Page 52 of Lovesick Titan (Lovesick #2)

The last twenty-four hours had been a whirlwind for Mal, like everything involving Danny Grant.

If they weren’t helping each other simply live in the open but still cramped quarters for so many people or working on the plan against Ludgate, someone was always buzzing around making sure everyone rested and ate and took care of themselves—usually the good doctor, until Stella finally stood in front of Lynn and demanded she take her own advice.

When the end of the day drew near, there hadn’t been enough time, there never was. All Mal could think about, pushing aside the numbing fear of facing Ludgate, was Danny and how much he wanted to see the kid without the shadow of impending doom.

He’d avoided Danny the rest of the day, but that wasn’t what he wanted, it was just his way when he didn’t know how to express his feelings.

He was such a hypocrite for it too, because he kept telling Danny that he could always talk to him, yet there he was, keeping quiet like a coward.

Mal knew what he wanted, but all this—the teams working together—made him all the more terrified of what he might lose.

And that made him hate Hades down to his bones.

Mal felt unraveled, as if having Danny and losing him, then almost having him again only to lose him to Ludgate, and then finally, finally having him again only to keep Danny at a distance—it was like a cord pulled taut until it snapped.

There were several rooms that had been temporarily retrofitted as lodgings. Mal stood now before the door to his claimed room, hand on the knob but unable to enter .

“Maybe the problem,” Lucy broke into his reverie, and he flinched as he looked up to see her standing only a few feet from him, “is that’s the wrong room.” She nodded at his door before disappearing through her own.

Mal turned back to stare at it. This was his room, but Lucy didn’t mean he was about to accidently enter someone else’s. He no longer had excuses about testing his new goggles or the Miasma Field or helping get the trap ready for transport. There was no way he’d be able to sleep without Danny.

As Mal turned from his room to walk the hallways, he saw that most of the others were asleep or getting there—he was fairly certain the murmuring he heard from one room was Priestly on the phone checking in with Arty, and Danny’s adopted brother offered Mal a pleasant goodnight as he passed him.

The whole affair carried a sense of family beneath the abject fear of the boogey man Ludgate had become.

Stepping up to Danny’s door at the end of the hall, Mal knocked twice but didn’t wait for an answer before he entered. “Hey. Thought maybe you wouldn’t want to sleep alone,” he said and closed the door behind him.

Danny’s face lit up when he saw Mal. He was awake.

Of course he was. He sat against the wall on top of one of the few actual mattresses they’d acquired, placed on the floor with a mess of sheets and a large down comforter atop it.

In his underwear and a T-shirt, he looked far too young and endearing.

“Hey. Yeah. I really don’t,” he said, dropping his legs from being pulled into his chest to spread out on top of the covers.

Mal had traded jeans for sleep pants—not Zeus ones, though he’d been tempted—but otherwise remained in his long-sleeved T-shirt.

He’d padded there in socks, a surreal enough experience, and climbed now onto the makeshift bed in what appeared to be a supply closet, looking claustrophobic with all the shelving squished against the walls to give the bed room.

The touch of Danny’s hand was like an electric shock.

He let Danny pull him down and sat beside him, leaning against the wall, hip to hip.

Their hands stayed coiled, resting between them.

It felt like an exhale they hadn’t earned.

Oh they’d earned it, but that deep breath in between wasn’t yet finished, not until they took care of Ludgate .

“Not trying to be distant, Sparky,” Mal said after a few quiet moments, staring at their intertwined fingers. “When you showed up at the last second to save my life, my only thought was holding you and never letting go. But life doesn’t work that way. We haven’t had time to think. To breathe .”

“I know. There are too many unknowns out there and it sucks. But that’s why I’m glad you’re here.” Danny rested his head on Mal’s shoulder, and Mal couldn’t resist dropping his head down too, feeling the brush of Danny’s hair against his skin.

“We haven’t answered the hard questions yet. Shan’s talking pardons and your father isn’t glaring as much as I expected, but what comes next? For this , I mean.” Mal lifted their connected hands.

“Tomorrow,” Danny said, as though the answer were simple.

“And the next day. And the next. Here.” Untangling from Mal, he reached over the side of the bed and returned with a tablet.

It lit up at his touch, and he pulled up one of its applications.

“This is what Andre made me. It has a normal calendar with birthdays and appointments coming up,” he said, showing Mal each item as he mentioned it, “but the default view only looks at today, because thinking too big, too much at once, that’s when life starts to feel suffocating. ”

A lump formed in Mal’s throat as Danny tapped an icon marked ‘Today’s Heroics’ and it pulled up a simple list with the day’s date at the top.

“Just today is easier. Then tomorrow when it gets here. Today, I…ate all my meals and snacks,” Danny said as he tapped a checkbox beside the item and progressed downward.

“When asked how I was, I told the truth—sometimes okay, sometimes not. When people wanted to talk to me, I stopped and listened. When I wanted to be angry, I let myself be angry, but then I took a breath to calm down before deciding what to do next. When I felt like it was all too much and I couldn’t…

” his voice caught with a touch of distress and dampness, but he paused, took a breath.

“I got up...and did laps around the garage,” he chuckled.

“Then I ate another snack to regain the calories. All in all, a good day. See?”

Reaching the end of the list, with everything in it checked off or marked with additional notes in the margins like a real journal, he pressed enter at the bottom, and the screen changed.

It looked like Tetris for a moment, but Danny didn’t control the pieces that began to build on one another to form a tower.

