Power couple?
I shot him a glare, and he gulped.
“Yeah, so, wh-what can I get you?” he asked, retraining his focus on his computer screen.
Helena sized me up with an admonishing frown, then turned to Bryce—whose hand shook as it hovered over the touchscreen.
“Chicken nugget Happy Mean—I mean Meal,” Helena said. “Meal, not Mean.HappyMeal. Not Mean Meal.” She popped her pumpkin-shaped purse onto the counter. “With a chocolate milkshake. And…” She gestured to me. “Whatever my… date wants.”
I glowered down at her while Bryce arched both brows at me.
Like he was silently asking himself—andme—how I’d gotten to be such a lucky bastard.
But she was just trying to make us seem more natural. Like I’d done with the cop.
Also, did she seriously just order herself a kid’s meal? And just a second ago, was that a Freudian slip? Did she really think I was mean?
I wasn’t being mean to the kid. Then again, maybe I could be nicer.
But if we were supposed to be on a date—fake or otherwise—why the hell was she digging in her purse?
“Small coffee,” I told the kid. “Black.”
“That’s not a treat,” muttered Helena, sounding disappointed as, with trembling fingers, she unearthed her wallet.
My scowl, which I kept aimed at Helena, deepened as I extracted my billfold and then a twenty, which I handed to Bryce before Helena could wrestle free a ten.
“Keep the change,” I told the kid as he rang in the cash.
“Seriously?” asked Bryce, brightening.
I shifted my glare to him, and he ducked his head, eyes vanishing behind the visor of his hat, his smile falling as he worked to break the bill.
“Veryseriously,” he murmured under his breath.
And here it was—one of the too-numerous-to-count reasons I never took my human form. I didn’t fit in. I couldn’t. And trying always made everyone, including me, uncomfortable as fuck.
“Thank you,” Helena whispered my way as she slid down to where another staff member deposited an honest-to-God plastic jack-o’-lantern bucket and the paper cup with her milkshake. My coffee followed. “You didn’t have to do that. I would have bought your coffee, but sidenote, that twenty you gave him totally looked like it came from the nineties.”
Because it probably did since that was likely the last time I’d taken this form and, consequently, needed cash for anything.
“Does that mean you come from old money?” she asked, then laughed up at me, her smile—unexpected as it came—shattering something within me.
I looked away because, deprived of the obscuring sanctity of my hood, I couldn’t just stand there staring at that smile like I had when she’d flashed it my way the first time. The last time…
We’d been on that balcony then—the site of her demise. The death that had never occurred because I hadn’t let it. Because I’dstoppedit.
That smile. It had done something to me then, and it was doing something to me now.
Except that wasn’t supposed to happen. I certainly wasn’t supposed to let it.
“S-sorry,” Helena said before brushing past me, “I make jokes like that when I’m nervous. And… when I’m not. I’ll… just grab us a table. Look, there’s one that lights up.”
Great. More lights. Just what I needed.
I grabbed my coffee and followed Helena to the long flat white table, which indeed displayed a grid of circular lights that changed colors and shifted patterns.
Because of course it did.
