Page 5 of Five to Love Him
This human had come with another and with an oceanic. The other human looked very neat and clean. Clean in all the ways, like someone who wasn’t going to explode and beat you up. He had a messenger bag and brown hair. We took note because the first human—the gleaming one—and this one had come in together and clearly knew one another. It mattered that he didn’t look like he would hurt the gleaming one.
But the gleaming one…we knew only we could see the gleaming. He looked very neat too, so pretty. He had one of those cross-body shoulder bags we’d seen on others but never gotten for ourselves, and his hair was a light, golden brown with a soft wave to it. The strands reached over his ears, and we wanted to touch both his ears and his hair. Back home, we woke up and blinked the sleep from our eyes.
“Hey, what’s gotten into you?” asked Coral. They—he followed our line of sight. “Oh. Is that a shifter? You like broad shoulders, hive?”
“We…excuse us.”
We headed toward the group and checked we looked presentable from behind the bar where we were making a Gin and Tonic. Luckily, we did. At home, we got dressed and put the checkbook away while turning off the stove and covering the stew so we could eat later. This took precedence over dinner.
The oceanic was big, bigger than we were, but most oceanics were not aggressive either, especially not on land.
“You’re full already?” they asked, clearly assuming we’d turn them away. It was not unusual. The Dazzle was popular.
“No, not at all. We just wanted to show you to a table. You will need room for three?”
The gleaming human looked at us. He had brown eyes, but the left one had a flake of green in it. We loved that.
“Yeah. And just for one or two rounds,” the oceanic said.
“Please follow me,” we said and led them to one of the quiet tables at the back where we’d have an easy time keeping an eye on them.
“Wow, this goes on! Ez, you never told me this place was this big!”
“It’s like a cave,” the gleaming one said, and we also loved their voice. We blushed.
“You could call it an artificial cave. This area was dug out to make room for the bar,” we told them.
“Sort of creepy,” the gleaming one said.
Back home, we checked we looked as neat as was possible on short notice and headed out. We’d not be able to come into the Dazzle, of course, because Coral had forbidden it, but we’d wait outside to take the gleaming one home. And maybe we’d have to explain to him. Although, with humans who were here and with a supernatural, things should be easier and quite straightforward, thanks to Hawthorne. They had very strict rules about who got to go down to the underground, one of the reasons why we’d decided to live here rather than above.
Now of course all of that might change. We’d have to figure something out if that was the case. But no, there was no if. It would have to change. Just a little over two hundred square feet was fine for us, but humans often liked to have more room than that and could easily feel cramped if there were too many singulars around. And they would see us as that at first, as singulars, at least if they’d never interacted with one of us.
We beamed at them. “We here at the Dazzle think that creepy is our selling point.” Coral had told us to explain this to newcomers and the curious, although we didn’t quite have his lernean charm.
The gleaming one looked at us while the other two were sitting down. He looked so long that we thought we had offended or done something wrong, but then he started a smile like that cat from the old cartoons, the one that kept trying to catch the mouse although they were actually in love.
“Creepy is good.”
We exhaled. That was a relief.
three
“Wow, this place! Am I right? Leo, say I’m right.”
Ezra chuckled. I said, “You’re right, Tate. What even is this style?”
The Dazzle blended red, black, and velvet as if the interior designer had been a drag queen in love with true crime. Skulls watched us from nooks in the rough wall, and yes, right above Tate’s head there hung a chime made of knucklebones, fake knucklebones hopefully, but then this was the secret underground. Tate and I, we were the minority here.
I planted my butt on the chair upholstered with red velvet and sporting tassels. The table’s grain stood out like callouses under my finger, but it was clean, spotless. In its center, a fake wax LED candle shimmered.
“Right, what is this style?” Tate echoed, turning his curiosity on Ezra. “Explain it to us, Ez. Be our guide.”
Ezra shrugged. “Dunno. But the owner is a lernean, so creepy and morbid sound about right.”
“A lernean, learnean…” Tate almost reached for the notebook in his bag. I could see his fingers twitch.
“A creature that dwells in fresh water, mostly bogs. They can perceive things that happen in the bog from great distances away and have traditionally worked as morticians and undertakers, given they can dehydrate a corpse faster than an air fryer.”
