Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Benjamin was hiding.
He could have lied to himself, maybe, if he’d really wanted to.
He could have pretended that, since it was the weekend before Christmas, and he had nothing to do and no one to do it with, he just happened to be sitting inside his apartment for days on end.
That he wanted to be eating cold takeout on his couch all by his lonesome.
And maybe, in addition to the takeout, he hadn’t stocked up on groceries, and instead of leaving his apartment to do so, he’d ordered them delivered for the first time in his life. But that was just the extravagance of the holiday season, wasn’t it?
It wasn’t. Because Benjamin was hiding.
He knew it. His grocery delivery driver probably knew it. And his infuriating upstairs neighbor probably knew it too.
Atlas. Ugh. He was probably rolling in the sheets with his current flavor of the week right at this moment, laughing it up over how all he’d had to do was breathe in Benjamin’s general direction and he’d turned Benjamin into a frozen, horny statue.
Except no doubt he wasn’t thinking of Benjamin at all. Atlas was probably far too busy thrusting what had appeared to be an indecently massive cock into a very willing, warm body to be thinking about his socially pitiful downstairs neighbor.
Ugh.
Benjamin couldn’t hear any rolling around in the sheets—not that he’d been listening for it—but that didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Maybe Atlas had decided the holiday season was now the time to be considerate of noise levels.
It wouldn’t be completely beyond the pale for him to be considerate, even. Benjamin had seen it a few times, this past year—a sign or two that his upstairs neighbor was something beyond a muscled bozo hellbent on ruining Benjamin’s sleep schedule.
There’d been the time Benjamin had spied Atlas reading Mrs. Peters’s mail to her, when she’d forgotten to bring her glasses with her and was insistent on trashing her spam before hauling the rest back upstairs.
Their easy postures and her lack of sniping had indicated it might even have been a regular occurrence.
Or the day Benjamin had seen Atlas playing cards with the building’s one child resident on the apartment stoop, when her mother had been late coming home, and she’d been afraid to be alone.
Or the fact that Benjamin had overheard someone say Atlas did some sort of medical research for a living, something that involved reversing paralysis in trauma cases.
It had been easier to ignore those signs of civility though.
Easier to convince himself that Atlas was a mindless cretin and not someone Benjamin had to regret making a fool of himself in front of.
Not someone Benjamin might have wanted to attract, if he’d been anything more tempting than a sad sack accountant with no friends or family.
That was all beside the point, anyway.
The point was that something had been… off in that apartment.
Despite his ridiculous insistence, Benjamin hadn’t actually been drinking before his arrival at 4B’s doorstep.
And clearly nothing had been wrong with the water he’d guzzled because as soon as he’d escaped into the hallway, Benjamin had felt completely normal again.
More than a little frazzled and embarrassed, sure, but otherwise normal.
It had been… something in the air. Or maybe something in Atlas’s eyes. They really were an unusual color, weren’t they? That pale, pale green?
And Benjamin could have sworn he’d felt something coiling around him. Something that had been decidedly not human.
And was Benjamin really so hard up that the focused attention of an attractive man—even slightly cynical, mocking attention—had been enough to have him hallucinating himself into a fugue state?
Benjamin didn’t think so, but maybe that was giving himself too much credit.
How long had it been since he’d had the focused attention of an attractive man, anyway? Or, for that matter, how long since he’d had the attention of any man? Even longer since he’d had any sort of story worth telling.
Not that one strange moment in a neighboring apartment was a story worth telling, exactly.
Not unless Benjamin had actually done something about it.
If he’d leaped onto Atlas’s chair and straddled him, perhaps.
If he’d had the temerity to strip off Atlas’s clothes and demand he show Benjamin exactly how two people fucking could possibly make so much damned noise.
Not unless he’d been prepared to let Atlas ravish him.
And the snaking sense of regret that kept making its way into his thoughts made Benjamin think that maybe he should have.
And if something odd… something unnatural… had been going on…
Well, what had Benjamin gotten out of being on the straight and narrow so far?
He was alone on Christmas, with no people or gifts, or even impersonal holiday cards to show for it. He didn’t have so much as a single measly goldfish to keep him company.
It couldn’t get much worse.
There was a single knock on Benjamin’s door. He cocked his head, waiting, but whoever had knocked left it at one.
Benjamin set aside his takeout and clambered off the couch.
He opened his front door to find a small, square package on his doorstep. It was gift wrapped, not in red this time but in rich emerald-green paper, with a golden bow on top.
No note. And yet Benjamin knew, without a doubt, that this gift was meant for him.
Benjamin picked up the package and stepped back inside. He stood right by the door in his flannel pajamas as he unwrapped the gift carefully, preserving the beautiful paper as best he could.
It was… Benjamin didn’t know exactly what it was. He lifted the item out of its box, turning it this way and that under the overhead light.
It could be a snake scale, perhaps. A very, very large one. It seemed at first to be pearly white, but when Benjamin held it up at just the right angle, it was actually the lightest, most iridescent green.
It was beautiful, whatever it was. Really, truly beautiful.
And there was only one person it could be from.