Really quite a lot

I kept my eyes to the ground all the way home, straining to make out any little glint lit up by the street lamps, in case I’d lost it between his place and mine after I left. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t turn up.

I undressed again and crawled disconsolately under the covers in just my underwear, not bothering with my nightclothes, and lay there thinking about the rook and not sleeping.

It startled me at first, when quite a long time later I heard someone fumbling with my lock, and then the sound of a key falling on the floor outside, and Curry swearing lightly under his breath. At this I climbed out of bed, since I wasn’t asleep anyway, and tossed my thin dressing gown on so I could go let him in. I opened the door to him crouched on the floor looking for the key.

“Shit. I didn’t mean to wake you up,” he said, slurring a little.

“You didn’t. Here, come in.” I gave him a hand up, then stooped and picked up the key. “What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked once he was inside and I’d shut the door and relocked it and given him back his key.

Curry braced himself against the wall to keep himself from swaying while he put it away in his pocket, then gave me a crooked little smile. “I just really missed you tonight. I know. It’s outrageous. The middle of the night. What an appalling overstep.”

“Maybe if it was anybody but you,” I told him, taking him by the elbow and leading him over to my bed, since I wasn’t sure how much longer he was going to stay upright like this. “Just how much did you have to drink tonight, anyway?”

“A lot,” he said, sitting down heavily on the bed and fixing his eyes on the dying fireplace. “Really quite a lot.”

I sat next to him. “What started that? You didn’t look drunk at all when I left the pub.”

He shrugged. “Just… one of those nights?”

“What happened after I left?”

“Tell you in a minute. Can I lie down? Do you mind?”

“I don’t mind. Just let me get your boots and cloak.”

I knelt on the floor and began picking at his boot laces, then felt a gentle touch as Curry patted me on the head. “You’re really nice to me, Fuzzy.”

“It’s not a big deal,” I said, since I didn’t feel very nice after having lost his special necklace tonight.

I had just gotten the first boot off and started on the second, when he asked, “What if we never went to the academy?”

“What do you mean, Mag?” There was a knot on the second lace that looked like it had gotten soaked through earlier with melted snow and then dried and tightened up, and I was half-distracted, still unpicking that.

I paid only partial attention while he made a little hmm sound and then considered what he meant and how he wanted to explain it to me, and while I managed to get the knot loosened with my fingernails. I undid the laces and pulled the second boot off, then took both boots and his cloak over to where I kept my own such articles. Curry was still sitting up when I crossed back to him. “You want to lie down? Or did you feel like talking first?”

“Let’s lean against the wall,” he decided. “Split the difference.”

I shoved the bed pillows up against the wall and made a place for him to get comfortable, then when he moved over there, sat next to him on the edge of the bed. “What were you going to tell me before? About the academy?”

“Mm. Nothing. Never mind. Just rambling.”

“Do you still want to tell me about tonight?”

“Not a lot to tell, I guess. I went home with that blonde-haired girl.”

“The elf? How was that?” I asked, even though I had a feeling the answer was, not great, since he was about as drunk off his tits as I’d ever seen him, and at my place instead of hers.

He sighed. “Well. She had very very nice breasts. And she wasn’t lazy in bed. The sex was, you know, pretty good overall. But then after.” Curry fell silent for a long enough moment that I looked up to see whether he’d drifted off. But he was only considering his words. “She just kept talking... about nothing, and I realized that was all she’d done all night, and that her personality was just… terrible. And she was mean about the people she was saying absolutely nothing about.”

“We talk about nothing,” I pointed out. “And we’re—well, maybe not you, but Bag and I—we’re plenty mean about people.”

“Yeah, but you’re being funny. She wasn’t even doing it to be entertaining,” he said with an expression of troubled distaste. “She thought she was witty and superior but it just made me sad.”

“So how come that made you drink yourself half blind?”

He shrugged. “Maybe you and I are both having some kind of midlife crisis right now. Let me think on it before I try to explain. What was your night like?”

