Chapter Seven
Davy stood in front of the open fridge, phone pinned between his shoulder and ear as he checked the contents of the shelves. He seemed unwilling to give up the idea of a secret stash of bacon.
Finally, he plucked a grape out of a bowl and tossed it into his mouth.
“I’m just the messenger,” Davy said, voice slightly muffled by grape.
He burst it between his teeth and swallowed it.
Hill, reminded, reached down and touched the crumbled cookie packet shoved in his pocket.
He resisted the urge to sneak a bite, and Davy reached into the fridge to grab a carton of milk.
He didn’t read the label. “I know it’s early there, but Mr. Jones is calling in his debt and… ”
He paused to listen to the angry objections on the other end of the call. While he waited for them to finish, he rolled his eyes at Hill and made a “blah-blah-blah” gesture with his free hand.
“I think I see the problem,” he said finally. He grabbed the top of the carton and twisted the lid off with a pop. “It’s just not my problem, and I don’t think you want to make it Davy’s problem. Whatever deal you made with Fraser, take that up with him. It’s nothing to do with Davy.”
He added the milk to his coffee, a generous glug that lightened it nearly the color of his hair, and smirked at whatever was being said.
“Yeah, I thought so too,” he said and hung up.
“You’re enjoying yourself,” Hill said. “Sleep well?”
Davy shrugged as he tossed the phone down and picked up his cup. Steam spilled out over his hands, and one of his tentacles curled around his hip to flick at it. Like a cat with a length of string.
“Like the dead,” he said cheerfully. “Besides, the Beyond doesn’t have phones. It’s fun to yank people’s chains without having to back your mouth up.”
Hill thought of the receptionist at CIRATTA. He was about to ask, until he remembered the…wet…sound, like a swallow, as she plugged the wires into her body.
“And it’s for a good cause,” Davy reminded him. “To save my little brother’s soul…after I give him an ulcer.”
He snickered at his own joke and took a drink. The face came a moment later as he wrinkled his nose and smacked his lips. He jabbed his tongue out like a lizard. Hill rolled his eyes at the drama.
“It’s potato milk,” he said and pointed at himself. “Vegan, remember?”
Davy narrowed his eyes and then picked up the carton to check. He pulled a face.
“Who thinks ‘you know what, let’s milk a potato’?” he grumbled as he tossed his coffee down the sink. “When they die, I wanna be there. Their stigmata is going to be weird as hell.”
Hill shrugged. “I prefer oat,” he said. “But they didn’t have any so close to Christmas.”
“That makes sense,” Davy said as he rolled his eyes. “There’s always a run on oat milk leading into the season. You don’t want Santa getting the shits halfway through his run.”
Hill ignored that.
“So is that what we’ve been doing all day?” he asked. It was meant to sound non-judgmental. He was fairly sure that it didn’t, but he pushed on. “Just prank calling Fraser by proxy?”
It wasn’t exactly what he’d expected from transgressing the social and spiritual barriers to raising the dead.
“Sure,” Davy said as he filled the mug with cold water. “Why not. I gotta get something out of this, since you won’t let me kill him.”
“This isn’t a game,” Hill objected. He lifted his hand so Davy could see the hole carved through it, light visible from the other side of the wound.
Davy glanced briefly at it as he took a long drink of water, and Hill aggressively tried not to notice the way his throat worked as he swallowed.
“I didn’t defy the Church and do this to myself so you could play games. My dad—”
“Helped cover up my murder,” Davy reminded him. He set the mug down on the counter and dried his mouth on the back of his hand. “Don’t get me wrong. I’ve done worse, and I don’t hold it against him. But don’t expect me to shed any tears for him now he’s in the dirt.”
That was…a good point, Hill supposed.
He…
For a second he stalled on how to regulate his emotional state without his tried and tested tool kit: deep breathing, a drink so cold it hurt his teeth, a corner to dig his shoulders back into. None of those things would work right now.
Maybe the corner, but…Hill glanced at the nearest one and put that thought out of his mind.
In the Beyond, his penthouse apartment—concierge service included in the package—was a derelict, run-down room with cobwebs and mold fighting it out for ownership of the walls.
Dead plants haunted cracked pots, and shadows moved constantly in the corners of his eyes.
He’d thought they were other ghosts at first, but now he thought they were him.
He recognized his posture sometimes, the way he tried to crack his knuckles like his dad had.
So no.
He folded his arms tightly instead, fingers pinched around his elbows, and tried to pull his thoughts back on track. It was easier to do without the static of adrenaline from his body to tangle him up.
