Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel (15 page)

“You know, we’re going to be at your sister’s place in less than twenty minutes,” I noted. “I’m sure they’d let you change in their bathroom.”

Completely ignoring all rules of safe driving, Suze threw her balled-up panty hose at my head. Since panty hose doesn’t exactly throw well, it mostly ended up draped around my shoulders. “Women’s formal wear should be classified as cruel and inhumane between the dates of November first and April thirtieth.” She pulled a pair of wool socks out of her purse and yanked them on, then took off her seat belt and started rummaging in the backseat for her bag of spare clothing.

After a quick glance to make sure that I wasn’t in danger of hitting any other cars if I took my eyes off the road, I glanced to my right to contemplate the sight of Suze’s rear draped over the center console, her wool dress still rucked up to her waist after the removal of the panty hose. Her dress must’ve been thick enough that she didn’t have panty-line concerns, because her underpants today were cotton hip-huggers, decorated liberally with daisies. I wondered whether she fully appreciated the extent to which the sight of her underpants consistently improved my day. Perhaps that effect would eventually begin to fade with familiarity, but I was willing to continue my exposure to her underpants to test that theory.

“You could always have worn dress slacks, you know,” I said mildly.

Her immediate response was both pithy, foul, and anatomically unlikely. She wiggled back into her seat, now in possession of her duffel bag, which she began rummaging through for clothing as she continued her retort to my suggestion. “Have you
seen
how good my legs look in this dress? Wearing slacks would’ve been a crime against humanity.”

I knew I was grinning like an idiot at her smug self-confidence, yet I couldn’t help it. “You do love your contradictions, Suze.”

“And don’t you forget it, man friend,” she said as she tugged on the fleece-lined pants that were apparently her reward for the thermal sacrifice her legs had made for the sake of the human race.

Twenty minutes later we were parked in the driveway of the compact town house that her twin sister, Keiko, shared with her boyfriend, Farid. Suze had completed her outfit change in the car and, now comfortably ensconced in pants and a sweater, began hassling me about the moments I was spending trying to attain a modicum of her own clothing comfort.

“Come on, Fort, get the lead out,” she grumbled.

Ignoring her, I continued loosening my tie gently, doing as little damage to the knot as possible, until there was enough slack for me to ease it over my head.

“Oh, you’re not serious.” Suze’s expression made it clear that she already knew the answer but felt the need to make the statement anyway.

“Completely,” I assured her. “I’m going to get as many uses out of this knot as I can.” Technically I supposed that I could track down the same YouTube video that Dan had learned it from, but despite all the aphorisms about teaching a man to fish, I had no intention of leaving the frozen fish aisle. “Also, I’m visiting
your
sister for the umpteenth Friday night in a row. I’d expect a little more buttering up.” I knew that I could’ve made an allusion to the complete lack of make-up sex that had occurred since our fight, but things felt too delicate to go there.

“I
am
buttering you up,” she insisted. “That’s why I’m not pointing out the stain on your shirt.”

“Shit.” I’d forgotten about what the tie had been covering up. I pondered it for a second, then shrugged. This would certainly not be the first time that I’d shown up somewhere in less than adequate attire. If I listened to Chivalry, that would basically be the story of my life.

With a long-suffering sigh, Suze dug again into her duffel, then fished out a rumpled wad of dark green cotton. I stared.

“Is that one of my sweaters?” I asked. She nodded, pleased. “Not that I’m not grateful, Suze, but . . . when did you stick my sweater into your duffel? You weren’t even in my bedroom today.”

Her dark eyes gleamed as she preened. “My ways are mysterious.”

I pulled off my stained button-down and exchanged it gratefully for the sweater, which was significantly warmer. As I tugged it all the way down, though, I gave Suze’s pleased expression a sidelong look. “You climbed the tree and broke into my room this morning, didn’t you?”

Her smile widened.

“You climbed a tree, broke into my room, kidnapped one of my sweaters . . . all to surprise me with—oh, shit, what else did you do?” I couldn’t help feeling impressed—some girlfriends would’ve responded to a fight like that by bringing over baked goods or suggesting kinkier-than-usual sex. Mine engaged in third-floor burglary.

