Sunbeam Lair eventually, the world stood in our way

It is quiet, but he hears her. His ears twitch upon his head, stirring dirt on the ground but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t pick himself up and greet her, as he might have on any other day. Things are different now, they can’t deny it, but he finds himself torn between responsibility and his own selfishness. It would be easy to give, repeat the maplewood all over again. He had his friends to disappoint and let down, now short one entirely, but he faces the possibility of letting his children down. Children that might not even be his.

He tenses when she speaks his name and he moves his head along the dirt a few inches but she barely comes into view before he speaks a very lazy, very gruff, “what?”