Portals and Puppy Dogs E-Book

Amy Lane

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Hedge Witches Lonely Hearts Club: Book Two Sometimes love is flashier than magic. On the surface, Alex Kennedy is unremarkable: average looks, boring accounting job, predictable crush on his handsome playboy boss, Simon Reddick. But he's also a witch. Business powerhouse Simon goes for flash and glamour… most of the time. But something about Alex makes Simon wonder what's underneath that sweet, gentle exterior. Alex could probably dance around their attraction forever… if not for the spell gone wrong tearing apart his haunted cul-de-sac. When a portal through time and space swallows the dog he's petsitting, only for the pampered pooch to appear in the next instant on Simon's doorstep, Alex and Simon must confront not only the rogue magic trying to take over Alex's coven, but the long-buried passion they've been harboring for each other.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Sneak Peek

Blurb

Dedication | Author’s Note

As If by Magic

Sounds from the Darkness

Sunset in Hell

What Are the Odds?

The Hope in the Lie

Eventually

Seven Fools and a Dog

Shifting into the Whirlwind

Preventative Measures

Aha!

The Reasons Why

Help!

About the Author | By Amy Lane

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Copyright

Alex swallowed, loud enough for Simon to hear, then licked his slightly parted lips. “Protection,” he murmured. “Safe.”

But the look in his eyes was anything but safe.

It was Simon’s turn to swallow, and he allowed his thumb to trail from the necklace down the hollow of Alex’s throat. The world stopped, and the only thing Simon could hear was his own heart beating in his ears and then—

Portals and Puppy Dogs

By Amy Lane

Hedge Witches Lonely Hearts Club: Book Two

On the surface, Alex Kennedy is unremarkable: average looks, boring accounting job, predictable crush on his handsome playboy boss, Simon Reddick.

But he’s also a witch.

Business powerhouse Simon goes for flash and glamour… most of the time. But something about Alex makes Simon wonder what’s underneath that sweet, gentle exterior.

Alex could probably dance around their attraction forever… if not for the spell gone wrong tearing apart his haunted cul-de-sac. When a portal through time and space swallows the dog he’s petsitting, only for the pampered pooch to appear in the next instant on Simon’s doorstep, Alex and Simon must confront not only the rogue magic trying to take over Alex’s coven, but the long-buried passion they’ve been harboring for each other.

So, this book was written during the pandemic, which meant that what I WANTED to do was stay in bed and listen to audiobooks and maybe knit. For my husband, my kids, for Mary Calmes and Elizabeth North, I wrote this sweet, adorable, fluffy book, because my husband and kids needed normal, and my friends needed fluffiness. And that’s it. That’s my motivation. Thanks, guys, for dragging me out of bed.

Author’s Note

IT turns out that my retention for the rules of anything—police procedure, job hierarchies, witchcraft—is severely limited by the time it takes my irritating brain to go, “But I’d do it THIS way!” I did my best to stick to the rules of witchcraft here, but in doing research it occurred to me that many people seemed to be making up their own. So, uhm, I did too. Just saying. If your friends are caught in a dimensional rift and you’re trying to get them out using hedge-witch magic, maybe don’t use this as a sourcebook.

As If by Magic

“REDDICK, Lockhart, and Baldwin Accounting, Alex Kennedy, associate, speaking.”

Alex spoke into his headset and continued to enter figures from the box of receipts on his left into the spreadsheet on his computer. According to his friends, this ability made him “spooky smart,” but given that he was the least talented witch in a coven of seven, he thought the “spooky” was just there to flatter him.

“Hey, it’s me,” his roommate said, sounding quiet and nervous—but then, Bartholomew Baker was possibly the most painfully shy person Alex had ever met, so he always sounded like that. “I… uh, was wondering if, uh, you could walk Glinda tonight. I mean, a second time. Lachlan took her out this morning, and he’s been doing his accounts at our kitchen table, but he was, uh, sort of hoping we could go back to his place tonight.” Alex could actually hear his anxious swallow over the phone. “So we could, you know, have tomorrow for the coven meeting.”

