Chapter 25 #2
He spins all this around in the tumble-dry setting of his brain for a minute as he finally inserts the pod in the coffee maker.
“You like him?” he asks, immediately realizing he doesn’t want the answer.
She smiles.
Not the shitty smile. It’s the flax smile.
Topher is held in the same esteem as a pack of bland seeds she’d shove a newlywed for. Ask him how he knows. He’s so stunned he doesn’t put the mug in his hands under the coffee maker spout and has to scramble to get it positioned when coffee starts spitting onto the table.
“Do you like him?” She prods from the couch, on her knees now, facing the back of the chair with arms folded along the top edge as she watches him make a mess.
He sops up bean water and frowns, trying to consider Topher in some ill-defined way.
It’s not as though he dislikes Topher—he loves the parts that have all the money—but now Mateo’s thinking about the vagueness in his chest. When he was a kid, he blamed his unclear feelings on the demon.
Like it was blunting the world, making other people less interesting than everyone else seemed to find them.
Then he’d met Ophelia.
Their friendship was a slow-motion car accident. The kind where everyone gets a good look at everything, knows exactly who ran what or failed to brake, before two chrome bodies wrap around each other and destroy both vehicles and everything inside.
But positive. Ish.
They were each other’s first anything and everything, good and bad. It was like trying to compare the brightness of a flashlight to the sun when the sun had already blinded him.
And then there’s whatever the hell’s happening lately with the demon. It’s reacting to a lot of Topher-adjacent things.
Like right now, he realizes with a start, teeth sharp.
But why? Because he was asked something about Topher? What the fuck, demon? It certainly felt some sort of way about Topher. Positive or protective or something. And if that’s happening, how’s Mateo supposed to filter through that to figure out how he actually feels?
He doesn’t answer for so long that Ophelia asks a different question. “What about Ethan?”
“What about Ethan?”
“You forgot about Ethan,” she singsongs it, making fun of him. “The man that said right to your whole stupid face that he’d give you information if you slept with him.”
He cringes, not sure if his pain is at the forgetting or just that she’s saying the sex part with her human mouth, and he hates it.
“I forgot about Ethan,” he admits. “I was kind of busy falling out a window. Oh shit.” He abandons his coffee attempts and goes to his room, grabs something out of the closet, and returns.
“I stole his jacket.” He presents the studded Les Hommes Ethan had thrown over Ophelia’s shoulders after the pool incident.
It’s still beautiful even if it also smells like chlorine.
“I meant to call him or something. Or leave it with Topher.”
“Free jacket,” Ophelia says, sprawling on the couch now.
“This thing had to be a grand,” Mateo says, normally a fan of getting a free, expensive jacket, but Ethan had been nice, if playing at a different league or bracket or whatever sports metaphor makes sense for guys that are casually suave at sleeping around.
Wait. Ethan had been all slick lines, but Topher had kissed him. Isn’t that the stronger come on? Why is he less disoriented by Ethan’s advances, which were, comparatively, better?
He digs out his phone, not a fan of how much he doesn’t know what he feels about anyone except the amazing, studded jacket in his hands and the horrible girl on the couch.
None of it matters anyway. He’s not looking to date random guys.
He’d probably end up eating them. “We’ve got a few hours still.
I’ll shoot Ethan a text.” Mateo pretends not to check whether Topher messaged again.
“And we weren’t fired so we should go back to researching. ”
Ophelia makes a guttural, dying noise but retrieves her laptop.
It takes two hours and a pizza before they’re bored out of their minds. Mateo swipes an especially ad-laden site away and checks the time. “It’s almost two-thirty. That’s too long just to report something, isn’t it?” Unless this was Topher’s conflict-averse way of firing them.
“I texted half an hour ago,” Ophelia says, giving him a meaningful look. Surely, he’d text back the rabid and beautiful lady. “Call him.”
“Why me?”
“Because he’s so hot for you.”
Mateo pulls up the last text from Topher, but his phone starts chirping before he hits Call.
The caller ID reads Slick as Shit.
“It’s Ethan!” he yells for no reason.
“Speakerphone!” Ophelia yells, also for no reason.
Mateo hits speakerphone and answers. “Hey!” Too loud. Bring it down. “Hi. Hello.” It’s not that he’s excited to talk to Ethan or anything, but this is something happening after hours of nothing happening. It’s a coincidence that he’s avoiding all eye contact with Ophelia right now.
A pause on the line—probably laughing at him—before Ethan says, “Hey to you. And wow, the nerve. Trying to skip town without showing me your magic tricks and stealing my favorite jacket?”
“Dick move, I know.” Mateo bodily turns from Ophelia, as if that makes a difference when it’s speakerphone.
It’s awkward to talk with her hearing every flirty thing Ethan says.
“My flight’s soon, but I think I can leave it at the front desk.
In exactly the same condition you last saw it in.
Which means it smells like chlorine because I’m scared to try to clean it. ”
“You’re leaving?”
“Yeah. We’re close to wrapping things up with Topher,” Mateo lies.
Another pause on the call. “You know baby Nystrom’s in jail, right?”
Now Mateo meets Ophelia’s equally startled eyes. She tosses the wet, cheese-less pizza dough she was about to bite onto the table, wipes her hands on the rug like an animal, and drags her laptop to herself.
“What?” Mateo says, crawling off the couch to peer over Ophelia’s shoulder as she starts searching for local news.
“Coverage started a few hours ago. Said he was brought in for questioning and then arrested,” Ethan says.
On Ophelia’s screen is a closed caption video of a perky Californian with platinum blond hair.
Topher’s face sits in the upper right corner, like one of those night mode stills of a raccoon in someone’s trash.
Mateo reads the headline below the picture three times before it registers correctly. Trust Fund Murderer.
“Who’d he murder?” Mateo asks slowly, touching Ophelia’s screen like that’ll help or prove anything. She opens a second video, and a slim guy with too much gel in his hair makes a perfect Hollywood-concerned-face as he says something about the charges.
“His mother,” Ethan says as the screen doubles down with a caption: San Francisco native charged with killing mother.