Page 11 of Code Mages & Empty Pages
How do I tell her it’s nice to listen to her?
I bit into one of the doughy cookies and groaned.
“Goddess, they are delicious.” I smacked my lips. “I’m a passable cook, but I’m useless at baking. You two amaze me.” I looked from her to Mia, who was also a fantastic baker, and back again.
“I’ll bring some to the office when I bake them next time.” Something in my chest unknotted at the cautious smile she gave me when she said it. I held onto her eyes for a long moment before snagging another cookie from the tin.
Just one more.
We alternated between snacking on what we’d brought, talking about everything and nothing, and just lounging in the late spring air. About half an hour after Dawn arrived, Hector and Mason turned up with their arms full. They brought a crate of craft beer and a cooler loaded with cider, lemonade, and water.
“Hey, little brother,” I called, getting up to greet Hec. We did the usual sort-of-a-hug side hug. Since Desmond had got together with Mia and Hector had Mace, both of them had become a lot more touchy-feely. To my surprise, it had rubbed off on me.
“By three minutes!” Hec snorted, bumping his fist against my shoulder before going to hug our cousin and Mia. We all adored her, not just because she did Desmond good, but because Mia was such a lovely person. I knew Hector and I agreed our lives were better with her in them. Mason gave me a quick hug too.
“How are you, BIL?” Mason asked with his usual tongue-in-cheek grin, capitalising on the nickname like it was a royal title. I snorted. Mace had been calling me BIL—his brother-in-law—since the day he put a ring on Hector, and he wasn’t going to stop now.
“Could you hand me a bottle of quince cider, baby?” Hec asked.
Mason’s cheeks flushed pink when Hector addressed him thus in front of all of us, and he rummaged in the cooler with an embarrassed grin on his face.
“Can I have one too, Mace?” I piped up.
“Sure!” he said, passing me a bottle.
I was doing my best to avoid temptation by sitting just close enough to Dawn to catch her scent, but far enough not to do anything stupid. Ed and Aspen joined our group. Aspen’s sons weren’t with them. “They are fifteen,” Aspen explained to the rest of the group when Mia inquired about her nephews. He sketched quotation marks in the air to indicate that he quoted them. “They don’t want to ‘hang out’ with us on a Saturday.” He huffed as he leaned back against Ed, who wrapped a heavily tattooed arm around his waist.
Later in the afternoon, Mia, Aspen, and Dawn got up to grab some ice cream for all of us from the ice cream truck outside the park.
The mood shifted when Mia came back and sat beside me. She handed me my ice cream and gave me an upset look. “Dawn found some kind of fungus growing in her hallway cabinet,” she said. “She just told me and said it was okay if I told you. That’s why she’s been feeling so shitty.”
I watched Dawn settle back down on my blanket and was relieved to see she scooted over to take up about a third of it. She’d told me she felt off on her first day but had put it down to nerves.
“Oh, fuck. I’m sorry.” What else could I say?
“Thanks, Luc,” Dawn sniffed. For the first time in my life, I wanted to wrap an arm around someone to comfort them but I didn’t.
“What are you going to do now?”
“I don’t know. I never had to deal with anything like this before.” There was a stubborn set to her jaw that told me she wasn’t about to let anyone else swoop in and fix it for her. She stared down at her hands in her lap. Something about her quiet resolve pulled at me, and my gaze drifted lower, to where the loose fabric of her shorts had ridden up over her lush thighs.
Fuuuck. Bad wolf!
I tore my eyes away.
“Tell me more about the fungus.”
What Dawn described made me uneasy.
“You can’t stay in your house,” I said. “I’m not an expert, but that sounds like Greenleech.”
“That doesn’t sound reassuring.” She sounded dejected.
“Greenleech can be dangerous,” I told her. “I mean, there are a few other fungi that look similar, like Mintfilm or Willowmoss, but you won’t know until you get it tested.”
“Luc is right,” Mason said, suddenly serious. “You can’t stay where there’s Greenleech. We Pookas are pretty much indestructible, but Ed had that in his old flat. It wasn’t great.”
“Nope,” Ed agreed. “I felt nauseous all the time and had—”
