Chapter 7
“I can’t believe she came over when I wasn’t there,” Jo fumed from behind the bar, slicing lemons so haphazardly that Niko was afraid they’d lose a finger. It had been almost a week since Merritt’s visit, but Jo seemed to get only more pissed by the day. “You’d better invite her here soon.”
The here in question was Off the Rails, where Jo bartended several nights a week.
“Or what?” Simon teased from the stool next to Niko, his attention fixed on the muted soccer game behind Jo’s head.
“Or I’ll burn our house down.”
Niko looked up from his beer in alarm. “What?”
Jo laughed and reached across the bar to pat him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Niko.” Their expression darkened in mock-seriousness, and they stuck a finger in his face. “As long as you get her over here.”
He shrugged noncommittally. “Maybe.” It was hard to picture Merritt at Off the Rails, which was as dive-y as it got in this town. Then again, it had been hard to picture her smoking a joint in a folding chair in his garage until he’d seen it himself.
Niko had lost track of how many roommates had rotated through his house over the past seven years, but in the eight months they’d been living there, Simon and Jo had grown to be two of his favorites.
They were friendly, laid-back, and courteous of the fact that, even though they were all technically renters, it was undoubtedly Niko’s home.
Simon was always bringing home extra food after his shifts at Last Chair Pizza, and they drank for free on the nights Jo bartended.
Since the rent was on the expensive side compared to most ski bum housing, his roommates tended to be either people who juggled three or four jobs and came home only to sleep, or those who had other mysterious cash flow sources to supplement the few hours of shift work they picked up every week.
Jo and Simon were definitely the latter—not that Niko would judge them either way.
They’d already been best friends before moving to Crested Peak, taking a gap year between graduating from Stanford and starting their New York hedge fund jobs.
Niko still wasn’t exactly sure what a hedge fund was, no matter how many times they explained to him it had nothing to do with shrubbery, but neither of them seemed to worry much about money.
Simon shoved a handful of pretzels into his mouth. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she shows up on her own.”
“What do you mean?” Jo moved on to polishing pint glasses.
“She’s, like, fully in love with Niko.”
Niko choked on his beer so violently he felt like it was going to come out of his eye sockets. “What? No, she’s not. That’s—What? Why?”
Something happened on TV that made Simon half rise out of his seat, shouting and gesturing. “Oh, come on!” He settled back on the stool and took another sip of his drink, his eyes still glued to the game. “The whole time she was over, she couldn’t stop staring at you. You didn’t notice?”
Niko blinked. Was that true? He’d been too preoccupied with trying not to stare at her to notice. “Maybe I had something in my teeth.”
Jo snorted. “Don’t be so modest. You’re a strapping young man.”
Simon frowned, finally tearing his eyes away from the game. “Wait, if nothing’s going on with you two, then what were you doing in your room with her?”
“I was showing her my bed!” he said, a little too indignantly.
“Fuck yeah, you were.” Jo held up their hand for a high five. Niko scowled and drained his beer.
“She’s my client.” And the way things were going, after he was done with her house, he’d be able to pay off all his credit cards, maybe even approach five figures in his savings account. Unless he fucked everything up by hitting on her.
“So?” Simon smirked.
Suddenly, the fact that he was almost a decade older than his roommates had never seemed more obvious.
His life wasn’t real to them, he realized with a jolt.
They were a couple of kids passing through on their way to bigger and better things.
It didn’t matter to them if he did permanent damage to his business or his reputation or his social life; they’d be gone forever in a few months.
They just saw him as a source of entertainment, part of the story they’d tell their friends one day about their wild year living in Colorado.
Jo seemed to sense the shift in his mood. They quickly opened another beer and slid it over to him. “Sorry, sorry. Just busting your balls a little.”
Niko shrugged, his annoyance fading as quickly as it had come. Now that the initial shock had worn off, he let himself sink into Simon’s words like a warm bath.
She couldn’t stop staring at you.
Maybe he could, for a second, entertain the possibility that Simon was right—that worldly, sophisticated, mysterious Merritt was into him—and the implications of what that might mean.
Of course he thought she was beautiful. He didn’t have to think twice about that part. She’d seemed oddly familiar when he first met her, but once he had found out that she was famous, he’d figured that was it. But the other night, moments before he’d drifted off to sleep, it had hit him.