And tonight for making hot lemming love, Alex thought dryly. Bartholomew and Lachlan had only gotten together two weeks ago—but there was nearly two years of pent-up longing built up between them, and although Lachlan was very solicitous about how guarded Bartholomew was, Alex had no doubt they were making the most of every private moment.

He suppressed a sigh.

If only he could have some private moments of his own.

“I hear you,” Alex said. “You’ll be there for the ritual tonight, right?” he asked a little nervously. “I mean, before you leave?”

“Yeah, I’ll get home ten minutes before dark. Do you need Lachlan to fill in for you?”

Alex grimaced. The coven was supposed to have seven people in it, but two of them were… missing? Well, that wasn’t quite right. Everybody knew where they were—Dante and Cully’s house was the third of the four-house cul-de-sac, where they’d lived since the entire coven had graduated from college.

The problem was since a spell had gone hideously awry two weeks earlier, nobody knew when the two roommates were. Going into their house was… problematic. All of the residents of the Sebastian Circle cul-de-sac could hear Dante and Cully, and sometimes they could see one of them or the other—but they weren’t always solid, and they were never visible in the same instant.

And that wasn’t the only physical manifestation of the mangled spell.

The fact was if the remaining five coven members didn’t cast a sunrise and sunset protection spell without fail each day, the physical world around Sebastian Circle became increasingly bizarre.

Morning was usually not a problem—even when Bartholomew had sleepovers at Lachlan’s, he left at 6:00 a.m. so he could be in the cul-de-sac well before 7:00 for the sunrise spell, and nobody else left the cul-de-sac overnight, so that was easy. But Alex rode his bike to and from work, and since they were in the middle of October, sunset came a bit earlier each day. If he left even a little late, that made things damned tight. Lachlan had been asked to sub in on occasion, and every once in a while, when someone got stuck in traffic, they’d had to make do with only three members of the coven.

Three members—even with Jordan and Bartholomew, who were the coven’s most powerful practitioners—were not enough to stem the tide of strange animal behavior, oddly colored emanations, horrible shadows, and what sounded like human screams that bubbled up from the ground when they couldn’t get five people there.

When Bartholomew said, “Oh yes. Don’t worry, Alex, I’ll be there in time for the ritual,” Alex could feel his spine physically relax, vertebra by vertebra. “I’ll just have to leave before her last walk of the night.”

Alex smiled a little. Such a small favor, really, but Bartholomew never wanted to impose. “Yeah, man. No problem. I’ll walk her. As long as you’re there during sunset, I’m all good.”

“You’re okay in the house alone?” Bartholomew asked. Well, yeah. Staying in the house alone was… not fun. Jordan used to room with the two of them, so once upon a time it wouldn’t have been a problem, but the thing that had started the witchcraft was Jordan being asked to take care of the little witch’s cottage at the entrance to the cul-de-sac. The rest of the cul-de-sac was populated by Jordan’s friends. Jordan’s father was a contractor, and he’d built the development—all but the witch’s cottage—and he’d gotten them a steal on rent. They’d all taken one look at Helen’s colorful library, her impressive herb garden, and her collection of essential oils, and had been hooked. With Jordan to lead the way, they’d taken to the witchcraft with the same zeal with which they’d done everything together since Jordan had taken them on their first bug walk in college.

It didn’t matter what they were doing. What mattered was that they were doing it as a group.

But the price had been that Jordan had needed to live in the cottage.

Dante and Cully, Alex and Bartholomew, and Josh and Kate—the other members of their coven—all lived in the three identical two-bedroom stucco ranch-style houses, with vaulted ceilings, open kitchen/dining room/living room floor plans, and very average front yards. Jordan lived in Helen’s tiny haunted cottage on the corner, because if he didn’t live there, the cat familiars who also lived there got… unruly.

That was the word for it.

Unruly.

