by Jax Garren
Damn, she felt nice. Maybe that was the adrenaline talking. “I hope you’re cool that I have a...” He trailed off, remembering her story about how she’d almost shot herself. Shit. “It was my grandfather’s. Rancher. It stays locked in the safe.”
She smiled up at him. “It worked well for us. Don’t worry about me.”
Maybe it was that they’d just fought together and her blonde hair reminded him of Freyja’s, or maybe it was the way she looked at him with the admiration he so desperately wanted from his partner, but the nearly overwhelming desire to kiss her poured over him, along with the near certainty that she’d let him.
She’d said over the weekend she’d do more than that if he asked. And things were so crazy right now, and he hadn’t been touched in months, and...
And it wouldn’t be fair to her after she’d clearly said she’d feel awkward around him afterward.
But damn, her mouth looked awfully comforting.
Her hands slipped from his waist to his neck and pulled down. Then she kissed him.
Chapter 23
WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! Alarm bells rang through Giselle’s mind as she froze, her mouth on Rafael Marquez’s not-unwilling one.
Gods, he tasted good. Like sweet, nutty coffee.
She yanked back, stumbling out of his arms, and slapped her hand across her still-tingling mouth. “I am so sorry.”
He leaned forward to right her when she almost tripped again and left his hand on her arm. “It’s okay.”
She started to say, “I can be professional,” right as he said, “I’m pretty sure I was staring at your mouth.” Then they both stopped.
For a moment they studied each other warily. Then Rafael laughed. Wiping his hand over his face, he leaned against the couch back and then motioned at the floor. “I have ghost juice or whatever on my floor. What the fuck was that thing?”
“Uh...” she said, unsure if they were just going to pretend she hadn’t done that—which might be the best thing. “I don’t know,” she lied.
“Hey,” he said as he grabbed her arm and dragged her next to him against the couch. “We fought a... thing together, then jumped each other—like you do—and stopped before we went too far, or much of anywhere, really. Yeah?”
Okay, so they were going to discuss it, but he was going to be that cool about it? “Yeah?”
“So we’re good, far as I’m concerned.” He gave her braid a friendly tug, then pushed away from the couch. “Coffee? Whiskey? Water? I have a SodaStream.” He picked up the knife, covered in more of that nasty black ichor.
“So sorry about your kitchen knife. I’ll clean it. With bleach.”
That just made him laugh. “Don’t stress. You can save my life with anything in the house.” He flipped a grinder switch on a load of coffee beans, despite it being evening—her kind of person—and got out a carafe with a paper filter in it.
She washed the knife carefully, happy to see the black goo wasn’t too hard to get off. “What’s that?”
“Chemex? It’s my family’s favorite way to make evening coffee.” As the beans ground, he poured steaming water from a spout over the stove, which stuck the filter to the mouth of the carafe, then dumped the water and added the freshly ground beans.
She finished with the knife and wiped it dry as she watched him pour more hot water, wait a bit, then pour water again in a process more complicated than the switch flip she was used to. “Must make good coffee,” she commented.
He laughed good-naturedly and just shrugged. “I don’t know, but I like the ritual of it. It’s calming. Thanks for cleaning the knife.”
“I’ll see what I can do about the floor.” She grabbed a couple paper towels and soaked one.
“I can get it in a minute.”
“No, it’s fine. Idle hands aren’t my friends.” After she righted the upturned barstool, it didn’t take long at all to wipe up the first black stain, making her feel hopeful about the sheets from, uh, two days ago? Three? With twenty hours in a plane, times and days were blurred.
Had she put the sheets in the dryer? Crap no, they were going to be a moldy mess.
“You think that thing had anything to do with the conduits in our area?” Rafael asked. “I hear we’ve got an unusual number for a town this size. But why would the ghost thing come here? Think anyone else got attacked?”
