Page 100 of Thirsty
“Welcome, and thank you for flying with us,” the agent at check-in told them, once Charlie had given her their names. “I see one first-class coffin and one business-class seat.”
Charlie blinked. “No, I booked two seats in first class—one coffin, one daybed—so we’d be together.” He shot a small smile at Lorenzo, who was still waking up—they had to fly at the very crack of sunset, and he’d grumbled about it more than once in the car ride over.
“I’m sorry, sir, I see separate seats here,” the agent said, typing rapidly.
“That must be a mistake,” Charlie said.
“I’ll see what I can do,” the agent said, “but—”
“You suggest,” Lorenzo said slowly, taking a step closer tothe counter, “that I would have intentionally seated my chosen human companion away from my coffin?”
The agent looked flummoxed, her hands frozen over the terminal. “You think I should do such a thing as we take to the sun-drenched skies in this magnificent beast?” Lorenzo went on, gesturing at the planes on the tarmac. The pitch of his voice had dropped to something volcanic and dark. “Be separated from the call of his blood?”
The agent blinked rapidly, and then said, “Uh...no, sir. Let me—let me just get my manager.”
Lorenzo broke into a goofy grin as soon as she left the podium. “I just love doing stuff like that.”
After they’d secured their seats and gone through security, they got snacks. Well, Charlie got snacks—there was a stall by the moving walkway that had truffle fries, and he loved truffle fries, he didn’t care how basic it made him. But Lorenzo wasn’t feeling anything they’d passed yet, so they’d found their seats at the gate, and Lorenzo had asked Charlie to watch his bags while he stretched his legs and poked around.
Charlie took in the terminal slowly, savoring his snack and trying to resist the urge to check his phone. They were on vacation, and besides, where else but an airport could you engage in some true people watching in this day and age?
A millennial couple on the other side of the gate were arguing quietly about something on the woman’s phone. He watched patiently, trying to see if he could suss out anything about the fight from their body language—the man was pointing at the phone vigorously, but the woman kept shaking her head and mouthing something Charlie couldn’t quite decipher. Sitting closer to him was a woman with a dog in her purse—it was too snuggled up for him to make out the breed—and a girlwho looked like a student, who had very cool iridescent snakes coiled neatly on her head.
But he decided to stick with the arguing couple. He loved a good fight. He wanted to see if he could figure it out.
“You look deep in thought,” Lorenzo said, settling into the seat next to him. He was holding a pair of Reese’s cups, and started to unwrap them.
“Just snooping. You know me,” Charlie said lightly. Lorenzo grunted, but not in a way that gave Charlie anything to work with when it came to reading his mood. He hadn’t always had the best reaction to Charlie’s curiosity about others.
Then Lorenzo slid him a glance. “The girl with the dog, or the fight?”
Charlie’s heart bloomed a bit. “The couple. What are they fighting about?”
Lorenzo’s eyes glazed over as he tuned in to the distant voices. It always turned Charlie on when he did this, every single time. Just imagining the things he could hear...the sounds Charlie could make so quietly that only Lorenzo would hear them...
He was lost in thought when Lorenzo reported back, flatly, “Backsplash.”
“Ugh,” Charlie sighed, stuffing his face with truffle oil. Lorenzo leaned over and snagged a few fries before he’d even unwrapped either of his candies. He licked his thumb when he was done, and Charlie giggled at him.
Then his phone buzzed twice, and Charlie slid it from his pocket without thinking.
“No,” Lorenzo said sternly, leaning over to grab it from him and immediately getting greasy fingerprints all over the screen. Charlie sighed, looking pointedly at the smudges.
“We said,” Lorenzo defended himself.
And it was true—they’d badly needed this getaway. Re-launching the column and the rest of the site after turning down Advance Media’s offer had been a herculean task. They’d gone from the meager support he’d had as Wise Old Crone to doing absolutely everything themselves—the kind of legal, administrative, and technical minutiae that turned Lorenzo’s eyes red and gave Charlie panic attacks. But slowly, painfully, they’d gotten the new site up and running—Charlie’s column, and eventually a few other regular contributors’ pages, plus some fun new features—and the forum. The forum had been atonof work, but it was so worth it to see people start signing up and chatting. They posted about stuff Charlie had written, and issues he hadn’t had a chance to write about, and about things he’d never heard of—creatures and rituals and places that even Lorenzo hadn’t encountered.
They weren’t getting a lot of sleep—along with Ava, Rachel, Maggie, Isolde, Gray, and the few other friends they’d pressganged into service. But all those sleepless nights and stumbling blocks had been worth it, because the site was starting to thrive. They’d attracted a decent number of subscribers, and they had five other regular contributors now, including Rachel and Gray. People were getting paid, they had enough money to hire more staff, and Charlie and Lorenzo had even done a mini tour, helping to get in-person supernatural groups set up in other cities, which was incredibly gratifying and fully exhausting.
They’d called the new siteThe Lupine. The forum they’d called Green Shoots. Wise Old Crone was gone, dead, and Charlie didn’t give her a second thought. (Like other mystical old crones, though, he wasn’t counting on herstayingdead forever.)
Ava said she’d always known it was headed here, but Charlieknew it hadn’t been. He and Lorenzo had had to work to make the site successful—to make it into something they could be proud of.
But they’d left all that turmoil and stress and hard work back home, and on this trip, they’d pledged not to think about it even a little.
At the changeover in New York, Charlie kept watching the movie he’d started on the first plane, while Lorenzo flicked through the news. Eventually Charlie noticed that Lorenzo had put his phone away and was staring somewhat blankly at his own screen. Charlie grinned and offered him one of his earbuds. Lorenzo’s answering smile was full of warmth, like a sunrise.
It was so strange to think that there might have been a time that Charlie would have dreaded Lorenzo taking a peek at his phone. Sharing screens was a sign of trust—and more, he supposed, as Lorenzo tucked his head into Charlie’s neck, already getting wrapped up in the film.
