Primrose pushed her chair back. “You know that,” she said. The lines in her brow deepened. “You know me. You know what I can give you and what I can’t, the things I can’t afford to allow you. The boundaries of our relationship haven’t changed.”

Sometimes it almost felt like they had, lying abed with the window open for the breeze, or laughing down by the waterway in the very early morning with the mist coming off it. But Orfeus wasn’t enough of a fool to have believed it.

“I know,” she said, greatly soothing. “I know, I know. Come, come, I know words and I know contracts. I was just humming. A piece of a new song, nothing worth talking about even if you let me. While we’re on the subject, though, he’s still uncomfortable with the idea of you two being in an open relationship? Let alone properly polyamorous?”

“Of course he is,” Primrose said. She took too deep a swig of her drink, set it down, ran her tongue over her lips. As though it were the grapes and not lip-paint that dyed them so deep a purple. “It’s…fair. It’s fine.”

Orfeus should let it go, should’ve let it drop long since, but she was always one to strain her luck until it snapped. “If it’s something you’re open to and always have been and that he refuses to contemplate, that’s a weakness in the relationship. That’s bad of him.”

And if their affair offended or wounded Bellan, in a manner clear and obvious, then this was bad of Primrose. And it was bad of Orfeus to carry on with Primrose, knowing that. None of this was what any of them should be doing.

Orfeus didn’t care that much about should, not when Primrose had so compact a form, so clever a knack with fabrics, so kissable a mouth.

Bellan could stuff it.

“I clearly don’t want to talk about it,” Primrose said, and shook her head. She pushed her chair the rest of the way back from the table and stood. “We’ve had our drink. Good evening, Orfeus.”

“You said two,” Orfeus blurted, showing too much in her distress, hands clutching the edge of the table. “You agreed to two glasses.” She tried to relax, to not be the clinging vine, the burr to be shaken off. She tried to think of some stratagem that wasn’t trying too hard and came up wildly blank. “Let me get you flowers.”

Primrose looked at her, and it wasn’t her cutting look. She looked at her as though Orfeus were a length of fabric that had come out in quite different colours than she expected.

Orfeus leaned forward to press the advantage. “Flowers like when I first courted you,” she said. “Every type of flower I can find.”