“I know. I know.” Robin waved the blanket again. “Natural and yet ridiculous, since I can talk to my dead ancestors as many other people can’t. I can feel them in the house. I can see my aunts and their husbands and their lovers and my grandmother and everyone else in the curtains and the rugs and the doilies. I’ve got their recipes, and their stories, and closets full of their work. Their pictures on the walls. All of their things still in their rooms. But I miss them. I couldn’t miss them before because I was working, and trying to keep them healthy, and caring for them as they died, and keeping the business going. I wasworking, and now Ican’t, and… it feels very stupid, mourning people years later.”
“They’d want you to be happy. And to be happy again, you’re going to have to rest. I’m sorry.” Lucas put a hand on Robin’s knee, warm through the blanket. “But you do know that now? And that the best way to remember them is to be as well as you can, and live?”
“I do know that,” Robin said, but sniffily and a bit sulkily. He took a deep breath. “They weren’t even upset with me for not using my gift. They never even asked me why.” They’d probably been afraid that Robin would run away like his father had doneif they pressed him in any way. “You never have, either.” He turned his head so their eyes would meet. “I lived in a house full of older relatives and the shadows of the long dead, who had often perished under gruesome circumstances. Do you know what I See when I look at their shades directly? What I would See when I tried for a glimpse of the future of my living relatives? Even their familiars… I couldn’t….”
Robin dragged in another breath. “It is, for some reason, my destiny to know when the people I care about will die and how they will die. It’s yours to have some great purpose and stand alone for it. It sucks," he summed it up neatly, sniffly once again but not crying.
“Did it make it easier for you in the end?”
A hard question in a soft voice.
Robin shrugged. “I was with them all,” he admitted slowly. “That’s no small thing.”
“Oh, Blessing.”
They all kept saying that.
“Yes, I suppose it did,” Robin agreed, half-serious. He tugged his hand from the blanket so he could hold onto Lucas’. It was a good hand to hold; their fingers laced together without any fuss. “You’re fortunate with your family. Death will happen of course, there is no avoiding it. But at least they’re younger. And soon your siblings will add on to the family, start their own branches.”
“Not me?” The question could have been teasing, but Robin didn’t think so.
He glanced over. “I haven’t Looked and you know it.” The haughty response was automatic but he regarded Lucas earnestly. “Do you want to know? If you really want me to, I can.”
The wind must have picked up. Robin shivered, even in his blanket, and couldn’t seem to stop. He didn’t want to witness Lucas having another horrible accident, or staying a lonely bachelor forever while his family members married and had occasion for joy. He didn’t want to watch Lucas die. He could bear Lucas finding someone, if that’s what Lucas wanted, but thinking of it didn’t help him stop shivering.
“Drink your coffee while it’s still warm,” Lucas advised, no-nonsense and gentle. He watched Robin drain his cup of hazelnut-vanilla something or other, then waited for Robin to tuck himself back into his blanket cocoon. “No,” he responded to Robin’s questions at last. “There is so much I see that I’m willing to be surprised for myself. Anyway, some things I already know, although knowing doesn’t always mean understanding. It’s frustrating.” He really did sound irritated, his soothing voice rough for just a moment. “To have a path like this… like yours. I wonder a lot what good is it for them, for me, to be this person. I just wanted to learn. I didn’t ask for this. Fate might whisper to me, but at best the knowledge only guides. I believe that you have a purpose as much as I do, and you will act as you can and as you will, and it’s my pleasure to help you, but I’m not looking to your gift for answers for me personally. I’m content to wait. I wasn’t at first, but I’ve learned to be.”
Lucas was wise. That was part of what it meant to be Lucas.
He also liked to help. More people should let him.
“Youhavehelped me.” Robin smiled for it. “Your family adore you, too, obviously. And you… didn’t need to bother with me, but you have. Hopefully it hasn’t been too awful, or boring. And I should stop falling asleep on you soon. I mean, that’s the plan.”
Robin paused when this was met with silence.
“Not that I’ve fallen asleeponyou,” he corrected himself. “Unless I did?” He jerked back at the thought, knocking into his empty cup, and Lucas reached for it before Robin could disentangle himself from the blanket.
Lucas set the cup carefully onto the arm of the bench and Robin looked up before Lucas had leaned back all the way. Lucas’ hand slid to Robin’s knee. For balance, probably. Robin didn’t particularly care why, or mind it.
He didn’t know what he felt, frozen and still except for faint shivers he couldn’t banish, his knee warm, his focus on Lucas’ mouth.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought about kissing Lucas before, seventeen-year-old Robin certainly had, many, many times, and hadn’t stopped with kissing. It was maybe that Lucas stayed where he was, pressed in close, growing warmer by the second, letting Robin look or feel or imagine.
Preposterous, to seriously consider if Lucas would mind hazelnut-vanilla on Robin’s breath, if he thought Robin was too much of a mess to bother with even if he wouldn’t say so, to think about holding Lucas’ face and gently turning it so they could kiss where any Greysmith might find them. Yet that’s what Robin did until a sound came from inside the house.
A harmless bump and then laughter, as if someone had fallen down but not been hurt enough for it to be serious, and now had to deal with his sister’s amusement.
Lucas pulled away, taking his warmth and his hand with him, then stood up. “I have something to finish before it gets any darker,” he said, frowning again. “And you should go in before it gets colder.”
“And that wasn’t him pushing?” Robin asked the question after Lucas had been off the porch and out of sight for severalminutes. Itwasgetting dark. Funny that Robin hadn’t noticed. He got to his feet, pausing to adjust the blanket and grab his empty cup, then to stare without seeing at the tea Lucas had left behind.
They could have kissed. Or, he could have kissed Lucas and he suspected Lucas would have let him, possibly just out of curiosity or loneliness or friendship. There was nothing wrong with any of those options. Yet theyfeltwrong. Robin might kiss for those reasons, but he wasn’t sure Lucas would. Lucas had waited, possibly to see what Robin would do, or say, and Robin hadn’t done or said anything.
Maybe Lucas thought he was meant to be alone. Or he’d seen signs that Robin was destined to be with someone else and felt strange about kissing him now. Lucas got clues but he didn’t always understand them, he’d said.
Robin exhaled heavily. Or maybe Lucas had just been nervous and careful because his family was a few steps away.
“It sucks,” Robin said again, to himself, to any listening spirits, to the single raven still on the porch with him. “I forgot how it feels to have people around.” More and more threads popping up, rolls and skeins in every color and possibility. What was he supposed to do with them all?