When the pieces had all fallen, different colored blocks that fit like a puzzle, a tiny 8-bit Zeus appeared onscreen and jumped up and down at the top, with a pixelated lightning bolt flashing overhead that caused the entire screen to flicker.

Mal laughed, and Danny giggled with him, nuzzling his shoulder.

“Great, right?” Danny said. “If I miss a checkbox, I have to navigate the Tetris pieces like the real game. So even on a bad day, there’s still a way to make up for it, ya know?

” Because failure came with its own setbacks, but this had a way to make things better, however small, even after a misstep. “Just means I have to work harder.”

“How did Vaughn come up with this in days ?” Mal asked.

“Coz he’s pretty much a genius? Plus I think he’s been working on it for more than a few days, he just had it ready finally. Though I totally went into the code and added the lightning,” he said proudly.

Mal looked at Danny snuggled against his side and had to marvel at him, because even the things Danny thought mundane about himself were extraordinary, yet he never seemed to understand that.

“Maybe Andre can create a little 8-bit Prometheus to come give me a kiss on a good day,” Danny mused.

“Mmm. Or the real thing could do that.” Mal waited for Danny to look at him before he reached over to grasp the kid’s chin and tilted it upward for a kiss.

Only after their lips met did he realize this was their first kiss since that awful, bitter goodbye in his apartment.

There was that lightning again, like a shock straight to Mal’s heart. Then again when Danny’s mouth parted, teasing with the gentle tip of his tongue. Mal shivered as they connected. Damn , this kid. Damn him and bless him and never let him leave Mal’s side.

“I told you once…that I’d never hurt you again,” Danny said when they parted. “I failed. But I’m trying to be better. So this time it’s going to be true.” Big golden eyes blinked at Mal brilliantly. “I will never hurt you again.”

Mal felt burned by Danny’s closeness, by his honesty.

This was what he’d been avoiding, the inevitable wave of too many emotions that made him feel weak just by being near Danny.

He wasn’t used to enjoying his own vulnerability, but there was no doubt in his mind now that this was where he wanted to be .

“You’re not like Thanatos, Danny. You’re not like Ludgate. You are not like my father.”

“Neither are you,” Danny said, shifting closer and causing the tablet to drop from his lap between them.

“I’m sorry,” Mal said. “For everything. You keep apologizing, but I haven’t said it enough back.”

“You don’t have to apologize for defending yourself.”

“I wasn’t—”

“You thought you were,” Danny smiled. After all, they’d had this conversation before, the other way around.

Try as he might, Mal never seemed to be able to beat his nemesis. “You had every reason to believe I was worth manipulating.”

“And you had every reason to believe I wasn’t worth forgiving.”

“I was wrong.”

“So was I.”

They were practically wrapped around each other, Danny’s hand at Mal’s hip, Mal’s hand on Danny’s face.

“I love you,” Mal said, because he needed to say it, without his doubts and insecurities holding him back.

Danny’s smile brightened but quickly faltered. “And not because I made you?”

“Made me? You didn’t make me do anything. I fell in love with the moments I was with the real you. With the things you couldn’t fake. And nothing is going to change that. Least of all Ludgate.” He pressed another kiss to Danny’s lips, slower and gentler than the first.

Danny shuddered. “I love you too,” he said, soft and meaningful and everything Mal had been waiting to hear.

They kissed again, propped up by the wall behind them, and wrapped their arms tighter in their embrace.

Their hips aligned, and Mal felt the twitch and growing hardness of Danny between them.

Shivering as it connected with his own through the fabric of his sleep pants, the clash of heat made Mal growl in his throat.

He tugged Danny closer, kissed him deeper, then gasped away as the persistent voices at the back of his mind reminded him of everything they’d gone through and everything yet to come.

“Danny,” he tried to pull back as Danny clutched at him, “we don’t have to— ”

“I want to,” Danny said, grinding forward as he continued to press their lips together in a desperate attempt to touch.

“Please. If…if you want to…” He blinked with uncertainty, betraying his fear that he was pushing for something Mal didn’t want, but the flutter of those long lashes against flushing cheeks only made Mal more frantic to reconnect.

“I want to,” Mal said, and as soon as their eyes met with what Mal would swear was an actual flicker of lightning, he pulled Danny to him with no intent to let him go.

R

Hades reared back a fist to punch the mirror before him but held himself in check. Anger was pointless. Team Zeus and Prometheus’s Titans were holed up in the basement of the downtown precinct leaving him no way inside the reflections; he couldn’t change that now.

A few days ago, he had simply walked inside, invisible with the suit’s help—unaffected by that damn reflection killer while the suit was on—and turned the program off just in time to take Zeus’s form and fool his friends.

Now he’d lost the mask and didn’t have time to reverse engineer another one.

He’d lost a contact too, but he no longer cared about leading Team Zeus astray as to his real powers and intentions.

He needed a different plan while they were no doubt working on one of their own.

He watched their homes, their places of work, their neighborhoods, but nothing caught on his radar, and soon even Prometheus’s favorite shops blocked him from seeing through their reflections. He needed a way to lure Zeus out before they tried to lure him.

Returning to the upstairs reflections of the precinct, even though it was late and only a skeleton crew mulled about the police station, he finally caught sight of someone useful.

Someone perfect. A few members of Team Zeus had been going in and out of the basement, but the difference this time was that the person he saw walking down an otherwise vacant hallway was alone and exactly the sort of poetic justice Hades had been waiting for.