The next morning, over breakfast, I asked Caleo if he wanted to come with me to the alchemist.
He was halfway through a piece of bread, his notebook open beside his plate—our standard breakfast arrangement now. Caleo ate with one hand and made notes with the other, filling pages with observations that ranged from rigorous pharmacological documentation to enthusiastic personal memoir. He said yes before I finished asking, as he did with most things.
Caleo closed the notebook and dusted crumbs from his fingers. He had been in the house for about two weeks. It felt considerably longer, and not in a bad way. Some people arrived and the space rearranged itself around them so naturally that you couldn't clearly remember its previous shape. The house felt like a house now instead of somewhere I was camping. The crafting room had a second chair. The kitchen had someone else's preferences in it. Barro divided his time between our laps with the impartial devotion of a creature that had assessed both options and found them equally acceptable.
The sex was easy and uncomplicated, which was something I hadn't known to want until it was there. No guesswork, no self-consciousness, no weirdness about asking for what we wanted—just two people who had established a thorough working knowledge of each other's preferences and applied it freely.
I had tried the knot again three times. Three times it had declined to cooperate.
"That's the curse," Caleo had told me after the third attempt, with the philosophical acceptance of a man who had been living with this situation for three years. "You work up to dildo number six. That's what the set is for."
We had settled on number three as a reasonable current ambition and made it an ongoing project. It was already producing results the ring found extremely encouraging. Numbers four through six waited on the shelf in Caleo's room with the patient certainty of a curriculum.
I had not stopped thinking about the second knot.
Fourteen inches, with one knot halfway up the shaft and the base knot locking everything in place—the geometry of it, the extraordinary fullness it would produce—occupied a dedicated corner of my brain at all hours. It was going to happen. The graduated set was going to get me there. I was treating it as a long-term goal with measurable intermediate milestones, which was either a mature approach to personal development or an insane way to think about sex over breakfast.
Probably both.
The Guild was the other reason I wanted Caleo with me.
Since the inspection, I had been moving product out of the house faster than I was comfortable with. Keeping large quantities on the premises felt like an unnecessary risk. Drest had found nothing actionable, but he had filed something. I was certain of it. The alchemist's note requesting more of the darker vials had the studied neutrality of someone being careful about what he put in writing. The Guild was watching. Taking my business partner to the transaction felt tactically sound.
Also, the smell around the house was becoming a documented local phenomenon.
Some people didn't mind it. Vera had adapted completely and now left her kitchen window open in the mornings with what I chose to interpret as deliberate positioning. Barro had been joined by two additional cats from somewhere in the district; they sat against the courtyard wall in a companionable row and declined to leave. A flower seller had set up a small stall at the end of the street three days ago and was doing brisk business, which I suspected was less about her flowers than the foot traffic drawn by the ambient scent.
Others found it off-putting. The man two doors down had complained to Vera, who reported this to me with the expression of someone delivering information rather than taking a position. A passing merchant had stopped outside the house on Wednesday, worked his nose for a full minute, then hurried away wearing the troubled expression of a man who had learned something without understanding it.
It turned out I liked the smell a lot, which was probably relevant biographical information. Caleo liked it even more. His status screen read Orifice Sage, Cum Sommelier, which I had seen one morning and laughed about for longer than was dignified. Orifice Sage because he had spent three years training every relevant orifice with systematic dedication. Cum Sommelier because he had been conducting informal tastings since age fourteen and had the theoretical framework to prove it. What an absolutely specific human being to have wandered through my door after following his nose across the city.
I kept wondering whether I loved him.
I examined the question the way I examined most things now: pragmatically, without too much drama, trying to assess the actual contents rather than react to the label. I had no reference point. I had never been in love. I didn't know how it felt from the inside or how that differed from this.
The bond complicated the question because it was business, technically: a System mechanic, a ring evolution, a potency multiplier. None of that explained why I wanted to sit across a breakfast table from him for the foreseeable future, or why the morning light in his hair while he read kept interrupting my own breakfast.
I couldn't resolve it. I took his hand anyway as we walked down the street.
His fingers tensed around mine for a fraction of a second, then relaxed and threaded through them. I caught him looking sideways at me. I kept my attention on the morning street.
He was grinning like an idiot within approximately four seconds. I could see it in my peripheral vision.
A woman approached with a market basket on her arm and her morning evidently planned. Caleo straightened slightly as she neared us.
"Good day, madam," he said with great warmth, lifting our joined hands with the casual pride of someone displaying a new acquisition. "This is my boyfriend."
He added a small wink that contained approximately nine distinct meanings.
The woman regarded our hands, then Caleo, then me. Whatever response convention demanded, she didn't find it. She kept walking.
I turned to Caleo.
"So now we're boyfriends," I said.
"Well." He considered this with the expression of a man presenting a logical argument. "Our dicks are in each other's holes essentially constantly. It seemed like a reasonable inference."
He had a point. I kept it to myself.
"Boyfriend," I said, trying the word out.
It fit in a way I wasn't going to examine too carefully on a public street.
"Boyfriend," he confirmed with satisfaction.
We walked the rest of the way to the alchemist with our hands loosely clasped. Caleo nodded at passersby with the proprietary warmth of someone who had recently acquired something he was pleased about and wanted the general public to know it. I let him. My thoughts had already returned to the second knot.
