“It never came up.” I picked up my own burrito—basically everything I could convince them to encase in a single flexible tortilla—and produced the second bag of chips from beneath the table before plopping myself down in a chair.
“I’ve brought groceries,” he protested.
“Yes, and I didn’t ask about where they came from, because if you were enchanting some poor clerk into letting you shoplift, I didn’t want to know.” The fae attitude toward property can be, well, flexible, especially when the property in question is in the hands of humans. Purebloods mostly don’t steal from each other unless they’ve got an army behind them. Everyone else is fair game.
“You used to work at Safeway, right?” asked Jazz.
I nodded. “I did, before May showed up and started helping cover the rent. That’s when we were in the old apartment.” The timeline there was skewed and simplified, but it was close enough to accurate. Sometimes things have to be condensed if they’re going to make sense.
That’s the history of Faerie in a nutshell, really. When you’re talking about people who live for literal centuries, entire dynasties can wind up shortened to a sentence tucked away in a paragraph about how nice the flowers look when the spring returns. Legends are true. History is a lie. Everything old comes around and becomes new again, and people who’ve witnessed linguistic and continental drift firsthand are standing right there to give their opinion on it.
“I bought the groceries,” said Tybalt, sounding only faintly offended. “I bought them with legitimate human currency, and did not rob anyone to get it.”
I blinked at him. “How did you—?”
“I arrived in the Mists over a century ago, when there was no indication that this small, provincial kingdom would become such a hotbed of activity,” said Tybalt. “I was in Pines before that, living among the mortals with my Anne.”
“Oh.” Anne, his first wife, had been a human woman. She died in childbirth sometime in the early 1900s. The local fae courts had been unwilling to step in and help her or their child.
It was because of that reluctance that Tybalt had disliked changelings for so long. A changeling took his wife away, even if it hadn’t been intentional or malicious. I’d known things between us were never going to be the same when he’d finally broken down and told me about Anne. That was when he’d let his grudges go. That was when he’d admitted that he loved me.
Life is never simple. I’d say “when Faerie is involved,” but I don’t think I need to. Life is never simple, period. All we can do is hang on and hope for the best.
He smiled, finally picking up his own burrito: chicken, pork, beef, cheese, and sour cream. “Anne was quite annoyed when I took things from local merchants without proper payment, and I’ll admit, I had a bit of a prior inclination toward paying, born of my time in the Londinium theater. It’s better to pay people for the things they make, assuming you want them to keep working. I’ve never been inclined toward learning a mortal trade, but I did odd jobs enough to keep her fed and healthy, and I learned your banking system well enough to acquit myself.”
I blinked at him slowly. “Tybalt. You didn’t understand what a car was until I started making you ride in one. You’d never been on a bus before.”
“Neither of those things is a requirement of banking, little fish. Money has many uses, and not all of them are related to transportation.”
“I don’t . . .” I pinched the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know what to do with this. You have money?”
“Yes.”
“How much money?”
“Sufficient that I can pay for groceries when I wish to, and I’ll expect you to allow me to do so.” He took a hearty bite of his burrito, chewed, swallowed, and added, “I am a part of this family. I will contribute, like it or no, and I will do so in ways that do not involve your bedroom.”
A harsh cawing sound rang out from the end of the table. I whipped around, nearly dropping my burrito. Tybalt flinched, unable to quite control the momentary flash of panic in his eyes. Then we both froze, staring.
Jazz was laughing.
May raced into the room, face pale and eyes wide, clearly ready to jump into battle against whatever was hurting her girlfriend. Then she froze as well, pressing one hand to her mouth. Jazz kept laughing, leaning back in her seat and tucking her hands behind her head, seemingly helpless against her own amusement.
“Honey?” asked May. “Are you all right?”
Jazz shook her head, still laughing.
I found my voice, tucked away in a corner where I hadn’t been able to reach it before. “I think she’s going to be okay,” I said. “I think . . . I think maybe we’re all going to be okay.”
May laughed once, and if there was a hint of a sob tucked inside the sound, none of us was going to point it out. She rushed to Jazz’s side, putting her arms around the other woman, and they held each other while they laughed, and for the first time since Amandine had shown up at my door, I started to feel like maybe things were getting back to normal. We were safe. We were home. We were together, and we were going to be okay.
Tybalt smiled at me across the table as he picked up his burrito. I smiled back, and everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be. Finally, finally, everything was right.
TWO
THE HOUSE WAS QUIET by ten o’clock. The boys were in Quentin’s room with the door closed. I should probably have been concerned about them getting into trouble, but I was honestly too relieved to know where they were to care. May’s chocolate chip cookies had been baked and devoured, and May herself had gone upstairs, dragging Jazz by the wrist. They, too, had closed their bedroom door, and I felt like I’d be even less welcome in that particular room.
The remains of dinner had been cleaned up and either put in the refrigerator or thrown away; there weren’t even any dishes to deal with. Tybalt and I took advantage of the rare lull to curl up on the couch and put on a BBC production of The Tempest. Not that we were paying any attention to it. There’s nothing like Shakespeare to blunt the sounds of impending hanky-panky, or current heavy petting.
Tybalt had one hand under my shirt, cupping the curve of my right breast, while he tangled his other hand in my hair, tying knots that would take me hours with a hairbrush to untangle. I wasn’t complaining. I was too busy trying to mold myself against him, making it easier for him to reach any part of my body that caught his fancy. Living in a house with three other full-time residents and an endlessly shifting cast of visitors has taught me to take my pleasures where I can find them, and at the moment, I was very focused on finding them.
It didn’t hurt that Tybalt is possibly the most beautiful man I’ve ever been lucky enough to set my eyes on. Some of the Daoine Sidhe could beat him for pure prettiness—prettiness is sort of what the Daoine Sidhe do—but personal tastes have something to say when it comes to attraction, and Tybalt is so perfectly suited to my tastes that he might as well have been tailor-made to keep me happy.