Chapter Eighteen
“Stop looking at me.”
Silence met Josie’s demand.
“I mean it, you two. You’re weirding me out.”
Barb’s and Jenna’s desks faced each other’s in the rectangular-shaped Financial Aid Office. Unlike the outer office, which looked out into the lobby of the Admin Building and Ben’s office and the meeting room along the outside wall, the space where Josie and her coworkers sat had no windows.
There was a massive corkboard on one end stuffed with flyers about every conceivable on-campus or university-affiliated event as well as rideshare ads and help wanted notices.
The rest of the walls held a smattering of framed Monet prints hung crookedly over the institutional butter yellow paint, and one lone copy of the university’s official calendar.
Not much there to capture a person’s attention.
Not that Barb and Jenna cared enough about what Josie thought to pretend to be looking at anything other than her.
They’d been at it since eight this morning.
Josie had even looked up harassment guidelines in the university employee handbook.
“I’m admiring the fact that a lovely color has returned to your cheeks,” Barbara said with a straight face.
“Uh-huh,” Josie scoffed. She turned to Jenna. “What about you, Jenna? Want me to blink my eyes at something? Looking for my cyber ransom note?”
“I’ve never seen you wear that shirt before,” Jenna said. “It brings out the blue in your eyes.”
The shirt was five years old. Josie had worn it at least three times a month for the past two years.
Josie narrowed her eyes.
Enough.
“Fine,” she spat. “I have a lovely color and my eyes are sparkling. Was there a question you had for me? A guess as to why my eyes are sparkling?”
Jenna and Barb traded glances.
Barb shrugged and batted her eyelashes, the picture of innocence. “I don’t know, Josephine. Why are your eyes sparkling?”
“And does it have anything to do with that bouquet of flowers on your desk?” Jenna asked in a high, questioning tone.
The flowers.
They were on Josie’s desk when she arrived at work this morning.
A huge arrangement of sunflowers.
There was a card, but it was a get-well card with no name or message on the other side.
“Have you been sick?” Jenna asked the instant Josie set foot inside the door.
“I bet it was the only free card left,” Barbara whispered to Jenna five minutes later when they stood at the copier pretending to copy but staring at Josie’s flowers instead.
“You know,” Josie said now, “it’s possible I have a social life. Maybe I went out last night and met a nice man and he’s sending me flowers because he likes me.”
“Out,” repeated Jenna, enunciating the word. “Out, like someone with a social life.”
Was that so hard to believe?
“We all deserve flowers, dear. You can tell us you bought them for yourself, you know,” Barbara said.
My God, was Josie truly so pathetic that neither woman entertained the idea an admirer would send Josie flowers? They acted as though the bouquet was one more symptom of whatever they thought was wrong with Josie lately.
Despite her constant protestations that no, she wasn’t being threatened, and no, she hadn’t tweaked her meds, and no, she wasn’t going to the new church two blocks away that smelled like burnt popcorn, the women persisted in coming up with the most outrageous theories for her recent “personality change.”
“I’m going to go in there and tell Ben we need a weekly meeting to discuss the premeeting meetings needed for the number of meetings we’ve scheduled for the week,” Josie threatened.
Barbara gasped in horror and Jenna held up her first two fingers in a crooked V and shook them in Josie’s direction.
“You wouldn’t,” Barbara insisted.
“I will give you each one direct answer to one direct question, then you will stop speculating about my emotional state,” Josie said. “After that, no more staring at me and muttering to yourselves unless you’re trying to figure out how to tell me I’ve won the lottery.”
“The lottery is rigged,” Barbara said.
Jenna swung around in her desk chair and gazed intently at Josie. Her thin nose quivered as though readying itself to sniff out the truth.
“Have you joined a cult?” she asked.
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
“No,” Josie said. “No cults. I’m Catholic. We frown on organizations that ask you outright for donations instead of guilting you into it by standing next to you with a basket.”
Cracking her knuckles, Barbara took over. She stood, wobbling in her pink-yellow-and-purple Fluevogs on the uneven carpet. Like a shark circling its prey, she stalked around Josie’s desk, eyeing the flowers, eyeing Josie, eyeing Josie’s desk until Josie almost called the whole thing off.
“Does he make you happy?” Barb asked.
Oh.
There was something to contemplate.
“I thought I was responsible for my own happiness,” Josie countered.
Did Pax make her happy?
Was he truly the reason Josie had felt more confident of late?
Yes and no.
Pax’s attentions made her feel good—better than good. Attractive. Interesting. All the things a woman should feel when a man kisses her with enough passion to wobble her knees.
However.
This confidence, it wasn’t born solely from those kisses. Life had been tough lately, but Josie hadn’t fallen apart. She hadn’t turned into her momma, either.
She was living in a magical apartment building that was a living organism, and her neighbors were faeries and vampires, and instead of losing her mind, she was making a garden with them.
Choices had been made, and although they terrified her every time, Josie had made some solid and healthy ones.
The world was bigger than she’d ever imagined, but Josie hadn’t lost her place in it.
Unsettling, really, Josie was growing up simultaneously with her own child, but she held a suspicion even the most adult-like of adults struggled with indecision and insecurity, just like their kids.
Barb shrugged. “You can’t make yourself happy if the person you love doesn’t want the same.”
He did, though. Deep in Josie’s soul, she knew Pax wanted happiness for her. Even if it came at his expense.
Except. She didn’t love him.
Right?
These emotions, they weren’t love. A responsible parent wouldn’t fall in love with a magical knight whose kisses were disorienting and who made them feel cherished.
