Chapter 43 #2
Although … Topher hadn’t seemed particularly uncomfortable at the magic book vomit ritual, which could be politeness or the concussion.
And really, didn’t Topher always look uncomfortable?
How was he supposed to parse what was Topher’s default nice guy who is normal uncomfortable versus nice guy who is exceptionally uncomfortable?
Not that Topher had looked uncomfortable while he’d been actively putting tongues all over—
No. Absolutely not. He can’t finish that thought. He folds the sweatpants with urgency.
This is stupid. He’s being stupid. Get it together, you absolute jackass.
Rising from his bedside crouch, he gathers up the very folded clothing and makes his way through the ridiculously long halls of the house, aiming for Topher’s room tucked into the back. The hope that someone will waylay him finally dies as he reaches the open door to Topher’s room.
The space is in scandalously slight disarray—startling only because the room had been so sparse and neat before.
Now the bed is unmade, the night’s pajama pants hanging limply off the end of it.
More books have appeared on the desk, another laptop, and a pile of things that look like they have something to do with computers.
Square flat boxes with wires and a power strip that weren’t there before.
There’s even a bowl of what was once cereal but is now a single fattened O floating in an inch of milk, sitting atop one of the stacks.
It’s almost like a totally normal room that someone actually lives in—albeit someone rich enough to have multiple computers and a wall of windows.
Back toward the door, Topher sits curled forward at his desk, cross-legged in a rollie chair definitely not meant for that, attention on a laptop.
Weird-looking black headphones curve around his earlobes, and with the way he’s lightly bobbing his head and scrolling around with abandon, he hasn’t heard Mateo come in.
All at once, Mateo’s seeing Topher in his natural habitat, without the stress of an accidental murder, a dickhead dad, or a missing mom threatening from every angle.
His hair’s puffy but corralled backward, the worry lines that have been knitting his brow since moment one are gone, and he’s mouthing something—maybe the words to whatever he’s listening to.
None of that vibrating tension of anxiety rolls off of him.
Taking advantage of this voyeuristic moment, Mateo also checks out his outfit: dark gray joggers with a trendy seam down the front of each leg and an oversized linen tee in pale gray with raw hems. He’s like a soft custom rain cloud, scrolling and vibing out to what sounds suspiciously like screamo music.
It takes Mateo a moment to realize what he’s scrolling through. Job listings on a pay-to-play site—the kind of site Mateo’s never seen the inside of. Salaries listed boldly because they’re amazing six figures, and the people who apply for them are at a premium.
Topher is at a premium.
Right. What the hell was he being nervous about? This is a goodbye—of biblical proportions.
He’d done what he’d been paid to do—albeit in a really roundabout way—and he’s going home. Topher’s going to be in San Francisco, hacking things and getting paid piles of money on top of his piles of money. This had been … fun. Confusing. Ultra weird. No small amount of traumatizing.
Mostly, it had been temporary.
“Hey,” Mateo says.
Topher draws in a sharp breath as he turns to the right, but his startled woodland creature expression shifts into a smile when he realizes it’s Mateo. He returns a whispered, “Hey.”
Which sands some of the forced indifference off of Mateo’s next words. “Got your stuff. All clean and only sort of stretched out. No demon gunk, at least.”
Bare feet drop to the floor and Topher stands, taking the pile of clothing without so much as glancing at them, dropping them onto the seat he’d been occupying.
They are suddenly way too close. Like Mateo had creeped right up to him without realizing it. So now he’s basically all up on Topher and those massive gray eyes are vibrating, directed up at him, the bruising still stark against pale skin in a way that makes Mateo’s chest hurt.
“Are you leaving now?” Topher asks.
“Just about,” Mateo says, meaning to ask if Topher wants an itemized receipt, or maybe joke about leaving a good Yelp review if he ever gets a website up, but the idea that this is it, the last chance, muddles with the memory of Topher’s head hitting the concrete in Ethan’s basement.
Instead of saying something stupid, he presses the stray hair away from Topher’s bruised eye, coaxing it back behind an ear with a careful touch that he lets linger till he’s sliding fingers to the back of Topher’s neck.
It’s not a decision so much as a necessity, like they were both waiting for this except Mateo hadn’t realized until now.
Topher’s gaze steadies, lips parting slightly, and Mateo leans down to meet them.
It’s not a frenzied kiss, though his heart is pounding.
He keeps it gentle, like he’s still afraid he might hurt Topher even without the maw of sharp teeth.
Really, he just wants to take his time, savor this moment that’s never going to happen again, commit it to memory, and maybe overwrite some of the other stuff.
The less good stuff. Anything that isn’t the knee-weakening-ly sweet way Topher’s kissing back, a hand gripping Mateo’s shirt hem, the little sigh he makes, and the way he tastes like sugar and smells like cinnamon and grass.
It takes a delayed moment of more warm kisses before Mateo’s brain drags up the fact that the grass smell isn’t a Topher thing.
