ooc: from rené to wren: a triptych.
Feb. 3rd, 2015 03:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fairywrenWrote some past!fic and wanted to post it.
Warnings here, in order, for: bullying and violence, implied homophobia, neglectful school officials and childhood depression/suicidal ideation; implied periods of homelessness; drug use and alcohol.
But also a lot of love.
The first time he thought, seriously, about how to get away from Portland, René Bellamy was 9 years old.
He hasn’t said anything since his mother came to pick him up from school. That’s when he knew it was bad. His mother doesn’t pick him up. Even when he’s sick. It’s usually their neighbor, Mary, a maternal, round woman who’s sterner than his mother but gives good hugs, anyway. She’s been babysitting him since he was little, and her big old couch smells like cats and smoke, and he calls her tanté because it makes her smile. His mom can’t afford to stop a class full of dancers – or a rehearsal, or a performance – to come grab her boy. That’s just how it is.
So when Elise Sauvageon came walking in the office door, legwarmers still on, jaw set, he knew something serious must have been said on the phone. She gave him just a little glance before knocking on the door of the principal’s office, and he watched that pale oak door shut behind her and stay that way for a long time. The whole office disappears under its weight. At one point, both voices are raised, still incomprehensible, and Rene sank into the chair, wishing fervently to disappear.
His mother finally strode out of the office, quick and graceful and cold, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on,” she said. He looked at her for any sign, but her face and tone was totally unreadable.
Now she’s driving, back to their little house down the highway, and he stares out the window, cools his bruised cheekbone on the glass. He’s watching the seagulls dive and rise, white shapes caught between a gray, demanding sea and restless clouds that promise rain. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” he says quietly, pulling off a silver star sticker by his eye.
“What?” she says, glancing at him.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” he says again, enunciating. “I hate it! I hate it, I hate everyone here, I hate being me.” By the end of the sentence it’s barely audible. “I want to go away. I want to disappear.” He lets his head flop against the window in frustration with a thunk.
“Rennie,” she says, like her entire heart has been broken, and reaches to touch his head. He can’t stand it, even the physical feeling of someone else touching him, and he pulls away, curls against the door. His mother takes a breath, and after a moment she turns the car, abruptly, away from their house, and into a parking lot next to a little ice cream and hot dog stand shut down for the season. She reaches across and unlocks his door. “Come on, let’s take a walk.”
He isn’t sure what’s going on, but he gets out of the car, into the chill of October in Maine and the unyielding salt of the wind.
They walk quietly for a little while, into the grass, bright green against the sky, yellow and orange leaves thrown into the air. She turns and holds out her hand to him, open. His mother is all limbs, stalky and pale and angular like a heron or some swaying birch, and Ren thinks she must be the most beautiful woman there is alive, even now, even when he’s a little angry with her, with everyone. She looks like him, and doesn’t at all. Maybe he looks like his father.
But he doesn’t have a father. That’s what started all this.
He slowly puts his hand in hers, and she tugs him to her, pulls him in like a dance partner and lifts him off the ground, turning and turning around until he feels laughter is sinking into his veins despite himself. "That's better," she says and sets him on his feet. He goes to the corded fence and looks out at the ocean, and she comes to hold him tight from behind. Together they watch the waves.
"Someone called you a name for these pretty stars, didn't they," she says, kissing the ridge of his unblackened eye and the remaining silver star sticker adorning it.
"'Fairy'.” He scoffs a laugh. They’re idiots. If he were really a faery he’d make sure they were afraid to mess with him. “Some other things. They do that all the time, I wasn’t really paying attention. I think they hate that, sometimes?” He looks up at her, eyes tired of all this. “One of them pushed me down and kicked me, and when I told them to stop and leave me alone they said, what, will you call for daddy? Oh, you can't, can you, you don’t have one.”
She sighs deeply and says, “Ren, I’m sorry.”
René’s quiet for a long time. He doesn’t want her to be sorry; he doesn’t want her to have to be sorry. He’s not going to tell her that that’s not why he hit the boy back. That it was when he started saying things about her. He doesn’t want her to know. “If I hadn’t hit them back,” he says, looking back out at the waves instead of at her, “no one would have known. You know?” He squints. “I knew that. I thought, If I just let them hurt me, if I keep quiet and just let them, they’ll get bored after a while.”