But that meant when Bartholomew went out and tried to have a life, Alex was stuck there in the house, without Jordan—or he slept on Jordan’s heinously uncomfortable couch.

Either way, the haunted quotient went up by a factor of ten when Alex was in the house alone.

“Maybe Kate and Josh will stay with me,” he said weakly, hating himself for not taking it all in stride.

“Lachlan and I can stay,” Bartholomew said hastily. “Never mind. I’ll walk Glinda. It’s okay, Alex, we don’t need to leave you alone. It’s fine. No worries. I’ll have Lachlan run home this afternoon and get more clothes and stuff—”

“No!” Alex said, his back straight with resolve. “We’ll do the thing, the neighborhood will be fine, and I’ll walk the dog. Don’t worry about me, Barty. I’ll be fine, okay?”

“If you’re sure….” Alex could picture his roommate, with his longish sand-colored hair and enormous gray eyes. He’d be biting his lower lip right now, looking adorable and worried, and while Alex had never harbored romantic feelings for Bartholomew Baker, he was pretty sure the guy made the sweetest roommate ever.

“I’m sure,” Alex comforted him. “Now I gotta go. I need to get these figures in to Simon before lunch. Don’t worry about it. You get home at sunset, and I’ll walk the damned dog.”

“Thanks, Alex,” Bartholomew said. “Gotta go crunch my own numbers. Bye!”

Alex moved his hand to his ear to hang up just as he heard the voice behind him.

“What happens at sunset? Does your boyfriend turn into a pumpkin?”

“Simon!” Alex whirled in his chair, knocking his headset off as he moved. “Dammit!”

“Calm down, calm down.” Simon Reddick laughed, tucking a strand of his long, shiny black hair behind his ears. The sound rolled out of him, larger than life, like everything Simon did. “I was just kidding about the pumpkin!”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Alex mumbled, scrambling to his knees to pick up the headset. He bounced back up, coming to his full five foot eight inches, and smiled, trying to keep the expression professional.

It was damned hard.

Simon Reddick was six feet two inches of wide-chested, black-haired, brown-eyed prime-of-his-life male, and Alex had been thirsting for him since he’d started working for the firm.

But it was an impossible crush and a stupid one. Simon was not just older—thirty-five to Alex’s twenty-six—but he was also rich, handsome, successful, and, hey, hello, Alex’s boss. A thing Alex had needed to remind himself of every day for the past three years.

It was getting so he couldn’t have a normal, everyday interaction with Simon without sweating in all of the embarrassing places—neck, armpits, buttcrack—and Alex was so damned over the crush that he’d actually initiated drastic action to get himself the hell out of this branch of Reddick, Lockhart, and Baldwin. The next branch may have been miles farther down the road, but hey, Alex was a bike commuter. He had calves of solid steel. What was an extra five or seven or nine more miles of road, both ways?

“Oh?” Simon said, dark eyebrow winging up. “Not your boyfriend?” There was something seductive in his voice, something that made Alex want to believe Simon was trying to flirt, but that was inconceivable because: (a) Simon had a girlfriend, and she was lovely and kind and blond with a figure that wouldn’t quit, and (b) Alex didn’t know how to flirt, and that was common office knowledge.

“My roommate,” Alex said, his throat like cracker crumbs. “We’re taking care of our friends’ dog while they’re, uh, not… here.”

A faint smile played with Simon’s lean, sensual mouth. “Not here? Are they on vacation? Visiting relatives? What?”

“Sure,” Alex said, cursing his ever-practical brain. Would it kill him to come up with a casual social lie? What could possibly go wrong if he shot the moon and said something not stiff and awkward? “Visiting vacationing relatives. But they left us their dog, and he’s got a boyfriend, and I commute on my bicycle, so we have to keep coordinated.”

“The dog’s got a boyfriend or the roommate has a boyfriend?” Simon asked, mouth compressed and eyes dancing.

A little bit of annoyance penetrated Alex’s fluster. “The roommate has a boyfriend,” he snapped. “The dog’s gotta crap.”

