Page 73 of Hellfire & Tinsel
Zorun froze like he hadn’t considered that… then looked down at his dick. “You think?”
“Ah… well… they did mention… um…” He covered his eyes with his hands, mortified. “Sure. But maybe in private?”
“You’re smart,” Kassel said, stroking the back of his head.
Beau’s nonexistent tail started wagging. He dropped his hands and leaned into Kassel, letting him pet him into a fugue state.
“You two are grosser than Luc and Oren,” Zorun stated. “Catch you around.”
“Before you go, I have a question,” Kassel said out of the blue.
“What?” Zorun sighed.
“Did you know Dave was in a band?”
13
Epilogue
“Honey, I’m home,” Kassel deadpanned from the door, not really sure why, but the phrase made Beau stupidly happy so he tried to say it every day. He made sure to lift the sound barriers on their room so the screaming couldn’t reach them.
All for Beau’s comfort.
He was rewarded with a ball of black knitwear slamming into him, wrapping legs around his hips and arms around his neck.
“HI!” Beau said, raining kisses all over Kassel’s face, making him have to blink random eyes to avoid being poked.
“Missed you,” Kassel said, holding Beau by the ass and making sure to rub him up and down a bit just to show him how much he really had missed him.
“Did you have a nice day at work?” Beau asked, a small frown on his face. Kassel was once again floored by how someone aspure as Beau could be so accepting of where he was, how he got there, and where he had to spend the rest of eternity, even when Kassel knew he felt immense sadness at the pain and torture Hell was plagued with.
“Fine,” Kassel said, refusing to go into detail, walking them inside his—their—room, and sitting down on a small green sofa.
That hadn’t been there when he left for work that morning.
And it looked strangely familiar.
“Ask me how my day was!” Beau said, bouncing up and down on Kassel’s lap in excitement, only managing to be completely unhelpful to Kassel’s thought process.
“How was your day?” Kassel asked dutifully.
“Zorun took me topside to get some more of my stuff,” he said with a sunny smile. “I have clothes and all of my books and Christmas stuff, and I also got like a calendar thingy to keep track of time so we know when to celebrate. I don’t think I have enough to decorate the whole place, but Oren said to leave that to him. Zorun also helped me bring my sofa! And all of my knitting stuff. I’m gonna make outfits for the hatchlings. OH! And I got a job.”
Kassel’s head was spinning.
Clothes were good. Beau needed those. Books too, to keep him entertained. The knitting was a given, since Beau had been talking about making clothes for the hatchlings since he first saw one. Also he’d made Kassel more hats after returning his original one, which was now sitting on the purple fair duck’s head. The sofa made sense; Kassel liked it, and it was comfy, if a little bit small.
“Wait, you got a job?”
Beau nodded. “My file was completed and sent down and Oren came bursting through the door when he saw I used to work in HR. He was ecstatic and all ‘I always wanted to set up an HRdepartment down here, I’m so happy I could cry’ and I didn’t want to make him sad so I said yes. I have ideas too.”
“You do?” Kassel asked, titling his head.
“Yes,” he said. “No disrespect, but I feel like you guys are a little bit unforgiving. Sure, people make mistakes and there are some very evil ones, but, like… sometimes the mistakes are just that. Mistakes.”
“They still deserve to be punished,” Kassel said slowly, and Beau tilted his head back.
“Not for the rest of eternity though,” he said. “So here’s what I thought. We could set up a sort of a… a rehab, I guess you could call it. Where we could send those who messed up but only a smidge. They can stay there until they learn what they did was wrong and are truly sorry for it.”
