The Grimrose Path (Trickster, #2)(60)
“Sorry, princess. I think you’ll survive.” This was what it was like to have ungrateful, spoiled children. I’d have to remember that in the future.
Griffin, not interested in the discussion of the smell of ass, sweaty or otherwise, tried again. “Zeke, I promise I’ll . . .”
“No.” Zeke didn’t wait for the rest of the promise. “Start crawling. I’m tired.”
Griffin exhaled, the guilt back in his face. It wasn’t the guilt of doing things he’d never done, being what he no longer was. This was a guilt he deserved and for behavior modification’s sake, I didn’t pat him sympathetically on the shoulder. There were no Lone Rangers in this bar and I wanted him to remember that. “I’ll bet you are,” he said. “I know you are.” Along with the guilt, you could see him picking up Zeke’s exhaustion like the empath he was and wearing it with his own emotions and sensations. “You didn’t sleep last night. You didn’t sleep this morning. You stole that scalpel from God knows where, keeping me safe, watching out for me.”
“It’s not easy to do,” he replied stolidly. “I’m supposed to be the stupid one. Not you.”
“Jesus Christ, you’re anything but stupid. Don’t say that. Don’t think it either or the verbal ass-kicking you’ve given me since yesterday, I’ll give you five times over,” Griffin warned. “If there’s a stupid one here, it’s me. Now let’s get some sleep.” He put a knee on the foot of the bed and started to crawl, pulling Zeke’s arm along with him. “But you’d better be ready with that cuff key if any demons do attack. I don’t want to die because you have a weird bondage thing.”
“It’s not a weird bondage thing,” Zeke protested, following after him in the crawl up the mattress. “It’s a perfectly natural bondage thing. The porn magazine said so.”
With that I closed the door on them and left them to their own devices, hopefully sleep, but guys will be guys and a porno magazine would never lie.
“Did you get around to telling them about Cronus and the impending Armageddon slash slavery of worlds or did that, like certain other things, escape your attention too?” Leo, beer already in hand, asked at the bar.
“I think they deserve one night relatively worry free and, again, I’m sorry about the shower thing. It was enormous, I swear to you. So large that I trembled in its shadow like a tiny mouse fearing it would be crushed. Attached to a body that defines perfection itself. Michelangelo would’ve taken a hammer to David and smashed it to pieces if he knew what he could’ve sculpted instead. Every poet living or dead couldn’t find a single word worthy to describe the beauty and majesty that is you.” I let the door support me and my aching ribs as I gave Leo my most contrite look. I was too . . . sincerely contrite. It was Leo. My Leo. “Forgive me?” I tucked my hair behind my ears, then touched one of his folded arms with a single fingertip. It rested next to a small mole he’d had since he had first become Leo. I saw it every day. There was a comfort in that, in an unchanging thing, although unchanging was a curse word among our kind. “You know I can’t let certain things catch my attention. Not yet. You and I . . .” I traced my finger along warm skin and smiled, a little wistfully, but the best things are worth waiting for. Our day would come and on that day, the attention I would give him would etch every molecule of him in my memory for the rest of my life. “We’re not there yet. We’re still too much alike in the wrong ways and not quite enough in the right ones.”
“You’re right. We’re both stubborn, both hold grudges. We both are staggering in our hotness,” he said with the gravity it warranted.
“But luckily vanity will never stand in our way.” I pinched his arm lightly, rubbed the pale red mark, and said, “Stay on the couch tonight? You’ll have to be up early in the morning for another trip to the airport.”
“Your bizarre leaping to other subjects is something we’ll have to work on. That, I’ll never match and the level of Tylenol I have to take to stop the headaches is beginning to become a danger to my liver,” he said, unfolding his arms and pretending to fish in his jeans pocket for a capsule or two. “Why the airport? Did you come up with something for Cronus? If you have, that will top even your Roses.”
“It would, wouldn’t it?” I started toward the kitchen to get a broom and dustpan for upstairs. I moved stiffly, the snowflake touched by a careless finger. Damaged. “Didn’t you say back in January that Thor was hanging out with the Swedish women’s volleyball team?”
“Last I heard.” A crease appeared in his forehead. Now he did actually have a headache. If anyone would give you a head-pounding one, it would be Thor. “In the past months I’ve been getting a lot of late-night drunken ‘Ha, ha. You’re not a god anymore, douche bag’ calls. A few ‘nyah-nyah-nyah mortal dickwad’ ones to add variety. Why?”
“I was thinking about something I saw on TV last year. It reminded me of Thor’s hammer.”
“Mj?llnir? It’s a serious weapon, but it wouldn’t stop Cronus.”
“No, but what made it might,” I said. “That and a trip to hell.” Little h, pa?en hell.
It all came down to what I’d quoted to Eligos before, “I think, therefore I am.” They were good words, those five. Words to live by for some. For others . . . maybe . . .