“Ren --”
“But I hit them back, I tried to hurt them, and it got noisy and they had to break it up.” His voice hardens. “No one cared that either of us were hurt. They cared that we were distracting.” He can feel his mother take a long breath behind him, her jaw set on top of his head. She tenses as though she wants to say something. René just watches the waves. He knows he's right; he doesn't need her to make it real. Once, Gabe -- the oldest of them, eleven and tall -- caught him curled up with fairy tales when they were supposed to be going to gym. He'd pushed him against the lockers, kicked his book away. Ren had just frozen, let Gabe bore himself in seconds that felt like hours: he'd counted heartbeats, watched sparkles form behind his eyes, wondered who would find him if anything happened.
Nothing happened. No one said anything and life continued. When he looked, later, he could swear it left a mark but maybe only he could see it.
His mother can't do anything about them. It wouldn't make it stop, not really.
Out on the ocean white peaks form on the waves and he watches the patterns they make colliding into each other. “Maman?” he asks, suddenly feeling very small.
“Rennie,” she says, tipping her head down to kiss the top of his.
“Do you miss my father?” He knows the answer.
She takes a long moment. “I do, sometimes,” she says, and even though he feels faintly sick, something feels better for the honesty. “Sometimes very much. But that's not what matters.”
“If I -- do you think he’d have stayed if I hadn't --”
“No,” she interrupts firmly. “I know he wouldn’t have.” She takes his hand and turns him around, sitting on the ground in front of him in one fluid motion. “Come sit, mon coeur.” René sits down across from her, knees touching hers, picking at the dying grass. “Yes, I miss your father sometimes. But he was gone long before you were here, really. And --" and her voice is serious, "If I were given the chance to trade I wouldn't." She tips his head up to look at her, putting a clover flower behind his ear. "Not ever. Not if he were standing on my front steps. Okay?"
He looks down at the ground, both embarrassed and uncertain, and she reaches across to pull him into her lap. His ribs are bruised but he doesn't pull away from affection this time, letting her tug him sideways and lying his head down on her knee. She plays with his hair. "Everyone says that the first time they hold their baby, they're the most beautiful thing they've ever seen," she says slowly. "But Ren, I think the most beautiful thing I've seen is getting to see you grow and change every day. And I want you to know that. I don't ever want you to hear you say you want to disappear, because that would be the worst thing in the world to me. You understand? I would do anything to keep you safe."
Ren wriggles a little under the onslaught of affection, but he turns over at that. "Anything?"
"Even beat up those little jerks," she says with a smirk.
"You can't do that," he teases, "you'd get arrested." It doesn't make everything better, but the idea of his mother in handcuffs for terrifying the older boys makes something loosen, a little.
"And that's why I haven't, yet. Come here." She holds out her arms and he sits up to give her a hug. "Does this eye need to see a doctor?" He shakes his head.
"Come on then, baby, let's go home."
Ren's perched on his amp, taking a break from serenading dispassionate Manhattanites to pick the melody line of a Klaus Nomi song out in harmonics on his guitar. He's got a gig tonight, a kind of regular thing at a little dark club off of Avenue A called "Second Level" perhaps in a nod to Dante’s lustful sinners but just as probably referring to the fact that they're up a long stoop from the street.
He gets paid a cut of what gets brought in, minimal and only weeknights so far (he's working on that). But they don't care that he's not 21, or what he plays, and he gets free beer and sometimes other things depending on the waitstaff's inclinations. It keeps him under a roof, for now, a little pay by the week place with public bathrooms that're nicer than the last one.
It doesn’t keep him fed, though, except the snacks he gets flirting with the bartenders. And that’s why he’s out here at parks and corners and train stations fighting for space with other buskers. Mostly, fucking around with Christmas carols this far through December. Most people ignore him, and the longer they go without looking at him, the more inappropriate his 12 Days of Christmas get.
Sometimes he just gets in their faces and serenades them until they get uncomfortable. One girl, a be-dreaded college student, beams and sings back, dancing around with him for a few minutes, and even though she has nothing but a handful of nickels and pennies to contribute it leaves him smiling.
He could kill for a cigarette right now but instead he slots 6 nickels into a phone booth to call his mother and lies about how he’s doing, how he’s safe and warm and fed, he’s thinking about renting a place soon, he’s getting gigs and yeah she can wire him some money if she really, really wants to for Christmas but not too much, okay maman? I love you, he tells her, I’m okay and I love you, and tries to make that the part she remembers because it’s the honest part.
