The Ugly Duckling, King's Court
Do you want me to caprise you or not? She half-wanted to demand, irritated by his sudden need to make a problem where there had not, before, been one. He was irritated by her trying to be polite, he was irritated by her behaving normally; it was obnoxious and juvenile and, Chrysanthe supposed, entirely consistent with the way he’d behaved to date.
Chrysanthe lifted her eyebrows, settled on her stool, chin raised, when Charlie implied by his denial that she was, in fact, the one with a stick lodged in a particularly uncomfortable place. To his credit, he was not the first to accuse her of such, although just at the moment she felt entirely in the right. If he were an osta, all the hair on his back would have been standing straight up, and he might even have hissed.
Chrysanthe made a little face at his whining non-apology, glancing down at her beer, her lips twisting lightly to the side. As if the beer were the issue! But he had said it, for all that he had been dancing around it so far. She hadn’t quite forgotten the way he’d laughed at Adelaide’s flirtations, and she wasn’t entirely sure she’d forgiven him for it either, though she supposed the apology went a ways in the right direction.
Perhaps, too, so would the beer.
Alice came by, and deposited two more Clever Fellows on the bar beside them. She raised her eyebrows firmly at Charlie, and waited, hand out, until he had paid. She tucked his coins in her pocket, glancing between them as she went back down the bar towards the man leaning intently over the other end. They laughed.
Chrysanthe glanced at the mostly empty beer next to her. She grimaced, put the neck to her lips, and drank the rest of it, then set the bottle back down on the counter. The only thing worse, she decided, then watching someone else chug a beer was chugging one yourself.
“It wasn’t entirely your fault,” Chrysanthe said, taking the beer Charlie had offered her, and quite deliberately. She shrugged. “But I’ll take the beer.” She looked back at him once more; the tense set of her shoulders softened, slightly. It wasn’t entirely Adelaide’s fault either, Chrysanthe knew, but she had less than no interest in unpacking her narrowly-averted disaster of a date to anyone – and particularly, she felt, not to Charlie Ewing.