"Right now?" he responded harshly. "I just want some fucking space."

It was a cop-out, and he knew it, but it wasn't a lie. He'd been up since before dawn, and he'd dueled someone that morning; he was tired. He would have been tired regardless, but he especially didn't have the energy for this. He didn't have the energy to recount everything he'd done since the end of January and try to defend every action to her. He didn't have the energy to try and convince her of something she'd already decided she didn't believe, for all she said she was genuinely asking — her very next sentence belied that one, because if she was genuinely asking she wouldn't be making passive aggressive comments about sleeping through conversations about duels. And she'd apologized for the way she'd brought up the Witch Weekly article, but that didn't mean anything. It didn't mean that she felt any better about allowing him to go talk to other people. It didn't mean that she trusted him. It just meant that she realized at least that piece of her narrative couldn't be used to keep spinning herself into the role of victim. Confronting him over the article just didn't fit the act she was putting on, so she wanted it expunged from the record. This whole thing had always just been an act, and Ben was tired of trying to keep it up.