Page 39
Two months later
Calisto
Bellamy cast a look over to where Ben and Griffin were working their way round the room to speak to their wedding guests. They looked resplendent in traditional matching wedding suits with white waistcoats, red cravats, and a black jacket. “The ceremony was perfect,” Bellamy said, smiling. “And if you didn’t already know it, you’d never have thought they were already married. It had some truly heartfelt moments.”
Expecting some sort of barbed comment from him, everyone at our table looked to John. Either he couldn’t find anything negative to say about a ceremony, which, just as Bellamy had said, had been perfect, or he was on his best behavior. From some of the meaningful looks I’d seen John and Bellamy exchange during the ceremony, I suspected a proposal might be in the offing and they’d be next. Perhaps John was already considering how it might feel if someone made snarky comments about their ceremony when the time came.
“What about you two?” Bellamy asked, his mind clearly running along the same lines as he looked from me to Asher. “Do you reckon you’ll get married one day? You’ve been living together for how long now?”
“It’s only been a couple of months,” I said. No sooner had my family moved out of Asher’s house than I’d moved in. Properly this time, with all my possessions. Asher, to give him his due, had barely batted an eye at me littering his house with things that didn’t match the décor. I’d had no qualms about giving my flat up. Asher and I might still have had a lot to learn about each other and a lot of compromises still to make before we found our relationship footing, but I’d had no doubts about us getting there. And we had. Piece by slow piece.
Asher hadn’t changed that much, and I hadn’t wanted him to. He had learned to relax more in certain areas of his life, though. Breakfast occasionally comprised something other than a smoothie, which helped if we wanted to eat out. And the pre-dawn daily Tai Chi sessions had become less rigid in terms of both the time they occurred and their frequency. He still worked for Cade, the two of us usually having lunch together at his desk when I was in the building.
“You’ve had a house guest for most of that time, though, haven’t you?” Bellamy remarked.
At the mention of Baxter, all heads turned to the buffet table. He stood at one end of it with a plate of food in his hands. Given how little attention he gave to it, it seemed for decoration only, his focus on two old friends of Ben’s from his police academy days. You didn’t need to be a body language expert to recognize his stance as flirtatious.
“Which one is he chatting up?” Bellamy asked.
“Both probably,” I commented before I could think better of it. I immediately felt guilty for the unsupportive comment, Asher’s fingers tightening on my knee in a show of solidarity.
“You can hardly blame the guy,” John commented. “He was dead for decades. He’s got a lot of catching up to do.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. But even I could hear how flat it sounded.
Cade caught the tail end of the conversation as he returned from the bar with drinks for everyone and started unloading them from the tray. We’d speculated endlessly about who he might bring to the wedding. Male? Female? Friend? Significant other? The mysterious mother of his child who even Griffin seemed to know little about? The speculation had all been for naught, Cade turning up alone and fobbing off any inquiries about a plus one.
Once he’d distributed the drinks, he retook the seat next to mine and followed our gazes to Baxter. “How’s he doing?”
“You hired him,” I pointed out. “Shouldn’t you already know the answer to that question?” Baxter being psychic when I’d never known him as such, had taken quite some adjustment. I was used to him seeing my visual secrets, but I couldn’t get used to him seeing my mental ones. Especially teamed with his inability to not say what was on his mind.
It was one reason Baxter moving to his own place had become a pressing urgency. That, and waking up to strange men in our house quickly losing its initial amusement value and becoming tiresome. Once or twice a week would have been okay, but a different man every single night wasn’t. And they weren’t all what you’d class as upstanding citizens. Only luck had stopped us from being burgled.
So now Baxter had his own place. A small flat close to the PPB building. We’d helped him furnish and decorate it; we hadn’t just thrown him to the wolves. Did I feel guilty about him leaving? Undoubtedly. But if he’d really wanted to stay, he could have reined his hedonistic urges in, and he hadn’t.
Cade inclined his head in recognition of my point. “I meant how is he really doing beneath the front he puts on that he’s having the best time ever, and nothing and no one can stop that?”
“Your guess is as good as ours,” Asher said. “He puts on the same front with us.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “He does.” And I couldn’t put into words how much it rankled that he wouldn’t admit, even to me, that adjusting was hard. Because how could it not be? He’d been dead for decades. And now he was back in a world he’d thought closed to him forever, needing a job and a place to live, having to keep normal hours, and build relationships with people. He was back to reading minds and knowing what ninety percent of the population was thinking. The world must be incredibly loud for Baxter when, for so long, it had been virtually silent.
“Has he mentioned anything about…” Cade lowered his voice. “You know what?”
‘You know what’ was Baxter’s unsolved murder, Cade apparently deciding it wasn’t an appropriate conversation for a wedding. Not even a wedding where the two grooms were a homicide detective and a necromancer. “He says it’s in the past,” I said. “He claims there’s nothing to be gained from revisiting it.”
Picking up on the way I’d said it, Cade narrowed his eyes. “You don’t believe him?”
I shook my head. “I think he’s full of shit. How do you just forget something like that?”