Simon’s laughter was like getting an all-over body rub with velvet gloves. “Thanks for the clarification,” he said. “I knew you had a sense of humor locked tight in that steel-trap brain of yours. Want to come to lunch with me?”

Alex gaped at him. “Uh….” No. No, he did not want to go to lunch with the alluring and playful Simon Reddick. Going to lunch could lead to relaxation. Relaxation could lead to involuntary confidences. Involuntary confidences could lead to Alex confessing that he wanted to lick Simon’s abs in exhaustive detail before seeing his second live penis and perhaps finding out if blowjobs could be an acquired skill.

“Don’t tell me you’re not all caught up on your work,” Simon said, mouth relaxing into a gentle smile, “because I won’t believe you. C’mon. It’s food truck day at the strip mall down the block—there’s a vegan Thai place that’s supposed to be so amazing.”

No. No. No no no no no— “Sure,” Alex said. “Let me grab my wallet.”

REDDICK, Lockhart, and Baldwin occupied an entire building in an office complex off of one of the main business streets in Folsom. As Alex and Simon emerged from the two-story building into the brisk, cold wind off Lake Natoma, Alex couldn’t help it—he turned his face toward the midday sun and closed his eyes, appreciating the sun and the sky and the wind.

Eight years ago, before college and before Jordan Bryne and before their tight group of friends had become their coven, Alex would have wandered into a day like this with hunched shoulders and a preoccupied brain. Numbers, order, making the world fit his exact specifications—that had been how Alex had gotten through his painfully lonely adolescent years and survived into adulthood.

But Jordan was an entomologist, and the first adventures he’d dragged his friends into had been bug-watching walks along the river at Sac State, looking for flora and fauna. Then there had been trips to the zoo and hiking trips into the mountains and group vacations to the ocean. By the time they’d all moved into the houses on the cul-de-sac, Alex had learned to participate in and enjoy the natural world.

Starting the coven and learning the craft had simply emphasized how the forces of the natural world worked together in harmony. His awareness of a crisp wind and the smell of change—and the electric scent of excitement—was a blessing of not being a self-involved child anymore.

Alex opened his eyes and resumed his walk, conscious that Simon was gazing at him with interest.

“What?” he asked, trying not to be defensive.

“That look on your face. You really love being out of doors, don’t you?”

Alex swallowed and tried not to let his face heat.

And failed.

“I do. Except in the summertime.” He pointed to his freckled nose and shuddered. “Green-eyed ginger. I’m a walking zinc-oxide-covered heat blister.”

Simon chuckled. “I noticed. And yet you still ride your bike to work on all but the hottest days. Do you even own a car?”

Alex grimaced. “Yes. A hybrid.” He paused and then realized he should elaborate or he’d sound churlish. “My parents live in the Bay Area. I visit every other month or so. And my friends and I like to go on trips together, so having a car helps with logistics.”

“Mm.” Simon nodded and his smile went away. “So this transfer you asked for, to our Orangevale branch. Is this closer or farther away from your house?”

Oh. So that’s what the offer to lunch had been about. Alex would have thought Christopher Lockhart or Gabriele Baldwin, the other two partners in the firm, would have been the ones to talk to him about this.

In their offices. Professionally.

Not on a crisp fall day on the way to a food truck with their gaits fitting together like they were at least friends.

“Farther,” he said on a rasp.

“Are you still planning to ride your bike, then?” Simon asked, and he sounded a little concerned. “Because Auburn Folsom Road’s dangerous, Alex—I mean, every day, two ways, even at night?”

Alex had thought of that, and the more intense his inconvenient crush on the man next to him had become, the more he’d thought the risk would be worth it.

“Calves of steel,” he said weakly, knowing that he’d added another half hour or so to his commute. But anything, anything, rather than feel this panicky, half-embarrassed wash of humiliation every time he saw his handsome, kind, organized boss and knew there wasn’t a thing he could do to control the flutter in his stomach when Simon so much as glanced at him.

