Page 51 of Hex and the City
For a second I considered the possibility of smothering myself to death under there. It could be preferable to the humiliation of being caught snuffling at his bedsheets like a bloodhound. Tiamat would just have to find a different host to channel her madness and power.
I really should have checked if he was still asleep in bed with me. No breath on my neck, and no potentially immense boner pressed up against my butt, either. That last part especially was something I noted with dismay. I sighed, pulled the covers down, and sat up. I could live to die another day.
“Was just stretching,” I announced to the room, stretching my arms up for emphasis. “And taking my first deep breath of the day, you absolute weirdo. Why in the world would I be smelling your covers?”
Maximilian Drake sat on the edge of his couch, shoulders hunched, hands clasped as he studied me intently. Barefoot in jeans that left so little to the imagination, wearing his regulation white tank top, Max looked so different and domestic compared to the image he projected to the outside world.
He seemed so vulnerable like this, the grumpy bad boy stripped of all his trappings, all the hard edges and sharp protrusions. Personally, I was much more interested in his hard protrusions, but like last night had shown, everything seemed to have slowed down between us, now that we’d burst that blowjob bubble.
“It’s okay, you know.” Max leaned back, pushed his hair up and out of his face, his bicep bulging. “I know you’re attracted to me, and pheromones are supposed to be a thing. You can’t help what your body wants.”
The way he’d said it so matter-of-factly made me want to jab him in the stomach, but also kiss him hard on the face. Except we weren’t doing all that, for some reason. Not for now. I could sense the odd tension in the air, this unspoken armistice. We’d never exchanged a single word on the subject, but somehow we’d both agreed.
Maybe we shouldn’t have been moving too fast. If Max and his strange group of friends were my conduit to a semblance of a stable life in Dos Lunas, it would serve me to avoid making any sudden moves that could jeopardize the already fragile peace. And that included getting along with his very dangerous and very real best friend Tina, too.
“It’s really cute how you keep teasing me about that,” I said, huffing as I clambered out of bed. “I mean it’s pretty obvious that you’re into me as well.”
He shrugged. “I am. I won’t deny it. None of this would be happening if I didn’t think you were hot.”
I blinked at him, realizing that he’d said all of that with a perfectly straight face. He wasn’t mocking me or anything.
This was Max trying to have a reasonable, rational conversation with me about where things stood for us. I thought I’d be more upset about this odd standstill, the sudden carefulness. Instead I found it refreshing. Mature. I didn’t usually do mature. It was kind of nice.
“Listen,” he said, pulling on some socks. “Since we don’t have any leads, I figured I could stay in, take a look at the spreadsheet we stole from Atomica. Vera’s been ignoring my texts, too.”
“Same,” I said, peering at my phone, ruffling my hair. “Wish there was something I could do.”
“Well, you could pick up some coffee, and I could pick up some pastries. There’s a place that does some great croissants nearby, and Unholy Grounds is actually within walking distance from here.”
I laughed. “Are you serious? You love your friends that much and moved in to be near their coffee shop?”
Max twirled his finger in the air, stepping over to his desk. “Other way around, actually. We were friends before they even had the idea for the café. Long story.”
He fished something out of his pocket, placing it on his desk close to the computer monitor. It was the flash drive from the night before.
“But yeah,” he continued. “Get dressed. We could just eat what’s already here, but you’ve already tried the overnight oats I like. Plus, a certain someone told me I should be a bit more adventurous sometimes.”
I gave him my brightest smile, hardly able to form a response without slobbering all over myself. Weird how Max could be a bit sweet sometimes. I hobbled over to the desk as I pulled on my jeans, nodding at the USB drive, at his computer.
“So you work with computers a lot? You one of those Silicon Valley programming geniuses I always hear so much about?”
He laughed. “Not even close. I don’t know any more than your average person when it comes to computers. Won’t deny that I spend a lot of time on mine, though. You know, browsing, watching stuff, gaming.”
Normal enough. Like me, in fact. I liked all those things, too.
“My magic, though — that’s a lot closer to programming, now that you mention it. I practice a lot, make sure everything’s fully in operation, so the magic works exactly the way I need it to, when I need it to. I like to work in chains of spells. Put things in sequence. All part of the program.”
I nodded along as I threw on the rest of my clothes, chalking it up to his infrequent and frankly adorable bouts of geekiness. But somehow it still didn’t sit right with me. I knew I was reaching, pulling nonsense out of thin air, but the mere mention of chains had me thinking of all the links between these stray, random thoughts.
Somehow it all made sense, at least in my head. The anomalist had used these slivers of magic that resembled quartz crystals. All of Max’s magic seemed to come from the same family, either incorporating the transparent crystals, or making him transparent himself.
And speaking of sand, of Silicon Valley, wasn’t sand just a form of silicon, structurally similar to quartz crystals? Quartz crystals that just so happened to be very commonly used in watches and computers, two things that Max happened to like very, very much.
He was strapping it on again, that grubby platinum thing with the patina. A twenty-K watch, and computers. Never mind that his computing talents only covered being vigilant enough to watch the Atomica lady type the world’s simplest password, but also the foresight to carry around a USB drive. And what did USB drives have inside them?
Chips. Electric components. And fucking quartz!
Again, this all seemed like such a stretch. I could envision the conspiracy theory pinboard in my head, an angry web of red strings connecting all the dots. Somehow the satisfaction of seeing all the disparate pieces of the puzzle clicking into place just wasn’t there.
