Page 72 of A Subtle Scar
“Seriously?” Chandler mumbled, but hit his key fob to open the car to the rest of us.
I got into the back seat with the necromancer. The human looked at me as if I were contagious. I ignored him.
“Hi, baby,” Hermes purred when Chandler got in the car.
“No need to ‘hi’ me. It’s been minutes.”
Hermes reached for Chandler’s hand and pulled it to him so he could brush a kiss over the knuckles. “Baby, I missed you a lot in those few minutes.”
Chandler pulled his hand back, sharply reversed out of the spot, then quickly rejoined traffic.
Reflected in the rearview mirror, I saw Chandler look over to his right. “Hermes. Can you show me that spell you say you found? I’d like to confirm it’s there.”
Hermes beamed. “Of course. It might be difficult for you to sense, I don’t know. It is an old kind of spellmaking, and the result is weak compared to other magic you will be familiar with, baby. But I might be able to help you.” He paused for effect, then added, “If…”
“If what?” Chandler asked, swallowing the bait. In the mirror, I saw his brow furrow as the hook sank in.
“We get to take you to lunch.”
Hermes and I exchanged a look, and I nodded in appreciation. That was a good move.
“Fine,” Chandler said. “Right after I share everything with Rice and Jasmine.”
“Who is Jasmine?” Hermes asked.
“FIS public relations person. She’s here to help the local police manage the case with the press.”
“I see,” Hermes said, but judging from the distant look in his eyes, he was already considering how to turn lunch into something more.
Once again, he and I were on the same page about that.
Hermes and I had been told by our boyfriend to wait at a currently vacant desk at the murder unit while Chandler was talking to Rice and Jasmine in Rice’s office. We watched them through the glass wall of the office.
“I can’t decide if he looks good when he works and wears a suit or if he looks too good,” Hermes said. He’d left the doughnuts out for the other officers, which had earned him their good-natured thanks. Chandler had been ignoring the sugary treats, and I considered that Hermes might have had a point about a ten’s high-maintenance character.
“He is a very handsome man,” I said.
Hermes sighed. “Ronny. The man I met at the subway station was a handsome man. In addition, he was willing and asked me to exchange numbers. He wanted sex.”
I frowned at Hermes.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Hermes said and reached for the little tower of sticky notes that sat behind the keyboard on this desk, then for a pen from the cracked mug that served as a catch-all for them as well as a handful of lollipops, red and green ones. “I didn’t want the other human. I just want that one,” Hermes said and began drawing a face on the topmost sticky note, the jawline looking decidedly like Chandler’s.
“I sympathize,” I said. “I want him as well.”
“I know. And I think it’s really a thing. The monogamy. You know when we spent the night drinking at that dive bar? With the stuffed crocodile’s head mounted to the wall? It was in, oh—”
“Lisbon.” Maybe thirty years ago. It had been a fancy wine bar, and we’d started at around noon and not left before sunrise the next day. The crocodile’s glass eyes had been set so they gave the creature an unnatural, cross-eyed look.
“Yes. Do you remember how we talked about Hades and Sephy? About how odd that was. Being with one person for that long, never taking other people to bed? Never even minding that you didn’t take other people to bed? And then Lucy proclaims he’s serious about monogamy as well now. It all sounded unreal and…unnatural. An impossible thing.”
I nodded. “I agree, but at the same time, I feel like you. Not that I ever enjoyed random men as much as you did, but Chandler is special. As I told you when I first saw him, I am drawn to him, and I want him.” I closed my eyes, imagined other humans I had met, stranded at airport hotels when snow had blocked the skies. I could not imagine doing that. Not anymore. “Quite possibly only him.”
“I saw him first,” Hermes said. He’d drawn the eyes and was now working on giving our boyfriend’s image a smile. “But it’s odd, right?”
I shrugged. “It might be something to do with our nature. Maybe the Dragon Mother would know. Maybe all gods can be drawn totally to a human, and maybe we live so long in order for us to have all this time to find them. Maybe they bring us ultimate happiness.” I looked at Chandler and then said, “Maybe we were made for him.”
Hermes snorted. “You’re such a romantic. But yeah, maybe.” He finished his drawing and dropped some magic into the paper so that the face became animated, the smile bigger. Ink Chandler looked back and forth between us, winked at both of us, made bedroom eyes at both of us. “And maybe I want that ultimate happiness. Mostly, I just want to get him naked. And inside him. I’ve never wanted to lay a human as much as I want our boyfriend, and sometimes when I look at him, I want to tear his clothes off and take him right where he stands.”
