She looked up, and there it was. The bed was bigger. The bed was bigger, and comfier. It filled the room now, as soft and plush as a marshmallow. And the room it filled? She felt pretty sure it wasn’t the same. The walls were a different color—a pale lavender, like some of the trim on her store, instead of the gray they’d been before. Like someone had painted them overnight.
Which she supposed they had.
They’d just done it with magic instead of Dulux.
Jackhad done it with magic instead of Dulux. Or maybe the house was magic, like the truck, and he’d just commanded it. She didn’t know. She didn’t suppose it mattered. Everything was too wild to really focus on the underlying details. All she could do was stumble out into the living room in a daze, taking in a million things as she did.
The couch was not just slightly plumper. It was enormous, and wrapped in a rich burgundy leather.Same as the chair in my store again, she thought, but couldn’t linger on it. The television had already caught her attention. It was still older, clunky, not digital. But it was huge. It stood like a monolith in the center of the room. Tom Hanks’s face on it looked about seventy feet wide.
She stood in front of it, giddy as anything.
Though she couldn’t maintain it. Of course she couldn’t. Because as she took in every new bit of comfort, every new soft thing, all it did was make her slowly realize that he’d done all this for her. Just for her, only for her.
He had never done it for himself.
Ten years he said he had lived as a human, with the constant power to make his life more comfortable. Yet somehow he just hadn’t. He’d lived in the ramshackle remains of the many films and shows he half understood. He had made a home amidst the rubble.
And yeah, she knew part of that was trying to look convincing as the kind of man he thought he was. But there was clearly something else there, too. A terror of being too comfortable, of being too content. Like the night before, when he’d hardly been able to stand a gentle touch.
He thinks he doesn’t deserve even that, she realized in a heartbreaking rush.
Then didn’t even think about it. She went into the kitchen and crossed the now hardwood floor, and just as he turned and started to say something probably innocuous about breakfast, likehey, the eggs are almost ready, she slipped her arms around his waist from behind. She pressed her face into his back.
And he laughed.
He said, “Well, if I thought frying up some over-easy eggs got me one of these, maybe I’d have started doing them sooner.” But then he seemed to realize she wasn’t stopping, and she felt him go still. She heard him swallow thickly. “Oh, honey,” he said, soft and sad but also something else.
It seemed to her like relief.
God, she hoped it was relief.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
She was researching loopholes in supernatural pacts when he said it. Right after she’d told him that it didn’t seem as if it would be possible to change the wording fromI love youto something a little less serious. “Not that I think she couldn’t love you. But you know, time is starting to run out. You’ve got a month to go to her, ask her out, and then win her over; it’s not a lot of time. It would have been ideal if we could change it,” she said.
Then he just came out with it.
“If I’ve not got a lot of time left, maybe we should spend it doing things that couples who live together do. You know. Just to finish rounding out my education,” he said, in so strangely sad a manner that she looked up from the book she was busy highlighting. She pushed her glasses up her nose. She assessed him.
But his expression was as neutral as she’d ever seen it.
He didn’t even take an agitated drag of his cigarette. It was clamped between two of his fingers, and said fingers were folded over his other hand. As she watched, smoke coiled in front of his face. It veiled him for a moment.
For some reason, she thought of the scene in a movie when the private detective knows more than the killer but is kind of pretending otherwise.Columbo, she remembered the show being called. And that made her a little uneasy, even if it made a lotof sense.That is kind of what he’s spent his existence doing, she thought.Being one step ahead of serial killers and monsters and things that go bump in the night.Just because he doesn’t understand how to human doesn’t mean he’s not smart. It doesn’t mean he’s not more amazing than you could ever possibly fathom.
Then suddenly all she wanted to do was ask.
She wanted to say,If I show you my world, maybe you can show me yours.
But of course, he hated his world. He wanted to escape it. Who wouldn’t have wanted to, considering the harrowing nightmares he’d had to deal with over the aeons? So she focused on what he’d asked for. “Well, we’ve covered dates. And breakfasts. And making out. And watching things together. And sex. And sleeping together. And getting along with each other’s pets,” she said, while eyeing Popcorn, who was currently sitting in Jack’s lap. His fury at having to listen to their shenanigans had abated pretty quickly, once he realized he could get more petting and plenty of food from her defiler. Plus, she felt pretty sure that Steve was starting to warm to her. He had honked his horn when she’d gone out onto the front porch. Then a second later she’d clocked the hellhound, lurking in the bushes, waiting for her to step over the boundary of the house. So what did that leave?
“There must be other things you’ve always wanted,” he prompted.
But all she could think wassomeone like you, I just wanted someone like you.
It took her a second to swallow it down and think of something else.
Something simple that wouldn’t stir her up too much. Maybe multiple somethings that she could make a list of, and check them all off, methodically. That always helped, when her mind tried to betray her. It had helped after the bad place, when she’d keptwanting to fall back on magic. She’d kept wanting to write bizarre and fantastical things, and hadn’t been able to. Instead, she’d shrunk herself down to the simple sentences, then words, then finally nothing at all.
