“Maybe they aren’t that bad…” They didn’t lock people in a tower, after all.
“Well, Kami’s an utter fucker.” Talon winked at him. “I should know, I’ve known him for a long time.”
“How did you two meet?” Mercury was curious about everything in Talon’s past. How did his mate get all those scars? What was the keep like that Talon and Triton were from?
He wanted to know it all. Every single minute of everything.
Talon chuckled at him, his eyes dancing with laughter. “At a bar.”
“A bar?” That figured.
“Seriously, I was at a bar. He bumped into me and spilled my beer, and I got grumpy. We got into a fight, and somehow in the middle of the fight we ended up fighting a bunch of other guys instead of each other, and by the end of the night we were drinking together.”
“Did you ever have sex?” The words popped out of his lips.
“What?” Talon’s eyes went wide.
“With Kami. Did you ever have sex?” He didn’t like the idea, but it made sense. There was no way Talon was a virgin, after all.
He wasn’t a virgin either.
“Ew, no. That’s gross.”
Mercury let his eyebrows raise in disbelief. “Okay…but he’s not ugly.”
“No, he’s my friend. I can’t imagine. There’s just nothing about Kami that reads that way to me. I just—ew…” Talon’s face screwed up just like he was smelling something awful—like rotten fish stuffed with onions.
Mercury started chuckling, the sound bubbling inside him before it broke free in a set of happy cackles. “Your face, Talon!”
“Well, I can’t help it.” Talon snorted. “So mean to me, giving me that image.”
Mercury couldn’t stop laughing, holding his belly when he had a hard time catching his breath.
“I do love your laugh, hailee.”
A knock came to their door, and Talon slid from the bed, “You wait here. I’ll bring the food. We’ll have breakfast in bed.”
“Is it breakfast time?”
“Breakfast, lunch, dinner—does it matter?”
He didn’t suppose so.
What they ordered wasn’t really traditional breakfast food, it wasn’t really breakfast time, but if they wanted to call it breakfast and eat in the bed, they could.
He forced himself to sit up, straighten the blankets and arrange the pillows a bit so that there was a comfortable place for Talon to sit with his back to the headboard.
He liked Talon’s bed. It was very soft, filled with blankets. Most of which he had the suspicion were there just for him.
Every day there seemed to be another fuzzy blanket that appeared for him to cuddle up with in their nest.
He sat there and looked at the bedroom window, which was covered in a heavy curtain that blocked out the sun for sleeping. The view from this window was gorgeous—the mountains filled the entire space, the snows above the tree lines, the crags so different from the rocky cliffs near the ocean.
He thought about sliding out of the bed, going over, and opening the curtains to see if he could see a hawk or a herd of elk, but it seemed like a lot of work when he could simply ask Talon to open them when he got back into the room.
He supposed this was why Talon wanted him to eat, so he could get the strength to do things like open the window shades on his own without bothering his mate.
“No, hailee. Mainly it’s because I want to make love.” Talon walked in and placed the tray down on the end of the bed. Then he went to open the curtains, proving that it was dusk. The sky was red, orange, and yellow with the sunset, and it stole Mercury’s breath for a moment.
