She noticed before, but got distracted. She was back to noticing and she was figuring it out.
My best friend was catching up here.
“Jay?” she asked.
Nope. That most definitely wasn’t a frog in my throat. And it hadn’t doubled in size when I nodded back.
“Yeah,” I rasped.
Another cringe from her, mixed with a pitying look. I hated the pitying look.
The frog just did a loud-ass ribbit.
I looked away, and shuffled back because I knew what was going to happen. She would herd Uncle Cream and Bud, no—she’d make sure Bud got clothes on first—and once they were gone, she’d take my whiskey from me. She’d go to the kitchen. She’d pull out some drink glasses, put in some of the nice cubed ice she always keeps on hand for me, and we’d pour ourselves a drink. After that, it’d either be a veg-out night, which I was now wondering how that phrase came about? Because we’d sit, talk, fill each other in, and we’d drink. Pizza would either get ordered, or we’d go the other way.
We’d drink. Talk. And decide we needed to go out.
It was Halloween, a night we both avoided because we were usually insulted by how humans viewed us, but… Jay happened.
2
Something Something
“He was in mid-thrust?”
We were an hour into drinking, and Nikki jerked toward me, sloshing her drink on the way.
She didn’t notice.
“Mid-thrust.”
I’d relayed the story of how I came home early from work, heard the moaning and groaning from the bedroom, and thought Jay was watching porn. That was it. That’s all I thought.
I should’ve known better.
I did know better. That was the thing.
I had found texts on his phone three months earlier.
Silly me, right? Stupid me, more likely.
“Four years, Nik.”
She moaned with me. “I know. Four years.”
Fuck.
Four years.
“He was my high school crush.”
“He was. You liked him for so long.”
I did.
I had.
“You were, like, pathetic about it too. Like, really, really pathetic about it.”
“Uh…”
“You wrote him poems. You drew hearts with his name in them on all the desks you sat in. You’d stare at him in every class you both had. You were the water girl for the football team, and had a special bedazzled water bottle just for him.”
“Um.”
“It was pink, with his name in a circle.”
“Okay—”
“You offered to drive him home all the time, and you didn’t have a car. You started taking cooking lessons from his mom, and you don’t cook. You’re banned from your own kitchen by your landlord. Or you were, when you lived with him, I mean…”
An awkward silence.
Not for Nik, apparently.
She was only taking a breath.
And breath taken. “You used to slip him anonymous letters.” She reached for her glass. It sloshed again. “I never told you, but Becca Harris saw you slip a letter into his locker one day.”
“She did?”
“She did.” She took a messy drink. It sloshed down her throat. “She told Jay it was from you.”
She paused, frowning. Her head cocked to the side. “I never told you about that.”
I gritted my teeth. “No. You certainly did not.”
She was still frowning to herself. “I should’ve told you. There was a reason I didn’t tell you.” She went back to thinking. “I can’t remember it now.”
I wanted to growl at her.
Screw it. I did. I bared my teeth too.
She just laughed, finishing her drink.
Shoving her chair back, she stood. “I need another drink—OH MY GOD! I forgot it’s Halloween tonight.”
“Yeah…?”
She looked at the clock, then grabbed for her phone, and she screamed again. “I’m supposed to work tonight.”
“What?! We never do anything on Halloween.”
“No—” But she was off, racing to her bedroom.
She came back, still rushing, and grabbed the whiskey before hightailing once again. She yelled over her shoulder on the way, “Grab my glass and follow me. I’m late, and I can’t be more late.”
“What?”
But I did as she asked.
With my own drink topped off, I took the rest of hers. She was in the bathroom, her make-up scattered everywhere. I grabbed her glass, filling it.
Sitting on her bed, facing her in the bathroom, I gripped my glass tightly. “You said you’d work Halloween tonight?”
I have to stress how this was so not normal.
We didn’t do Halloween.
Halloween was for humans, not for us. Not for those of us who were ‘other’ than just human.
They dressed up like us, and it was beyond insulting.
Contrary to everyone’s opinion, we weren’t ‘sexy fill-in-the-blank’ all the freaking time.
I watched Nikki finish her makeup (record time) and disappear into her closet. Literally. Nikki was a demon. Not all demons were equal in their powers, but Nik had been working on her teleportation lately. Which was whoa, you know? Teleportation is huge in our circles, and my girl was achieving it. Granted, she could only teleport five feet away, but that’s something in my book.
She came back a second later in black leather pants and a black leather corset. Her hair was up and she whispered a few words. As she did, her hair started braiding itself. It wasn’t something she always did, but only at times like this—when she was late for work.
Her powers were growing more and more.
Not all demons are naturals. When Nik started trying to braid her hair, the scrunchie just kept flying through the hair. There used to be injuries, of everyone in the room except her.
“Nik!”
“What?”
“Why are you working tonight?”
She worked at a nightclub. Bass. All kinds went there, meaning ours and theirs. The humans. It was known as one of the most exclusive clubs in the Western Hemisphere. (That’s our speak, not humans.) Humans don’t talk like that. They’d say it’s one of the most exclusive clubs in the nation or something like that. They only cared about country borders, state lines, county rules. Not us. We paid attention to territory, and Bass was straight up the best on our side of the world.
Nikki had been working there for the last year, and her powers had been getting stronger ever since. It was also known as a demon bar, where most of the employees were demons. I used to question it at first, but when she seemed to have her power in check, I backed off.
Power corrupted, or tended to corrupt, and I didn’t want to lose her.
She hadn’t answered my question. Her mind was distracted, and I could feel her communicating with someone else. It was my thing. I could see, feel, and hear energy, and with Nik right now, her energy was spreading out from her, completely leaving the room we were in.
I shoved up. “Nik! I’m getting alarmed here.”
She snapped back to our room, all her energy focusing back around her. “You didn’t finish telling me about Jay.”
“What?”