Page 84 of A Subtle Scar
“Sorry about the blue balls,” I said. “I really do need to get to work though.” And I’d get up and find the shower…in a second.
The door opened. I turned my head to see the rest of the house beyond it, light green wallpaper and the maple brown banister of a staircase. It looked like a nice, normal place, not what I’d have expected of an immortal.
“Here, darling,” Charon said and crawled back into bed. The way he was moving, the hot tea should have spilled, but he was clearly using magic to keep it in the mug.
Hermes lifted me into a sitting position and let me lean fully against him. That was nice. It shouldn’t have been this nice to have a naked immortal as your chair back, but it was.
I took the mug from Charon. It was peppermint and honey, and after the first sip, I realized that I was thirsty on top of unusually tired, so I finished it all in one go.
“Well, that should make you feel better in a moment or two,” Charon said. “But maybe I’ll just go make you another.”
Three large mugs of honeyed tea later, I was indeed feeling like myself, except for the part where one immortal was cuddling me from behind and kissing my shoulders and head every once in a while, and the other was serving me tea, butt ass naked and aroused.
Fuck, but were these two ever not hard? Was that an immortal thing? Or god thing, as they liked to call themselves? How did they put pants on?
“Where’s my phone? I need to check my phone,” I said.
Hermes let me go, but he grumbled about it, sounding like a wolf dog whose belly rub had been interrupted.
“Darling, if you don’t mind me asking, what was your trance about last night?” Charon said as I awkwardly tried to free one of the extra-large sheets to wrap myself in.
“I told you, trances are not something that I do. Just psychometry.”
“Vision through touch,” Hermes said. “You said that, but you never wear gloves.”
“Because I can control it, and because the psychometry is something that I learned to do. They tested me pretty thoroughly at school. The ‘strong psychic leaning’ was a bit out of left field, but it can be useful. Works much better on people than things, though. Sometimes, I try, but I don’t get anything from things at all, so it isn’t even really that strong, as psychometry goes.”
Charon got up from the bed while I was struggling with the damn sheet and handed me a dressing gown, a fancy Japanese-inspired silk thing.
“Here, darling. If you want to be shy now, you might as well be so in style. And you want to shower. There’s massage oil all over you.”
“Oh,” Hermes said, almost jumping out of bed. “I’ll come too. In order to make sure he doesn’t fall. In the shower. Or we could all take a bubble bath together. Doesn’t that sound nice, baby? Ronny, run a bath.”
I pulled the silky robe closed and pretty much ran to the bathroom door before facing the two of them. “No one is running a bath, I am taking a shower alone, and as soon as I’m done, I’m leaving for work. Is that understood?”
“Aaw.” Hermes looked like I’d told him to wear baggy clothes, and Charon was twirling a strand of his hair around his index finger.
I didn’t wait for their response but closed the door between me and them. And turned around.
Charon’s bathroom was the massive kind, and the tub was less of a tub and more of a small rectangular pool. Everything was matte tile in a creamy gray-green while the walls showed a mural in a soft, monochrome design of greenish blue: immortals and humans danced in a circle, all smiling and holding hands. A lute player, flutist, and drum player provided the music, and more revelers were joining from all over the walls of the large room.
It could have been gaudy, but all the little things in the room, chosen with care, made it work and look like a place you wanted to spend time in: pothos plants whose leaves cascaded off high shelves, baskets in gray that held everything from towels to a curling iron, just a handful of small vases and sculptures, all with straight lines and keeping true to the color scheme.
The shower was on the other end of the room, next to the massive tub, clear glass walls around it.
“Fuck,” I said when I realized my phone was in my pants pocket. “Five-minute shower.”
It was a shame, really. The only other bathroom as nice as this one I’d seen was in one of the fancier sex clubs in New Cassel, but I couldn’t be thinking of sex. Or what the two horny gods were doing in the next room. I had to get my head back into the case.
I turned the shower to cold and stepped under the stream.
The bedroom was blessedly abandoned when I walked in there, wrapped in a towel. It was silly. I’d never had an issue with getting naked in front of others. Intellectually, I knew that plenty of people couldn’t care less about who saw them in what state when it was a no-strings-attached situation, but then became self-conscious when it came to a serious partner. Also intellectually, I knew that wasn’t me.
I forced myself to stop thinking about that as I fished my phone from my pants. My sex life really wasn’t that important.
Rice had called. I sat down on the stool in front of Charon’s vanity and called her back.
“There you are,” she said.
