Kyle didn't stop to remember his parents very often. Remembered their deaths often, yes, because the anger that came with those particular memories was easy. Everything else, that was harder, and more often than not he preferred to keep those memories at a safe distance. But as Freya talked, he found himself briefly recalling his father's book collection. Those, as were most of his father's possessions, off limits to his only son. He didn't like for Kyle to touch his things.
Maybe if he'd been raised and encouraged to read books for pleasure growing up, he'd have something more to offer her in this conversation other than to listen. The very fact that he felt such a strong desire to offer her something he realized with some degree of disappointment he had no capacity to give was puzzling, to say the least. Like everything else that was difficult, Kyle pushed that thought away too.
Feeling driven to match her in a skill wasn't new for him, it was the entire basis for their relationship in most respects. Every time they met for training, it was with the almost sole purpose to find a way to outdo the other. Or at least, it had been. Somewhere along the way, it'd become about learning from each other instead of merely fighting against their respective power. And sometime later, the understanding that they both had something to offer the other in working together seamlessly toward a shared goal, as murky as even that goal had become in more recent months. But this? This had nothing to do with power.
She was hiding it from him, that much was clear in her suspiciously noncommittal answer that the book wasn't for her. Behaving as mysteriously as the mysteries she had been attempting to explain to him, Kyle was momentarily too preoccupied to do what he so often did and react poorly, though he did briefly consider it. The urge to take the secret book from her hands like he might try to disarm her in a training session entered his mind before Kyle immediately dismissed it, for reasons still as much of a mystery as the sight of her backing away from him with a barely contained grin that made his stomach twist.
Brows knit together in total bewilderment, Kyle watched her retreating form slip away from him without argument. He didn't have to do as she asked, yet he found himself moving towards the door anyway, crossing his arms over his chest and standing there awkwardly despite himself. Too tall to really blend into his surroundings, Kyle found himself unable to avoid opening the door for several customers with arms full of books and no free hands, doing so begrudgingly while he waited. When Freya returned, she would be met with a slightly put off Kyle raising a wary eyebrow like he expected her to bring back a bomb. "What exactly are you up to?"