“Alex,” Simon said warmly, “come on, ’fess up. Do you really want this transfer? Who pissed you off?”

Alex looked at him helplessly and, unbidden, came that moment of absolute clarity two weeks ago, right before his entire coven had been knocked on their asses and sharply reprimanded by the forces that be.

They’d been trying to cast a spell for their heart’s desire, and every member of the coven—every member—had lied. They’d formulated the spell carefully. Alex had been in charge of thread colors and candle colors because that was his thing, and Jordan had been about the essential oils. Cully had been aesthetics, Dante had helped with the wording of the spells, Bartholomew had been in charge of the ingredients in the cauldron, and Kate and Josh had been all about implementation, putting the ingredients together.

And they’d stood, everybody gathered around the black, white, and red column candles at the points of a seven-pointed star made in black, white, and red thread, reciting the spell together. And then when each one of them was supposed to formally read the spell asking for their heart’s desire, the forces of witchcraft had gotten pissed off.

A cone of power had grown above them—something so awesome and otherworldly not even Alex could deny its presence—and the magic had coalesced at the peak of the cone and then whooshed out, throwing everyone backward and pulling from them one word—one damned word—that had embodied their true heart’s desire and not the pretension they’d written on the page.

At present, the only word that had been made public was Bartholomew’s. It had been “Lachlan,” and he’d had to confess to the object of his heart’s desire that he’d been in love with him for nearly two years before the spell had even partly begun to right itself, and it was still wreaking havoc in their neighborhood.

Alex’s word wasn’t quite that specific, but it still had the same gist. Passion. God, wasn’t that a laugh? Alex. Quiet, dry, competent Alex Kennedy, who used his highly methodical brain to help people assemble shoeboxes full of receipts into legal documents, and his rather scattered, creative friends assemble spells using the logic of the harmony of the universe while also doing their taxes—wanted passion.

He wanted love and sex and humor and hunger, and by Goddess, he wanted it with Simon Reddick, so bad that just smelling the man’s aftershave or seeing his customary black turtleneck as he strolled through the rather sterile white-walled office space hurt his heart.

He couldn’t have Simon. He was an employee—a nobody. Simon was the boss. The power imbalance alone made his liberal brain hurt.

He gave Simon a helpless sideways glance and physically squashed every impulse he had to pause and smooth Simon’s hair back from his eyes or rub his thumb over those lean lips.

“Nobody,” he said gruffly. “Nobody pissed me off.” He swallowed and put his hands in the pockets of his Dockers, hunching his shoulders against the wind.

Sounds from the Darkness

SIMON stared at Alex Kennedy in dismay. God, what had Simon done to make him close down like that?

One minute they’d been talking, and Alex’s face—narrow with pointed features—had lost its usual guarded expression and opened. That moment, his closed eyes to the sun, his mouth slightly parted to catch the wind—that had been such a beautiful, pure thing right there.

Simon had needed to swallow against the stirrings of sexual attraction in his stomach.

Alex didn’t have the kind of presence that punched someone in the gut with lust, that was true. But he’d been working for Simon’s firm for three years. Three years of Simon watching Alex arrive wearing bicycle tights and riding gear and then make a quiet, Clark Kent–like transformation in the bathroom to emerge as mild-mannered accountant Alex Kennedy.

Three years of his grounded competence, sly humor, and his ability to think above and beyond whatever the partners had asked of him, go the two steps over to the thing they’d been about to ask of him, and then just deliver it on a silver platter without fuss.

Simon had become increasingly fascinated with Alex Kennedy, had fantasized about the classic—and sexist, of course—boss/secretary scenario, each time running up against the wall of not wanting to perpetrate sexual harassment.

Then Simon’s fascination had grown into hunger, his hunger pitched to need, and practically the moment he’d planned to ask Alex on a very conservative, very aboveboard date to see if maybe it would be worth it for Simon to start basing himself at the other branch so they could see where this attraction might lead…

Chris Lockhart had gotten Alex’s petition to transfer to the other branch instead.