“Oh. Well. I have a confession that’s been making me miserable all night. That’s why I wasn’t asleep when you got here.”

“A confession for me?” He sounded confused.

“Yeah. Ugh. I lost your rook necklace somewhere tonight. I even went back to his and we looked all over. It’s just gone.” I let out a shaky breath, then concluded, “I'm really sorry, Mag. I feel so incredibly awful about it.”

“Oh, honey,” Curry said, then scooted over to the middle to make room for me. “No. Come up here. Don’t feel bad. It’s fine. We’ll get you another.”

“But your mum gave that one to you.”

“Aw, I know, Fuzzy. But it’s all right. I promise it’s fine. Definitely not worth you feeling bad about it. The memory it stirs is what matters, not the thing itself. We’ll get another,” he said again, motioning for me to come up on the bed with him.

Curry put his arm out and waited while I made sure my dressing robe was tied properly, then let me lean against the wall with him, using his arm and shoulder for a headrest. “Before that, though. The rest of your night.”

“Disappointing for kind of the exact opposite reason as yours. I had fun talking to him at the pub. And then we got back to his place and—I mean. If he was a complete ass I’d have felt no reservation about simply never seeing him again, except I sort of liked his company, so now I’m left wondering, if I stuck with him a little while for the conversation, can he ever rise above being, pretty much all right, not too altogether terrible, mostly fine, at sex?”

“Ouch,” Curry said, with a wincing sort of expression. “Poor—what’s his name? Ronald?”

“Roland. And yeah. I mean, I’ve had worse shags. Obviously. He wasn’t the kind of bad who thinks he can make up for it by taking charge and just being more aggressive with his mediocrity. Or the kind of bad who brags throughout. Or where you don’t get to finish at all. But it was… not exactly good, either. It’s not that I’m grading him down for being inexperienced. He got a lot of stuff right and he paid attention. But like, I’m also not looking to take on a project, you know? It seems stupid to train my fling, just so he can be better at fucking other women in the future.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I didn’t kick him to the curb. But I tried to prepare him for disappointment. So I could think it over.”

“How’d he take that?”

“Not the least bit shitty. He said thanks for being honest. I said thanks for not being a prick about me not having a good answer after knowing him for three whole hours. He said, well I did warn him before I only wanted a casual thing. Said it was fun. Totally good-natured about it. I mean really, he said one hundred percent everything a man could possibly correctly say to salvage a mediocre sexual performance. Which, hardly anybody has ever managed to swing that in my experience, so. You know. Obviously now I’m at a total loss what the fuck to do with him.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you chilly?” I asked him. “I can stir up the fire.”

Curry shook his head. “Unless you are.”

“Not right now. You put off so much heat I could sleep in an ice house if you were next to me.”

“I think you’re the only person I’ve ever shared a bed with and don't sleep shitty,” Curry mused. “Maybe that’s ‘cause you run cold and I run hot.”

“Me too. For me it might also be that I don’t usually dream about Lydell when you’re there.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you stopped having those dreams years ago,” he said, curling his arm around me and giving me a little squeeze.

“Mostly I did. Only sometimes. If I’ve been under a lot of strain, say.”

“Like lately?”

I shrugged. “Some, maybe. Not so bad.”

Curry nodded vaguely.

“Do you still want to tell me about your mid-life crisis thing?” I asked after a short silence.

He shrugged. “It feels like such fraught territory.”

I looked up at him, puzzled. “I don’t think I follow.”

He considered for a moment before speaking. “I’m starting to feel a little like I shouldn’t think too hard right now about what I want from life? Or maybe like, I shouldn’t admit my thoughts aloud? Else they might become more real and I might wind up contemplating some dramatic gulfs between those and reality. And stack enough of those, eventually maybe they make life totally unrecognizable. And I don’t exactly know how to do anything other than what I’m doing now. That probably doesn’t make any sense,” he rumbled, half to himself.