The Grumpy Gargoyle's Mating Mark

1. Chapter 1

Rory

Sunday night at the Wandering Gnome smells like sugar and vanilla, which also means the French silk pie. And French silk pie is the guiltiest of my guilty pleasures, something I have no intention of ever apologizing for.

The chalkboard on the pie case says LAST SLICE in Mathilda's block capitals. I’m the first one to see it as she steps away from the chalkboard and I make my way to the counter to nab it before anyone else.

I do love a small win. Early bird gets the worm and all that applies here. My week might actually be salvageable after all.

The windows are fogged white at the edges, the brass lights have turned the whole room golden, and the percolator is doing its low burble behind the counter like it's gossiping about somebody.

Half of Saltford Bay is in here pretending they came for good conversation and coffee.

Nobody comes here for conversation on a Sunday.

They come for what's in that case.

And what's in that case, as of thirty seconds ago, is one slice of French silk with my name on it. Not technically, but give me a minute.

"The last slice of the French silk pie, please," I tell Mathilda, and I do not apologize for the way I say it, like she might change her mind if I show weakness.

Mathilda, the gnome proprietor of the establishment, looks at me over her half-glasses for a beat longer than necessary. Then she plates it, wipes the chalk notice away with one flour-dusted thumb, and slides it across the counter my way.

I carry it to a window booth like it's a relic and I'm the last surviving nun of my order.

Fork. Napkin. Then I take a moment to appreciate the fact that something has finally gone right.

I have had the kind of week where a seventeen-year-old cried in my office, twice, both times it was about the same problem, and neither time was I allowed to fix it with violence.

I have earned this slice. Deeply. Personally.

The first bite is on the fork and I take a moment to groan with anticipation. The fork is almost to my mouth when a shadow falls over my table, big enough that the brass light gives up entirely.

"That's mine."

I know the voice before I look up, which is its own little tragedy, because I shouldn't.

A year of two-word exchanges shouldn't be enough to teach anyone a voice.

But this one sounds like gravel settling at the bottom of a quarry, and there's only one man in this town who comes with a voice like that.

Coach Bram Stryge. Seven feet of granite-gray gargoyle in a back-vented button-down, wings folded high behind his shoulders like the world's most judgmental cathedral, green eyes doing that startling thing they do against all the gray. Arms crossed. Scowl pre-installed.

Gorgeous as sin and cold as, well, stone. I get instantly annoyed at how I appreciate his good looks even as he’s being a jerk.

For one full year I said good morning to this man in the staff room.

I complimented his terrifying whistle technique.

I once brought him coffee during playoff week and he looked at the cup like it might bite him.

A year of me being professionally delightful, and the sum total of what I got back was granite.

Cold, carved, aggressively unbothered granite.

And now he speaks to me. In public.

Over pie.

"I'm sorry," I say, in the tone that means I am not sorry. "Were you talking about my dessert or me?”

I lift an eyebrow and I’m rewarded for my sass by a deepening of his brows.

Ok. No sense of humor. Duly noted.

"That slice is set aside." His eyes drop to the plate, then come back to me. “Every Sunday. Mathilda knows it.”

Oh, that’s how he wants to play it? Being a cold jerk at work isn’t enough for him, he thinks he can bully me into surrendering my slice of pie and my only win of the week?

Fat chance, stone boy.

"Funny. It didn't have a name on it. It had a chalkboard that said LAST SLICE, and I ordered the last slice. I’d say I won that slice fair and square. Better chance next time and all that.”

Something ticks in his jaw. Oh, that's delightful. In a year of trying, I have never once gotten this man's face to move.

"Mathilda holds it for me.” He nods at the shelf behind the register, the one with the boxed slices and the masking-tape names. “She always does.”

I look. There are three boxes on that shelf. None of them say STRYGE. I turn back to him and let my smile go wide and terrible.

"Then it appears your standing order fell down on the job. My condolences. The apple pie is also lovely."

"She must have forgotten**,** then.”

