Page 22 of Five to Love Him
“Of course. And we want you to know that we don’t lie, not like this, and not to you. We’re sorry we did it.”
“Oh. Uh. That’s okay. I think I get it. It’s like showing up to a date and not knowing whether you’re underdressed or overdressed.” He chuckled. “I was on the phone with a vampire earlier”—he whispered the last, glanced around, though no one was paying us much attention. “He was trying to get me to wear a tux to breakfast.”
“You told a vampire you were going to have breakfast with us? Are you friends with this vampire? Vampires do enjoy feeding on humans, Leo, even if they’re friendly.”
But Leo shook his head. “It’s not like that. He’s the principal. At St. Auguste, where I have that class. He was trying to get me to work there. Well, I suppose he hired me.”
We nodded, glad this particular topic had been broached without us having to do that.
“We heard about you looking for a job yesterday, and we thought about it. We are meeting with someone tomorrow to take another job. We don’t think you’ll have to work at all, unless you want to. We are small, but we are capable of paying attention to you and making sure you are comfortable and have everything you want.”
Leo stared at us, the coffee cup frozen halfway to his mouth. “You want to do this whole breadwinner thing? Doesn’t apply to the gay side, I think. Also, what do you mean, you’re small?”
We fidgeted and nearly bumped into a shifter on their run on our way to the store in the underground.
“We are only five,” we told Leo in a whisper. We used the opportunity to lean in closer to him.
“Five. Five. You know that’s plenty, right?” He looked at us with concentration. “How does it even work with five people? Well, six. I didn’t even—you’re definitely sure you’re not pulling my leg here about this whole mate thing?”
“We wouldn’t,” we said, and he looked over the table at us. Maybe we had spoken a bit more firmly than was needed, but we meant it.
“You’re not platonic. Are you platonic? Because if you’re not platonic, how does that even work?”
“We don’t want anything you are uncomfortable with.” We said that firmly as well, memories washing back over us, bile-inducing and raw. In the store in the underground, we dropped the stevia. An oculi saw and picked it up for us, asked whether we were all right. We nodded and breathed, breathed. That way we could stay calm in the Moonlight, and Leo didn’t have to see this. “We would never force anything on you.”
“But how—you know what, don’t answer that. I don’t want to think about that. It’s weird. This whole waking up married thing is weird.”
“But we aren’t married, Leo.” If human law allowed, we would marry him in a heartbeat.
“No, I know. But my friend—Tate, you know, from last night—he talked to our instructor at St. Auguste, and he said any type of mating isn’t just equal to human marriage but given more weight.” He gasped. “Fucking hell. I’m a fucking cliché. I went out drinking, and I woke up married. Tate was right. At least I didn’t wake up with you in my bed. I mean, no offense, but erm. This is a lot. Maybe I should have finished college and stopped chasing shadows.”
“You are not a cliché,” we managed. The food came then, and we ate in silence for a while.
The silence meant we had a moment to think, to consider what we hadn’t dared think about before. Or maybe we had. We had just said we wouldn’t lie to Leo, and we didn’t want to. We would give him a promise, and we would swear it. It would not be lying not to tell him about that black patch in our past. But if he was there if and when we turned into a trembling mess kneeling on the floor of some store and being comforted by an oculi, he might rightfully wonder why that was. Technicalities aside, he might call us a liar, and we’d not argue it.
We would have to tell him. How we had been stupid to trust, had thought we could end our suffering by going through it. We knew we would have to tell him all that.
What would he think of us when he learned? We were scared, terribly, terribly scared to find out. We didn’t want him to find out. He might reject us, or he might hurt for us, and neither was good.
We made a decision then, and we knew it had regret built into it. We decided we would make him fall for us before he could hate us if only to learn what it was like to be loved by our gleaming one, by the one who shone for us alone. We would tell him when the time came, when we couldn’t hide it anymore, but we would wait as long as was possible.
“Wait. If you guys are one and the same, does that mean you taste all the food at the same time?”
The hivelings all stopped chewing. The one who was having the veg scramble put his fork down. “Yes. But we don’t always eat different food.” The one next to me tapped his fork against the plate his cherry pie sat on. “We do like having something sweet on the side though. It’s not that different from when a singular has brunch.”
“I suppose.” The mention of sweet things made me remember what Farrow had said about cake. I wasn’t sure whether he’d been serious about me working at St. Auguste, but if so, I could see it as temp work. I definitely wasn’t going to mooch off this…small, five-person hive. “So my new boss—I mean, I don’t really know if it’s real—but he said he was going to order cake for after class today. He asked me to invite you. Do you want to come?”
“We would be delighted,” they chorused. “He is the vampire?” the one on my right asked before taking another bite of his cherry pie.
“Yeah. Odd guy. He told me Hawthorne expects me to find a job, and that they offered me a position as a paralegal. I hate that kind of work, and I said I was going to find something else to satisfy them.”
“Why would Hawthorne require you to be employed?”
“I guess if I’m employed, I’m less likely to sell supernatural secrets.”
“They don’t have to worry about that. We’ll take care of you.”
I snorted. “Easy there. I’ve never really worked. I actually think I have to if just to prove to myself that I can, now that I found what I was looking for all this time.”
