Chapter Six
Alexo leads me to the parking lot and points at the dumpsters behind the townhouse.
He stays on the sidewalk, and I jog for them, not liking him out of my sight in this neighborhood—or at all.
My footsteps crunching on the gravel is the only sound around us, broken by the occasional bout of music from a building farther down and a car engine revving at the intersection up the street.
By the time I’m back to him, he’s got his hands in the pockets of his baggy jeans, his head tipped to the night sky washed clean of stars from the same city light intrusion that casts the area in a dreamlike gray.
He swings his gaze not to me, but to the empty parking lot, his head moving in a slow refusal of something unsaid.
“He left,” he growls at the lot, about that guy, I realize, and I stuff my fisted hands in my hoodie’s pocket to hide how I curl them. “He yelled at me for—” He stops, chews the remainder of the sentence. One of my fingers pops. “And then he left. He left me here, and you show up, and he’s gone.”
With a frustrated shout, Alexo whirls, hands in his hair. He paces and shouts again, and I watch him the same way he’s always watching me. Studying. Learning.
A hundred questions stack up in my throat, waiting to explode, to demand answers of Alexo. But I force myself to swallow them one by one. I will not lose myself again, not tonight. I have reached the max on what unhinged behavior I’ll allow.
Besides, asking questions would only serve me right now, and Alexo’s clear irritation swerves sharply into something far too close to grief when he cups his hands behind his neck and rolls his eyes shut.
“Do you want to come somewhere with me?” is the only question I let myself ask.
He turns to me and snorts. “Well, you’re a polite stalker slash kidnapper, so at least you’ve got that going for you.”
The memory of Thio saying I was the politest striptease he’d ever had immediately has my brain picturing doing a striptease for Alexo, and I’m glad the dim lighting out here hides the sudden blush I feel tearing up my cheeks.
“Not kidnapping you, I promise,” I say.
“But you admit to the stalking.”
“Unfortunately, the evidence is a bit damning.”
Alexo laughs, letting his hands drop from around his neck, and I soak up the sound of his laughter like a shriveled plant in a drought.
He sighs. “You know what? Sure. Let’s go somewhere. Why not?” He throws the last question at the empty parking lot, and my stomach twists.
“If this will get you in more trouble—”
“I’m twenty-three years old.” He glares at me, fury blunt in his eyes. “I don’t get in trouble. I don’t answer to him. I won’t. Let’s go.”
He marches off down the sidewalk.
In the wrong direction.
I clear my throat and point. “My car is—”
Alexo swivels around and resumes his frustrated stomping the right way, scowling to the cracked sidewalk.
Around the block, my car is intact, and Alexo stares at it for a long beat.
“This is…” He coughs. “A fancy car.”
I fiddle with the keys. “Compared to some of the outrageous vehicles my teammates drive, a Maserati might as well be a soccer van, I swear.”
He gives a look that says that’s your best excuse for having such an ostentatious car?
“Hey, I’m allowed a vice,” I say with a grin and step down the curb to open the door for him.
Alexo’s expression swings to amusement.
“But he was such a gentleman,” he says, his voice intentionally too high. “How could I not get in the car with him? It would’ve been rude.”
I cock my head.
“Just reciting what I’ll say to—to the adventure party who has to rescue me from you later.”
I ignore his stumble and lean on the open door. “If you want, I can call a rideshare for you and have them drop you where we’re going. Which is somewhere public, I promise.”
Alexo narrows his eyes. “Oh, fuck all the way off.”
I recoil. “What?”
“You—this.” He waves his hand at all of me.
“Your whole knight in shining armor routine. This level of chivalry should be illegal.” But he’s talking to himself now, and he sucks in a deep breath that evolves into a moan.
“Idiot. I’m such an idiot,” he mumbles as he slides into my car’s passenger seat.
I hold, processing what happened, before I grin and shut the door.
By the time I fold myself into the driver’s seat, Alexo has his seat belt on and is fiddling with the radio.
He looks almost comically small in my car—I got an adjusted model for customers with bigger ancestries, and it’s the same as seeing Seb or Thio here.
Only with Alexo, it highlights that size difference in a few very obvious ways, and I clamp my lips against the rush of saliva that fills my mouth.
Alexo finds a radio station he seems satisfied with and glances up at me. “So. Where are we going?”
I shake out of my stupor and focus on the road. “It’s a surprise.”
“Hm. A surprise like an abandoned warehouse where no one will hear me scream, or a surprise like a roll of duct tape and a creepy basement?”
