Robin considered Lucas’ mouth before meeting his gaze again. “You should be petted. I’ve thought that a lot. And that you should wear things made by hand with love. Although, you look good like this, half-dressed and all.” Robin sighed. “I’m just talking. I’m always talking around you.”
“Yes,” Lucas agreed quietly. “You said what you said too.”
“Did I?” Robin mostly remembered yelling at him because Lucas had been standing in the middle of a storm just asking to be…
“You’re shaking worse now.” Lucas broke into Robin’s thoughts, worried. Robin must have been shivering something fierce to make Lucas take hold of his hands again.
Robin didn’t mind. Lucas clasped his wrists and tugged Robin’s hands to his shoulders and said, “You need to get out of those jeans,” so seriously that Robin nearly laughed.
“It’s because I’m nervous,” Robin informed him, voice high when Lucas’ hands moved over his waist and then his hips, pushing the jeans down. He curled his fingers into Lucas’ shoulders. Lucas was dry already and warm again, which wasn’t fair but nothing ever was. “No, it’s not nerves,” Robin corrected himself, stepping out of his jeans when asked to and assuming from Lucas’ silence that his boxers must be plastered to his body. “It just feels like nerves. Heart in my ears. Stomach gets cold. Thoughts go too fast. Which is strange because I can make you breakfast and it feels so normal.”
“Blessing.” Lucas moved the jeans onto the bricks of the fireplace, then raised his head. “You…”
“Like an old married couple,” Robin finished. “Remember?”
“Remember?” The eyebrow and a half drew together, then separated. Lucas’ appealing mouth curved up with the hint of a smile before he made it vanish. “You need to warm up and get some sleep. Other things can wait. They’ve waited this long already.”
Robin didn’t like the sound of that, mostly because he didn’t understand it. “Cryptic druid bullshit,” he decided. “You knew where the lightning would strike.”
He wasn’t asking. Lucas nodded anyway, looking wary.
“And you know that if I Looked, I wouldn’t find your death? Not for years?” Robin went on.
“Blessing….”
“Stop sayingBlessinglike that unless you’re also going to sayRobinlike that and put your arms around me!” Robin would have stamped his foot if he wouldn’t have fallen over. “Do you get nervous when you see me?” he asked in the stunned silence, then held his breath.
Lucas frowned but nodded again.
Robin dropped his head to exhale in relief, then found himself caught between smiling and yelling some more. Maybe he was delirious with exhaustion.
“Let’s go to bed,” he suggested at last, and looked up. “I’m tired and cold, and bed seems better than standing here.” But he brushed his knuckles against Lucas’ cheek as if to prove himself a liar. “I’m not well, you know,” Robin admitted, turning his hand to continue gently touching Lucas’ face. “I don’t even think… I don’t know if I could seduce you now, if you want that.” Not that Robin had ever seduced anyone, but if he were going to try, it would be with Lucas. Not tonight, however. “Soul sickness, Mallory said. Depression, your sister said. I… I’m just tired, and maybe I don’t know what I’m doing, and it allisas dire as you thought and...”
“I scared you out there.” Lucas stopped him, tone understanding. “And you want someone here with you.”
Robin had a vague memory of threatening to slap Lucas silly.
He scowled for half a second. “No, I wantyouhere. I wouldn’t ask your mother to cuddle up with me, now would I?”
“She’d send me in to do it anyway,” Lucas remarked after a pause, dry, like this was funny. He was serious again in no time at all. “Bossy, Bless—Robin.”
Robin swept his fingertips down Lucas’ nose and, just for a moment, touched his mouth, which softened before his eyes.
“I’m not actually bossy,” Robin insisted. “You don’t have to listen to me. There’s nothing to make you.”
“And yet,” Lucas said, still dry.
“And yet,” Robin echoed, wondering. “So you will?”
“You have to change out of your wet clothes,” Lucas pointed out, feather-light. “And I’ll need to get something from the guest room.”
“I’ll be tempted to kiss you,” Robin confessed for the sake of honesty. “But I’ll resist. I don’t want you uncomfortable.”
The corners of Lucas’ eyes crinkled with real amusement. “You’ll be asleep before you’ll think to try.”
Unfortunately, he wasn’t wrong. “I really don’t deserve you around. None of us do.”
Lucas took Robin’s hand by the wrist and held it where it was, the tip of Robin’s finger almost against his lips. “You only say that because you don’t see what I see. Get ready for bed, and I’ll join you in a moment.”
