Less sexy than it sounds at first blush

“Soo… hey,” Curry said, coming back from the bar and leaning on our high table some hour-or-so later.

“Hey, you. Want another pint?” I asked. “Or… do you want to go?” I was pretty sure Baggett and I were both fine with it if we just all left and then resumed our aggravating, not-overtly-hostile, nebulous carping after the weekend.

“Oh—well, that wasn’t exactly it,” he said, and something in his posture read a bit funny to me so I ignored the lofty good humor with which Baggett seemed to regard my every interaction with Curry and gave my partner my full attention.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Nothing.” He hesitated. “I was just trying to decide if you’d be all right on your own, if I called it a night.” He looked doubtfully at me.

I glanced behind him to where a tall, pretty elfish girl several high tables over was eyeing him while smiling and whispering to her friend. Curry flushed pink straight up to his hairline.

I glanced at Baggett without really meaning to, and we shared a grudging look of amusement, which wasn’t quite common ground, but wasn’t not, either.

“We’ll be fine,” Baggett answered for me, confirming my assumption that our night would wind up quick without Curry there to glue everything together. “You go have your fun, young lad.”

“Who the fuck are you young-ladding?” I asked. “Are you even thirty yet?”

“Hush down now, young lass,” Baggett advised me.

For anyone else, I would have laughed. For him, I kept my face neutral.

“Are you sure, though?” Curry addressed the question directly to me. “I won’t go, if you’d rather.”

I stifled the impulse to chuck him on the shoulder, so his girl wouldn’t see and get the wrong idea. “Gods, Mag,” I said, only partly for show, because he was making me look like kind of a controlling fucking shrew in front of Baggett. “I’m sure. Have fun, yeah? I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He gave me a funny, bashful little smile. “All right. Well, see you then. Have a good night.”

“Sure,” I agreed, even though the rest of my night was probably going to amount to finishing this pint and staying out of the way once I got home, since Nan was hosting her ladies’ club tonight which meant that the front room would be full of slightly drunk old women eating too much cake and laughing when they beat each other at dominoes.

When I turned back to our table Baggett had just finished rolling a cigarette between his long, deft fingers. He licked one finger and wet the paper to seal it, then put his tobacco pouch away and leaned in to the small table lantern for a light. “So, does he always secure your explicit permission before getting his dick wet?” he asked me, with one brow raised in wry curiosity as he took a long pull and held it in.

I didn’t bother rolling my eyes. “This tasteful spirit of inquiry I’ve learned to expect from you in the last week,” I told him instead, reaching over and taking the cigarette, “makes for curious predictions in my mind, concerning how you and I will fare when our sweet-natured Magnus Curry isn’t immediately at hand to mediate everything into sunshine and rainbows.” I took a long drag and handed him his smoke back. “It also begs the question of why an unpartnered bastard like you thinks he can tell the difference between asking permission and simple courtesy,” I added in a voice made odd-sounding by holding the smoke in.

We exhaled in unison. “Fair enough,” Baggett said. “It’s partly that the gossip about you two wonder kids is a **** unto itself,” he observed before taking another drag. “I thought people liked talking shit about Lamb and Ladd, but fuck.”

“You trying to ask me something?” I inquired pointedly.

This time he actually offered me the cigarette. I took it.

“Only half-assedly,” he said. “Am I pissing you off?”

I took my turn, then passed it back, shaking my head. “Not really,” I said on a long exhale. “But I’m guessing the truth will disappoint, if you go in for that shit. We're not fucking. No love child. Not secretly married. Not connected to anybody important. Not undercover IG. Any others I haven’t heard yet that want dispelling?”

Baggett grinned. “That covers the most credible-adjacent big ones. Is it true you live together?”

“Yeah,” I said. “With his seventy-two year old grandmother. Believe it or not that's less sexy than it sounds at first blush.”

He laughed aloud at that, which I noted with **** pride. I had figured out this week, not necessarily to my own benefit, that Baggett was one of those people who refused on principle to laugh just because someone had intent to be funny. If he didn’t think a humorous remark passed muster he unobligingly let it hang there brutally unacknowledged, as if expressed in total seriousness. “Nobody smart believes the gossip, anyway,” he said, his expression slightly less shitty. “There was once a diehard rumor going round that I’m a Rookish warlock and that explains my solve rate.”

It only seemed fair that I should laugh too, if he had been so charitable for me. “Wouldn’t a magician harnessing the power of Rava just be another priest?”

Baggett took another long drag. “You have no fucking imagination at all, Bersk,” he said, shaking his head.

When I made no reply to that, he added with a sidelong glance, “Probably because you’re not an idiot.”

Possibly owing to having had two pints, or maybe because this concession from someone who thought everybody was an idiot felt like an overture, I said, “Big words from the guy who kept his mouth shut for three years about the stupid constable he found under a bed she was misguidedly investigating.”

Baggett’s posture changed a little, became incrementally less standoffish. “Most people in the guards only flex their intellect to construct whatever empty reassurances convince them they’d be just as good as us if they had the same unfair, definitely supernatural, advantages we do," he said with a shrug. "At least that constable had some notion she was trying to commit an act of genuine police work.” He passed me back the cigarette without being asked, then eased himself up from the table. “I’m going to hit the head.”

“Want me to get another round?” I asked him, moved to generosity by our strange, unexpected turnaround.

“Not gonna say no, Constable.” Baggett stretched his long, lanky limbs. “Or rather, I meant to say Sergeant-Constable,” he amended with a small grin that surprised me in its inclusiveness, then sauntered in the direction of the privies.

Well, that wasn’t nothing.

I flagged the barmaid down and paid for two more pints, then sat swinging my legs idly from the high stool I was perched on, and wondering whether Baggett was curious to delve into whatever this fledgling not-hating-each-other thing was, or whether he’d call it a night after this round. Perhaps if he did, instead of going back and getting inevitably pounced on and fussed over in Csoglaran by everyone at Nan's ladies’ club, I’d take a leaf from Curry's book and find somebody worth going home with.