Bound by the Moon

Breakfast and Bargains

Elara didn't sleep well, but that was nothing new.

The inn room was clean and warm, and the woman at the front desk broad-shouldered, silver-streaked hair, eyes that seemed to see several things at once had handed her a key without question when Elara said Caelum Drave's name. Something had flickered across the woman's face. Not surprise. More like satisfaction.

In the morning, Elara sat at the small table by the window with a cup of tea and made a list, because lists were how she kept the panic at a manageable distance.

One: find work. Two: find an apartment that doesn't require first and last month's rent up front, which is apparently illegal to ask for but everyone does it anyway. Three: pay Caelum Drave back before he can decide the debt buys him anything.

She underlined three twice.

A knock at the door.

She opened it to find him holding a paper bag and two cups of coffee, looking no less unreasonably tall in daylight than he had in moonlight.

"I didn't order breakfast," she said.

"I'm aware. I brought it anyway." He held up the bag slightly, as if presenting evidence. "The inn doesn't serve breakfast on Thursdays."

"How do you know it's always Thursday when the inn skips breakfast?"

"Because I own the inn."

She stared at him. "You own the inn you sent me to for free."

"I own several things in this town. It's a small town." He said it like it explained nothing, which it didn't, and like he knew that, which was somehow worse. "May I come in, or are we doing this in the hallway?"

She stepped back, mostly because she hadn't yet worked out an argument against it and didn't want to invent one badly.

He set the bag and cups on the table and pulled out the chair across from hers without waiting to be asked, which she noted and decided not to comment on.

"I don't need you bringing me breakfast," she said, sitting across from him.

"I know you don't need it. I brought it anyway."

"That's not really how needing things works."

"No," he agreed. "It's how wanting to do something for someone works. Different verb entirely."

She narrowed her eyes at him. He didn't look away, which most people did when she gave them that particular look it had ended arguments with landlords, supervisors, and at least one ex-boyfriend who'd deserved considerably worse than a look.

"You're going to keep doing this," she said. "Whatever this is."

"Bringing you coffee?"

"Showing up. Being unreasonably accommodating. Making it difficult to say no to things."

"I could stop," he offered, entirely unconvincing.

"You won't."

"Probably not."

She opened the paper bag instead of responding, because she didn't trust what would come out of her mouth next, and found a still-warm croissant and a small pot of jam. Something in her chest loosened the tight, careful knot she kept wound around her ribcage at all times and she looked down at the croissant so he wouldn't see it.

"Elara." His voice dropped slightly. "I have a cottage on the eastern edge of my estate. It's been empty two years. You're welcome to it while you find your feet."

"Absolutely not."

"You haven't heard the terms."

"I don't need to hear the terms. The terms are: I take your charity, and then I owe you, and I don't do owing people." She said it fast, like ripping off a plaster. "I've managed my whole life without "

"It's not charity. I'll charge you rent." He said it simply, like he'd anticipated this exact objection and built the offer to survive it. "Whatever you can manage. If that's twenty dollars a month, it's twenty dollars a month. I'd rather have a tenant in it than an empty building."

She opened her mouth. Closed it.

"That's a real arrangement," she said slowly, testing it for the trap she was certain was hiding somewhere inside it. "Not a favour."

"A real arrangement. With a lease, if it would make you feel better. I'll have one drawn up."

"You'd do that. Draw up an actual lease. For a cottage you're basically giving away."

"I told you. I'd rather have rent than an empty cottage." A pause, and something almost like humour in it. "You're welcome to negotiate the terms, if it helps."

She studied him for a long moment, searching his face for the angle the thing behind the thing, the expectation dressed up as generosity that she'd learned to spot from a hundred feet away. She found nothing. Just those pale grey eyes, patient and entirely unbothered by how long she was taking to decide.

"Fine," she said. "Twenty dollars a month. And I want it in writing."

"I'll have it ready by this afternoon."

"And I'm not grateful," she added, somewhat unnecessarily.

"I never said you had to be."

She broke the croissant in half and set one piece in front of him without quite deciding to. He looked at it, then at her, and something in his expression shifted brief, unguarded, gone before she could properly name it.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay," he agreed, and picked up the croissant, and she thought, not for the first time and not with any particular logic, that the moon had looked very large the night before.

Large, and somehow close.

Like it had been watching, and was satisfied with what it saw.

He left before nine, and Elara spent the rest of the morning doing the thing she always did after accepting help she hadn't asked for: working twice as hard to prove she didn't need it.

