Hex looks baffled by the specific nuances of human behaviour that Felix is describing, and that just adds to the hilarity.
We talk about the woman who came into the shop last Tuesday and spent twenty minutes explaining to Felix that coffee was bad for him, which Felix handled with a restraint I find genuinely impressive.
Felix pauses in his retelling. His dark eyes fix on me. “I deserve a raise for that, Boss.”
I chuckle as I sip my wine. “Yes, I guess you do.” Because he does.
He purses his lips for a moment and then waves his hand airily. “Actually, just take it off my rent.”
“Fine,” I agree.
We both know that him living in the flat above the coffee shop is perfect for everyone. He gets a home. I get someone keeping an eye on my business at all hours. Rent money is just a formality.
The conversation drifts on. We talk about the garden and the cornicing in the front room that turns out to be original Georgianand that Hex has feelings about, which is a sentence I never expected to be ordinary and is.
It is all very ordinary. That is the best thing about it.
An ordinary dinner with a witch and a former shadow prince, in our house in Clifton.
My mother came to see it in March. She stood in the hallway with an expression I recognised from the night Hex turned up to the family dinner in someone else’s body and comprehensively dismantled her entire opinion about my worth. It was the expression of a woman recalibrating.
She said it was very nice.
High praise.
James, apparently, is still trying to find the private island golf course in Reykjavik. I’m told he’s written several emails. I find this privately hilarious every single day.
My uncle’s flat is his again now. I went back once, to collect the last few things, and stood in the kitchen for a moment looking at the shelf where the mugs used to be in their descending row. My uncle’s mugs are there now. The crystals are gone. The spice rack is not organised by frequency of use.
I closed the door and didn’t look back.
Around ten, Felix uncurls from the chair with the efficient grace of someone who knows when an evening is complete.
“Right,” he says. “I should go.”
“I’ll walk you,” says Hex.
Felix looks at him. Something moves in those sharp dark eyes. “Fine. But I have conditions.”
Hex looks interested in the way he always looks interested when Felix has conditions, which is the look of someone who has learned that Felix’s conditions are usually thinly veiled chaos. “Go on.”
“If we pass anyone on the way back who deserves it,” Felix says, “I want you to let yourself be seen. Properly seen. None of this subtle cold-in-the-air business. Full red eyes, shadow tentacles, the works.”
Hex is quiet for a moment. Then the corner of his mouth moves. “Define deserves it.”
“Anyone who’s unpleasant in public after ten o’clock on a weeknight,” says Felix, immediately and with great precision, which suggests this definition has been considered for some time. “Littering counts. Aggressive cycling counts. That man who always shouts at the bus counts, you’ve seen him.”
“I have seen him,” Hex agrees.
“I just think,” Felix says, with perfect reasonableness, “that watching people scream and piss themselves never gets old. And I’ve had a long week.”
Hex looks at me.
I look at Hex.
“Don’t,” I say.
Hex grins. It is the full grin, the one that has too many teeth and that I have completely given up trying to find alarming. “It is extremely funny,” he says.