Ren's set finished a while back, and he’s people watching while he finishes a drink. The crowd’s manic with the last week of the millennium, and the energy seems to echo through him, vibrant, like color. He gets up to work himself into the crowd; is turned around by a girl who takes his face in both hands and kisses him on the lips, hard enough to hurt: her mouth tastes bitter and she smiles brightly at him when he blinks. He just laughs at the likelihood that he was given something and lets himself dance, unthinking, and that’s when he runs into a blond girl, long sharp angles and smooth curves, that he's seen here a few times now, talked to occasionally.
"You again," the blonde yells over the music.
"Me again;" he agrees with a smile, "still," and she yells over the music,
"What's your name? I'm sorry, you told me once. I'm really drunk."
"It's Christmas," he says, snagging her waist to dance.
"Your name is Christmas?"
He smirks. "No - it’s Christmas, you’re allowed to be drunk. I'm Ren."
"What?"
He pulls her closer to press his face against hers, close to her ear. "Ren, I'm called Ren."
"Wren, like the bird," she exclaims, leaning back in his arms to blink in delight, and he starts to correct her, but she's already exclaiming, "like a songbird, that's perfect," running her hands through his hair. It spikes up between her fingers.
"I could be a bird," he says thoughtfully.
She asks him: "You know Rian?” He follows her gesture to where a boy is laughing, head and shoulders above most of the crowd, recent hair dye dripping red onto his neck as he moves with the music. Rian. He nods. Yes. Yes: he knows Rian.
Rian had introduced himself after a show at the Green Carnation, and he hadn’t needed him to say he’d seen Ren there before. Ren had noticed him weeks before, there regularly the same way he’s seen the girl here. One time, after that, busking in a nearby train station, he’d noticed the tall boy watching him. Sidelong, curious or maybe like a train wreck, Ren couldn’t tell. He’d watched him right back, holding eye contact, audacious and stubborn, until he looked away.
(The next time Ren was at that stop Rian had his violin and, without saying much, pulled it out to harmonize. They’d played until his train came and they were both laughing, but he still doesn’t know anything more than that. Part of Ren had wanted to follow him. Because he hates not knowing things - obviously just that.)
“We're married,” she’s saying.
"What?"
"Oh, no worries, baby bird," she says assuredly, "not really married, just. Married, you know? My better half."
He raises an eyebrow and smiles. "I'd hate to be the cause of any adultery," he deadpans and she catches her fingers in his belt loops.
“Would you really? I think it’d be forgiven.” She follows his gaze to where Rian’s now figured out they're talking about him, and grins, tugging Ren close, waves her fingers at her partner in crime. "I'm Lexi," she says into his ear.
"I'm pretty sure I knew that."
When they wake up, they’re on Rian and Lexi’s floor, tangled. It takes the three of them together to repiece the night. Three shades of glitter are mixed on their skin, but they agree nothing torrid has happened, and all of them are a little undecided on whether that’s disappointing. Lexi says, curled up with her head on of (w)Ren’s hip, “I’m adopting you. You’re warm. Where do you belong?”
He laughs and gives her the name and Rian makes a face and says, “That’s not going to work.”
“Cage hotel doesn’t suit your aesthetic?” he drawls sardonically, stretching backwards and looking at Rian upside-down, challenging. Technically the place is called a hostel, these days, but given that the walls of each room don’t reach the ceiling, it’s not hard to figure out what it used to look like.
“Wrens shouldn’t be in a cage,” Lexi says decidedly.
“Wait, it’s like the bird,” Rian says, with a blink of realization, and suddenly he tilts his head and looks at him, really looks at him so hard he can feel it and says, “Wren. Of course it is.”
And like that, it sticks. Wren sits up, newly named and not at all, careful not to disturb Lexi and offers Rian a thoughtful smile. “Of course?”
Lexi seems to agree with this assessment. “It suits you.” She looks at Rian and it’s a capital L sort of look, a long one. It’s not the kind Rian has just given him, the deep investigatory kind that pries into crevices, but it’s still something else Wren wants suddenly to be a part of, some kind of intense silent communication. “We’re keeping you,” she says abruptly, casually, and gets up.
Wren glances at Rian. “What just happened?”
“You heard her,” Rian says and shrugs as if he had nothing to do with that.