Simon was—he hoped—keeping a good face on things, but it was getting harder and harder to rein in his hurt.

“Nobody pissed you off?” he prodded gently. “Are you sure? It seems damned inconvenient for you to move to the other branch. I mean, we depend on you here in Folsom, Alex. Is there anything we can do to get you to stay?”

They were pausing at a crosswalk as Simon asked this, and Alex cast him a stricken look, holding on to the unusual charm he wore at his throat on a silver chain woven with a green cord.

“Never mind,” Alex said in a small voice, his eyes focused somewhere beyond Simon’s left ear. “I was being… silly. I can manage here. That’s fine.” He took a steadying breath and tried—but didn’t quite succeed—in meeting Simon’s eyes. “I need to be home for sunrise and sunset anyway. That’s hard to do this time of year when you’re riding a bicycle.”

“What is this thing about sunrise and sunset?” Simon asked, bemused. Then, with more focus: “And what is that necklace you’re wearing? It’s intriguing.”

For a moment Alex’s hand tightened protectively around the charm, and then, as Simon reached for it, his fingers relaxed, and Simon took the opportunity to move a little closer. Oh, Alex smelled good. He obviously used the employee showers before he changed, and Simon could smell deodorant and aftershave and… ooh. Something woodsy and natural. Pine? Cedar? And something dark too. Amber? Cinnamon? Oh wow. Whatever it was, it sent an electric pulse down Simon’s spine and made him want to press the smaller, slighter man up against the light post and devour him, starting at his neck.

Simon breathed in hard to control himself and then lifted the piece of jewelry with a fingertip.

That electric pulse zinging along Simon’s nerve endings doubled in charge and intensity, and the hair on the back of Simon’s neck and the fine hairs on his forearms and wrists lifted in response.

“Uhm…,” Simon said gruffly, trying to remember to breathe. “That’s a pentagram, isn’t it? But it’s been molded somehow so the points are lodged into the base, and there’s a… there’s a little symbol carved into the wood.”

“It’s a rune for friend,” Alex murmured. “And another one for protection. My roommate sort of made them for us. All of his friends. They’re sort of… a thing to keep us safe.”

“Safe?” Simon raised his eyes quickly, and this time Alex didn’t look away. Simon met his gaze squarely, close enough that he could see the tiny flecks of gold deep in Alex’s green eyes.

Alex swallowed, loud enough for Simon to hear, then licked his slightly parted lips. “Protection,” he murmured. “Safe.”

But the look in his eyes was anything but safe.

It was Simon’s turn to swallow, and he allowed his thumb to trail from the necklace down the hollow of Alex’s throat. The world stopped, and the only thing Simon could hear was his own heart beating in his ears and then—

“Hey, you guys moving or what?”

Simon shook himself, and a polite social smile popped out all on its own.

“Uhm, yes, sorry about that,” he murmured, moving away from Alex and checking his surroundings before starting to cross the wide street. He turned his head in time to see Alex startle as well, as if waking from a dream, and then hustle to resume his spot at Simon’s side.

“So,” Simon said, his voice abnormally loud in his own ears as they walked, “your friend believes in that stuff? You know… witchcraft, Wicca, whatever?”

“Uhm, yes? Is that bad?” Alex’s voice should have been a warning, but Simon could feel the flush of embarrassment, of being caught out doing something improper and socially inappropriate and only knowing he’d missed the cues to tell him how not to make an ass of himself.

“It’s just, you know, sort of bizarre, right? I mean, does he dance naked at the solstice and sacrifice small animals at an altar?” Together they stepped up on the curb and turned toward the Home Depot parking lot where the food trucks gathered on weekdays.

“No,” Alex said coldly. “He sells baked goods at sci-fi conventions and works IT for his hated day job. Do you have a problem with that?”

Simon looked at him oddly. “No, no—it’s… uhm. Not conventional.”

