Page 4 of Five to Love Him
“I’m assuming he was talking about eggplants, the vegetable,” I said.
“Yeah.”
Ezra’s voice was tight, and he didn’t so much as look at me.
“We’re just friends, dude. And he’s been using me to perfect that brownie recipe he says he wants to surprise you with, so relax.”
Ezra glanced at me. His eyes were very blue. He sized me up again, the expression over-the-top critical, inviting me to back off from his man, or else. That sort of thing wasn’t for me, but if Tate was good with it… To each their own.
“He wants to surprise me? That’s why he’s been sneaking them to class each week without leaving any for me?” The hardness in Ezra’s gaze melted like an ice cube on a barbecue. “Really? He wants to surprise me?”
The big dude sucked on his bottom lip while his cheeks filled with color. Possessive, sure, but also a big puppy apparently. A small part of me wondered what it would be like to have that, what it would be like to have this focused on me.
“Would you have eaten me if he’d been making them for me?”
Ezra looked away and shrugged. “I’m not super carnivorous, but—”
“For fucking real, dude?”
Ezra cleared his throat. “Ah, no. That was a joke. Haha. Just kidding.”
I gazed at Tate, who was looking awkward as fuck talking to the book seller. “You know, I think you should probably tell him you guys are dating.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Ezra stared at Tate as if Tate were the sun and Ezra a flower, doomed to wilt at nightfall.
two
We looked over our shoulder. It was what we did, ever since before coming to Newstaten’s underground. It was safe here though, and quiet, and expecting to be followed, to find shadows chasing us, should have become a fading urge, but far from it.
“Hey, did you get that?” asked a customer at the Dazzle, and we flinched in our sleep, at the stove in the small house at the end of Silver Line, and with our notepad in hand, standing at the customer’s table.
“We—I did, sir,” we said. Back at the stove and while balancing our checkbook at the kitchen table, we practiced it back and forth, saying I instead of the more natural we. It was not a requirement at the Dazzle, but we never knew when we’d have to be able to fit in again.
We focused on the Dazzle where two of us were currently working. It was a good job, better than we had expected from a literal underground bar. We wanted to give it our all, even if they were only paying us like they would a singular and had told us never to be more than two while we took a shift. We repeated the order to assure the customer and made our way back to the bar.
“Hey, do you have an issue with snakes?” the barkeeper and our boss asked us.
“No, Coral. Why?”
They—he looked at us as if confused. “You nearly jumped out of your skin when the gorgon over there talked to you.” He looked at us where we were slicing lemons at the other end of the bar. “Both of you.”
“Oh. We were just lost in thought, Coral. We apologize. It won’t happen again.”
Coral sighed and leaned forward to glance at our notepad. “One Bloody Mary coming up. And don’t add Coral each time you talk to me, okay? It’s a bit much.”
We nodded—all of us. “Okay, Co—okay.”
Back home, we looked up from our checkbook while we turned around in our sleep and moved on from the lemons to get two customers their beers. We still didn’t know how to talk to singulars, not really. Sometimes, their names were important, but clearly you could overuse them. Where was the line though? Yes, we knew the theory of it, but failing in the practice frustrated us, some days more than others.
We looked at the checkbook. Numbers were easy and had always been, but this was hard. Small doubts crept through all of us sometimes. Should we really have left? We could have borne it. A hive was not easily broken. But we had wanted freedom. We had wanted not to hurt.
All the same, sometimes we wondered.
***
When the human walked into the Dazzle, we were incredulous and surprised for all of two seconds before a fuzzy warmth spread through all of us. We checked the time on our phone. An hour to midnight on a workday was late for normal humans, and normal humans at the Dazzle stuck out even when it wasn’t late for them.