"That sounds like a you problem. Or a her problem. Notably, not a me problem." I gesture at the plate with my fork, which is a mistake, because I talk with my hands and the pie wobbles. I steady it. He tracks the wobble like a hawk tracking a limping rabbit.

And here's the thing. Here's the beautiful, glowing thing.

It's Sunday night. I'm not Ms. Hale right now.

He's not Coach Stryge. There's no staff room, no students, no professional anything requiring me to be sweet about this.

Just me, one slice of French silk, and a man who has spent twelve months treating my existence like background noise.

I have been so good all year. I'm about to make up for it.

"You know what," I say, settling back against the vinyl, "let's settle this. Why does this pie belong to you?"

"I have a slice every Sunday. It’s a settled arrangement.”

"That's not a reason. I've had a terrible week, I got here first, and I paid for it. It’s mine and if you want to stake your claim on it, you’ll have to be way more convincing than that.”

I wave my fork right above the surface of the delicious, delicious dessert.

"Put the fork down."

"Make me."

Two words, out of my mouth before my brain catches up to my mouth, and I watch his face as they land on him. His eyes narrow. The wings behind his shoulders pull in tighter, a slow**,** controlled cinch, like a man unbuttoning his coat before a fight.

"You're a counselor," he says. "Aren't you supposed to model conflict resolution?"

"It's Sunday. I'm off the clock."

He unfolds his arms, and then, God help the furniture, he sits down across from me.

The booth gives a long, suffering creak as his wings and shoulders fold into the space opposite me with this deliberate, economical calm, like a mountain deciding to be patient.

He plants one forearm on the table and looks at me the way he looks at players who jump offside.

"You took my pie," he says. "Say it."

"I liberated an unclaimed dessert."

"You stole it."

"Wow." I press a hand to my chest. "A year you and I have been colleagues. A whole year of good mornings and getting blinked at like I'm some particularly annoying pest, and this is what finally cracks the statue. Not my winning personality. Pie."

"Your winning personality is currently eating my Sunday treat.”

"Not yet." I wave the fork again, slow, maintaining eye contact, because apparently tonight I've decided to die on this hill and the view is fantastic.

"Some of us know how to appreciate things, Coach.

You'd probably inhale this in two bites at your desk over game film, anyway.

That's not eating pie. That's refueling. "

"And what are you planning to do with it?” It doesn't even bend at the end like a question. It just sits there, flat and granite, daring me.

I should say something normal. I do not.

"This," I announce, "is the best thing that's ever been in my mouth, and tonight I'm taking it to bed with me and taking my sweet time with it."

The percolator burbles. A fork clinks somewhere in the back.

My entire face catches fire.

Because I heard it. He heard it. The booth behind him heard it. Somewhere on the harbor, a gull heard it. My skin does the thing it always does, the traitorous fair-skin thing, going scarlet from my collarbones to my hairline and making sure everyone knows that I know exactly how that sounded.

Bram Stryge doesn't laugh. He does worse. One black eyebrow climbs, unhurried, and the corner of his mouth moves a fraction of an inch, and on that carved face**,** a fraction of an inch might as well be a standing ovation.

"Is that so?” he says, and the gravel has gone low and almost warm, and no. No, we are not doing this.

“No, it’s… That's not what I…” I stand up so fast my knees hit the table. "It's pie. Normal people eat pie in bed. It's a whole thing. You wouldn't understand."

I grab my coat off the booth hook with one hand and the plate with the other, because I am leaving, immediately, with either my dignity or my dessert, and since the dignity has clearly left without me, the dessert will have to do.

What happens next is entirely my fault.

The coat sleeve swings. My heel catches the table leg. The plate tilts in my hand, and the last slice of Sunday French silk slides neatly off the china and lands chocolate-side down in the dead center of Coach Bram Stryge's lap.

Nobody moves. He looks down at the ruin on his gray slacks. I look down at the ruin on his gray slacks.

He lifts his head, and those green eyes fix on me, and he goes very, very still. Carved still. The kind of still that comes right before something extremely not-still.

"Well," he says, quiet and low, like a teacher scolding a toddler. "Now nobody gets it."