She walked into town with her résumé folded into a clean square in her bag three years of diner experience, a string of part-time jobs before that, nothing impressive but nothing dishonest either and started at the top of Cresthaven's small main street and worked her way down.

The bakery wasn't hiring. The hardware store's owner looked at her like she'd asked something faintly absurd. The bookshop had a sign in the window that said help wanted, which felt promising right up until the woman behind the counter explained, not unkindly, that the position had been filled that morning.

"Sorry," the woman said. "You're new in town?"

"Sort of." Elara had lived in Cresthaven her whole life, technically, but it didn't feel worth explaining. "Do you know anyone hiring?"

The woman's eyes did something quick and assessing, the way half the town's eyes had done since she'd walked in a once-over that lingered a half-second too long, like she was being catalogued against information Elara didn't have access to.

"You're the one staying out at the Drave estate," the woman said. Not a question.

Elara's spine straightened. "I'm renting a cottage. There's a lease."

"Didn't say there wasn't." The woman held up both hands, mild. "Small town. People talk. Doesn't mean anything by it."

"It sounded like it meant something."

"It didn't." The woman softened, something almost sympathetic crossing her face. "Try the Marble Street inn. They're always short-staffed, and Greta won't care whose cottage you're sleeping in. She'll care if you can carry four plates at once."

Elara thanked her and left before the conversation could circle back to anything resembling pity, which she had a finely tuned radar for and absolutely no patience to receive.

Greta the same broad-shouldered woman from the front desk, it turned out, with the same eyes that seemed to track several things at once looked Elara over with considerably less subtlety than the bookshop owner had managed.

"Diner experience," Greta said, reading the résumé without picking it up off the counter. "Three years. Why'd you leave?"

"Fired. Register came up short. Wasn't me, but I wasn't going to argue with a man who'd already made up his mind."

Greta looked up at that, something flickering behind her expression that might have been approval. "Most people lead with the part where it wasn't them."

"Most people are hoping you'll believe them. I don't particularly care if you do." Elara held her gaze. "I can carry four plates. I can carry six, if you don't mind a little ego involved in proving it."

Something that might have been the beginning of a smile moved across Greta's face, there and contained almost as quickly as it arrived. "Start Monday. Breakfast shift."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. The breakfast shift here makes your old diner look gentle." Greta was already turning away, already done with the conversation in the brisk, economical way Elara recognised from people who ran rooms instead of waiting for permission to run them. Then, without turning back: "You're staying in the Drave cottage."

It wasn't a question this time either. Elara felt the same defensive flare rise in her chest, the same readiness to draw a hard line around the word renting.

"There's a lease," she said again, evenly.

"I know. He had it drawn up by an actual lawyer in town, not some handshake arrangement." Greta glanced back, and whatever was in her face now wasn't gossip and wasn't pity. It was something more careful than either. "That's not nothing, where he's concerned."

"What does that mean?"

"Means what it means. Monday, seven a.m. Don't be late, and don't expect me to go easy on you because you've got somewhere fancy to walk home to." Greta disappeared into the back before Elara could decide whether to be irritated or curious, and found, by the time she'd left the inn and started back up Marble Street, that she was thoroughly both.

She told Caelum about the job that evening, mostly because she didn't have anyone else to tell, and partly though she wasn't ready to examine this part too closely because she'd wanted to see his face when she said it.

He was at the cottage gate when she arrived, which she hadn't expected and didn't ask about.

"Greta hired me," she said. "Breakfast shift. Starting Monday."

"Good." He said it simply, without the performance of surprise or the over-warm congratulations she'd half-braced for. "She's exacting. You'll do well there."

"You don't sound surprised."

"I'm not. I've watched you argue a landlord into a lease he didn't ask for and negotiate rent downward on a property you wanted to refuse outright. Greta will like you for exactly the reasons most people find you difficult."

Elara opened her mouth to object to difficult, found she couldn't entirely, and closed it again.

"That's not a compliment," she said instead.

"It was meant as one." He looked at her steadily, the porch light catching the pale grey of his eyes. "Goodnight, Elara."

"Goodnight, Caelum."

She let herself into the cottage and stood for a moment with her back against the closed door, turning the day over the job, the lease, the way half the town already seemed to know her business before she'd told them any of it. She didn't know yet how much of Cresthaven's quiet, watchful attention had anything to do with what Caelum was, rather than simply who he was.

She only knew that something about all of it, instead of frightening her the way uninvited attention usually did, had begun, very faintly, to feel like being looked after.

She wasn't ready to call it anything more than that.