Chapter 6 #2
I stay exactly where I am, cheek against the cool table, listening to the nothing-sound of him not moving. My heartbeat is still doing something structurally unsound behind my ribs.
I give myself a few moments. Then I catalog the following facts: I am lying face-down on my worktable. My leggings are still on, technically, though they’ve migrated to a position that suggests they had an eventful afternoon. My shirt is rucked up under my armpits.
The rosemary-oat bars are still setting perfectly.
And the most thorough orgasm of my adult life just happened.
“Okay.”
I push myself upright.
The motion is slow, my arms shaky and loose. Oz has peeled away with a warmth that lingers like a handprint on sun-heated glass.
I pull my shirt down, tug my leggings back into position, and swipe at the mica on my cheek, which just smears it further.
“Okay,” I say again.
Oz has settled back from me.
Three feet of deliberate distance.
His form is less humanoid than it was before, the edges soft and pooling. He’s watching me the way he’s been watching me since the crate: total attention, total stillness, room for me to land wherever I need to.
I sit on the stool and look at him straight on.
“I need to say something.”
The violet deepens. “I’m listening.”
“That was really good.”
A wave of gold so bright it throws light onto the drying rack.
“But,” I continue, “You deserve to understand what town you just arrived in. It’s a good town. It’s my town, and I love it. But it’s small, and people talk because they care, and caring looks a lot like knowing everybody’s business.”
“Oh.”
“If anyone finds out you’re here, I won’t just be the woman who let a monster into her house.
I’ll be the woman who ordered one. Off the Internet.
Like a—” I wave my hand, searching for the word and hoping I don’t find it.
“Like a mail-order situation. Do you understand what that means in a place like this?”
His surface ripples. The jagged static pattern I saw earlier, brief and bright. “I understand what people assume about slimes.”
“It’s bigger than slimes. People around here aren’t sure about any of it.
” I pull my knees up on the stool, hugging them to my chest. “About twelve years ago, before the Unveiling, a hiker went missing on the ridge trail. The search party found her all shaken up a few days later, talking gibberish about aliens, monsters… She couldn’t describe what took her. ”
“Oh,” he says again, looking slightly deflated.
I continue, “A few months later, the Garcias lost a few goats in one night—torn up in ways the wildlife officer said he’d never seen.
When the Unveiling happened, half this town decided they finally had an explanation for whatever had been out there on the ridge.
That it was a monster, and that we’d never welcome any in this town. ”
He hesitates, before asking, “Do you feel that way? That monsters have no place in—”
“No.” I hold up a hand. “I just let you—on my worktable, Oz. I think my personal position on monsters is pretty well established at this point.”
The static smooths out. A thread of teal curls through his center, tentative.
“What I’m saying is that I need time to figure out what this is, and I can’t do that with Mrs. Pritchett peering through my kitchen window asking if I’ve got company because she saw an extra shadow move past the blinds.”
Oz’s colors shift through a slow gradient, teal to amber. “You want me to stay.”
“I want you to stay while I figure things out. I’m not… I can’t commit to anything just yet.”
“I understand.” The gold brightens at his edges. “I can be very quiet. Quiet is something I know how to do very well.”
The matter-of-fact way he says it lands in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, good. So we have a plan.”
“We have a plan,” he agrees.
Something about the way he echoes it back—careful, like he’s holding the word plan up to the light—makes my throat tighten.
I slide off the stool.
My legs are still doing that post-orgasm thing where they feel like they belong to a marionette operated by someone who’s had two glasses of wine, but they hold.
I straighten my shirt.
Redo my bun, which distributes the mica more evenly without actually removing any of it.
I’m sure I look like a disaster, but what else is new?
“First order of business,” I say, turning toward the drying rack.
“Those rosemary-oat bars need to be checked in forty minutes and I still have to clean up the mica, and you—” I point at him, then at the door.
“You should probably get off the studio floor before my five o’clock alarm goes off, because Deborah times her evening walk to coincide with garbage night and she’ll absolutely peek in here if the door is open. ”
Oz is already moving toward the hallway.
His form becomes compact, flowing across the concrete with a silence that is genuinely eerie for something his size.
At the doorway he pauses, a single thread of gold light tracing his edge like a question mark.
I open my mouth, close it, and point at the hallway. “Go.”
He goes.
Then I’m standing alone in my studio, with the ghost of warmth still pressed along every vertebra of my spine.
I look at the worktable. I look at my hands, which are shaking slightly, in a way that has little to do with my back and everything to do with the fact that I just told a slime monster he could live in my house in secret, forty-eight hours before the first batch of my biggest wholesale order ships, in a town where the smallest change in routine can get the rumor mill spinning like a jet engine.
“Cool,” I say to the empty room. “Great plan, Maisie. Really airtight.”
The rosemary-oat bars, at least, look perfect.