Palace: At Your Service.

[A few hours after Johnny and Harry have lunch and a few minutes after Harry and Christian talk.]

Johnny was kicking back on the sofa, idly scritching Obie with one hand but mostly staring at the ceiling. His talk with Harry at lunch had bothered him. He'd thought of telling Liam about it, but somehow he'd never found the right place in their afternoon talk to bring it up. It just... it sounded like the wrong problem.

Harry'd said Johnny was "self-deprecating" but that wasn't really it. It wasn't so much that Johnny was surprised that someone liked him, it was that someone who liked him -- which meant a regular person, not some asshole like Carstairs or Jake or whoever -- didn't like Harry. It meant something was wrong with the world and it was nagging off in the corner of Johnny's brain, irritating and demanding to be solved. If Gwyn hadn't liked either of them, if she'd been as nasty to him as she'd apparently been to Harry, then he'd be able to just write her off as a nut job or something and that'd be that. But why would she be normal and nice to him and so awful to Harry?

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