Page 80 of The Succubi's Choice

LUNDY HANDLER (10:02 AM): call when available.

And the missed calls all interspersed.

MIRI (10:18 AM): I’m safe. Sorry, I slept in. Weird night, will tell you later.

She looks up at Thomas, who’s sorta waiting. “I don’t suppose you can teleport yourself, can you?”

He shakes his head. “But we can walk out, it’s no big deal. I’ll get an Uber.”

* * *

The Uber driveris definitely amused at the two of them, with her mini dress and his half-worn suit, but Thomas is so breezily blasé about it that she tries to copy that.

With the fakery cheery music popping in the background, Thomas looks over at Miri, joking gone for a second.

“I’m serious, it’s totally fine if you bang him,” he says, ignoring the snort from the Uber driver. “I’m not sure if you thought I’d be weird about it, but I won’t.”

“You’re not...” she dips her voice down low, “conscious when he does that right?”

“Nope,” he pops the ‘p’ sound. “But it’s not weird, I promise.”

“That definitely sounds weird,” she says, and gets a smile in return. “But seriously, we didn’t. I tried, but we didn’t.”

His eyebrows do a weird thing, like he’s trying to be suggestive but doesn’t have enough coordination to quite pull it off. “He actually turned you down?”

She leans away, torn between amusement and frustration. “To be fair, it wasn’t so much a turn down as a ‘maybe not when you feel obliged to’ sort of sitch,”

He nods, like that explains everything. “Ah.”

* * *

Out of too much caution,she has the Uber driver drop her off a block away from home, so the most the neighbors would think she’s doing is a bad walk of shame, and she’s rewarded with the view of Lundy’s van idling in front of her apartment.

He waves at her from the van, and she breezes right past him, climbing the stoop to her own place as fast as she can in the minidress.

Of course, Gabriel is waiting for her inside with Jacqueline, and he rockets to his feet when she bursts in.

“He came by, I didn’t know what to say, I’m sorry, and —"

Jacqueline, idly reading what looks like a math textbook, says, “He told him you crashed at a hotel with your mark, it’s no big deal.”

“He’s outside, he saw me come in, I’m gonna change.” She breezes past them, suddenly eager to be wearing anything else but the minidress, and strangely eager to wear underwear. Because of course that got lost somewhere in the night.

Her room, small and cramped without the sunlight or the heating, with her small bed and her regular quilt and the mess of her clothes everywhere. She has a moment to take a deep, shuddering breath, before stripping and scrambling into a pair of sweatpants and sweatshirt. Because if she’s going to be interrogated—again—she wants to be comfortable this time.

He had told her they wouldn’t find out, and she has no clue how he could affect that or change their actions, but…

She hears the front door click open, the inevitable sound of trouble, and she really fucking does not want to see Lundy right now, but she pushes her own door open and strides out.

Hiding won’t exactly get her where she wants to go, after all.

Lundy gives her the long familiar up-down glance, his brows drawing together. “You look...well.”

“Fuck off,” she says, crossing her arms and looking him straight in the eyes. “I don’t want to speak to you.”

There’s a small thrill, of saying what she wants, without couching her words behind politeness and fear.

“Well, too bad, I need to make sure your arm isn’t infected,” he says, completely unaffected by her words. “Here.” He holds out his hand, she doesn’t move, and they stand like that for a split second. “Jacqueline, can you excuse us?” He says, with a nice, friendly customer service smile towards the couch.

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