Page 46 of An Amateur Witch's Guide to Murder
“He’s probably just looking for a warm body during these trying times,” Mateo defends weakly.
“Yeah, he really strikes me as the hookup type,” Ophelia says with a taunting edge.
He tries to imagine a suave Topher, getting ass all around town, but his brain rebels against the concept. Not that Topher hadn’t been—in retrospect—kinda slick in the moment. Kinda slick during his apology and the pay-the-price motivational speech too.
But.
She definitely has a thing for Topher. Her tastes have always run cutesy. She’d only become friends with Mateo becausethey’d met during his pastel phase. And Topher’s basically a little plush rabbit. The kind that moves and blinks but the battery’s fried, so it just vibrates with its disproportionately too-large plastic eyes. But, like, not in a bad way. Pleasant enough.
He spins all this around in the tumble-dry setting of his brain for a minute as he finally inserts the pod in the coffee maker.
“You like him?” he asks, immediately realizing he doesn’t want the answer.
She smiles.
Not the shitty smile. It’s the flax smile.
Topher is held in the same esteem as a pack of bland seeds she’d shove a newlywed for. Ask him how he knows. He’s so stunned he doesn’t put the mug in his hands under the coffee maker spout and has to scramble to get it positioned when coffee starts spitting onto the table.
“Doyoulike him?” She prods from the couch, on her knees now, facing the back of the chair with arms folded along the top edge as she watches him make a mess.
He sops up bean water and frowns, trying to consider Topher in some ill-defined way. It’s not as though he dislikes Topher—he loves the parts that have all the money—but now Mateo’s thinking about the vagueness in his chest. When he was a kid, he blamed his unclear feelings on the demon. Like it was blunting the world, making other people less interesting than everyone else seemed to find them.
Then he’d met Ophelia.
Their friendship was a slow-motion car accident. The kind where everyone gets a good look at everything, knows exactly who ran what or failed to brake, before two chrome bodies wrap around each other and destroy both vehicles and everything inside.
But positive. Ish.
They were each other’s first anything and everything, good and bad. It was like trying to compare the brightness of a flashlight to the sun when the sun had already blinded him.
And then there’s whatever the hell’s happening lately with the demon. It’s reacting to a lot of Topher-adjacent things.
Like right now, he realizes with a start, teeth sharp.
But why? Because he was asked something about Topher? What the fuck, demon? It certainly felt some sort of way about Topher. Positive or protective or something. And if that’s happening, how’s Mateo supposed to filter through that to figure out howheactually feels?
He doesn’t answer for so long that Ophelia asks a different question. “What about Ethan?”
“What about Ethan?”
“You forgot about Ethan,” she singsongs it, making fun of him. “The man that said right to your whole stupid face that he’d give you information if you slept with him.”
He cringes, not sure if his pain is at the forgetting or just that she’s saying the sex part with her human mouth, and he hates it. “I forgot about Ethan,” he admits. “I was kind of busy falling out a window. Oh shit.” He abandons his coffee attempts and goes to his room, grabs something out of the closet, and returns. “I stole his jacket.” He presents the studded Les Hommes Ethan had thrown over Ophelia’s shoulders after the pool incident. It’s still beautiful even if it also smells like chlorine. “I meant to call him or something. Or leave it with Topher.”
“Free jacket,” Ophelia says, sprawling on the couch now.
“This thing had to be a grand,” Mateo says, normally a fan of getting a free, expensive jacket, but Ethan had been nice, ifplaying at a different league or bracket or whatever sports metaphor makes sense for guys that are casually suave at sleeping around.
Wait. Ethan had been all slick lines, but Topher had kissed him. Isn’t that the stronger come on? Why is he less disoriented by Ethan’s advances, which were, comparatively, better?
He digs out his phone, not a fan of how much he doesn’t know what he feels about anyone except the amazing, studded jacket in his hands and the horrible girl on the couch. None of it matters anyway. He’s not looking to date random guys. He’d probably end up eating them. “We’ve got a few hours still. I’ll shoot Ethan a text.” Mateo pretends not to check whether Topher messaged again. “And we weren’t fired so we should go back to researching.”
Ophelia makes a guttural, dying noise but retrieves her laptop.
It takes two hours and a pizza before they’re bored out of their minds. Mateo swipes an especially ad-laden site away and checks the time. “It’s almost two-thirty. That’s too long just to report something, isn’t it?” Unless this was Topher’s conflict-averse way of firing them.
“I texted half an hour ago,” Ophelia says, giving him a meaningful look. Surely, he’d text back the rabid and beautiful lady. “Call him.”
