Lionel's lip curled upward in a smirk as he watched the checkmate play out. Marin was a good player, if not quite as good as Peter, and Lionel lost, if a minority of the time, often enough that he still derived satisfaction from a win. Games of wizard's chess were a dime a dozen at Hogwarts, but notching a win against most players was boring at best. Perhaps chess was a cheap way to feel accomplished - mental exercise that was nevertheless constrained that outsmarting a single opponent when playing by strict rules was rarely truly innovative - but Lionel would take the cheap way out occasionally if the alternative was only ever feeling his worth in sparse moments in the long and daunting slog of trying to move wizarding knowledge one inch farther than it was. "Good game," he acknowledged. "You nearly had me earlier with that underpromotion to a knight."
Living with his brothers had proved surprisingly tolerable, but quiet times with Marin recaptured much of what Lionel had appreciated about the past year. For maybe the first time, Lionel had felt it passing in a fashion that never had him spinning out of control. Whatever had happened - the incident with Roderick and his brother, for instance - had largely been both external and minimally affecting to his day-to-day life, two criteria that somehow had alternated bieng unfulfilled in nearly every previous year. Even with Blythe, things had just sort of fallen into place at an approachable pace, both of them making plenty of room for one another and never relying on one another for much. They'd whiled away many hours like this, engaged in some quiet and relaxing (or occasionally pleasurable with a charged undercurrent) pursuit in between the hours of studying, and Marin had frequently been there with them (except for the occasions). Marin had become a closer friend ever since those months where he'd finally spent less time with Winifred, and Lionel had developed a deep appreciation for the Hufflepuff. He knew Peter respected him by his responses in discussions and debates, but he knew Marin respected him by his silent presence. And Lionel liked that Blythe liked him in a more genuine way than most of his friends. Blythe was excellent around all of them, charmingly slipping into conversations and deftly navigating their favorite topics, but she held almost all of them at arm's length. It wasn't that she had engaged in hours of intimate conversation with Marin, but at least Lionel knew that the way she engaged with Marin on an artistic level was genuine and reciprocal.
It made it the more frustrating that Blythe had, with very few words, declined the open invitation today. When they were in the same place, at the very least making brief contact in the common room in the evenings even if precluded from those long hours by her N.E.W.T. review sessions or his prefect duties, or his deep research immersions or her delicate and demanding assemblies, making space for one another had been simple. It had flowed simply and mutually between two people with sharp ambitions. Now that school was out, bereft of the clarity of its rhythms, Lionel found himself frequently stymied over her short messages and how to strike the correct balance of demonstrating his desire to spend time with her while refraining from harassing her. Lionel respected his girlfriend's obvious intelligence, but sometimes it was difficult for him to divine, with logic, exactly what she wanted from him. Sometimes it was because she herself didn't seem to know.
"No," he said, pausing to look out the window of the cafe onto the bustling street, ruminating on his utter lack of knowledge of her whereabouts and the fact that he might even see passing on the street if he just looked. He turned back to Marin and tilted his head to the left, a new, self-deprecating smirk appearing on his face, eyebrows quirked upwards. "Haven't seen her in a few days. No idea where she is. She said she was...busy." The pause, because that was literally all that her note had said. "How's Winifred? Overwhelming as always, I gather?"
