Nico managed the handful of blocks on foot before waving himself up the stairs of his building, fiddling with the wards and barging in without a key to find Gideon seated on the cramped sofa beside a dozing, outstretched black lab.
“Nicola´s,” Gideon said, glancing up at his entry with a smile. “Como estas?”
“Ah, bien, más o menos. Ça va?”
“Oui, ça va,” Gideon replied, giving the dog a nudge. “Max, wake up.”
After a moment’s pause, the dog slid groggily from the sofa, stretching out with a heavy-lidded look of annoyance. Then, in a blink, he was back to his usual form, scratching idly at his buzz cut to glare over his shoulder at Gideon.
“I was comfortable, you massive fuck,” announced the man who was sometimes Maximilian Viridian Wolfe (barely domesticated under the best of circumstances) and sometimes not.
“Well, I wasn’t,” Gideon said in his usual measured tone before setting himself on his feet, tossing aside the newspaper he’d been reading. “Should we go out? Get dinner?”
“Nah, I’ll cook,” Nico said. He was really the only one who could, seeing as Max was mostly uninterested in picking up practical skills, preferring instead to sleep on the couch and ponder his existence, while Gideon… had other problems. Right now Gideon was shirtless, stretching his hands overhead past the usual wayward glints from his sandy hair, and if not for the bruising below his eyes, he would have looked almost perfectly normal.
He wasn’t, of course, but deceptive normalcy was all part of Gideon’s charm.
Eternal sluggishness aside, Nico had certainly seen Gideon in poorer states than this one. Hastily avoiding his mother, for instance, who had a tendency to show up in public toilets or the occasional gutter of rainwater, or skirting his foster family, who were less a family than a bunch of bloodsucking Nova Scotian leeches. Gideon’s condition had been worse than usual in recent weeks, but Nico was pretty sure that was the inevitable result of graduating NYUMA. For four years Gideon had gotten to have a mostly normal life, but now he was back to…
Well, whatever life became, Nico supposed, when you had nowhere to go and a serious case of something a less-informed person might call chronic narcolepsy.
“Ropa vieja?” Nico suggested, saying nothing of what he was thinking.
“Yes.” Max smashed a fist into the side of Gideon’s arm, heading into the bathroom. He was, as he always was when he shifted, completely nude. Nico rolled his eyes and Max winked, not bothering to cover himself as he strode past.
“Libby texted me,” Gideon remarked to Nico in Max’s absence. “Says you were your usual dickish self.”
“Is that all she said?” Nico prompted, hoping it
was.
Ah, but of course not. “Said you guys got some sort of mysterious job offer.”
“Mysterious?” Damn it.
“In that she wouldn’t tell me what it was, yes.”
They had been warned not to, but still.
“I can’t believe she told you already,” Nico grumbled, disgusted anew. “Seriously, how?”
“Messaged me just before you got here. I like that she keeps me informed.” Gideon reached up, scratching the back of his neck. “How long would it have taken you to tell us if she hadn’t?”
That sneaky little monstress. This was Nico’s punishment, then. Forced communication with people who mattered to him, which she knew he loathed, all for implying that her boyfriend was precisely what he was.
“Ropa vieja takes a while,” Nico demurred, retreating hastily to the kitchen. “Has to braise.”
“Not a good answer, Nico,” Gideon called after him, and regrettably Nico stopped, sighing.
“I,” he began, and pivoted back to Gideon. “I… can’t tell you what it is. Not yet.”
With a pleading glance Nico enacted the faultless trust built on their four years of shared history, and after a moment, Gideon shrugged.
“Okay,” he conceded. “But you still have to tell us things, you know. You’ve been on eggshells with me lately, it’s weird.” He paused. “You know, maybe you shouldn’t come this time.”
“Why not?” Nico demanded.
“Because you’re babying him,” came Max’s drawl as he emerged from his room, clipping Nico’s shoulder with his. He had deigned to put on an incongruous mix of sweatpants and a cashmere sweater, which was at least an improvement on the apartment’s state of sanitation. “You’re fussing, Nicky. Nobody likes a fusser.”