A laugh bursts out of me. “Okay, fair point. We’re going to a magic smash room.”
“A—” Alexo twists toward me. “A magic what?”
“A smash room.” I take a turn and begin working our way toward the city.
“It kind of is a warehouse, but other people will be there, even this late. It’s full of magically warded rooms that are stacked with various obstacles or breakables—pottery, electronics.
And you can buy stuff for spells and use whatever you want to blast the shit out of things. Do you do any magic?”
I glance at him quickly, and he shakes his head.
“That’s fine. They have potions that can give you temporary attack abilities. Or you don’t need to use magic at all—they have weapons, too. It’s a fantastic stress release.”
I found it when I was in college, researching ways to help Seb with his anger issues, but I never took him; I was honestly terrified of what he’d do if he was allowed to attack shit with abandon.
Alexo’s quiet for a beat. I keep my eyes on the road, but I can feel him looking at me, the heated weight of his gaze on the side of my face.
“And you think I need to relieve stress?” he asks. I can’t pin his tone—is he upset?
I risk another look at him. “I think you’d appreciate not having to restrain yourself.”
He blows out an exhale. The spacious interior of my car is quickly feeling very, very small, and the steady gusts of the AC swell his apple scent, filling the whole car with the saccharine aura of fruit.
When he moves on the seat, arms crossing over his stomach, it wafts more of that scent, and a hint of the mint soap the stadium provides in the showers.
I bet his curls smell like that, a combination that absolutely shouldn’t work, peppermint and apples, but I want nothing more than to bury my face in the spot behind his ear and breathe.
“His name’s Tem,” Alexo says softly.
My hands spasm on the wheel and I snap my gaze forward to keep from swerving off the road. “Who?”
“The guy I live with. Tem Raussec. And he’s not my boyfriend or my partner or anything romantic at all.
He’s like my uncle. And he can be … overprotective.
He hates that I insisted on working with the Hellhounds, but I got the internship, and it let me be at least performance adjacent, so I took it.
And then this whole PR thing…” He sighs, head thumping back against the seat.
“I can’t say too much. Okay? Please don’t ask.
But Tem’s … he’s not all bad. He hates when I’m in the spotlight. Hates me being vulnerable.”
I gnaw on my response. Carefully, painstakingly select each word.
“Well. I can at least understand that. Wanting you to be safe.”
He hums. “Yeah. That’s all that matters, right? People being safe.”
The lot for the smash room comes up. I pull into it, park, and twist to look at Alexo.
He doesn’t move. The smash room is a massive warehouse in the industrial area of town, all lit up with a few people lingering outside, and Alexo stares out the windshield at it, bracing.
Like he knows I’m going to push. Like he knows—suspects, fears—that I’m like Tem, wanting to overbearingly protect him.
The thought of being at all like that asshole has nausea roiling in my stomach. Yes, I want Alexo safe. But I also want him how he was when he sang at the bar. How he is when he dances.
“Is he hurting you?” I ask.
Alexo flicks his eyes to me. “Not physically.”
That’s loaded. I exhale through my nose, then ask, “Do you want my help with him? With getting away from him?”
Alexo hesitates, curious, and shakes his head. “No.”
“All right. If that changes, let me know. I’d still very much like to date you, and I can’t promise I’ll always be good at not, for lack of a better word, smothering you, but I can promise I’ll try. I don’t want to force anything on you that you don’t want.”
His eyes are huge by the time I’m done talking. The light from the smash room fills the car, reflecting off his brown irises, and I have a moment of panic that I finally succeeded in being too much and scaring him off.
But Alexo unbuckles his seat belt, lurches forward, and kisses me.
It is decidedly not the PDA list’s framework of kissing, no tongue.
There is tongue.
And the taste of him.
With the unendurable flavor of him fed directly into my mouth, buffeted at the edges by his apple scent but an onslaught on its own, syrupy, masculine, I grab the back of his head and feast. He makes a helpless, lewd moan, pushing against me so his glossed lips slip and slide and his tongue wars with mine, each brush ricocheting straight into my gut.
I quickly forget that he initiated this, that I should let him lead, too lost in devouring as much of him as I can, and I distantly note that I’m memorizing out of fear this will be the only time.
Memorizing the silken feel of his curls against my fingers and the warmth of his breath in my mouth and the hemorrhagic, blissed-out whimper I get out of him when I suck on the tip of his tongue.