Page 8 of The Herlequin: Pitch & Sickle 6

Pitch folded his arms across his chest in one tight, controlled movement. ‘I beg your pardon?’

The lad crumpled, sitting heavily on Edward’s bed, laying the man’s hand down gently in his lap. ‘I’m sorry. That was unfair. I am just so tired…’

Pitch’s fingers twitched, and he considered for a fleeting moment putting a reassuring hand upon the lad’s shoulder. Luckily the nonsense idea fled before it could embarrass him, but he was gentler when he spoke. ‘Yes, well, none of us have had an easy time of it.’ He’d not say so aloud, but the fact that Charlie, after all he’d endured, was not as wrecked as those patients at the Fulbourn was impressive. Perhaps it was Ottelie’s forest magick, or the ghost of the angel in the man he clearly cared for, giving him strength. Perhaps Charlie was just very used to fighting to protect himself. ‘You’re a stubbornly resilient thing, aren’t you? Silas thinks you remarkably brave for staying true to your preference for’– he sent a vague wave the lad’s way– ‘a man’s life over a woman’s.’

Charlie shook his head. ‘It is not a preference. It is simply what should have been. What is. I don’t expect you to understand.’

‘Don’t expect me to understand a desire to have been made a different way? No. I don’t suppose I could ever understand that.’

Charlie glanced away. He stroked an errant hair away from Edward’s sweaty neck. The lieutenant’s normally clean-cut hair was straggly and longer than Pitch knew the man preferred. ‘I’m sorry –’

He sighed. ‘Gods, I already have one man in my life who apologises too much. I don’t need another. Are you recovered from the Fulbourn…the tree and all?’

It was a stalling tactic, but Charlie did not challenge him on it. ‘Well as can be expected, I suppose.’ He tugged at his cuff, hiding the bracelet. ‘There are a few aches and pains still, but who does not have them after that place?’

Pitch grunted, a vague acknowledgement of the understatement.

‘What of yourself, Tobias?’

‘Fine. I’m really not so delicate as a certain ankou would treat me. The man is a fiendish coddler.’

Charlie’s smile reached one side of his mouth only, tired as he was. ‘I will not disagree with you there. If Silas asks Bess one more time when I can be moved somewhere safer, I think I shall clobber him. I know it must be far worse for you. Can you even take a piss without him worrying?’

‘Only if I pissonhim. Which he really doesn’t seem to mind.’

‘Oh Jesus Christ,’ Charlie cried, a grimace and a smile contorting his lips. Pitch’s intentional vulgarity working its dubious charms. ‘You really are appalling.’

‘Says the one who invaded my privacy terribly, not a half hour ago.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, I shall pay for that mistake the rest of my life. I am scarred deeply, I assure you.’

‘Come now, we both know what you’ll do with that memory when next you are in your bed alone.’

Laughing softly, Charlie glanced down at Edward. The lieutenant’s eyes darted beneath his lids, his fingers twitching as though he were typing out a manic Morse code. Charlie caressed his hand, and at once Edward sighed, the tension in his body easing.

‘You are fond of him,’ Pitch said quietly.

It didn’t need to be a question. Charlie looked on Edward with far more than a doctor’s concern for a patient.

‘I am.’

‘You barely know the man.’

‘I’m not sure that matters.’ Charlie spoke softly, touching a fingertip to a bead of sweat running along Edward’s cheek. ‘But we had some time….before all this…to share some pints and conversation…and I couldn’t remember when I’d last felt so at ease, so very sure I did not wish to be anywhere else.’ His gaze flicked to Pitch. ‘You know how that is, I’m certain. You soften when you are with Silas.’

Pitch had leaned in to listen, but now he took a firm step backwards. ‘Gods, I’m not a soufflé. We have been forced into each other’s company. Fortunately he’s not a terrible man to be stuck with. Nor to fuck. As you would know.’ He wasn’t sure if he’d kept the brittleness off those last few words.

Cornflower-blue eyes fixed on him. ‘Tobias, there is no competition between us when it comes to Silas.’

‘Is there not?’ Pitch bit the inside of his cheek, abhorring how readily Charlie had seen through his charade.

The lad regarded him, freckles bright on pale skin. ‘Did that flame of yours fry a part of your mind? I know you are astonishingly powerful, but bloody hell, I didn’t think you were so stupid.’

Pitch stared, aghast. ‘Do you have any idea whom you are speaking to?’

‘A daemon with outstanding insecurities who needs his eyes checked. Because if you are missing the way Silas looks at you, then you are in dire need of a monocle at least.’ Charlie stood up while Pitch rather embarrassingly mimicked a carp, mouth opening and closing with no words coming. ‘What is between Silas and I is very different. We shared an instant closeness, I don’t deny that, but we misread it. We were both vulnerable and took the ease between us to mean one thing when it meant another, but by then we’d ventured where we shouldn’t have. I mean that’s not to say sleeping with him was terrible. He is a wonderful–’

‘What is your point, Charlie?’