Chapter 374: Shopping

Noah

He was utterly colorful, but he didn’t carry himself with Cyan’s loud, bright energy.

Instead, he had a sort of dramatic elegance to his movements, floating across the polished floorboards rather than walking, his long silk scarf trailing behind him like a cape.

Every movement felt like a purposeful performance for an invisible audience.

When his eyes fell on Cyan, his face dropped into an expression of deep, theatrical despair. "Non," he said first, his voice a low, melodic purr. "Non, non, non—"

He crossed the remaining distance between them with his arms thrown wide open. "Where have you been? I thought you were dead, Cyan! I nearly held a small, private service for you last week!"

Cyan stepped directly into the embrace, a genuine smile breaking through his makeup. "I was unavailable, Étienne."

Étienne pulled back, holding Cyan’s face between his hands as he inspected him closely.

"You look absolutely terrible," he said with an immense amount of affection.

"Gorgeous, of course, but terrible. What on earth happened to you?"

"It’s a very long story," Cyan murmured, patting Étienne’s arm. "I’ll tell you all about it later over a very large glass of wine."

"I am already producing the wine," Étienne said, gesturing toward a small silver tray on a nearby marble table that hadn’t been there a second ago.

Then, his eyes drifted sideways, his full, intense attention finally settling on me. "And who is this?" he asked, his voice filled with the distinct delight of a man who spent his life looking for beautiful objects.

"This is Noah," Cyan said, reaching out to pull me a little closer by my sleeve. "He belongs to a very grumpy prince called Cassian Wolfe. Be very gentle with him."

Étienne moved toward me immediately, taking both of my cold hands in his warm ones.

"Oh, but you are absolutely precious," he whispered, looking at me as if he were delivering a medical diagnosis.

"Cassian’s, did you say?" He glanced back at Cyan, a small smirk playing on his lips.

"I’ve heard the rumors. The man has extraordinary taste, as always." He turned his attention back to my face, his eyes wide.

"You have incredible eyes, Noah. Truly. Has anyone ever told you that?"

I stammered, my cheeks growing warm again. "I—no, thank you—"

"Come, come," Étienne said, already tugging me gently by my hands toward the deeper rows of clothing racks in the back of the store.

"I have several pieces from the new collection that will make you look exactly like a Renaissance painting. A very, very expensive one."

While Cyan and Étienne began to move through the store, they fell into a tight, rapid shorthand that clearly belonged to two very old friends who had survived everything together.

They complained about designers I had never heard of, laughed at inside jokes, and made quick, casual references to events and people from a past I had no part in. Their entire history was laid out in small, broken fragments of conversation as they moved from rack to rack.

I stood near a small velvet armchair, the cold glass of white wine Étienne had handed me resting heavy in my palm. And as I watched them, a strange, quiet thought began to take shape in my mind.

They were two men existing completely without apology. They didn’t calibrate their voices, they didn’t look around to see who was watching, and they didn’t try to make themselves smaller for the comfort of the room.

Étienne would reach out to touch Cyan’s forearm to emphasize a point, and Cyan would lean in to adjust the collar of Étienne’s shirt, both of them laughing far too loudly for such a quiet, expensive space. Neither of them noticed the outside world at all.

Nobody is looking at them the way I always expect people to look at me, I thought, taking a small sip of the wine.

Or if people are looking... they just don’t care. No, it’s more accurate to say Cyan doesn’t care. And because he acts like he owns the space, everyone else just accepts it.

It was a strange sort of wonder, watching someone be entirely themselves in public without scanning the corners of the room for danger first.

I didn’t know what that felt like. I had spent my whole life keeping my head down, trying to blend into the beige background of every room I walked into, always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I realized then, with a sharp, bittersweet ache in my chest, that I wanted to know what that felt like. Someday, I wanted to stop looking over my shoulder.

Cyan caught me staring from across the room. The look he gave me wasn’t his usual teasing grin; it was just a quiet, seeing look that acknowledged exactly where I was.

"Come here, Noah," he called out simply, waving his hand toward a heavy velvet curtain. "We are finding you something today that is absolutely not beige."

What followed was a long, exhausting parade of clothing that I would never have selected for myself in any version of my life. The first thing Étienne produced was a heavily structured jacket in a deep, dark forest green.

"Absolutely not," I said the moment he held it up.

"Absolutely yes," Cyan and Étienne said in perfect unison, their voices leaving zero room for negotiation.

The second piece was a soft, dark shirt with intricate, subtle detailing along the high collar. I took it into the fitting room, pulling it over my head with a heavy sigh. But when I stepped out and looked into the large, gold-rimmed mirror, the image staring back at me didn’t look like the version of me I was used to.

"I look—" I started, tracking the line of my shoulders.

"Like someone," Cyan interrupted, leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed. "That’s different from what you normally look like, right?"

"Yes," I admitted.

"Good," he said flatly.

The escalation happened gradually after that. The clothing became more interesting, the colors richer, the fabric heavier, mostly because I simply stopped fighting them and started just trying things on to see what would happen.

Then Étienne handed me a final combination, something I would have walked past on a rack without even touching. I changed into it slowly, the fabric sliding against my skin, and walked out into the main room.