Page 39 of The Trick of It

He sighed, casting his eyes heavenward, and climbed the staircase with the full knowledge of the futility of attempting sleep in the auditory nightmare happening behind his rented room.

That was why, about a quarter hour after parting ways, Seph found him plastered against her room’s door, blankets and pillows smashed tightly in his arms, pleading to let him in.

She pulled the door open so suddenly that he stumbled into the room fully enough for her to immediately close it behind him. She was wearing men’s pajamas, he saw as he regained his footing. Small ones that fit her frame, so perhaps a boy’s, not a man’s.

They had blue and red stripes. Always two colors.

He gave her a weak smile and dropped his pillows and blankets on her rug.

Her eyes followed the pile of linens and she blinked twice, looking back up at him with her mouth in a flat line. “Really?”

“I won’t do anything untoward,” he promised, fully aware of how pathetic he sounded. His eyes were already rimmed in red from trying to stuff the snoring out of his ears by suffocating in the pillow, and he blinked at her blearily, realizing his vision had gone a little murky.

“I know you won’t,” she said with a sigh, stepping over the pile of blankets and planting her bare feet at the side of her very comfortable-looking inn bed. “You don’t fancy blondes. I recall.”

He squinted at her. “What?”

“The floor,” she said, pointing at his things. “I’m dousing the lantern in ten seconds, Rhys.”

“Oh, but—”

“Nine,” she said. “Eight …”

He harrumphed and started kicking out his makeshift bed, flopping down onto it just in time for her to douse the light.

“If you snore,” she told him, “you’re going right back out into the hall.”

For a moment, they were silent, with only the rustling of blankets and the creak of the wooden floor between them.

Rhys rolled onto his back, staring up into the dark at where the ceiling probably was. “I like your pajamas,” he said. “Malcolm has the same ones.”

She made a noise like the tap of a cymbal. “Probably got them at the same shop in the Lanes,” she said. “Now I want to turn the light back on so I can see yours.”

“See them in the morning,” he said, stifling a little yawn. “They’re nothing special. But I also bought them in the Lanes. Perhaps we just missed each other, pajama shopping.”

“Perhaps,” she agreed, and he could hear the reluctant smile in her voice.

It made him smile too.

She sighed and shifted her weight. In the dark, he could see her shadow tilting toward him, propping her head up on her hand with her elbow buried in the mattress. “Did you ever share a room as a child? With your foster brothers, perhaps?”

“Not often,” he answered, turning his head to look at her outline. “Sometimes, when we traveled.”

“We’d do it all the time in the caravan,” she said. “I’d sleep in a cousin’s tent and then she’d come and sleep in mine, sometimes groups of three or four, especially if there was a celebration or special occasion. In the dark, children always talk. It’s safer to think hard and find the hidden corners of your mind and easier to speak them aloud. It’s something I think we lose when we’re grown.”

He considered that, remembering the boys huddled together on the floor of a large castle bedroom in Edinburgh. “We often tried to spook each other in those situations,” he confessed. “And half the time ended up spooking ourselves in the process.”

“Yes, that too,” she said with a wistful, little sigh. “I miss the meandering conversations more than the spooks.”

“Do you want to have one now?” he asked, lifting his arm to drape behind his head, propping it at an angle so he could look at her, so he could make out her features little by little as his pupils expanded in the dark. “I was reminded a bit ago that the word for ‘beaver’ in French is ‘castor,’ and I’ve been meaning to ask Hattie if she doesn’t think the little fellows are more like Pollux than his brother, in the end.”

Seph hesitated. Just for a moment. And then she laughed, dropping herself back on the pillows with a little thump. “You’ll have to ask Hattie,” she said. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.”

“Shame,” he returned, chuckling to himself. “I’ll have to save it for a dinner party that finds a lull. Do you want to talk about what happened tonight?”

She was quiet, like she wasn’t certain. “Maybe,” she said. “But not yet.”

“All right.” He could see her better now, the shape of her hair sharpening to individual strands sticking out of her braid.