“You don’t,” Asher offered, the two of us having talked about it previously. “We need to give him time, though. It’s only been two months. Let him have his…” He waved a hand to where Baxter was still flirting up a storm, the two men seeming completely enraptured and hanging on his every word. “All we can do is be there for him if it all comes crashing down around his ears.”
“I guess.”
Ben and Griffin arriving at our table offered a welcome respite from worrying about Baxter. A lot of backslapping, congratulations, and genuine heartfelt hugs followed before the two men moved on to their next group of guests. By that time, there was no sign of Baxter. I hoped he’d left rather than taking his pair of admirers to the bathroom, where anyone—including Ben or Griffin themselves—might happen across the three of them, but I suspected that’s exactly what he’d done. Either he’d always been incredibly indiscreet, or it was a new thing. Baxter just didn’t seem to give a fuck what anyone thought.
Asher
There were days, even after two months together, when it still felt like a dream to wake up next to Calisto every morning. Today, even John’s presence at the same table hadn’t been enough to detract from the pleasure of being able to sit next to Calisto all day, to hold his hand, to have people look at us and know we were a couple.
No sooner were we through the door of our house—it had long since ceased to be mine—than Calisto backed me against the wall, his hand in my hair, and his eyes hooded with desire. “Don’t think I didn’t see all those soppy looks you threw my way today.”
“I’m not allowed to be soppy?”
Calisto grinned. “You are. I’m just pointing out that I saw them. I guess weddings bring out the romantic in you.”
“I guess they do.” I weighed my next words and said them anyway because Calisto and I didn’t have secrets. “I’m not the only one that weddings bring the romantic out in.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“John’s going to propose tonight.”
Calisto’s hand slid from my hair to my neck, his fingers warm against my skin. “He told you that?” Calisto corrected himself before I had time to. “Of course he didn’t.” He was right to discount it. John and I might have a better relationship these days, but we hadn’t reached the point—nor were we ever likely to—where John confided in me. “You had a vision.”
“’I had a vision,’” I echoed.
“When?”
“At the ceremony. John, in a rare moment of self awareness, decided to wait until after Ben and Griffin got officially hitched before proposing so they didn’t steal their thunder. But tonight’s the night.”
Calisto smiled, happiness shining out of him. “Good! They deserve to be happy.”
“Do you have to be married to be happy?”
Calisto saw straight through my careful phrasing, his smile growing wider. “Of course not. But…” He left a deliberately long pause. “You know as well as I do that my family will put pressure on us to tie the knot.”
“Ah, yes, your family. How could I forget about them?”
“You can’t. They won’t let you.”
Calisto’s statement was only half a joke. Somehow, and I still couldn’t really work out how it had come about, the machinations behind it nothing short of awe-inspiring, the weekly family meal now took place at our house without either Calisto or me having okayed it.
To the best of my recollection, Mariana had turned up with some sort of flimsy excuse about having left something in the kitchen. And then the next thing I’d known, she’d let the rest of the family in one by one and there’d been a meal on the table. Where she’d gotten the key from to let herself in the following week, was still something of a mystery. It meant neither of us had a chance in hell of avoiding the weekly family meal, Mariana not doing a very good job of hiding how smug she was about that.
Calisto seemed much more at ease now his secrets were mostly out in the open. The first meal with Baxter present had been interesting, his family understandably confused to discover that Calisto’s imaginary childhood friend not only had never been imaginary, but was now no longer dead for reasons that defied explanation.
I pulled Calisto close enough that our bodies touched. “You know I’d marry you tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow!” He feigned shock. “What’s wrong with tonight?”
“Lack of an official to marry us.”
Calisto narrowed his eyes. “Are you telling me that Asher Baines, the man who can get anything done without breaking a sweat, would see that as an impossible task?”
“Perhaps not,” I conceded, the logical part of my brain already sifting through how I’d go about it if Calisto really was serious. Because why not? We could do the same as Ben and Griffin had. One marriage for us, and then a full ceremony at a later date for his family. John would be pissed we’d beaten them to it, but him being pissed was nothing I hadn’t handled a million times over. “Just say the word,” I said, our gazes locked together and excitement building in my chest.
“The problem is,” Calisto said slowly, “that if I say yes, you’ll spend the next however many hours on the phone.” He tapped a steady rhythm on my chest, just over my heart. “And I had plans for you.”
“Plans?” There was no keeping the huskiness out of my voice.
“Plans that involved me and you being naked.”
“That’s my favorite way to spend time with you.”
“Trust me, I know,” he said with a big smile. “There’s a certain part of you that’s no good at hiding your unrestrained joy at being naked with me.”
“So…” I said. “Marriage, or getting naked?” It was a genuine choice. If Calisto said he wanted to get married, we’d get married. Even if I had to abduct an official from his bed to make it happen.
Happiness shone in Calisto’s eyes as he considered the choice. “Marriage can wait,” he said.
He only got halfway through the sentence before I took hold of his hand and dragged him up the stairs. Marriage could wait. But proving to Calisto how much I loved him, and how grateful I was that things had worked out the way they had for us, couldn’t.
The End
Table of Contents
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