---
And afterwards:
"It's probably cursed."
Warnings here, in order, for: bullying and violence, implied homophobia, neglectful school officials and childhood depression/suicidal ideation; implied periods of homelessness; drug use and alcohol.
But also a lot of love.
The first time he thought, seriously, about how to get away from Portland, René Bellamy was 9 years old.
He hasn’t said anything since his mother came to pick him up from school. That’s when he knew it was bad. His mother doesn’t pick him up. Even when he’s sick. It’s usually their neighbor, Mary, a maternal, round woman who’s sterner than his mother but gives good hugs, anyway. She’s been babysitting him since he was little, and her big old couch smells like cats and smoke, and he calls her tanté because it makes her smile. His mom can’t afford to stop a class full of dancers – or a rehearsal, or a performance – to come grab her boy. That’s just how it is.
So when Elise Sauvageon came walking in the office door, legwarmers still on, jaw set, he knew something serious must have been said on the phone. She gave him just a little glance before knocking on the door of the principal’s office, and he watched that pale oak door shut behind her and stay that way for a long time. The whole office disappears under its weight. At one point, both voices are raised, still incomprehensible, and Rene sank into the chair, wishing fervently to disappear.
His mother finally strode out of the office, quick and graceful and cold, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Come on,” she said. He looked at her for any sign, but her face and tone was totally unreadable.
Now she’s driving, back to their little house down the highway, and he stares out the window, cools his bruised cheekbone on the glass. He’s watching the seagulls dive and rise, white shapes caught between a gray, demanding sea and restless clouds that promise rain. “I don’t want to be here anymore,” he says quietly, pulling off a silver star sticker by his eye.
“What?” she says, glancing at him.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” he says again, enunciating. “I hate it! I hate it, I hate everyone here, I hate being me.” By the end of the sentence it’s barely audible. “I want to go away. I want to disappear.” He lets his head flop against the window in frustration with a thunk.
“Rennie,” she says, like her entire heart has been broken, and reaches to touch his head. He can’t stand it, even the physical feeling of someone else touching him, and he pulls away, curls against the door. His mother takes a breath, and after a moment she turns the car, abruptly, away from their house, and into a parking lot next to a little ice cream and hot dog stand shut down for the season. She reaches across and unlocks his door. “Come on, let’s take a walk.”
He isn’t sure what’s going on, but he gets out of the car, into the chill of October in Maine and the unyielding salt of the wind.
They walk quietly for a little while, into the grass, bright green against the sky, yellow and orange leaves thrown into the air. She turns and holds out her hand to him, open. His mother is all limbs, stalky and pale and angular like a heron or some swaying birch, and Ren thinks she must be the most beautiful woman there is alive, even now, even when he’s a little angry with her, with everyone. She looks like him, and doesn’t at all. Maybe he looks like his father.
But he doesn’t have a father. That’s what started all this.
He slowly puts his hand in hers, and she tugs him to her, pulls him in like a dance partner and lifts him off the ground, turning and turning around until he feels laughter is sinking into his veins despite himself. "That's better," she says and sets him on his feet. He goes to the corded fence and looks out at the ocean, and she comes to hold him tight from behind. Together they watch the waves.
"Someone called you a name for these pretty stars, didn't they," she says, kissing the ridge of his unblackened eye and the remaining silver star sticker adorning it.
"'Fairy'.” He scoffs a laugh. They’re idiots. If he were really a faery he’d make sure they were afraid to mess with him. “Some other things. They do that all the time, I wasn’t really paying attention. I think they hate that, sometimes?” He looks up at her, eyes tired of all this. “One of them pushed me down and kicked me, and when I told them to stop and leave me alone they said, what, will you call for daddy? Oh, you can't, can you, you don’t have one.”
She sighs deeply and says, “Ren, I’m sorry.”
René’s quiet for a long time. He doesn’t want her to be sorry; he doesn’t want her to have to be sorry. He’s not going to tell her that that’s not why he hit the boy back. That it was when he started saying things about her. He doesn’t want her to know. “If I hadn’t hit them back,” he says, looking back out at the waves instead of at her, “no one would have known. You know?” He squints. “I knew that. I thought, If I just let them hurt me, if I keep quiet and just let them, they’ll get bored after a while.”
