a struck link // christopher lightwood {3}

eighteen // darling, won't you ease my worried mind?

Seanan took Gloria for lunch at an Aerated Bread Company store about halfway between the Institute and Castle and therefore not that horribly far away from the Devil Tavern.

"I suppose I should apologize," Seanan said, over sandwiches and tea. "I was a bit stupid back at Anna's."

"No," Gloria said. "No, you weren't. You had boundaries you wanted to set and things you weren't ready for, or maybe places you didn't want this to go, and that's perfectly alright. Your comfort is worth more than my small disappointment."

"Thank you." Seanan's smile was a little sad. She laid out her hand on the table, and closed her fingers around Gloria's when she took it. "I suppose...I think there's a past version of me who might have accepted the offer you made last night but...the last time I loved, truly loved and wanted, not just a flirtation and a few kisses, things got messed up pretty badly and it's left me cautious."

"That's okay. Heartbreak...it does that to you."

"Don't tell me you've had your heart broken, too."

"There...may have been a blue-eyed woman from Cuba who blasted through São Luis on her tour year—why are you looking at me like that?"

"Her name wasn't Paloma."

"It was. Don't tell me she's the one who broke your heart, too."

Seanan made a face. "And made off with one of my favorite shawls. I got it back in the mail some months later with an apology card from a man in Mexico City—apparently she'd tried to gift it to his sister. Who happens to be psychometric."

Gloria couldn't help but laugh a little at that. "Well at least we know some justice was served."

They traded stories from there, as they'd come to do. Gloria found some yarn and they played another game of scratch cradle, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all, that they were grown women and still playing a children's game and having fun doing it, too.

"Follow me back to Berkeley Square?" Seanan offered. "Or would you rather go home?"

"Oh, no, I like that house. And despite your bemoaning of it, I think I would like Taigh Liath, too. I've seen pictures of it, Pluto showed me when I asked about it. They say it's got quite the gothic vibe—I believe the phrase they used was 'dark academia?' At any rate I fully agree with their assessment and I think it looks quite fascinating."

"Hm." Seanan smiled. "You might be able to convince me to develop some fondness for my ancestral home after all."

On the shoe bench in the front foyer of No. 38 Berkeley Square, Gloria rested her back against the white-painted plaster behind her (most of this house was like that, all black and white like ink on paper, a neat little mark of the late Oona Lochlyn's obsession with keeping things clean), and stared into the wide, heavily gilt-framed mirror on the opposite wall.

"Gloria?" Seanan appeared in the doorway to the study, wrapped in another one of her large black shawls (they seemed to swallow her, making her widow-like and pale), eyes wide behind her round glasses. "You're alright?"

"I will be," Gloria answered. She had stopped there, when they reached the house, needing a moment to sit and rest, the trip to Mayfair had been long. Then she'd caught herself in the mirror and her thoughts had taken over. Thoughts of her huge brown eyes, and her tiny, curveless form (she was only four eleven), how girlish they sometimes still made her feel, even at nineteen. Of her fathers, their simple defiance in seeking out someone to birth her, of a world which breathed an unkind sigh of relief when it learned they had chosen each other. Of the boy going downhill too fast on a bicycle that had shattered her hip when she was only eleven. No matter what the best healers could do, there were too many breaks; some shards they just couldn't get back into place. "I suppose I'm more tired than I thought I was."