Page 15 of Dead Serious with Benefits
“It just does,” he said with a small smile and shrug.
“Mmm, should I be worried?”
“About yourself?”
“Well, if death is following you all over the place, it isn’t interested in getting its hands on you; otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. So it follows that the danger is for people around you.”
“Some people.”
“Like?”
At that, he gave a mysterious smile and shrugged. “I can’t really say.”
“Can’t, or won’t? I’m not scared easily.”
He chuckled. “I’m not trying to avoid scaring you. Some people find it unnerving, but for the most part, people dismiss it. I just so happen not to be able to give you criteria for what people. It just happens when it happens.”
“How delightfully ominous,” I said with a laugh.
“I’m glad you think so,” he said with a tilt of his head. “Though I think perhaps I should be a little concerned. Most people find that kind of fascination...macabre.”
“If you think for one moment that I haven’t spent my life constantly making people ill at ease, then you don’t have the perceptive skills I originally believed you had.”
He opened his mouth and frowned, looking up and drawing my attention back to the party. At first, there appeared to be nothing but voices until I realized some voices were louder than before. Not surprising since there was a party going on, but wherever in the penthouse it was coming from, the shouting was not what one would want to hear at a party.
“Interesting,” I said, brow furrowing. “Why do I feel I might have to involve the police?”
“Common for you?”
“Would you be surprised if I said yes?”
“From the conversations I’ve heard drifting down here, no, I would not be surprised.”
“You say the most interesting things. Mainly, when you say what could be a judgmental statement, and yet I don’t get the slightest hint of judgment from you.”
“Some people drown themselves in life; it’s not uncommon or shameful.”
“Drown themselves in?—”
I trailed off as the commotion came closer to the edge of the balcony, and I blinked when someone threw themselves at the railing. My chest tightened when they stumbled and nearly went over the top. Someone grabbed them, though, and I was spared from seeing them plummet to the street below. I had come over here to see if someone was going to take a fall willingly, but wouldn’t it be ironic if I got to see it anyway, just not in the way I had originally thought?
“H-he’s, he’s choking and I can’t...he’s choking!” the man rambled, and even from down below, I could see his pale features and how he gripped someone’s arm.
“OD?” I called up and then sighed when no one responded to my voice. “Of course, they can’t hear me.”
“They’re panicking,” Arlo said calmly, and I couldn’t tell if it was because he was simply that cool or because, like the death he said followed him around, he didn’t care what was happening, accepting it as a fact of life. “They’re not going to listen.”
“It’s probably an OD,” I said with a weary sigh, pulling out my phone. I winced when I heard a name being shouted down. “Ah, the Oxy fiend.”
“Codone?” he finished the word with a question.
“That’s the one.”
“Ah. Do you have Narcan?”
“Yeah, but those idiots clearly aren’t listening enough for me to tell them where the fuck it is...which I did at the beginning of the damn party.”
Arlo chuckled, and I jumped when he was suddenly beside me. “I see stress makes you drop all the purple prose.”
