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There’s something almost bittersweet about watching two strangers lose an entire evening’s revision to something that seems, from where I’m sitting, entirely worth losing it to.

Dark is watching them with an expression I’ve genuinely never seen on him before. Not disapproval. Not amusement. Something closer to pure, unguarded fascination. His head is tilted slightly, as though he’s encountered a phenomenon he’s aware of only in theory and is now attempting, in real time, to understand its practical application. He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t seem to think looking away is required. There’s something almost endearing about how openly he’s staring. Like a man watching a magic trick he fully intends to work out.

“They’re kissing,” I explain, mostly because the silence feels like it needs filling and I can’t think what else to say.

“Yes,” he says.

“I thought you’d know all about kissing. Since Hex and Dis feed on, you know…” I trail off, feeling my face go warm, aware halfway through the sentence that I’ve wandered somewhere I hadn’t quite planned to go. What do I say? Sex? Passion? Desire?

The silence stretches and I realise I’m not going to say anything at all.

Dark turns to look at me properly now, and there’s something careful in it, like he’s deciding how much of an answer the question actually deserves. He weighs the words the way he weighs most things. Slowly, thoroughly, nothing offered before it is ready.

“Hex was cursed,” he says. “Cut off from drawing power normally. Dis was bound, trapped, which does something similar. Both required workarounds. That is what you witnessed.”

“And you’re neither?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“So you don’t need to…” I say slowly. Before realising I’ve waded into the same trap.

“No,” he says again, understanding my awkward silence. “I do not feed. I never have.”

“That’s a shame,” I say, entirely without my permission.

The words land in the air between us, and I feel my whole face go properly hot, mortified. I replay what I’ve just said with the particular horror of hearing your own thought spoken aloud before you’ve had a chance to check it for sense.

He doesn’t answer straight away. He’s watching me with something new in his expression, something I can’t quite name. The silence stretches long enough that I consider, briefly, whether it’s possible to politely die at a library desk.

I wait for the shame to properly arrive. It doesn’t. I sit with the absence of it for a moment, almost surprised, the way you’d check a bruise that has stopped hurting.

Instead, underneath the embarrassment, something else settles quietly into place, plain and undramatic. A soothing acceptance of the truth.

I wouldn’t actually mind feeding him myself. If that were ever something on offer.

And there’s nothing wrong with wanting that. Nobody raised me to flinch from wanting things. The commune was lovely, whatever else people assume about places like it. It was full of warm, well-meaning people who genuinely believed love, in whatever shape it turned up, was something to be embraced rather than managed. Big Brian used to say the body was just another instrument for joy. The same as laughter, or good food, or dancing badly around a bonfire. Nobody ever made me feel that was anything worth being ashamed of. I grew up without the hang-ups most people seem to carry around like extra luggage, and for once, sitting here slightly mortified at my audacity in a library, I’m properly grateful for it.

Across the room, the couple finally comes up for air, laughing at something private, and gathers their things. They leave still tangled together, hands linked, heads touching, out through the door, in a way that looks less like leaving and more like continuing.

And it’s just us now, the whole vast quiet room ours, shelves stretching up out of sight on every side. The sort of hush that makes you want to whisper, even when there’s nobody left to disturb.

Dark watches the door a moment after it’s swung shut.

“What does it feel like?” he asks quietly. “Kissing?”

“I don’t know,” I admit.

He looks at me properly.

“You have never,” he says, not quite a question.

“No.” I feel my heart do something complicated, fast and slow all at once. “Never had the chance to, really. Or never wanted to, until now, if I’m honest.”

There’s a small, strange comfort in saying it out loud, admitting to something I’ve never quite let myself dwell on before. That all those years growing up somewhere full of warmth and easy affection, somehow left me without much practice at romance itself. I was too busy being sweet and useful and endlessly cheerful to anyone who needed it, to ever properly want something just for myself. It is a strange thing to notice about your own life only once someone asks the right question at the right moment.

Something shifts in his face, and I read it the way I usually can, most of the time, after months of learning the particular grammar of his silences. This one’s easy. He wants to know. He wants to know exactly the way I want him to know, and exactly the way I want to know. Which is a thought so enormous I almost laugh out loud with the sheer relief of it.

His eyes have gone brighter, amber brighter than what little light the library still has on. Glowing properly now, in a way I’ve only seen a handful of times before, always right before something huge.