And something in me snaps clean in half.

Because that's my pie. That was my week, my one good thing, my hard-won spoils, sitting in whipped ruins on the lap of the smuggest granite man in Maine, and he thinks that's the end of it.

I reach across the table, into his lap, and grab a handful of pie directly off the crotch of his pants.

His wings flare. Just a sharp snap of slate membrane behind his shoulders.

I straighten up, look him dead in the eye, and eat it. Out of my bare hand. Chocolate silk and crushed crust and whipped cream to the second knuckle, in front of Mathilda and half of Saltford Bay, and I hold his gaze the entire time, chin up, like a woman accepting a medal.

It's the best bite of pie I've ever had in my life. Spite is an underrated seasoning.

Bram's mouth parts just slightly, and his eyes go darker as they track the whipped cream from my fingers to my lips. The look on his face is furious and hungry at once, and my body likes it far more than my common sense does.

Something happens low in my stomach that I am declining to examine.

"Worth it," I say, with my mouth full.

Then I take my napkin, wipe my hand, drop it on the table, and walk out.

The bell over the door rings. The November night hits me like a slammed freezer, and I keep going, coat half on, heels going way too fast down the harbor row for a sidewalk this frosty and a skirt this short.

Click-click-click-click, the walk of a woman who has just eaten pie out of a coworker's lap in front of half the town and desperately needs to put distance between herself and the witnesses.

The cold bites straight through my tights.

The gulls on the streetlamps watch me pass with what I can only describe as scorn.

Shits and giggles. I ate pie out of his lap. With my hand. I made prolonged eye contact while doing it.

Monday is going to be a rich, full day.

I'm past the second streetlamp, building to a really quality spiral, when the air changes.

There's a sound like a soft thunderclap, a single deep whump of displaced night, and seven feet of gargoyle drops out of the sky and lands on the sidewalk in front of me.

I shriek. Full volume, hands up, one heel skidding on frost, the whole undignified package.

He lands the way big things shouldn't be able to land, silent and graceful except for that one clap of air, wings flared wide and dark against the streetlamp before they fold away behind his shoulders like the night zipping itself back up.

He's also holding my purse.

Fuck. Me.

Apparently I forgot my purse at the Wandering Gnome and didn’t even realize it, because I stormed out after ruining my reputation in front of the entire town. So much for my win of the week.

"You forgot this," he says, flat and cold.

I press a hand to my sternum, where my heart is attempting to exit through my ribs, and take a moment to hate everything.

"You did this on purpose to scare the soul out of my body.”

My voice comes out two octaves high.

"Faster than walking."

"It's a purse, not a transplant organ." I snatch it by the strap, careful, his talons on the leather and my fingers nowhere near them, and hug it to my chest. Then the obvious hits me. "You could've just given it to me Monday. At school. Where we both work. Like a normal person."

He looks at me. Streetlamp behind him, green eyes catching the light, chocolate still smeared across the front of his slacks like a crime scene, and he says absolutely nothing.

Nothing. Not "I didn't think of that." Not "I wanted it off my table." Not one syllable of denial.

Oh.

The silence stretches, and he just stands there in it, comfortable, letting it mean whatever it means, and my stomach flips again. Damn it.

"You're a brat," he says finally, conversational, like he's reading a scouting report. "A mouthy little brat looking for trouble."

"Excuse me?"

He takes one step closer. The streetlamp disappears behind his shoulders. This close I have to tip my head all the way back to hold the eye contact, and I do, because backing up is for sensible people and I have apparently resigned from their ranks for the evening.

"Somebody," he says, gravel gone low and slow and almost pleasant, "ought to put you over a knee and spank that attitude out of you."

Every drop of blood I own goes somewhere unhelpful.

I should laugh it off. I should say goodnight, Coach, and click-click home to my apartment and my throw pillows and my firm sensible rules.

I don't.

I look up seven feet of moonlit granite, into the smug green eyes of Coach Bram Stryge, and I hear myself say, sweet as whipped cream:

"Try it and see how it goes.”