When he’d lived with his grandparents in Kontovazaina, his entertainment options were limited to an old antenna TV and a beat-up VHS player that had a fifty-fifty chance of chewing up tapes and destroying them permanently—until the Christmas when he was twelve, when one of his uncles had shown up with a brand-new DVD player and a backpack full of bootlegs.
That backpack included a box set of a ’70s British fantasy miniseries called Of Darkness and Destiny, and Niko was instantly obsessed.
He didn’t care that his copy of a copy of a copy had been badly dubbed into Greek and was missing the second-to-last episode.
Some of his very first drawings had been of those characters, re-creating his favorite scenes and imagining the missing ones.
He’d obviously identified with the hero, Samson the Silent, the fierce and loyal warrior tasked with hunting down ancient treasures pillaged from his kingdom.
But secretly, his favorite character was Elora, elf queen of the Eternal Realm, with whom Samson carried on a passionate but forbidden affair.
He’d grown up in a tiny Greek mountain village desperately lacking in girls his own age, and Elora had been the object of his earliest fantasies—and not just because she was the first woman he’d seen naked who wasn’t related to him.
That was who Merritt reminded him of. Maybe that was why she always seemed slightly out of place, no matter where she was. She belonged on a crystal throne in an enchanted forest, surrounded by courtiers, framed by a Vaseline-smeared lens.
Which meant that, if it was true—if she was interested in him—he was in big fucking trouble. Warnings from his friends and his own professional code of conduct were no match for the deep-seated erotic hold of the elf queen.
Niko felt his ass buzz and dug his phone out of his back pocket. It was Dev, asking him to pick up an extra bag of chips on his way to poker night. He pushed his untouched second beer back toward Jo and stood up.
“I should head out.”
He expected them to tease him a little more, but they barely paid him any attention. Jo had gone across the bar to take someone’s order, and Simon was glued back to the game.
As he pulled his truck away from the grocery store and turned toward Dev’s house, his heart started hammering faster. He was going to see her tonight. She never played cards with them—not that she’d ever been invited—but she always seemed to be lurking around.
Maybe this was his chance to get some answers.
However, five hands in, she still hadn’t emerged. Maybe she wasn’t home after all. Either way, the distraction of wondering where she was wasn’t helping his poker skills.
“I’m calling. Whattaya got?” Bruce tossed his chips into the center of the table and slammed down his empty beer can emphatically.
Their poker group could sometimes be as large as eight, but tonight there were only four of them: Niko, Dev, Bruce, and Larry.
Bruce, hulking and thick-necked with a buzz cut and a barking, intimidating laugh, was the head chef at Gwendolyn’s, the fanciest restaurant in Crested Peak.
It was worth it to organize their games around his schedule, which was the most demanding, because he always brought the most incredible snacks Niko had ever eaten.
Niko looked down at his cards like it was the first time he’d seen them. “Oh. I’m out.”
“You can’t fold, he already called,” Larry pointed out.
“Well, I got nothing.” Niko tossed his cards on the table while Bruce collected the chips, gloating.
“I knew it. Your poker face is worse than usual.”
Niko ignored Bruce’s dig as Dev gathered the cards and started to shuffle.
He picked up a tortilla chip and scooped up a heaping glob of Bruce’s roasted beet dip.
He wasn’t sure if it was the angle of the chip or the speed with which he tried to pop it into his mouth, but before he knew it, it dropped onto the front of his white T-shirt with a wet plop.
“Fuck,” he muttered, grabbing a napkin and attempting to wipe it off, which of course only made the stain wider and angrier. He pushed back his chair and stood up. “Play this hand without me, I’ll be right back.”
“That’s right, run away now that you’re losing,” Dev said with a grin, dealing him out of the next hand.
Niko padded to the kitchen and turned on the sink.
He could never remember if it was hot or cold water that was better for stains, so he settled on warm just to be safe.
He tried to stretch his shirt under the tap, but the stain was too far up his chest, so he cupped his hand under the tap, filling it to haphazardly splash onto himself.
Within seconds, his entire shirt was soaked, and that was when Merritt walked into the kitchen.