A responsible parent would know things, like what political party they belonged to and the relative toxicity of their childhood, and what they’ve done lately to stop climate change.
This wasn’t love.
It couldn’t be.
· · ·
“The tokoloshe on the second floor set a fire in the waste bin of the community room,” Maddy said.
Pax nodded.
“That’s the third fire they’ve set this month.”
Did Josie like her flowers?
On Pax’s world, a knight brought his lady favors when they were courting. Flowers. Books. Ribbons.
Wait, did Josie know they were courting?
How was courting defined on this world?
“They got into a fight with Harry, the sulik in 3F, and dented the window shade,” Maddy continued.
Pax nodded again.
On Pax’s world, a male relative needed to give permission to the knight to court a lady.
“The residents of the sixth floor have woken and eaten everyone in a three-mile radius.”
Pax made a sound of encouragement.
Would Pax have to ask Amos if he could court his mother? How would he phrase it to the boy?
“Shit!” Pax jumped at the sharp pain in his hand where Maddy stabbed him with her pin. “Why did you do that?” he asked.
Clad in a suit made from a blue shiny sort of material, Maddy sat cross-legged on the corner of his desk, while he was trapped in his rickety chair with a broken backrest. Reams of paper sat in untidy piles behind her and the carcasses of two laptop computers lay in front of him.
She repinned a large sparkling brooch to the lapel of her jacket and sniffed slightly in that way she had of insinuating you were stupid or small. Or both.
“You’re not listening to me,” Maddy said calmly.
“I am,” he argued. “The sulik is being a dick, and the sixth floor…” Pax stopped. “Okay, you’re correct. I wasn’t listening.”
“You need to do your job, Pax.”
“How—”
She held up her palm near his face and he swallowed his question.
Obviously, Maddy was in the mood for a lecture.
Having been on the receiving end of lances, flaming arrows, sword points, and acid attacks, Pax could easily stomach a lecture, so he pushed himself away from the desk and leaned back, ready to listen.
He’d forgotten about the broken chair, though, and fell backward off it onto the green linoleum-tiled floor.
Perfect.
“I did not want you for the job of hotel manager,” Maddy said, ignoring Pax’s prone position and occasional painful groans as he pulled himself up to stand.
“I know,” Pax groused. “You told me within the first five minutes I started.”
Maddy had preferred working with the last hotel manager, Manny Quintas. Quintas had let Maddy take control of most everything from check-in procedures to schedules.
By the time Pax arrived, she’d expanded the Wayside’s Rules and Regulations from 38 rules to 843.
“You are too lenient with the guests and far too lenient with the staff,” Maddy began.
“You and I are the only staff,” Pax pointed out. He rubbed his tailbone and gazed at the heap of metal and wood that once was his desk chair.
“Because you let them go,” she countered. “We shouldn’t be cleaning up after tokoloshes and dealing with Denis’s plumbing issues. We have more important things to do.”
Had this office shrunk? Pax spun on his heel and examined the walls. It might have shrunk; it might be his own suffocation projecting onto the walls. He didn’t want to be inside listening to Maddy lecture him, worrying about an empty tank and missing Scrabble letters.
He wanted to be with Josie.
“I can’t keep them asleep forever, Pax.”
Pax pushed his palm into his forehead as though he could contain this obsession with Josie and place it somewhere out of reach. She was one woman, and the fate of hundreds of beings depended on the health of Number Five. That is what should be filling his brain.
Sighing, Pax walked around the desk and faced Maddy. Not too close, though, because he was admittedly scared of her snake hair. It was unnerving when those little tongues flicked out at him.
“I cannot imagine the strain of having to keep a floor full of gods and goddesses asleep until they reach their destinations. We are alive and well because of you and your power.”
Maddy sniffed. “I’m not looking for compliments.” She examined her nails, as though what she should say next was written in minuscule letters on the red acrylic.
Perhaps it was. Nail art was a mystery to Pax.
“I’m looking for a way off this lump of coal,” she said. “Has the needle moved at all?”
Pax sighed and Maddy’s lips thinned to a sneer.
“You are besotted with that woman and her child,” she accused.
What was Pax to say? Was “besotted” the same as “obsessed”?
Both words meant a loss of control, meant placing the importance of the LaChiusas over the importance of the people he’d sworn to protect.
Maddy slipped off the desk and pointed her forefinger into Pax’s chest.
“Ow,” he objected.
“The reason I didn’t want you as hotel manager was I knew the responsibilities. To most people, this appears to be an easy job. It’s not.”
Was she worried Pax couldn’t handle the stress?
Of course, Maddy knew what he was thinking. “I know you can handle the job, Pax. My concern was you shouldn’t have to. You should have been given a respite after your years at war, and instead you were given even more responsibility.”
“I don’t mind,” he objected. “It’s not more than I can handle.”
She scoffed. “Right. You can handle anything, because you’re a brave war hero who can stick people with a sword, yada yada.”
What did “yada yada” mean?
“Even if you can work past the point of exhaustion, you shouldn’t have to. If what’s happening with Number Five is to teach us anything, it’s we all need to refill our tanks now and again. Have you ever considered what you need to fill yours?”
If Maddy had even a hint of sympathy in her eyes while delivering this speech, Pax might have fainted in shock. Her expression, though, was of supreme annoyance.
Maddy went to the office door, put her hand on the doorknob, then paused. She didn’t look back at him when she spoke, but Pax felt the heat of her stare anyway.
“This infatuation with the woman and her son. Ask yourself, will this help you fill your tank or will it drain the last of your energy instead?”