She looked up to gauge his expression, but Rafael appeared casual as he added even more water to the coffee carafe—or whatever it was called. “Maybe.” Scrubbing hard, she managed to sop up the icky stuff until there was barely a stain—except in the bullet hole where the slug was embedded in concrete just past the wood flooring. The goo had soaked into the wood there, leaving a black spot. “I don’t think it’s going to come out right here.”
With an unconcerned shrug, Rafael poured two cups of coffee and brought them to the bar with a box of hazelnut-flavored coconut creamer. She joined him there. “Jada, our drummer—she’s mostly vegan—got me addicted to this.” He shook the box. “I don’t have any regular cream, sorry, but I can get you some sugar if you want.”
“Does it taste like coconut?” she asked.
“Not much.” He poured a tiny amount into his coffee and offered it to her. “Want to try it? Not low cal, but I figure after that thing, we deserve it.”
She tried to suppress a grin as she took his cup. “Like you need to watch your calories.” Feeling bold, she flicked him lightly on the abs.
To her relief he laughed and straightened up, lifting his shirt just a bit to show off rigid obliques. “How do you think I got these, huh?”
“Point.” Damn, she was biting her lip. She let it go, and her ears heated as she drank from his cup. Creamy, sweet, and flavored like his kiss. Yum. She poured a little into her own mug and watched sadly as he dropped his shirt back into place.
“To kicking demon-ghost ass,” he said, offering a toast.
“Cheers to that!” she agreed, clicking mugs before taking a healthy swig. “I don’t even remember what we were doing.”
He leaned back against the bar and stretched his legs out, looking every bit the suave superstar, and glanced back over at the table. “I think you were explaining a math fundamental I should’ve grasped in the ninth grade or something.”
She shook her head. “You were doing great! I think you’re going to be fine; you just need practice.”
“You’re really good at explaining things. Can I hire you to help me once a week? It would be a big favor.” He looked earnest and then grinned. “I can store jumpsuits and proton packs nearby, just in case.”
Lost by the reference, she shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
His jaw dropped. “Ghostbusters?”
“Oh, I never saw that.”
“What? Next you’re going to tell me you’ve never seen Star Wars.”
She shrugged. “I saw the one with the red guy with the spikes in his head.”
His mouth gaped like she’d just spoken blasphemy. “The Phantom Menace? That’s the only Star Wars flick you’ve seen? Why did we watch that shitty movie when we could’ve been fixing the gaping holes in your education?” His body still zinging with energy, he went to the piano and banged out the first few chords of the Star Wars song that even she knew.
“Darth Vader’s theme?”
“Technically it’s called the ‘Imperial March,’ but yeah, it’s Vader’s theme.” Rounding the bench, he sat. “Mind if I play a bit now, and then we can get back to math?” He tossed her a smile that was just a tad cheeky. “Stress activity.”
The alacrity with which she launched herself onto his couch was embarrassing. “Please. Play.”
His grin said he’d known she’d let him, and she mentally berated herself as his fingers glided across the keys, playing some classical-sounding thing she’d never heard before. “Do you care what I play?” As he spoke, the music changed to one of the songs off of his first album.
She slipped her flats off
and put her feet on the couch, hoping she wasn’t being too informal. “I wouldn’t hate it if you played a song or two you wrote. But do what makes you happy. It’s your de-stress activity.”
The music shifted again to something else ballad-y, but nothing she recognized. Still, it was pretty. Then he sang:
Three years chasing down the cold cement,
I got a long way from where I’ve been.
She grabbed a throw pillow and pulled it against her chest as she realized he was playing “Blur,” from their latest album—but it sounded completely different. Listening carefully, she realized it was the same tune. The released music, though, was fast paced, with dueling guitars and a driving drum, a trashy punk ode to dissipation.
The slowed-down simplicity of piano and voice eliminated the celebration, making the fun sound hollow and imbuing the music with regret. As he sang the new version, a couple words were different—nothing major, but enough that if the original was a paean to good times, he’d created from it a bitter morning after.
