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And typically, Niles would be working counter with her.
And nothing changed between them after that conversation, except that everything changed, and now they were always flirting, except they were both pretending they weren’t.
The flirting was around this long-running gag that they now had that was somehow centered around trading sex for workplace favors.
She might have started it.
Possibly, the next day, she was wrapping sandwiches, and Niles was standing over in the corner having a conversation with Gordon, who was in a great mood, announcing that he was going to start a new life without Will, who made him insane, and that he was going to be much happier without him tying him down.
When Niles finally came over, she was half done. He was like, “You’ve wrapped pretty much all the sandwiches, huh, Dahlia?”
And she was like, “You know, telling me you have two penises does not mean that I’ll just do all your work for you.”
“No?” he said, snickering.
“No, I mean, put out or step up, buddy,” she said.
He giggled really, really hard, so hard that he doubled over and then, he was gasping and tears were coming out of his eyes, and he pushed her out of the way, and he said, “I’ll finish up here. Anyway, I think if this were actually happening, it’d be the other way around. You’d be doing me favors.”
She walked off, out of the kitchen in the direction of the door to the counter, sashaying her hips. “Yeah, you want this?”
“No,” he called after her. “You’re like twelve.”
She stopped in the doorway and gave him a very annoyed look. “I am agraduate student, I will have you know.”
“Mmm,” he said.
“You’re just a very old man.”
He saluted her. “That’s me, all right. Super old. It’s wrong for us to even joke about this.”
“Totally wrong,” she said.
“We’ll stop,” he said.
“Obviously,” she said.
They didn’t stop.
At all.
DAHLIA AND NILESjoked about it constantly.
If Clarissa, who was a gnome who worked with Dahlia on counter sometimes, complained because Dahlia never got scheduled for Sundays, Dahlia would be like, “Well, when you’re servicing the boss, you get the perks!”
And then they would both start laughing, her and Niles, like this was a really, actually funny, joke.
No one else laughed.
Clarissa would always do that smile-cringe thing that people do, when they think a person is weird but don’t want to say anything.
Plus, as Dahlia had noted, people made allowances for weird in Shepherdstown.
So.
Anyway, they got closer, because of the joking. Physically closer. Like, they would laugh so hard that they’d be falling into each other’s arms, which was how she found out that sometimes he would be warm all over, and sometimes, he’d be cold, his skin would be cold and his scales would be cold, and he could fluctuate like that, between hot and cold because he was both warm and cold blooded, like all nagas were.
She would brush up against him and jerk her shoulder into him and be all, “I’m going to report you for inappropriate behavior if you don’t make me happy,” and he would give her this ridiculous grin and snicker at her.
