The static smooths out. A thread of teal curls through his center, tentative.
“What I’m saying is that I need time to figure out what this is, and I can’t do that with Mrs. Pritchett peering through my kitchen window asking if I’ve got company because she saw an extra shadow move past the blinds.”
Oz’s colors shift through a slow gradient, teal to amber. “You want me to stay.”
“I want you to stay while I figure things out. I’m not… I can’t commit to anything just yet.”
“I understand.” The gold brightens at his edges. “I can be very quiet. Quiet is something I know how to do very well.”
The matter-of-fact way he says it lands in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay, good. So we have a plan.”
“We have a plan,” he agrees.
Something about the way he echoes it back—careful, like he’s holding the wordplanup to the light—makes my throat tighten.
I slide off the stool.
My legs are still doing that post-orgasm thing where they feel like they belong to a marionette operated by someone who’s had two glasses of wine, but they hold.
I straighten my shirt.
Redo my bun, which distributes the mica more evenly without actually removing any of it.
I’m sure I look like a disaster, but what else is new?
“First order of business,” I say, turning toward the drying rack. “Those rosemary-oat bars need to be checked in forty minutes and I still have to clean up the mica, and you—” I point at him, then at the door. “You should probably get off the studio floor before my five o’clock alarm goes off, because Deborah times her evening walk to coincidewith garbage night and she’ll absolutely peek in here if the door is open.”
Oz is already moving toward the hallway.
His form becomes compact, flowing across the concrete with a silence that is genuinely eerie for something his size.
At the doorway he pauses, a single thread of gold light tracing his edge like a question mark.
I open my mouth, close it, and point at the hallway. “Go.”
He goes.
Then I’m standing alone in my studio, with the ghost of warmth still pressed along every vertebra of my spine.
I look at the worktable. I look at my hands, which are shaking slightly, in a way that has little to do with my back and everything to do with the fact that I just told a slime monster he could live in my house in secret, forty-eight hours before the first batch of my biggest wholesale order ships, in a town where the smallest change in routine can get the rumor mill spinning like a jet engine.
“Cool,” I say to the empty room. “Great plan, Maisie. Really airtight.”
The rosemary-oat bars, at least, look perfect.
Chapter 7
Night Air
Maisie
The ceiling fan clicks onevery third rotation.
I’ve been counting.
Eighty-seven clicks since I turned off the lamp.