“Ren --”
“But I hit them back, I tried to hurt them, and it got noisy and they had to break it up.” His voice hardens. “No one cared that either of us were hurt. They cared that we were distracting.” He can feel his mother take a long breath behind him, her jaw set on top of his head. She tenses as though she wants to say something. René just watches the waves. He knows he's right; he doesn't need her to make it real. Once, Gabe -- the oldest of them, eleven and tall -- caught him curled up with fairy tales when they were supposed to be going to gym. He'd pushed him against the lockers, kicked his book away. Ren had just frozen, let Gabe bore himself in seconds that felt like hours: he'd counted heartbeats, watched sparkles form behind his eyes, wondered who would find him if anything happened.
Nothing happened. No one said anything and life continued. When he looked, later, he could swear it left a mark but maybe only he could see it.
His mother can't do anything about them. It wouldn't make it stop, not really.
Out on the ocean white peaks form on the waves and he watches the patterns they make colliding into each other. “Maman?” he asks, suddenly feeling very small.
“Rennie,” she says, tipping her head down to kiss the top of his.
“Do you miss my father?” He knows the answer.
She takes a long moment. “I do, sometimes,” she says, and even though he feels faintly sick, something feels better for the honesty. “Sometimes very much. But that's not what matters.”
“If I -- do you think he’d have stayed if I hadn't --”
“No,” she interrupts firmly. “I know he wouldn’t have.” She takes his hand and turns him around, sitting on the ground in front of him in one fluid motion. “Come sit, mon coeur.” René sits down across from her, knees touching hers, picking at the dying grass. “Yes, I miss your father sometimes. But he was gone long before you were here, really. And --" and her voice is serious, "If I were given the chance to trade I wouldn't." She tips his head up to look at her, putting a clover flower behind his ear. "Not ever. Not if he were standing on my front steps. Okay?"
He looks down at the ground, both embarrassed and uncertain, and she reaches across to pull him into her lap. His ribs are bruised but he doesn't pull away from affection this time, letting her tug him sideways and lying his head down on her knee. She plays with his hair. "Everyone says that the first time they hold their baby, they're the most beautiful thing they've ever seen," she says slowly. "But Ren, I think the most beautiful thing I've seen is getting to see you grow and change every day. And I want you to know that. I don't ever want you to hear you say you want to disappear, because that would be the worst thing in the world to me. You understand? I would do anything to keep you safe."
Ren wriggles a little under the onslaught of affection, but he turns over at that. "Anything?"
"Even beat up those little jerks," she says with a smirk.
"You can't do that," he teases, "you'd get arrested." It doesn't make everything better, but the idea of his mother in handcuffs for terrifying the older boys makes something loosen, a little.
"And that's why I haven't, yet. Come here." She holds out her arms and he sits up to give her a hug. "Does this eye need to see a doctor?" He shakes his head.
"Come on then, baby, let's go home."
Ren's perched on his amp, taking a break from serenading dispassionate Manhattanites to pick the melody line of a Klaus Nomi song out in harmonics on his guitar. He's got a gig tonight, a kind of regular thing at a little dark club off of Avenue A called "Second Level" perhaps in a nod to Dante’s lustful sinners but just as probably referring to the fact that they're up a long stoop from the street.
He gets paid a cut of what gets brought in, minimal and only weeknights so far (he's working on that). But they don't care that he's not 21, or what he plays, and he gets free beer and sometimes other things depending on the waitstaff's inclinations. It keeps him under a roof, for now, a little pay by the week place with public bathrooms that're nicer than the last one.
It doesn’t keep him fed, though, except the snacks he gets flirting with the bartenders. And that’s why he’s out here at parks and corners and train stations fighting for space with other buskers. Mostly, fucking around with Christmas carols this far through December. Most people ignore him, and the longer they go without looking at him, the more inappropriate his 12 Days of Christmas get.
Sometimes he just gets in their faces and serenades them until they get uncomfortable. One girl, a be-dreaded college student, beams and sings back, dancing around with him for a few minutes, and even though she has nothing but a handful of nickels and pennies to contribute it leaves him smiling.
He could kill for a cigarette right now but instead he slots 6 nickels into a phone booth to call his mother and lies about how he’s doing, how he’s safe and warm and fed, he’s thinking about renting a place soon, he’s getting gigs and yeah she can wire him some money if she really, really wants to for Christmas but not too much, okay maman? I love you, he tells her, I’m okay and I love you, and tries to make that the part she remembers because it’s the honest part.
