Chapter 684 | Hold My Waist or I’m Going to Die

Chapter 684: 684 | Hold My Waist or I’m Going to Die

Dralun took the tart between two claws. He ate it in one bite. The pastry crumbled across the front of his vest, and he did not brush it off, and Luz cheered loud enough that the construction guys applauded.

\[Notice: Local Hero has consumed a pastry under social duress. No progression value. The Host is smiling. Please be advised that smiling is visible to others.\]

I stopped smiling, mostly.

Dralun finished chewing and looked at the window, at the late grey light sliding down the glass, then back at Nayeli. "I’ll walk you two home before it gets dark. Where are you staying?"

"Ninth Street," Nayeli said. "The blue building, across from the old lady with the crooked stoop."

Dralun went still in a new and interesting direction.

"I fixed that stoop on Saturday," he said.

"I know you did." Nayeli picked up her tart and finally unwrapped it. "I watched you from my kitchen window. Mrs. Alvarez yelled at you for forty minutes about a gutter, and you just stood there holding the bolt and taking it."

"You live across the street from Mrs. Alvarez."

"For four years, Oliver."

The restaurant had no response to that. Neither did Dralun. His tail lifted off the tile an inch, hung there, and then curled around the leg of Luz’s chair in a slow loose hook, as if it had made a decision without consulting the rest of him.

He held out his claw. Luz grabbed two of his fingers, which was about all her hand could manage, and hopped down from the chair with her pastry box clutched to her chest. Nayeli shouldered her bag and followed them toward the door. She paused at the threshold long enough to look back at me over her shoulder.

"Gold boy."

"Yes, not-ma’am?"

"Thank you for the number." She lifted her wrist toward me, mirroring mine. "Tell your boss upstairs his face is still terrible at lying."

The bell over the door jingled. The three of them stepped out onto Halverson, a dragon and a housekeeper and a six-year-old in glitter jeans, and the old man outside the barbershop lowered his newspaper so fast he nearly tore it in half.

Ophelia let go of my sleeve, grabbed my wrist instead, and hauled me toward the stairs.

"Window. Now. Window, Lukas, the window, go go go."

She took the black stairs two at a time in platform shoes, which should have been illegal in at least four municipal codes, and I followed close enough behind that her ruined skirt brushed my face on the turn.

The red underskirt flashed every time her heel hit a step. I fixed my eyes on the handrail and recited Section Eleven of the Accord education provisions in my head, which helped for about three steps.

The office was dark except for the scanner’s blinking eye. Ophelia did not bother with the light. She hauled herself up onto the radiator in front of the window, ignored the heat completely, and shoved the sash open with both hands. Cold November air rolled in carrying fryer oil and diesel. She leaned out over the sill with her phone held high, her whole upper body hanging into the street, her knees braced on the radiator and her ankles crossed behind her for balance that did not exist.

"Ophelia, you’re going to fall out of a second-story window for an Instagram post."

"For a documentary." Her voice came back muffled by the outside air. "Hold my waist or I’m going to die."

I stepped in behind her and closed both hands around her corset where it pinched in above her hips. The velvet was warm from the radiator and the boning pressed back against my palms, firm and curved, and the laces had gone loose enough in the fire that my thumbs slid under the edge of the fabric and found bare skin at the small of her back.

She jolted when they did. Her hips pushed back into me on reflex before she caught it, and the skirt rode up over the tops of her stockings, black garter clasps biting into soft pale thigh six inches from my belt.

I looked at the scanner. The scanner did not help.

"Your hands are hot," she said, very quickly, to the street.

"You’re sitting on a radiator."

"That’s a completely different heat source, and you know it." She wiggled forward another inch to get her angle, and the wiggle traveled through every part of her that was pressed against every part of me. "Don’t you dare let go. If you let go, I will haunt you, and my bats will haunt you, and Mr. Stitches will haunt you from beyond the grave."

"Mr. Stitches is sitting on your desk."

"He’s watching. He sees everything."

Down on the sidewalk, Dralun walked slow so that Luz could keep up. His tail swung low behind him, a wide easy sweep that kept a careful pocket of space around the little girl’s sneakers. Nayeli walked on his other side, close enough that her shoulder nearly touched his arm, and she said something I could not hear that made him duck his head and rub the back of his neck with his free claw.

"He’s doing the neck rub," Ophelia breathed. "Six years, Lukas, I have never once seen the neck rub."

\[Temptation Gauge Update: Ophelia Lin. 6% → 9%. Status: Curious. Note: Subject initiated full-body contact for a stated reason that is technically true and emotionally fraudulent.\]

Halfway down the block, Luz twisted around and looked straight up at Lin’s window. She pointed with her pastry box, and her whole face lit up, and she waved with her free hand hard enough that her pigtail ribbons flapped.

"HI, GOLD BOY! HI, SCARY LADY!"

Dralun turned his head. His brown eyes found the window, found Ophelia hanging out of it with her phone extended, found me attached to her hips behind her, and held there.

Ophelia shrieked and threw herself backward off the radiator.

She hit my chest at full speed. My heel caught the leg of my own desk chair, and we went down together in a tangle of velvet and wool socks and nephew boots.

I landed flat on my back on the floorboards with Ophelia sprawled on top of me, her skirt flipped up around her waist, her face buried in my collar and one garter strap snapped loose and dangling across my thigh.

Her phone skittered under Dralun’s desk. Somewhere above us, the open window let the cold pour in, and through it, faintly, came the sound of a six-year-old laughing on Halverson Avenue.

Ophelia lifted her head an inch. Her eyeliner had run to her jaw. Her cheeks had gone the color of the lining in her skirt, and her grey eyes were huge.

"Mr. Stitches saw nothing," she whispered.