The Half-Seal Doesn't Want to Live with the Imperial Princess and the Grand Duchess (2)
One month.
It had been exactly one month since Nox Adrian von Grolent survived under the same roof as two oversized feline predators. And change—there had certainly been some.
He no longer fainted when Elena flung a door open without warning. He no longer foamed at the mouth simply because Calien was standing behind him.
People truly are creatures of adaptation—no. Beastmen are.
Nox Adrian von Grolent had changed without even noticing. Screaming instead of passing out when someone suddenly seized his shoulder was, by any measure, tremendous progress.
Progress of which he alone remained unaware.
His heart still lurched, of course, but whether that was from fear or from some other reason entirely, Nox himself had long since abandoned any attempt to sort it out.
The problem was that the two predators had taken this slight progress for a sweeping bulletin of victory.
Afternoon. The garden bench.
Nox was reading. Elena sat down beside him, closer than usual—close enough that their shoulders nearly brushed.
"Nox, look at me."
He lifted his eyes. Elena was pulling off her leather gloves. The hands that emerged belonged to someone who had spent years gripping a sword, and yet they were unexpectedly slender and long.
"Look at my nails. I filed every one of them down."
"...Pardon?"
"You nearly died of fright the first time you saw my claws, remember? So I've been filing them every day."
The imperial princess spread her hands before him. The razor claws native to a lion beastman had been rounded smooth in earnest, and those fingertips drifted slowly toward Nox's cheek.
"See? Not sharp anymore, right?"
A warm fingertip met his cheek. Nox's lashes fluttered, but he did not flee.
Even so... a lion had ground down her own claws. More precisely, that painstaking consideration pricked somewhere deep in his chest.
Elena's red eyes curved, soft.
Nox had not fainted. Monumental progress—at least by her measure.
Behind the bench, a golden tail was lashing wildly from side to side. A tail of which its owner alone remained unaware.
Calien was seated beside Nox. The space between their shoulders was two knuckles wide—a distance at which, a month ago, he would already have been unconscious.
The snow leopard's tail crept quietly onto his knee. A wealth of silver fur spilled across his cotton trousers.
"...Grand Duchess. Your tail. It's touching me again."
"Contact training. A tail ought to be less threatening than a hand. Look. It's nothing but a clump of fur. No fangs, no claws—there's nothing here that could threaten you."
Nox opened his mouth to argue—and, honestly, it was warm. No. Cold. Cold, and yet warm? Strangely, it wasn't unpleasant.
Carefully, very carefully, he touched it. Then, like a man who had burned himself, he snatched his hand away and set it back again. Over and over.
Calien caught the minute shift in his expression. The corner of her mouth rose by an amount no one would notice—truly, by the width of a single hair.
Footsteps sounded behind them. Elena appeared with two glasses in hand, and her eyes found the snow leopard's tail spread across Nox's knee. One glass tilted at a dangerous angle.
"...Calien Blake von Arbein."
"What."
"Move your tail."
"No."
A low growl rolled through the parlor.
Nox, wholly absorbed in the fluffiest ball of fur in the world, had no attention to spare this time for the two predators' squabble.
The season had come when opening the villa windows revealed the sea.
Rose vines in the garden spilled over the wall, the ink in the study thinned in the heat, and every morning the cicadas began to cry before any alarm—and somewhere in the midst of it, the shadows of two predators had seeped, quite naturally, into Nox's days.
He no longer screamed when someone spoke to him from behind. When their eyes met, it took him five seconds to look away, not three.
Sometimes—truly, only sometimes—he even offered the tea first.
The two cats did not miss the change.
An afternoon when the summer sun slanted low and orange light poured into the study.
Nox sat in a chair, reading. Elena came up behind him, and she made her footsteps on purpose.
She had learned it a month ago: approach a seal without a sound, and it dies.
Things she had never known at the Academy—how to handle Nox—she was picking up and mastering, one by one, simply by living beside him.
Warmth touched his back. Elena's chin settled lightly atop his head, and a golden mane spilled down over white hair.
"What are you reading?"
Nox's shoulders locked—but he did not bolt upright.
"Marine ecology."
Elena's red eyes drifted half-shut. The contents of the book lay outside her interest.
What lay inside it was the white hair trembling faintly beneath her chin, and the fact that the trembling had been cut in half since the early days.
"Nox. You don't faint anymore, even when I do this, do you?"
"...No. I don't think so."
"Oh, then we can move on to the next stage."
The hand turning his page went still.
"And what, exactly, is the next stage?"
Elena's arms closed around both sides of the chair—a perfect enclosure. The broad shoulders of a lion beastman filled his vision, and her breath drifted past his earlobe.
"A hug."
"Your Highness, that is far too great a leap—"
"Duke Grolent wrote in his letter that overcoming trauma has to be gradual. We are being gradual."
"In what sense is this gradual!"
The instant Nox tried to twist free, the study door opened.
Calien stood there, two ice creams in her hands.
Those translucent blue eyes scanned Elena's siege. The snow leopard's ears folded hard against her skull, then rose again.
"Elena."
"What."
"Come out while I'm still speaking nicely, you insolent thing. It's time for Nox to eat ice cream."
"I am in the middle of important training!"
Calien held one of the ice creams out under Nox's nose. Blueberry—the flavor he liked. Collecting that intelligence had taken her two weeks.
"Take it, Nox. Training in accepting food a predator deigns to share."
"That was the excuse you used a month ago!"
"Revised edition. Idiot."
Pinned between the two predators, Nox let out a sigh—long, deep, cooler than the summer sea.
And yet he took the ice cream.
Elena's eyes went wide. Calien's tail gave one great sweep.
Nox bit into the blueberry ice cream and muttered.
"...Both of you, please exercise a little restraint."
That there was no killing intent left in that voice. That a faint thread of laughter had been woven through it.
There was no chance a predator's keen ears would miss either one.