“I hate to ruin a surprise.” She leaned closer to me. “But you hadn’t logged off of your computer, so I might’ve spent a little time doing some research. Your Amazon account might have some confusion about your preferences for a while.” A quick kiss, then that foxy grin. “Now let’s go in. Farid is sure to have the heat cranked.”

“At least he’s got that much going for him,” I muttered. Unlike my own apartment, with my landlord’s Professor Coldheart approach to interior heating, Farid took a very heavy hand on the thermostat whenever guests were coming over. Apparently his mother had emphasized hospitality pretty heavily when he was a kid, because the inside of that town house was never less than seventy-two degrees whenever we went over for dinner. It was pretty nice, actually, though when I’d mentioned it once to Suze she just gave a little sniff and said that, since they had natural gas heat rather than oil, it wasn’t a big sacrifice.

When Suze first addressed the idea of a weekly visit to her sister’s place, I’d been pretty surprised. Firstly, Keiko didn’t really like me. Secondly, Suze didn’t approve of Farid—the kitsune had pretty strict rules when it came to romantic relationships with humans. Casual dating was okay, but live-in relationships were completely forbidden. When it came to starting a family, the approved methodology was the one that led to Hoshi’s genetic screening process at Redbones. Keiko was her grandmother’s chosen heir to lead the kitsune someday down the line, yet she was in the midst of breaking some of the biggest rules by not just living with Farid, but also making him aware of her pregnancy with their baby.

For now, Suzume had been convinced, albeit very reluctantly, to stay quiet about Keiko’s master plan of keeping Farid in the dark about both his wife and daughter’s true natures indefinitely. Operating under the theory that it was better to ask forgiveness than permission, she was keeping their grandmother out of the loop, planning only to make her big reveal once she had a few years of success to show for herself. The modern kitsune woman, Keiko was trying to have it all—and a big part of that meant lying to Farid.

Which was where these weekly visits came in. During one dinner party of the damned, I’d actually ended up on Keiko’s side in convincing Suzume that the best thing she could do, despite her very sizable reservations regarding her sister’s plan, was to help keep the situation stable. So, in Suzume’s eyes, this meant that the whole situation was my fault. Having a good sense of timing, Suzume had informed me about both my culpability and the proposed weekly visits during the first month that we were having sex, right after she’d dropped her pants. No surprise, I’d agreed to everything she proposed.

Also—still worth it.

The dinner visits were to give Farid the mistaken impression that he was seeing a lot of Keiko’s family. She’d met Farid’s parents and extended family, and was apparently a regular guest at Amini family events, so it was necessary for her to fool him into thinking that there was an equal exchange. Both sisters had heavily downplayed exactly how extensive and local their family group was, and by the institution of weekly double date nights with me and Suze, poor Farid probably never really got the chance to realize that he’d never met any member of Keiko’s family beyond her twin sister.

I also knew that Suze was considering the possibility of hiring paid actors to pose as extended family at big events in the baby’s life, when it would be necessary to have a presence beyond just a sister, and using their fox tricks to smooth over any rough edges. I’d thought that it was a terrible, terrible idea, but I’d acknowledged that it at least showed that Suze was committing more to helping out her sister.

My own sacrifice of two months of Friday evenings had, I felt, been somewhat undervalued by the Hollis women. In some ways it hadn’t been too bad—for the first month, we’d gotten into a regular habit of eating out and then going bowling. Why Suze and Keiko had decided that bowling was the key to establishing a working cover of family togetherness I’d never entirely figured out—Farid and I mostly found ourselves in the position of talking the twins out of hurling the bowling balls at each other. There had been a certain excitement to those evenings—as much as any evening in rented shoes can really be called exciting—but we’d had to scrap those outings after Keiko’s pregnancy advanced sufficiently that her center of gravity started shifting, leading to just a weekly dinner and board game evening.