“Oh my,” Linnéa says from the door.
Mateo backs up so quickly he rams ass first into Topher’s desk with a swear, scrabbling not to knock the laptop or the bowl of milk off before throwing hands up in surrender. Last thing in the world he wants is for Topher’s mom to think he’s eating her son face-first or something.
But Linnéa’s doing that same patronizingly delighted smile from the book vomit ritual. “I’m so sorry to interrupt you boys,” she says in amusement. Which is the most embarrassing thing she could have said. “Ophelia asked me to find you, Mateo. She’s ready to leave.”
Absolutely one thousand percent did Ophelia somehow do this on purpose.
“Well, I gotta go,” Mateo says as the most inadequate goodbye ever, hands still raised but managing to look at Topher and not his mom. “See ya.”
Topher’s dropped into his rollie chair, haphazardly on top of the clothes, face bright red. “Absolutely. For sure. Yes,” Topher stage whispers, eyes back to vibrating.
Mateo’s desperate to get out of the room before he completely ruins his cool-guy-leaving moment, but Linnéa catches him in a long, awkward—but at least a different flavor of awkward—hug.
He manages to extract himself and finds Ophelia, who knows exactly what she did by the smirk on her face as she directs him to help her finish loading up the rental with the stuff they stole from Ethan’s house.
Once that’s done, they’re off.
Ophelia drives, Mateo lying down in the backseat because he’s still pretty run-down—and chest-vomiting a magic book that’s actually part of him hadn’t helped.
The music’s low enough for conversation but they don’t talk for a while.
Not in a bad way.
She’s letting him try to deal with everything, and talking never helps.
Staring at the tops of trees and sides of buildings whizzing past the window across from him, Mateo torturously replays the goodbye. The kiss had been really good. And he’d almost been so slick, up until that part where he got scared of Topher’s mom and knocked a bunch of shit over and ran away.
This is pointless to worry about. He’s never going to see Topher again.
Which.
Like.
So why the fuck had his brain supplied see ya as his departing line?
Forcing his thoughts to something actually relevant, he clutches the spell book to his chest. It’s going to take some effort, but he’s going to learn every spell in it.
He’s going to learn what his mother knew.
What she took from him. Maybe that’ll make him worse, but he’s already eaten two people.
How much worse can it get? And maybe worse has always meant more of what he actually is, and maybe it’s not bad if he becomes that.
Because demons aren’t evil, they just don’t interact well with the material world.
It’s whatever the human involved does to get the power, or with the power, that’s capable of good or evil.
And maybe he’s not actually human. But he’s also not just a demon.
So maybe he can be whatever the fuck he wants to be.
He’d been on the verge of something after Ethan’s knife sunk in.
And he can’t shake the feeling that the thing he’d transformed into had been a hell of a lot more informed than his current self.
But being like that, knowing whatever he’d almost known, had felt like a one-way street sort of deal.
If he’d walked down it, he’s not sure he’d be able to come back, and there are things here—people here—he needs.
“Talk,” Ophelia says from the front.
Talking never helps, except he’d nearly lost the ability to ever talk to her again.
So he talks. Tells her everything.
The dreams, the shadows, and the almost-knowledge he’d punted aside in that basement.
That kiss. The two before it. That they don’t matter.
That they do matter. That they can’t matter.
That he’d thought it was the demon who was being weird about Topher, but it wasn’t.
And it’s kind of a relief because the idea of something else controlling him was horrifying.
But if not something else, that means the one actually being weird about Topher is him and he has no idea what to do with that.
The Ethan stuff. So much Ethan stuff. There’s no emotional guide about what to do when you thought someone was cool and you sort of hoped they’d be your friend but instead you eat them.
He explains how he keeps waffling between knowing it was a perfectly valid response—sort of—and regretting it.
And it’s double terrible because he’s crying about this while in the coolest jacket Ophelia could spot in Ethan’s closet.
Balmain, double-breasted with a chunky zipper detail and an oversized cut.
It’s magnificent and Mateo’s glad she grabbed it, even though wearing it makes him want to lie down on the road a little bit.
And somehow this guilt is coupled with an utter lack of guilt that is extremely wide and bone deep because he’s furious at Ethan for touching her. For touching Topher. For seeming cool and being shitty. For trying to help and then trying to kill him. For actually succeeding in killing him.
Most nonsensical of all, he’s mad at Ethan for dying.
And beneath that Mateo has a blindingly bright fear.
That he’ll do it again. Eat someone again.
Because a week ago he thought he was human and today he knows he’s not.
He’s something else and that something is hungry.
But it’s also not a fear, it’s a certainty.
He definitely will eat someone. He knows he will. He’s excited that he will.
He spews out all the things he’s kept from her for years and years for no reason other than that saying them makes them real but it’s all real anyway so he might as well say it.
And when he finishes, she says, “We’ll deal with it.”
And he says, “I love you.”
And she says, “I know.”