“Upset?”
“I think so,” I answered quietly. I was calming down from the third-degree burns I’d gotten, but it was going to take a minute to forget walking in on him kissing someone who looked like he belonged on the cover of a motorcycle gang romance novel.
“Do you want to go upstairs?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No. I don’t know why I came to this.”
“Sit outside with me?” he tried. “Talk a bit?”
I stopped staring at the drain and nodded through the mirror at him.
* * *
The tavern’s fenced-in patio was ours, probably because Creatus was a toasty ninety degrees at night and known for sudden gales of wind. Near the door, I stopped in my tracks to gaze up at the stunning dark-violet sky, its bright stars sprawling in a purplish swirl and vibrantly twinkling.
Leland followed the direction of my head. “Want to lie down on a daybed?” he asked. “We can look up at them.”
I glanced around the patio at the wrought-iron tables bolted down to the concrete pad and the surrounding heavy black outdoor chairs. There were umbrellas, tied-up for the night, plus UFO-esque patio space heaters. But that was it. There was no daybed.
“Navy?” Leland asked, just as a section of seating transformed into a massive navy daybed, big enough for us to lay on opposite sides and reach our arms out without touching. “I’m not trying anything,” he said. “Talking means talking. I promise.”
“I know,” I said mildly, remembering how he’d jumped away from me in the washroom after snapping out of the lust spell his elemental magic had momentarily put him under. “I’m fine with the daybed.”
We sat down within an arm’s length of each other, semi-reclined against a backdrop of fluffy outdoor pillows. To stop myself inching closer to him, I stared straight up at the sky’s nebula of dusky pinks and dark purples. The Privacy around us seemed to shrink the world, brighten the stars, and bring them closer.
“What did you want to talk about?” I asked.
“Last night?” he suggested, angling his head. “Or the washroom?”
I sat up straighter and took a drink. “I don’t want to talk about the washroom.”
“I kind of do,” he said with a small wince. “You were upset. Do you remember who I was with?”
“Trying not to,” I said.
“What do you remember about it?”
I tossed the flask down on the thick navy cushion and twisted my hair into a low bun, giving him a sideways look. “Is this a test to see if I disappear?” I plopped back down on the pillows with a new layer of sweat shining on my chest because now I was remembering Leland’s hand drilling into the wall by Case’s head.
“I would never test you.” He offered his hand as a tether, but . . . I didn’t want to touch him with my sweaty hand.
I knew what we were dancing around. I saw him kissing a man. But Leland had never brought up his sexuality, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing to him. I had questions. But Leland was mine in magic, not partnership, so it wasn’t like he had to answer them.
“I asked if you remembered him because . . .” He looked up, stopping, not able to get the words out.
“Because you like men?” I guessed, reaching for my flask.
“Well, yes. I was going to say something different. But yes. Sometimes I like men. I like men and women.”
I chugged so I didn’t have to look at him.
“Does that change the way you look at me?”
I pulled my flask from my lips. “Not really.”
I thought Ash was bi, maybe a lesbian, but I was thirteen when she’d left, and we’d never had the conversation. The books in her room, though — the ones with the most cracked spines and least crisp pages — they were about women falling in love with women. There were also all the guys who walked her to ourdoor.Once. Because she was never interested. And while Dad badgered me about homecoming and prom and why I couldn’t get a real boyfriend, with Ash, he never did.
I imagined having to declare your sexuality to anyone was as awkward and annoying as me running inside, standing on a chair, clinking a knife to a tankard, and randomly disclosing I prefer to be vaginally penetrated.
