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“Good evening, my beautiful ladies,” Palamedes said, dropping his keys in the bowl and the mail in the basket next to it. His bag thumped to the floor and his coat almost but not quite made it onto the hook, slumping on top of the bag and then slithering onto the floor of the entryway.
(Dulcie had set up the little table - after Camilla dragged it in from where they found it next to the dumpsters - like a little shrine to Palamedes’ forgetfulness, with a ripply glass bowl the color of an oil slick and a shallow woven basket with one broken handle that they faced towards the wall so you couldn’t really even see it. Cam had put up the hooks, the muscles in her arms flexing as she wielded a power drill and Dulcie teasing her about her willingness to put holes in the walls when usually she of the three of them was the most stringent about not breaking any rules or making any waves.)
Palamedes moved into the tiny kitchen and gave Camilla a kiss on the cheek where she stood in front of the stove, stirring something that so far smelled mostly like onions.
“Take off your shoes,” Camilla said.
“I was!” He went back into the entryway, took off his shoes, and then crossed the apartment to the bathroom. Dulcie blew him a kiss on the way past and he smiled, that boyish grin that turned his serious professorial face into something else.
Palamedes always changed his clothes and washed up before he came to her, because he was a darling that way, but she was a brat so she resented that she had to, resented that everyone was realistic about her vulnerability to germs instead of blithely pretending that her yearly pneumonias were just crazy random happenstance.
Dulcie had almost worked herself into a proper sulk by the time Palamedes flopped down on the couch next to her, clad in a t-shirt and gray sweatpants. He put his head on her lap and she obligingly ran her fingers through the close-cropped dark brown hair.
“So what’s the news from today?” he asked her, and since she was a brat this annoyed her too. He treated her like a medically fragile person, because she was, but he never treated her like a child, because she wasn’t. Just because her world was limited to the bed and the couch and maybe the park across the street on very good days.