Death ain’t so bad, the memory of Seb’s opening salvo nudged at Hill for his attention.
Hill didn’t know about that.
It was easier to keep himself on track, but harder to let go. Even though he accepted it wasn’t fair to expect Davy to care about what happened to Albie, he couldn’t let go of the anger about it. It was like a barbed hook, and he couldn’t thrash himself off, no matter how hard he tried.
Something broke, crockery shattering on a hard surface.
Davy had thrown the cup, and that just made him angrier. He was trying, and it was—
A tentacle draped over his shoulder and down his chest. The tip curled around his hipbone and then tightened.
He could feel the muscles under the pale shadow-mottled skin, long and smooth and tight as they flexed around him.
The pressure didn’t squeeze the nonexistent breath out of him like he wanted, but it was there.
It gave him something to work with as he pulled his feelings back under his skin where they belonged.
It still felt…tenuous. Like he had them wrapped up in an overstressed rubber band that would snap the minute he let go of it.
“Feels like blue balls, doesn’t it?”
The question caught Hill off guard. He stared at Davy as he mentally confirmed that he was pretty sure he’d not misheard.
He still asked, “What?” just in case he had got the wrong end of the stick.
Davy leaned back against the counter, arms braced behind him. “Blue balls,” he repeated.
“I didn’t…I wasn’t… What?”
Davy stared at him for a second, then dragged up a smirk and a shrug.
“I told you yesterday. It takes a while to get used to being dead,” he said.
“You’re used to feeling a certain way in a certain order.
It doesn’t work that way for a spirit. There’s no spent adrenaline hangover when you get mad.
You’re just angry until you work out how not to be.
Or someone distracts you by saying something out of pocket. ”
Something like “blue balls,” Hill supposed. Although that said, the comparison wasn’t wrong. His fit of temper did feel vaguely…unfinished…for just having trailed off. It wasn’t that he missed that exhausted, sick post-anger feeling, but there should be something.
“I just…” Hill started. He stopped and bit his lip before he admitted, “I don’t expect you to feel bad about my dad.
I’d understand if you hated him, to be honest. The fact that you don’t remember him is what’s hard.
He was CFO at CIRATTA. He was a husband.
He was a philanthropist, sometimes. He played golf with the same people every week.
He was my dad. He mattered…and then he died, and everyone just couldn’t wait to forget him.
There aren’t even any photos of him. Mom kept them for a while, even after she married Fraser, and then they just slowly started to get taken down or moved, or we moved, and now there’s just a few I have. ”
It was more than Hill had meant to say. When he’d started, it had been an awkward apology for being awkward. That was a familiar task. He knew how it went. After all, he had to do it often enough. Once he started to talk, though, the words got away from him.
He blamed being temporarily dead. It was hard to bite back what you were about to say when your teeth were insubstantial.
Davy looked…trapped. His face was hard to read, but his eyes looked uneasy.
“I…um…yeah,” he got out, his voice scratchy. “I can see how, um, that would…”
He trailed off. A tentacle patted Hill’s head with the clumsy, heavy physical version of the empty comfort of “there, there.”
Hill reached up and pushed it away. “Thanks,” he said.
Davy hitched one corner of his mouth up and shrugged. “You don’t want me to kill Fraser,” he pointed out. “That and ‘there, there’ is pretty much all I have, unless you want me to fuck you.”
Oh. Yes.
No?
Fuck.
Hill swallowed hard. He licked his lips and remembered the cool grave-dirt and salt-sweetness of Davy’s mouth on his. That slow, eddying feeling that his brain was much quicker to ID as lust rippled through him, dry and slow like sand.
Or ashes.
If the “blue balls” comment hadn’t reset his brain, this would have done it.
By comparison, the deer-in-the-headlights look that Davy had been sporting was gone. It was replaced with an amused wickedness that darkened his eyes.
“Huh,” he said. “Did not know that was on the table.”
Hill bristled half-heartedly.
“What?” he snapped. “I don’t read as gay? Sorry. Should I take tips from you?”
Davy cocked his head to the side. “I mean, literally no one has ever questioned it,” he said. “So…maybe. But it wasn’t that. I just didn’t think it was on the menu while I’m, ah, already in you, so to speak.”
That was one way to put it, Hill supposed. It was a hotter thought than he’d have expected. Not just Davy’s cock in him, thick and solid as Hill squeezed around him, but all of him. He shifted his feet and, necessary or not, took a breath.