"I just did," she said with a little laugh. "I'll be fine. But once you get out, it's cold as shit."

"Nooo..." he bemoaned. "That's the worst. Unless..."

"Unless?"

"Will you keep it warm for me?" He asked, tugging the blanket up to his chin. "Assuming you're not going to run off back to your room for the night."

"No thanks, I don't need any reminders of the thing they got rid of this morning." she muttered, gesturing to the door. "I'll stay here. If it's cool."

"It's a win-win for me," he admitted. "I wasn't getting a wink of sleep alone."

"Honestly, yeah." Pari admitted, slipping under the covers. "And your bed is warmer."

"Be right back," he promised, slipping out from beneath the blankets and spiriting away to the bathroom. Peering at himself in the mirror now, he could feel the self-awareness kicking back in. Parisa had been known for her volatility in the past-- the way she had with words, how she crafted them into any truth she wanted and fed them to people who hung on every syllable-- he had a feeling she did that to herself sometimes, unwittingly. It would explain why her feelings would often turn on a dime from an outsider's perspective. He imagined she picked up on the slightest undesirable detail of a situation and ran with it, or perhaps the thoughts came as a building tide, brewing unbeknownst to everyone but her, so that when they finally manifested everyone was shocked but she'd felt it was a long time coming. Anyway, he couldn't know the inner workings of Pari's brain, though it was something he pondered often since childhood. His main fear now was... well, this. The situation at hand, however transcendental, was also rife with problems he knew both of them would have to face eventually. The question was whether, in the ten minutes it took him to shower, her brain would have picked apart everything wrong with them and await him with walls reinforced. It felt almost precarious to leave her to process the moment. To leave the unwatched pot to boil.

But then again, he reminded himself, if this-- whatever this was-- was going to be anything... it would need to survive more than a shower. It was with a resolute exhale that he finished toweling his hair off and gathered himself to reenter her company, vowing to stay open and trust for the best. Before tonight, neither of them wanted to be the first to open the floodgates. Now that they'd passed that, he was not going to be the first to close them again.

And after he'd gone, the haze in Pari's head cleared up enough for thoughts to push through. Memories. His discomfort the first time she'd confessed to him -- confessed, like a fucking fool -- back when she'd kissed him for the first time and explained that it had always been him. That she'd taken a while to contextualize the odd feelings making her heart buoyant despite all the pain around them, keeping her chest from caving in, but then she'd finally figured it out, and... she'd felt afraid.
It hadn't been something she could cast aside easily, like anger or disgust or shame or guilt. Affection, adulation, whatever you wanted to call it; it infected every corner of her brain like some sort of plague. After she'd noticed it, everything started coming back to Feofil. When she was down, when she was angry, when she was numb... the thought of time spent with him was what kept her going through her most difficult days. She'd lost Sparrow, then Kyros, then Vic and nearly Mirza. But Feo had dug his claws in, and she'd thought that had meant something beyond the fact that at his core, he was a good person and a great friend.
But then she'd lost him too. And it had been because she'd tried to do the very thing she'd learned not to do, which was to pull the mask off. To be honest. Vulnerable.

The very idea of doing it all again made her chest sink into her stomach. She wouldn't. She knew better now, and she knew not to look to Feo with hope in her eyes and remind him that he was everything, that he had seen through her and she adored him for it. That he had watched out for her when the person she'd considered her brother and best friend and the guiding light of her life and tossed her aside at the first sign of dissent. People like Pari weren't meant for solace. First she'd been a tool, and now she was some kind of weapon that no one quite knew how to use, so all she did was scare them. And she'd done that anyways, before. Now it was worse.

Who knew if Feo had even wanted this? He'd said that he did. She'd told him to be truthful. But what if he'd just been going along with it because she'd asked him to? And if he had wanted this, who was to say it went beyond what they'd done tonight? Despite everything, Feo was still just a man, and Pari had been putting up with them her whole life. All they ever wanted was one thing. Maybe the blessing here was that Feo considered her a person at all; that was more than many men would admit. He knew her and he liked her, but he didn't love her. She tried to swallow the unease that came alongside that reminder - after all, they lived in a modern world where people did things like this all the time, with strangers, even. But the discomfort stayed lodged in her throat.

It's just sex. Pari told herself, pulling the blankets tighter around her shoulders as the bathroom door creaked open. It's just sex. That's all. Nothing more.
She was smart. She was beautiful. She was charitable, to a point, and she always knew what she wanted. But she was grouchy and bossy and rude and people didn't like Pari, not really, though they liked what she could provide them. For Kyros, it had been loyalty. Then her loyalty had wavered and he'd tossed her out, like a dog. For Sparrow, it had been camaraderie. But then Sparrow had found better friends and left Parisa behind. Medeiros had wanted someone pretty and powerful on his arm. But then Pari became too powerful, and now he wanted to put her down. And Feofil? Well, if it wasn't sex, then she'd figure it out soon enough. And if it was sex, then that meant things were about to go downhill again.

Feo couldn't help the shiver that ran down his spine as he stepped from the humid warmth of the bathroom to the frigid wall of cold in the bedroom. It felt much chillier with only a towel to protect his bare skin-- though he still paused in the doorway to take Parisa in with a grin in his eyes.
"You waited up," he said, his tone as soft as she remembered from back when they were kids, before the world had hardened them into acerbic blades of steel. "I was hoping you wouldn't doze off."