Page 74 of Dick Stone, Regency Stud
“It’s just the way the world works, Dick Stone,” said Tabby with a pitying look.
“Why in God’s name does it have to work that way?” he half-shouted, feeling adrift. “Because you have some”—he lowered his voice—“lady parts?”
“That, and I’m an adult,” said Tabby, suddenly wistful. “I’ve been telling you that since we met, but now you know. I can’t keep living off your breedings.”
“Why in fuck’s sake not?” asked Edward, his headache roaring back to life. “Plenty of people have associates. People who work under them and receive wages.”
“Yes, but everything has changed,” said Tabby, not without a note of longing.
“What’s changed?” asked Edward, feeling the reins of the conversation slip from his usually able fingers. “Nothing’s changed. Nothing. Nothing has to change.”
He was tugging at Tabby’s jacket like a child trying to rouse their just-deceased mother. It was pathetic, the peak of humiliation, and he had no intention of stopping until his friend agreed to come back.
“You know about me now,” said Tabby, refusing to meet his eyes.
“I know you,” he said. “Always have. The important stuff.”
“But now you know—”
“Do you think I care about that?” asked Edward, his desire to shout tempered only by the last vestiges of his aristocratic manners. He felt spittle at the corner of his mouth, and he wiped it away with a cuff.
They stood in that passage, the buildings overhead casting shadows, their partnership shadowed by an impasse. Edward knew he looked terrible. If Tabby had a heart within that baggy coat, she’d set aside all this nonsense and get back to the way things were!
“Have you been eating enough?” asked Tabby, kicking at his shoe with her boot, this time gently.
“No,” he said. “You’re going to need to come home and feed me.”
“But I can’t come to your home, not now,” she said. Was that longing he heard in her voice, too?
“Whyever not?”
“Mrs. Chaffinch knows I’m a girl.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“You know how upstanding landladies are about men who bring girls back to their rooms,” she said, casting him a quelling glance.
“Now, didn’t you say you’re an adult? That makes you a young woman,” said Edward, awkwardly cuffing her on the shoulder. “Is that what you are—what you want to be? For me to call you? Tabitha?”
“It’s who I am,” she said with a sigh.
“What’s that for?” he asked, imitating her sigh. “If you want to be someone else, you can be someone else. Tobias or some other name, it doesn’t signify to me.”
“You never realized I was a girl?”
“Young woman,” he said offhandedly. “Demme, no, I’m not in the business of trying to see inside my friends’ drawers. I see plenty of parts in my line of work already. Too many.”
“Never suspected…”
Edward pressed himself closer to Tabby, presumably to make his point, but reveling in the sense of closeness at last. He was no monster, but if there were a way to eat some part of her — something she didn’t need — just so she’d be this close always, he’d surrender almost anything.
“Do you think I give a single fuck?” he intoned.
When Tabby’s face fell, he knew he’d said something wrong. Edward grabbed the girl’s — young woman’s — chin, so she’d look at him and hear what he was trying to say.
“Do you think I give a single fuck about that, what parts you’ve got? When you’re the one friend I’ve got besides my horse, and I’m not always sure he even likes me for me or for the clover I buy him?”
He’d always known Tobias as a street-hardened urchin, so when those eyes he’d missed so much filled with tears, Edward knew she was finally understanding him.
