Page 10 of The SnowFang Storm

“I was just wondering how I managed to get a bodyguard with your dossier for… this. Now I know.”

“I appreciate the regular hours and after almost fifteen years of field operations, I can’t say I mind the banality.”

I laughed.

In the bakery aisle, Cye promptly grabbed a big bag of large, pink marshmallows and made huge, beseeching eyes at me.

Fine, fine, I’d try being the soft mark for once. “He also wants hot chocolate packets.”

Cye squealed in glee, then flung the bag into the cart. He also piled in a number of boxes of unflavored gelatin, a sack of flour, and three bags of sugar to go with the ten pounds of butter and six dozen eggs. “We’ll have to double back to the tea aisle for that!”

But when I picked up Jun’s lemon creme cookies and put those into the cart, Cye squawked and flung them out of the cart like they were a live grenade. The pack of cookies smacked onto the glossy floor and slid into Hamid’s shoe.

People looked over their shoulders at the cookies, then at us, then back at the cookies. Then at Cye. Then at me.

“Cye!” I hissed. Hamid bent and picked them up. I stalked over and took them, muttered an apology, and returned the cookies to the cart.

Cye wilted, sagged a moment, then perked back up and mustered an oh-so-reasonable tone. “They’re disgusting. All chemicals and chafe! I can make something better!”

No doubt Cye could make something infinitely better than the two dollar pack of cookies made from leftover sawdust and industrial waste. That wasn’t the point. “Burian got his marshmallows and hot chocolate, Jun wants these.”

Cye stormed off in the general direction of paper towels. So Burian could have chemical marshmallows and hot chocolate, but if Jun wanted to slum with some cookies, it was a mortal offense.

Some people hid porn in their closets. Cye and Jun kept their skin mags in a giant mountain, but Jun had to hide his cheap lemon cookie sins in the bowels of the pantry.

Jun met us in the lobby to help us carry up groceries, and I pretended not to notice the wanderers lurking: two across the street, one on the corner.

“I can do this,” Cye told me as I helped him sort the groceries. Jun had already made off with a bag of chips and a carrot.

“I’ll just unpack everything.” There was so much damn stuff I could at least get all of it onto the counters.

“You really don’t have to help.”

“I don’t mind.”

Cye stacked a few loaves of bread. “It’s good you and Sterling are having sex again.”

“Ah—what?” I asked, holding handfuls of ginger root.

He tucked the loaves together just so. “I was a bit worried because it’s been so long since you two had been intimate. Jun and I were counting.”

Intimate? Counting? Did Cye keep a calendar? Was there a little chore chart somewhere in their room?

Cye cheerfully plucked the ginger root from my hands, gave me a sweet look with those big blue eyes of his, and hummed to himself as he tucked it into a fridge drawer.

[Sterling] >> Come to my office when you get in.

Oh, glorious timing. I dangled the bag of eggplant over Cye’s shoulder. “Sterling just summoned me to the back office.”

Cye tittered.

Sterling was in his office, and glanced up from his massive spread of charts, columns, and numbers as I came in. “That was quick.”

I deposited myself on the corner of his desk. “We were already back. Cye and Jun apparently are quite relieved you and I are having sex again.”

Sterling snorted laughter. “Yet Jun has threatened me three times now that if I… impose myself… on you, he will end me. He seems convinced I am a boar. He doesn’t understand how keen and sharp my scent and perception of you is.”

“Well, you are sort of an ass.” I pushed my spiked heel into his thigh.

---