Resonant

Chapter 14

Fen

"I need some pizza," I said as soon as Luin opened his front door.

It was eight in the morning, and I had caught Luin in his pajamas. He rubbed at his eyes a little before fixing a bleary gaze on me. He pouted a little, and I remembered that he really didn't like mornings.

"Come in," Luin finally sighed. "Arrowan's cooking breakfast. It's not pizza, but it'll taste good anyway."

Luin collapsed back on his couch as soon as he made it far enough into the living room. In the same motion, he rolled so he was facing the back of it and pulled a blanket over his head.

Perhaps it was too early to have come visiting, but my first class of the day was at nine and I really needed someone to talk to. And some pizza.

Since Luin was obviously not ready for company yet, I sought out his bond mate, Arrowan, in the kitchen. He had oatmeal in a pan in front of him and was measuring milk.

"I'm getting pizza. What kind do you want?" I asked.

"At..." He checked the time and raised his brows. "Eight AM on a Tuesday?"

"It's five PM in Italy," I pointed out. I knew, because I had looked it up.

"Right. Well, any kind sounds good?" Arrowan said it like it was a question.

He didn't get it, obviously. In the past when I really needed to talk to someone, Luin had been there with pizza and conversation and I'd walked away feeling like I might actually be able to handle whatever problem I was facing. It was a system that worked, and I didn't see any reason it shouldn't work in the morning, too. Whoever decided pizza wasn't a breakfast food, anyway?

At least Arrowan was going along with the pizza thing, even if he wasn't completely on board. "I'll be right back," I said.

Only, it wasn't as simple as I expected, popping into Italy and getting a pizza. The first barrier was the language. I had looked up a pizza shop on my phone this morning and figured I'd be fine getting there after taking a look at its general location on a map and looking at pictures of the street. Only, teleporting in unfamiliar places is hard and I ended up somewhere I didn't recognize and unable to read the street signs around me.

I tried asking someone on the street for directions, but the first two people I spoke with had very little English, and what they had was broken and heavily accented.

Then, I finally made it to the shop only to realize there was an obvious flaw in my plan: I only had American dollars. And at this point, even if I had the right currency, I wasn't sure there was even time to order a pizza, wait for it to be finished, and have time to eat it before class. I was due to teach in half an hour.

So, I admitted defeat and went back to Luin and Arrowan's kitchen. Arrowan raised a brow at my pizza-less appearance, but didn't comment. He just went to the cabinet and pulled out three bowls, then scooped some oatmeal into each one from where it had been warming on the stove.

"Luin, breakfast!" he called.

"Does that actually work?" I asked dubiously. Luin had seemed pretty adamant on going back to sleep.

Luin groaned loudly from the other room and Arrowan smiled fondly. "He just needs a minute. We can start without him, he won't mind."

So we sat at the little table in their kitchen and I stared into my oatmeal that was not a pizza, then looked at the man across from me who was not my best friend. It seemed sort of fitting that I couldn't even wallow right. No wonder Zale didn't bother to include me on big decisions. He must have seen from the start that I couldn't handle things on my own.