There was a brief flurry of greetings, as well as the near-ritualized feeling of Keiko’s belly to see if the baby would grace us with a kick, as we entered into the town house, already smelling mouthwateringly like pork cooking in the oven. At six and a half months along, Keiko was definitely visibly pregnant now, though not quite at the waddling stage. As I put my right hand on her belly, wishing that this weird temporary time-out of usual personal space and boundary rules would feel somewhat less like I was just standing there with my hand on the protruding stomach of a woman who, frankly, I didn’t know particularly well, Farid noticed the Band-Aid on my hand. It was only partially covering the bite that Buttons had given me that morning, but I still wondered if his hawklike vision for injuries was a result of being a surgical resident, or some intrinsic sharpening of the skill in preparation for fatherhood.

Either way, no sooner had I said the words
dog bite
than I found myself dragged into the downstairs bathroom and subjected to a full antibacterial scrub.

“Honey, can you watch the ham?” he called out the door.

I was gritting my teeth against the distinct agony of having a hospital-grade sponge-brush covered in iodine ground enthusiastically against a raw wound. “You realize,” I gritted out as he scrubbed, “that they’re probably just standing there staring at the ham, right? I mean, neither of them really does much cooking.”

“You’ve got such a good sense of humor, Fort,” Farid said with a grin.

Keiko appeared in the doorway. From the expression of her face, she not only had heard my comment and correctly identified that it had not been meant as a joke, but was now pissed off because she’d been coming over to ask Farid about what exactly he meant by watching the ham. Unfortunately for me, her vengeance was close at hand. “Dog bites can get infected so easily,” she said, her voice making a good approximation of real sympathy as long as you ignored the gleam in her eyes. “I sure hope you’re being thorough, sweetie.”

“Absolutely,” Farid said enthusiastically. “I’ll do a second scrub, just to be sure.”

“That’s great. Absolutely fabulous.” I dug my free fist into my leg to try to distract myself from that second sponge-brush coming toward my hand. I knew that Farid was being careful about my health, and I couldn’t bear to try to brush him off—even though my odds of getting an infection were pretty low. Since the beginning of my transition, I’d healed faster than I ever had before, and for the first time in years had managed to remain unaffected by flu season.

Suze poked her head over her sister’s shoulder. “Farid, how much of the hospital has ended up in your medicine cabinet?”

“Just getting prepared for the baby,” he assured her. Then, looking over at what had probably started as a linen closet, and now consisted entirely of various bottles, ointments, bandage wrappings, and even a couple of bags of saline that had to have started their lives on the shelves of a supply closet in his workplace, he gave a sheepish grin. It was a grin that transformed looks that even I had to admit were damn attractive into the Middle Eastern version of Ryan Gosling. “Maybe a few things found their way home,” he admitted.

After he’d finally judged my wound to be fully sterilized, and had been talked out of putting in just one or two stitches to help things heal faster, Farid gave me a wrap with gauze and medical tape that did turn out to be a significant improvement on my Band-Aid approach. Not that it in any way was worth the throbbing in my much-abused hand, but I was trying to focus on silver linings. Particularly since the ham had ended up overcooking while Farid was distracted.

“The timer went off,” I muttered to Suze over dinner. “Why the hell didn’t you take the ham out?”

“That timer could’ve been indicating many things,” she replied with a sniff.

I just shook my head. “Hey, Farid, what game are we playing tonight?”

Across the table, where he’d been surreptitiously trying to sneak more kale onto Keiko’s plate, Farid perked up. “I actually have one that you guys haven’t played yet.”

“You mean we’re not going for a repeat of last week’s game of Settlers of Cataan?” I asked.

“Those dice had it coming,” Keiko said darkly, her eyes narrowing. “It flies in the face of basic probability for the number eleven to be rolled that often.”

Suze nodded and set her wineglass down decisively. “And nine didn’t come up at all. Keiko was completely justified.”

Farid rubbed his partner’s back soothingly. “Those were a lot of obscenities that ended up getting screamed at the dice,” he noted. “Maybe that was kind of a peek at how things are going to be in the delivery room, but one look was enough.” I nodded in agreement. The Cataan Incident, as I’d referred to it to Dan and Jaison, had definitely been interesting to witness, but wasn’t exactly something that I wanted to sign up for a second round of. Farid continued blithely. “So tonight’s competitive delight will be Small World.” Keiko began a query, and Farid, clearly anticipating her question, said, “Yes, you can attack each other. And no, the dice involvement is minimal.” Both sisters looked pleased.