’s bloody horses.
MyLucas. The one I’d been living with for over a week and hadn’t even met yet. Lucas, who, this very morning, had sent me a litany of texts regarding proper shower etiquette—apparently, I was meant to rinse the tub after I showered toavoid the buildup of soap scum and other nasty things, it just saves so much work in the long run and I wouldn’t want you to slip and die because then I’ll never find out what happens to that penguin :)
He was being so very patient with me, despite the rise of deeply understandable frustration with my minging existence.
“Are you okay, Profe— Armand?” the cherubic creature before me asked in concern.
“Aye.” I coughed and hurriedly handed him back his mobile. “Quite. Er. Those are lovely. Aye. You’ve got the job, mate.”
Skyler’s face broke into a sunny grin. “Wow, thank you!”
“Don’t mention it.” I coughed again. “So—so I’ll see you early next week so we can do a dress rehearsal, or heh, anundress rehearsal.” I gave him a pained smile. “Feel free to bring along a chaperone, er, a friend or parent or someone.Ehrm. I believe there’s someone in the front office who’ll have you fill out the proper forms?” Surely there were forms? No clue what kind or how many, but there were always forms, weren’t there?
Skyler stood, still grinning, and held out a hand for me to shake. “Thanks again, sir.”
“God, please,siris worse thanprofessor.”
“Okay, Armand.” He laughed. “See you next week.” And then he left.
And I sat quietly in my horrible little office and let the water close in over my head. He knew Lucas. He worked with him.
It really was only a matter of time—I was delaying the inevitable, trying to hold back the tide of the world with nothing but my bare hands.
I still hadn’t responded to the increasingly nerve-racking texts he’d sent me. To his request for a meeting. Instead, I’d taken to carefully listening at the door before I left my room, and only venturing forth once I was certain he’d left—somehow the thought of meeting him, which had been intimidating before, now caused my heart to pound in my throat.
It was irrational. It wasridiculous.
I couldn’t put off meeting my flatmate indefinitely, especially considering how small the world appeared to be, and I knew he could be neither as punctilious nor as parochial as he seemed over text—after all, I’d found a TARDIS mug in the cupboard, and Pratchett on his bookshelf. But I’d become somewhat enamored with the idea of Lucas as an unseen presence who flitted about the flat while I slept, cleaning up messes and leaving snide little notes. Commentating on the out-of-context single pages of an already quite abstract comic I left out to dry.
I didn’t want to meet this person who so clearly found me both obnoxious and amusing—especially since however negative his current impression of me, the real article could only bring his opinion lower.
It was mad, but part of me truly believed that if I could continue avoiding him until I fled the country (twenty-six days until the convention, twenty-eight until my flight home), I could get away with never meeting Lucas face-to-face. How hard could it be?
“Armand?”
I jumped, instinctively crumpling the paper I held—the one with Skyler’s name on it and a surreptitious sketch I’d done of his sitting stance without even realizing—and inhaled sharply through my nose. “Titch!”
“Sorry.” The little ginger stood in my office doorway and held up both his hands, smirking impishly. “I didn’t realize how deep that reverie was. I thought you were just buffering or something.”
I glared at him, then actively loosened my shoulders. It had become clear over the past week or so that Robin Finch, who initially appeared to hold me in some semblance of esteem, had become fully convinced of my ineptitude. Which, unfortunately, was fair. “Come to take me back to my kennel?”
He nodded. “Yeah, did you pick out a life model for us to ogle next week? Are they hot?”
This was exactly what I’d been worried about. “That is not the purpose of this exercise,” I growled. “The whole point is to learn how to take in the aesthetic space of a person, capture theirenergy, their movement, not—”
“Okay, okay, calm down, Grandpa.” He walked over and picked up my bag, shouldering it with an air of wardenship. “So did you find someone?”
I nodded resignedly and unfolded to my feet, stretching. “Aye, and you will treat him with respect and compassion.”
“Obviously.” Finch rolled his eyes and stood aside, motioning for me to move past him and out of the tiny office. “Can we get a move on? I’ve got a hot date on Friday, and I need to start my 24-hour skin care routine!”
He clearly wanted me to ask him about this, which was one of the many reasons I did not.
Finch dropped me off back at the flat, then headed right back to campus to prepare for his date. I climbed the stairs, swallowed the nerves I experienced every time I came home—Is Lucas here?Is today the day? Please let it not be the day—but as usual, the flat was empty. I’d been especially concerned because this was a bit earlier than I tended to come home, considerably closer to late afternoon than evening.
As far as I could piece it together, my and Lucas’s days went something like this:
Lucas rose obscenely early in the morning and fucked off to work with old horses and small children.
