Page 47 of Five to Love Him
We flushed. He was too cute. “We’ll show you, Leo. We’ll show you.”
twenty-one
The hive was a menace in the kitchen, but in a good way. They sliced and diced while filling a pot with water and finding my pan, and at the same time, they set the table. When I complained about not having anything to do, I was given napkins to fold, a stack I knew Gran had bought, one of those oversized packages you wouldn’t be able to use up in your lifetime.
I sat down at the kitchen table and dutifully folded away, turning the napkins into pale lotus flowers, just like Gran had taught me. One hiveling watched me from the chair next to mine, his chin resting on his hands.
“We won’t be able to use these. They are too pretty to use now.”
“Oh, come on. You don’t need to flatter me.”
“We’re not.” The twinkling in their eyes told me they were lying.
Over at the stove, one of the hivelings had taken charge of the pan while another dropped things in—garlic I thought, then pine nuts and the veggies they had harvested. The smell that soon filled the kitchen made my mouth water. Maybe pine nuts were good on noodles after all.
A hiveling I hadn’t seen leave the kitchen came back with a chair from the basement and wiped it down before putting it at the table and heading back to get one more.
“Multitasking.”
The one sitting next to me cocked his head. “What?”
I pointed at the chair. “That’s another one of your superpowers. How many of you typically sleep when you do need to sleep?”
They seemed to think about it, at least one pair of eyes looking into the distance while the one at the stove did one of those showy pan flips instead of just stirring everything with a spoon like a normal person.
“We are fine if one sleeps. When we were young, as a child, more of us would sleep, and when we’re very exhausted, that’s still the case.”
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay on the floor?”
I felt their eyes on me. “Can we have a look upstairs? At your bed?”
Heat rose to my face, and I focused on finishing the final lotus flower napkin before answering.
“Fine. I’ll show you around. Come on.”
Two of them followed me while the others remained to run the kitchen. The second floor of Gran’s house really wasn’t that exciting. There was a guest room that was empty apart from several of Gran’s things I’d kept, a bathroom, the master, and my room.
I showed them the first three, and they gaped at what had been Gran’s room, empty but for the curtains, the light brown carpet marked by the trace lines of the wardrobe and the bed, all those things that I had felt I needed to get rid of in order to move on.
“This is all you,” they said when I opened the door to my childhood room.
“I, erm. I moved to college, and there was no reason to change anything. Then I dropped out, and Gran got sick not that much later, so I never got around to, uhm, getting a different wallpaper or donate my dinos to charity.”
“Why would you do that?” “They are fierce. We like the T-Rex.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I really do need a bed I can sleep in without needing the vampire head-principal to give me socks. Which I forgot back at the office.”
“We have an idea.”
One of them went over to my bed—fuck. For some reason, it had the sheets with the planets on it, my childhood nerdiness showing. The other one put an arm around my middle.
“What idea?”
“Only if you’re fine with it,” the one holding me said. The other one tested the mattress with his hand. “We can move this to the floor, carry up your pillows. It would be like a nest.”
“Do you…do hives have nests?”
They chuckled. “No. We like beds just as much as the next person, but we can see that you can’t be comfortable in this one. Nor can he.”