Ren's set finished a while back, and he’s people watching while he finishes a drink. The crowd’s manic with the last week of the millennium, and the energy seems to echo through him, vibrant, like color. He gets up to work himself into the crowd; is turned around by a girl who takes his face in both hands and kisses him on the lips, hard enough to hurt: her mouth tastes bitter and she smiles brightly at him when he blinks. He just laughs at the likelihood that he was given something and lets himself dance, unthinking, and that’s when he runs into a blond girl, long sharp angles and smooth curves, that he's seen here a few times now, talked to occasionally.
"You again," the blonde yells over the music.
"Me again;" he agrees with a smile, "still," and she yells over the music,
"What's your name? I'm sorry, you told me once. I'm really drunk."
"It's Christmas," he says, snagging her waist to dance.
"Your name is Christmas?"
He smirks. "No - it’s Christmas, you’re allowed to be drunk. I'm Ren."
"What?"
He pulls her closer to press his face against hers, close to her ear. "Ren, I'm called Ren."
"Wren, like the bird," she exclaims, leaning back in his arms to blink in delight, and he starts to correct her, but she's already exclaiming, "like a songbird, that's perfect," running her hands through his hair. It spikes up between her fingers.
"I could be a bird," he says thoughtfully.
She asks him: "You know Rian?” He follows her gesture to where a boy is laughing, head and shoulders above most of the crowd, recent hair dye dripping red onto his neck as he moves with the music. Rian. He nods. Yes. Yes: he knows Rian.
Rian had introduced himself after a show at the Green Carnation, and he hadn’t needed him to say he’d seen Ren there before. Ren had noticed him weeks before, there regularly the same way he’s seen the girl here. One time, after that, busking in a nearby train station, he’d noticed the tall boy watching him. Sidelong, curious or maybe like a train wreck, Ren couldn’t tell. He’d watched him right back, holding eye contact, audacious and stubborn, until he looked away.
(The next time Ren was at that stop Rian had his violin and, without saying much, pulled it out to harmonize. They’d played until his train came and they were both laughing, but he still doesn’t know anything more than that. Part of Ren had wanted to follow him. Because he hates not knowing things - obviously just that.)
“We're married,” she’s saying.
"What?"
"Oh, no worries, baby bird," she says assuredly, "not really married, just. Married, you know? My better half."
He raises an eyebrow and smiles. "I'd hate to be the cause of any adultery," he deadpans and she catches her fingers in his belt loops.
“Would you really? I think it’d be forgiven.” She follows his gaze to where Rian’s now figured out they're talking about him, and grins, tugging Ren close, waves her fingers at her partner in crime. "I'm Lexi," she says into his ear.
"I'm pretty sure I knew that."
When they wake up, they’re on Rian and Lexi’s floor, tangled. It takes the three of them together to repiece the night. Three shades of glitter are mixed on their skin, but they agree nothing torrid has happened, and all of them are a little undecided on whether that’s disappointing. Lexi says, curled up with her head on of (w)Ren’s hip, “I’m adopting you. You’re warm. Where do you belong?”
He laughs and gives her the name and Rian makes a face and says, “That’s not going to work.”
“Cage hotel doesn’t suit your aesthetic?” he drawls sardonically, stretching backwards and looking at Rian upside-down, challenging. Technically the place is called a hostel, these days, but given that the walls of each room don’t reach the ceiling, it’s not hard to figure out what it used to look like.
“Wrens shouldn’t be in a cage,” Lexi says decidedly.
“Wait, it’s like the bird,” Rian says, with a blink of realization, and suddenly he tilts his head and looks at him, really looks at him so hard he can feel it and says, “Wren. Of course it is.”
And like that, it sticks. Wren sits up, newly named and not at all, careful not to disturb Lexi and offers Rian a thoughtful smile. “Of course?”
Lexi seems to agree with this assessment. “It suits you.” She looks at Rian and it’s a capital L sort of look, a long one. It’s not the kind Rian has just given him, the deep investigatory kind that pries into crevices, but it’s still something else Wren wants suddenly to be a part of, some kind of intense silent communication. “We’re keeping you,” she says abruptly, casually, and gets up.
Wren glances at Rian. “What just happened?”
“You heard her,” Rian says and shrugs as if he had nothing to do with that.
---
And afterwards:
"It's probably cursed."