“And you like conventional,” Alex said, and the disappointment in his voice stung.

“I’m an accountant, Alex. I obviously like order.” He turned his head and saw Alex appraising him as though trying to see where he’d miscalculated somehow. As well he should, because outside the office, it was a blatant lie. Simon tended to go for flash, for bling—wildly flirty girls, rock-climbing artist guys. Chris and Gabby gave him grief for his taste in partners all the time, and he was pretty sure his long crush on Alex Kennedy would surprise the hell out of them.

“I’m an accountant,” Alex returned evenly. “I like order. But I also believe that this little symbol around my neck will protect me, because it was crafted with love. And I think that’s important.”

“Maybe,” Simon said, and the skepticism in his own voice sounded smarmy even to him. “But so does health insurance and a bicycle helmet, right?”

“Well, yes. If I get hit by a car, I’d need the doctors and the health insurance and the bicycle helmet,” Alex conceded. “But I’d still want my friends praying to the god of their choice that I’m okay. And I know the practical stuff would probably be what saved my life, but the friends wanting me healthy would be what I chose to live for.”

“Wow,” Simon said, feeling shamed. “That’s… that’s really, uhm, spiritual.”

“You can’t separate life into numbers and humans,” Alex told him, still sounding disgruntled. “Humans can’t be logical unless they’re moving in harmony with themselves and nature. What looks like ‘convention’ is sometimes just a mask for being closed off from what’s real.”

Simon blew out a breath, that flush of embarrassment overtaking him. God, he hated that—hated being in the wrong, hated not having the right thing to say. He’d overcome a hideously awkward adolescence to be the guy who had the answers and ran the show. Having Alex Kennedy basically call him shallow and spiritless hit him where he lived.

“Well,” Simon murmured. “I guess we know what you think of me. Is that why you wanted to transfer?”

“No!” Alex said, and Simon glanced to his side and saw that Alex looked mortified. “No, I swear. I just… my friends and I practice Wicca. You sounded really condescending.”

My friends and I. Oh crap.

“Well, you know….” Yikes. There was no way to make this right. “You don’t look the type.”

“Would you expect me to wear rainbow robes and braid my armpit hair into wreaths?” Alex asked, obviously still offended.

“No. That would be weird. You just look perfectly average!” Simon exclaimed, and even as the words came out of his mouth, he saw the pit he’d dug for himself with the spiders and snakes in the bottom. Abort abort abort—object of pursuit is not happy! Apologize, you insensitive dolt. Apologize now. “In a good way,” he added weakly, and that pit wasn’t looking half bad. Maybe he could leap into it and have Alex cover his body up as the snakes took him. “In sort of an environmentally-friendly, super-competent way.”

Alex’s look at him wasn’t kind. “Swell.”

The single syllable hung between them as they neared the food trucks. “So, uh, the vegan one is over here,” Simon stammered, and Alex continued to glare from narrowed eyes.

“You can go ahead and wait for that one,” he said pointedly. “I prefer the barbecue.”

Flop sweat gathered around the neck of Simon’s black turtleneck sweater, a thing that hadn’t happened since he was a high school junior, asking Cyndi Laughton to the prom. She’d said no, he’d gone stag, and he’d ended up making out with Julius Bridges instead, and while the revelation that he was pansexual had been welcome, the flop sweat had not.

“I, uh, would really like to eat with you,” Simon said humbly. “Barbecue is fine.”

He watched as Alex dropped his chin to his chest and pulled in a deep, cleansing breath. “Okay,” he said at last. “But we’d better hurry. I have work to do.”

“No worries,” Simon said, trying to get back to that moment at the crosswalk when Alex had gazed up at him with a sort of reverence in his green eyes and the world had stood still. “Turns out, I know your boss.” He smiled hopefully, but Alex gave him back an almost wounded expression. God. How could he have screwed up so badly in just a few sentences?

“I know you do,” Alex said, and the words didn’t indicate that was a good thing.