It had never dawned on her how vastly different a song could be interpreted just by instrumentation. She hadn’t cared much for “Blur”—she couldn’t imagine herself ever partying with the glitterati—but listening to him now made her heart hurt with his regret, an emotion she knew all too well, even if they had different reasons.
She felt the music. It suddenly meant something.
He didn’t stop when he finished, just moved straight on to another song from the album, this one also altered in fundamental ways, no longer a rich boy bragging about carousing through the elite parties of New York. His face, visible in profile from her position, had crunched into serious lines, almost as brooding as the music. By the end of the second song, he played like he was in a trance, his whole body moving subtly with the ebb and flow of his hands across the keyboard.
What must it be like to create music and get lost in it like that? Nothing she’d ever experienced gave her that sort of... exorcism was the best word she could think of. Each pound of his fingers or cry of his voice seemed to bash at whatever demons he fought more surely than she’d struck one with a knife ten minutes ago.
That had been too close. Where else were they going to appear? She needed to talk to Coyote about this.
And maybe... her mom? Such a weird thought. Ande had suggested—more like insisted—she give her mother time to readjust to normalcy before they added the stress of working on their relationship. As happy as Giselle was that her mother was alive, she was having a hard time adjusting to it herself. She had no right to be mad at Bryn, and yet she was furious—furious about all the lies and secrets, furious that Bryn had lost that final fight and left her alone, furious that after twelve years of building fantasies around the life that could’ve been, she now realized she didn’t know her mother at all.
Bryn was a good person who’d done the best she could in extraordinary circumstances—Giselle knew that logically. But feelings didn’t give a damn about logic. Growing up had been miserable, and misery wanted someone to blame.
That song ended, and Rafael switched to the new one he’d sampled at the party last week. Instead of the simple hope in the first version, the song came with a longing ache that made her sigh. Whoever that stupid girl was needed to get her head on straight. She could have this amazing, kind man, who looked like a brooding god of music. What the hell was wrong with her?
I would give anything for one day of devotion like this.
Curling up against the couch cushions, she closed her eyes, shoving away all the confusion of the last few days, and let the music wash across her, feeling peaceful for the first time in a long while.
Chapter 24
“HEY, WAKE UP.”
Giselle opened her eyes groggily at the gentle shake on her shoulder and the sound of a low voice.
Rafael Marquez’s beautiful face was about six inches from hers. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and reopened them. His face was now a good two feet away, but it was still definitely him. He winked. “Sorry to put you to sleep with my playing.”
“What?” She slowly rose, feeling sleep drunk, and looked around in confusion. She was still at Rafael’s. “I fell asleep?” She’d missed... Oh, fuck exhaustion! How had she fallen asleep during a private concert from Rafael Marquez?
“Yup,” he said with a grin, not appearing too offended as he sat back on the coffee table. “Sorry to wake you—you were sleeping pretty hard. But I didn’t know if you had something to do this evening.” He ran a hand through his hair. “And I’ve got tickets with some friends.” His face lit up hopefully. “I can see if there are any more available if you want to join us.”
She waved a hand vaguely at him. Between the hard sleep, the adventures of the last few days, and waking up in a strange—a good, but very strange—place, she felt completely out of it. But it sure sounded like Rafael had asked her to hang out with him and his friends. “That’s sweet, but I, uh...what time is it?” Wasn’t she meeting Coyote tonight? Shit, she hadn’t missed it, right? He was already pissed...
“About six thirty.”
She breathed out, relieved. As cool as it would be to hang out with Rafael, she couldn’t break her appointment with her partner. Yawning, she shot Rafael an embarrassed smile. “Thanks so much for the invite, but I can’t tonight. And I loved your playing. I haven’t been getting enough sleep. I think I was just comfortable, and the music was beautiful, and trust me, I’m kicking myself right now.”
He laughed and stood up, heading for the table and their math notes, which he began gathering together. “Gotta quit partying so much. Take it from a hypocrite like me, it’ll catch up with you.”
