I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 41: Finally Getting Time.

From the chair, Regulus watched this exchange with the focused attention of someone studying a dynamic he hadn’t fully mapped yet. He’d been doing that a lot—watching the people around Aris with the quiet methodical interest of someone building a picture.

Aris had noticed, obviously he had. Anything ever rarely slipped past his attention.

Anyhow, for some reason he found it, against his better judgment, mildly impressive that Regulus had pivoted from waking up in a medical ward to conducting social reconnaissance within the span of a week.

The kettle whistled.

He made the tea. Three cups, Lyra took hers without looking up from her tablet, the choreography of routine—and carried the third to Regulus, setting it on the small table beside the chair.

Regulus looked at it.

"It won’t bite," Aris said.

"I know what tea is," Regulus said, with the mild dignity of someone who had been making that particular correction more than he’d anticipated needing to.

An amused smile stretched across Aris’s lips.

"You looked at the kettle like it had personally wronged you."

"I was unfamiliar with the model."

"It’s a kettle."

"It made a very aggressive sound."

Lyra looked up from her tablet for the first time, glanced at Regulus, looked back down, and without hesitation made a small mark that Aris was fairly certain was not work related.

He sat down on the couch with his own cup.

The house was quiet in the way it was usually quiet—the particular texture of a space that had been occupied by one person for long enough that the silence had taken on that person’s shape, comfortable in its specific way, not easily shared, and not planned to be shared unless necessary. He’d noticed it more since Regulus arrived at the medical wing. The quality of rooms changed with more people in them. He hadn’t decided yet how he felt about that.

"The house rules," Lyra said, without looking up, in the tone of someone who had prepared this and was delivering it now before the moment passed.

Regulus straightened slightly.

"You have access to the kitchen, the living room, and the guest room on the second floor. The gym is available between six and nine in the morning and after seven in the evening. Lord Ashborne’s room is off limits." She paused. "Any questions?"

"The gym," Regulus said. 𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

"Yes."

"There’s a gym?"

"Second floor, left at the top of the stairs."

Something moved in Regulus’s expression—the first genuinely unguarded thing Aris had seen from him since the medical ward, a flicker of something that looked very much like relief.

Which made sense, he supposed.

Regulus was the kind of person whose relationship with his own body was fundamentally physical. Capability, output, the concrete satisfaction of a thing that could be trained and measured. A week in a medical bed was probably its own particular kind of suffering for someone like that.

"I’ll have a training schedule drawn up," Lyra continued. "Given the reconstruction, the specialist has provided guidelines. You’ll follow them."

"I’m aware of my own recovery timeline," Regulus said.

"The guidelines," Lyra repeated, pleasantly, with the tone of someone who had said the thing they were going to say and was done discussing it.

Regulus looked at Aris.

Aris drank his tea.

"She’s always like this," Aris offered.

"I’m professional," Lyra said.

"That too."

Regulus looked between them with the expression of a man recalibrating, again, what he’d walked into. He’d been doing that regularly. Each time Aris found it marginally entertaining and felt mild guilt about finding it entertaining, and then found it entertaining anyway.

This guy had a particular flavor compared to friends he had made recently, he was immensely foreign.

"One more thing," Lyra said, to Aris now.

She set the tablet down on the table, which meant she was being serious, which meant Aris’s mild entertainment was about to become something else.

"The boys from the neighborhood."

Aris looked at her.

"Their parents have been asking after you since the incident. Three of them specifically. The children have been having difficulty." She said it with the precision of someone delivering information they’d been waiting for the right moment to deliver.

"I think a visit would help. When you have time."

Well, that was convenient.

He thought about the group of them that evening, stunned, the way they’d flinched when the gate opened, the way the youngest one had looked at the hand on the ground with the wide eyes of a child encountering something real for the first time.

"Schedule it," he said.

Lyra made a mark.

The real kind this time.

The room settled back into its particular quiet. Outside, the crown district went about its impeccable business. The tea was good. The chair had apparently reached a truce with Regulus, who was sitting in it with marginally less discomfort than before.

"Aris," Regulus said.

He looked over.

"Thank you," Regulus said. "For the arrangement."

It was delivered the same way he’d said it in the medical ward—direct, no performance attached, the gratitude of someone who wasn’t used to needing it and hadn’t made the mistake of dressing it up.

"Don’t break anything," Aris said.

Regulus looked around the living room. At the general careful order of it.

"I’ll try," he said.

Which was, Aris thought, probably the most honest answer available.

Lyra left a while after they finished their tea, and Aris got to working on something he had been meaning to in all of this mess.

He needed to unpack his bags, a week without his cosmetics was already a kind of hell in itself, he didn’t know if he could afford to last another one without it. Not to mention, he was going to be busy in the coming week with marketing and publicity projects, so it was going to be essential.

He had shown Regulus to his room, and quietly headed toward his own room, thoughts filled with the excitement of finally getting a quiet moment to himself.