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He typed I think Felix’s moving picture child is very rude and then deleted it.

This was his first message in his first WhatsApp group chat, with his first male omega friends who weren’t Huxleys. Whatever he sent now would be the thing they remembered. Ivar had opened with a squid’s excrement hole, so the bar was both extremely high and extremely confusing. Cassian needed to ‘match their energy’, something he’d learned about from his secret viewings of Love Island with Diwa at two in the morning, or they’d think he was boring.

Cassian typed That squid is disgusting and I love it and then deleted that. He wasn’t sure if that would sound mean when Ivar was only giving more interesting squid information.

He held his mobile over the counter towards Ruari. “What do I say?”

Ruari read the messages on the screen. “Just an ‘it was nice to meet you all’ would do,” he said.

Cassian took his mobile back and typed it out, letter by letter, his tongue pressing into the inside of his cheek the way it always did when he was concentrating. He held the screen up again. “Is that right? The spelling?”

Ruari peered at the screen. “You’ve got an a in ‘meet’ instead of two e’s.”

Cassian corrected the spelling of ‘meet’, checked it again with his lips moving as he sounded it out, and then tapped send.

The message sat there in its little green bubble, correct and complete. Then he opened the GIF keyboard.

He’d discovered GIFs two weeks ago when Diwa had shown him that you could search for anything and a tiny moving picture would appear, and it had changed his life. GIFs said a lot and spared him the spelling.

He typed dog into the search bar and scrolled until he found the right one: a Bernese mountain dog the size of a small wardrobe, reaching out one massive paw and placing it with extraordinary gentleness on the head of a chihuahua.

He sent it, and Felix answered it almost at once with a red heart.

A red heart! That meant Felix liked the dog GIF, which meant Felix liked him.

Cassian’s heels drummed on the base of his stool. His chest was fizzing up. This was the best morning of his entire life, besides the day he’d found Hamish in his Brunswick East home. If he didn’t put something in his mouth immediately, it was all going to burst out of him, and he was going to vibrate right off the stool and through the front window of Proving Ground.

“THREE pastéis de nata please, Ruari.”

“You’re sugared up already. You can have two.”

Cassian let his lower lip tremble. This was a tactic that worked on Diwa, as long as Colin wasn’t in the room to watch it work and tell Diwa that he had the spine of a wet croissant.

Ruari counted two pastéis de nata out of the display case and set them on a square of waxed paper. Just two.

Cassian ate the first one in three bites, custard bursting warm and eggy in his mouth, and the second one in two. He licked the flakes of pastry off his thumb and forefinger, one finger at a time, while Ruari watched him.

“Thank you, Ruari.”

Ruari grunted, and Cassian touched his thumb to the screen of his mobile where the red heart was, just to make sure it was still there.

The alpha pulled a tray from the oven without gloves on, his forearms flexing under his rolled sleeves.

Cassian leaned in so he could watch the muscles moving beneath Ruari’s skin. Warmth crept up the back of his neck and down, and he wanted to be closer to Ruari, so he distracted himself by picking up his mobile and typing out a message to the MOAN chat.

✦ ✧ ✦

The reading exercises had become the part of his day that Cassian looked forward to most, which was saying something, given that his days now involved a visit to Proving Ground, and the MOAN WhatsApp group.

But reading, Cassian had decided, was magic. A true manifestation of the Universe’s abundance and desire to impart its mysteries.

You looked at marks on a page, squiggles, lines and curves arranged in patterns that shouldn’t mean anything. But if you knew the trick of it, if you’d done the work, the marks opened up and became someone else’s thoughts. A person you’d never met, who might be dead, who might have lived two hundred years ago on the other side of the world, had arranged those squiggles in a specific order. Now Cassian could sit in the kitchen at Ledbury Road and hear them thinking.

Mind reading. That’s what it was. He’d said so to Lysander on the phone last week, and Lysander had gone quiet and then said, “Yeah, Cass. That’s exactly what it is.”

Numbers, on the other hand, were shit, and he said so out loud. He was allowed to be honest about things he didn’t like in this house; Diwa had been very clear about that.

Colin and Diwa exchanged a look. Cassian’s shoulders climbed towards his ears, his Apple Pencil going still on the screen. Swearing was contamination of the mouth and the mind, and the Lumineer had once made a girl drink saltwater until she threw up and flushed out her ill will.