She stood and stretched her neck. “I don’t party that much. I have a job.”
“Oh? What do you do?”
“Temp.” Which she did, occasionally, to bring in a little extra. “But since I can’t work eight to five, I end up with jobs at all kinds of weird hours.” She repacked her things. “You going to be okay with this assignment? We didn’t finish. I can come back tomorrow or something.”
He looked down at it, his eyes scanning the notes. “Eh, actually, I think I can do it.” He sounded surprised. Then he looked back up at her. “I wasn’t kidding about you coming back, though. I could use it. Every Wednesday at five?”
Slinging her backpack on her shoulder, she tried to think through her schedule. Setting aside an hour plus travel a week wasn’t going to be easy, but it’d be worth it to help Rafael Marquez out. It was the least she could do for him, considering what he and his music had done for her—even if he hadn’t done it specifically for her. “Wednesdays at five are great.”
“Forty an hour all right? I think that’s what my folks used to pay tutors. But if that’s not enough—”
Her burst of laughter cut him off. “Forty dollars? An hour?” She was willing to do it for free.
He looked at her like she was unstable. “Fifty? You are significantly more helpful.”
That just made her laugh even harder. “Fifty dollars an hour. You don’t mean fifteen? There is nothing I do that is worth fifty bucks an hour, dude.”
He looked her over like he was confused, or maybe even disappointed. “Do you know how much I make an hour?”
That stopped her laughter as her nerves came crashing back in, and she shifted her weight uncomfortably. “I, uh... no. More than fifty dollars, I’m going to guess.”
“Yeah.” He wrinkled his nose and looked at the ground. “Nobody does anything worth what I get an hour. It’s pretty horrifying actually.” He paused for a moment, then kept going with an air of confession, his hands rubbing together like he wanted to do something with them. “I’m going to tell you something my abuela reminded me this summer. Twenty thousand people don’t buy tickets to a Rage show because I deserve it. They like the way they feel when I’m singing on their radio. They like the people they meet on fan pages. They like the way my abs look after a month of extra work, a juice cleanse, and Photo
shop—Abuela didn’t say that part. People drop cash because of how they feel, not because I deserve obscene quantities of money.” His foot scuffed at the rug. “I was starting to lose track of that. It’s part of why I came back to Texas.”
After another pause, he looked at her again. “I tend to think I’m worth more than I am because that’s how I get treated. You seem to think you’re worth less than you are, which, assuming it’s for the same reason, makes me embarrassed for humanity. I don’t want to be another person reinforcing that.”
The warmth his words engendered made her feel too hopeful, so she laughed. “I’m pretty sure a Rage Riot concert makes people feel better than doing math problems for an hour.”
His lips quirked at that. “Hopefully. But if I get through this semester without constantly stressing over my grade, that relief is easily worth fifty dollars a week. You make math easier than anyone I’ve ever worked with.” He walked toward the door, digging in his wallet, and she followed. When they stopped, he caught her in his sweet gaze and stuffed a wad of cash into her hand. “Don’t charge what you think you’re worth. Charge what I think you’re worth. Raise your rates if you want. I’ll pay it.” He shook his wallet like he’d pull out more right then if she asked.
Her heart dropped into her feet, and her eyes welled up as she clutched the money. Nobody thought she was worth jack shit. Nobody ever did.
No, that wasn’t true. Coyote had led a charge into the underworld to get her. And Rawan had come. And Bryn. And, okay, Shawn, but that wasn’t for her. The others, though, they’d come for her. For the first time since she was a kid, she had people who gave as much as they took. And Rafael Marquez was one of them. Yeah, it wasn’t going to hell for her, but never in her craziest fantasies at the shelter had she imagined him treating her like... What was the word she was looking for?
Like his equal.
She was not going to cry in front of Rafael. She was not. She bit the inside of her cheek and nodded, hoping he didn’t see how close to tearing up she was.