Page 3 of Five to Love Him
“All the time,” I repeated. Tate’s blush deepened. Call me fucking Cupid.
“I—well. That’s only natural. But let’s not stand here. Ez, can we finally go to that place now? That cocktail bar, the one you promised you’d show me. I want to celebrate you two finally meeting.”
Ezra heaved a sigh and crossed his arms. Boy was muscular, and if he was into that, Tate was lucky.
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, please?” Tate sounded like he wanted a cookie, or—my mind was diving into the gutter headfirst seeing him plead.
These two looked like they needed fanfic, because if Tate had left nothing out, they’d lived together as friends for going on three years, and clearly they wanted more.
But that was none of my business. “I could drink,” I said.
Well, maybe I could get them drunk just a little bit, help them to confess their feelings. I enjoyed living vicariously. My own love life had been and was a waterless desert in which nothing grew because that was just how deserts were.
Tate reached for Ezra’s hand. “See? Leo wants to go too. Please take us? We are just helpless little humans in need of a strong—”
“Fine,” Ezra said. “Fine. But I’m buying the first round.”
I, for one, could live with that.
***
St. Auguste had hosted a Summer Spectacular on campus at the end of June. That had been our outing for the season. We had not yet, but had been promised to, visited the secret underground.
I had been a pretty small kid when I learned about how many microbes lived in my gut. Millions and millions, too many for childhood me to make sense of the number. But the idea that there was something—a colony of somethings—living inside of me had haunted me and made me feel weird about just existing.
Then I had caught one of the Alien movies late one night, and that combined with the microbes had led to me wondering what would happen if my gut microbes mutated. The nightmares that followed were an entirely different chapter of my early childhood development, and I liked to think they’d played a significant role in shaping me as an adult. I loved horror movie marathons and often scoured the Internet for monster and human fanfics. Monster-slash-human fics. The tentacles in the back of the cab hadn’t really shocked me that much.
At any rate, to see a whole-ass other city alive and well in the bowels of Newstaten created a deep sense of unmooring inside of me. How had I not known? How had no one known? And how was it that there were so many monsters—so many supernaturals—here without anyone noticing?
It helped that I had always looked for something, that was my limited excuse for my own ignorance, but I’d not known that I was searching for this.
“This is the Center Hub. Some of these stores are really old,” Ezra explained.
He and Tate had to walk shoulder to shoulder, pressing close, because these abandoned subway tunnels were not the wide shopping streets I was used to from above ground. Behind Ezra and Tate, I was the third wheel, enjoying that I could stare without having to pay too much attention to where I was going while they cleared the path for our small group.
A lot of the stores were wooden structures. Not frail or shoddily thrown together but built like something made to last. The wooden façades were carved and painted in bright colors. Signs reminded me of something you’d see in some old European town time had passed by. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some Victorian lady walk out of a shop with one of those feathery hats and a frilly umbrella.
Other structures were stone or brick, fitting in just as well as the wooden façades. The entire place could have been a stage set, and if I’d seen a camera pointing at me all of a sudden, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“Wow! Leo, do you see this?” Tate slowed, his attention caught by a secondhand bookstore. He picked up a collection of ratty pages that had been stapled together rather than properly bound.
“Ugh, Dream Tentacled? I’m not sure that’s anything I’m interested in. But thanks for thinking of me, Tate.”
Ezra frowned at me, but in such a way that Tate didn’t see it. “Please don’t take this, Tate. Tentacles aren’t all they’re made out to be.”
“But look! Oh, someone annotated this. Uh. How to seduce a human and take him to a wedding with you? Come on guys, let’s go inside. I want to know what this is.”
Ezra cleared his throat. “How about we do that after? The Dazzle can fill up pretty quickly, and if we’re three people, we’re going to need a table.”
Tate looked from the pseudo-book to Ezra. “This is the eggplants at the farmer’s market all over again, but fine. I’ll just go inside and buy this. Would it be rude to haggle? Or rude not to?”
Ezra crossed his arms, one balled fist hidden behind his elbow where Tate couldn’t see. “How about I go in and buy it for you?”
“No, I think I can handle buying a book. Back in a jiff.”
Tate dashed into the stuffed bookstore where shelves were piled all the way to the ceiling, and Ezra’s eyes tracked him through the window glass.
