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“Are you a mobster?” I asked in resignation.
Holt froze in shock. “Huh?”
“The whole ‘forget about this night’ thing.” I waved a weary hand. “Calling your goon to come and ‘wipe my memories.’ Is Goliaths a mob thing? Because I seriously didn’t see any mob stuff, man. I swear. I mean, I wouldn’t even know what mob stuff looks like.”
“I’m not a mobster.” He sounded offended. “I’m a businessman.” Was there a difference? “I own this building!” he added defensively.
That made me freeze. “What?”
“Yeah. This one and the one next door.” He gestured at the room. “This is my day office. For my boring work.”
I blinked, which was currently a very painful action. “Oh. Right. But… So…” I glanced back at the door. “Why do you have a bodyguard?”
Holt hunched lower in his chair. After a few seconds of silence, he muttered, “I just thought it made me look cool.”
It would have been too painful to laugh, so I managed to stay straight-faced. “Oh right. Yeah. I mean, it… it does.”
“Thanks,” he mumbled gruffly, back to fiddling with the lid. Then he sighed heavily and took off his sunglasses to pinch the corners of his eyes.
When he dropped his hand and looked at me, it was jarring to see normal light brown irises and regular-shaped pupils within the horribly smudged smoky black make-up from last night.
It looked… kind of wrong, honestly. I wasn’t sure I liked it. I kinda preferred his cosplaying get-up. He was still mind-numbingly beautiful, even while hungover as shit and with panda eyes, but it was just plain weird to see him without the grey body paint and interesting pink contacts. The pointy ears and ultra sharp cheekbones.
We stared at each other in silence. I couldn’t stop recalling all the intimate details I knew about him, and I wondered if he was doing the same. God, I hoped not.
“So…” Holt pursed his lips, then let out what I guessed was supposed to be a light and breezy laugh, but it sounded more like he was in immense pain. “Do you remember any of that silly stuff I told you? About, like… emotions and whatnot?”
“Um…” I rubbed my cheek. “You mean that you absorb them or something? No, piggyback on them, right?”
He cringed and cleared his throat. “Yeah, that… that hilarious joke.”
“And the shapeshifting exotic dancers. And the guy who can ‘fuck with the timeline in my head,’ who was going to wipe my memories of last night, but he’s on a cruise with his girlfriend.”
“God.” He laughed again unsteadily. “I was really drunk, huh? Just… talking utter fucking nonsense.”
“Well, you said some of that before you got drunk,” I said doubtfully. Then I added, “You also kept saying you weren’t human.”
He coughed awkwardly. “Yeah, um, about that. I’m just… a really, really dedicated cosplayer. I was cosplaying as… this… character. From this… obscure… thing. Show. From the sixties. You won’t have heard of it. All that stuff was from that. Obviously. I’m just… a total nerd. That’s me. A total fucking nerd who likes to cosplay while he gets lap dances from regular human strippers.”
“Um, okay,” I said slowly. “I mean, I figured.”
His nostrils flared. “You figured I was a nerd?”
“No, I mean the cosplaying thing. But what’s wrong with being a nerd anyway?”
“Nothing,” he said quickly. “That’s what I am. A regular old human nerd. I take it super seriously.”
“Okay.” I was just glad we weren’t recalling all the embarrassing shit we’d told each other. Glancing at my watch, I saw I only had a few minutes to get up to the office. “Look, I should probably—”
“Wait, Taylor,” he blurted, then licked his lips nervously. “Um, do you think you could still… you know, not tell anyone about, uh… everything?”
“You mean the cosplaying?”
He winced. “Yeah, that, but also the whole Goliaths thing. All of it.”
I hesitated. “I thought you said it was all above board.”
“Yeah, well, I was…” He squirmed a little. “I also said it was very exclusive, and it actually is. It’s really exclusive, Taylor. No one can know about it. Like, no one.”