The alchemist glanced up when we entered. His permanent squint tracked from us to the bag I was carrying and settled there, professional interest overriding any response he might have had to our joined hands.
We arranged everything on the counter in order.
Golden Salve first: forty vials, warm gold and faintly luminescent in their slots. The eight I had made before breakfast remained on the shelf at home; keeping every dose in one bag felt like a different kind of unnecessary risk. I named the usual price. He accepted without bargaining, which told me he was moving them well.
Then the Vitalist's Draught. Six vials, darker and richer, their slow pulse visible even in the dim shop light. One gold each, the baseline we had established on the last visit. He lifted one toward the light, inspected it, and returned it to its slot with a nod.
Then the Compound Tonic.
I set three vials on the counter for a limited market test. The three reserved for Marten remained on the low table at home, untouched.
The Tonic was unlike anything else on the counter. Amber threaded through the gold, its deeper luminescence moving in layered currents rather than the steady glow of Morning Dew alone. The alchemist's squint narrowed. He reached for one carefully.
"What does it do?" he asked.
"Sustained systemic healing," I said. "Seventy-two-hour release. Addresses chronic conditions, long-term tissue deterioration, sustained organ stress." I paused. "It doesn't fix things that are broken. It slows things that are breaking."
He studied the vial for a long moment.
"Two gold each," I said. "They're exceedingly difficult to produce."
His gaze came up. "Two gold." He had a counteroffer ready. I could hear him deciding whether to use it.
"Two gold," I said.
"The production process—"
"Is proprietary," I said. "Significantly more complex than the Draught. It requires specific conditions that are difficult to maintain consistently." I kept my face neutral. "Two gold."
He turned to Caleo, possibly hoping for a softer target.
"The mixing process alone," Caleo said with the solemnity of a man speaking from professional experience, "is extraordinarily demanding. Temperature precision. Timing. The variables are—" He made an expressive gesture that conveyed enormous complexity and no useful details. "Considerable."
This was accurate. Caleo was the mixing vessel. I had called the arrangement mixing his brownies with my spatula that morning. He'd poked me in the stomach hard enough to fold me over and knock my elbow against the counter, then returned to his notebook without remorse.
The alchemist considered us, did his calculation, and set the vial down.
"Two gold," he said, concluding a transaction he wasn't entirely happy about and had decided to complete anyway.
He counted out twenty-four gold: twelve for the Salve, six for the Draught, six for the Tonic. A week's production from two people, one drain, a crafting chair, a goblin club, and a graduated set currently stalled at number three.
He slid the coins across the counter. Then he met my eyes and said nothing for a moment.
"The Guild," he said finally. "They're asking questions. Not about you specifically. About the product." His attention shifted to the Compound Tonic. "Results like these attract attention. The kind that asks where things come from."
I held his gaze. "And what do you tell them?"
"That I have a supplier. That the supplier is discreet. That the product performs as described." He placed the Compound Tonic vials carefully under the counter, one by one. "I tell them nothing useful because I know nothing useful."
He met my eyes again.
"I intend to keep it that way."
"Thank you," I said.
He made a small sound that was neither acknowledgment nor dismissal and returned to his ledger, closing the conversation with the same efficiency he brought to the sale.
Caleo and I exchanged a glance, took our money, and left the shop.
Outside, the merchant district had reached its midday volume: carts, voices, and the smell of something frying from three directions at once. We stopped on the pavement while I turned the alchemist's warning over in my mind.
"The Guild is asking about the product," Caleo said.
"Yes."
"Not about you yet."
"Yet," I said.
His academic attention came fully forward as he ran the problem through whatever framework he used for problems. Then his focus returned to me, settled and practical.
"We keep moving product quickly," he said. "Don't stockpile. Nothing in the house that can't be explained." He paused. "And we should probably think about a license."
"An alchemist's Guild license."
"A licensed operation is harder to shut down than an unlicensed one," he said. "They'd have to prove wrongdoing instead of pointing to the absence of paperwork." He tilted his head. "Do you know the licensing requirements?"
"No."
"Neither do I. But I know someone who might." He smiled. "Drest seemed like a man who followed procedures. Men who follow procedures usually know them very well."
I thought about Senior Examiner Drest standing in my bedroom, looking at the wet spot on my sheets, saying they don't pay me enough for this, and leaving with great dignity.
"You want to contact the man who raided us," I said.
"I want to contact the man who raided us, found nothing actionable, and still warned you to stay out of trouble," Caleo said. "That's not the behavior of someone who wants to catch you. That's the behavior of someone doing his job and doing it honestly. Those are useful people to know."
I stood in the midday sun and considered it.
He wasn't wrong.
"Boyfriend," I said.
He raised his eyebrows.
"Good thinking."
He grinned like an idiot again. It was becoming one of my favorite things about him without my having decided it would be.
I took his hand, and we headed home through the merchant district. Eight Golden Salves waited on the shelf. Marten was coming at the end of the week. The locked recipe behind Level 8 was getting closer every day.
The ring pulsed warmly at my base.
"I know," I said quietly.
"What?"
"Nothing. Thinking out loud."
He accepted that and started telling me about a new notation system for the notebook, his free hand moving as he spoke, his voice carrying over the street noise with complete confidence that whatever he was saying was worth hearing.
I listened. I still didn't know if it was love. I held his hand all the way home anyway.