“See you tomorrow,” he said, pausing as they arrived at her block. “Right?”
“Hm? Yeah.” She was thinking about something. “Right, and—”
“Rhodes,” he sighed, and she looked up, frowning. “Look, just don’t… you know. Don’t get all Rhodes about it.”
“That’s not a thing, Varona,” she grumbled.
“It’s absolutely a thing,” he assured her. “Just don’t Rhodes out on this.”
“What the—”
“You know,” he cut in. “Don’t spend all this time like, fretting or whatever. It’s exhausting.”
She set her jaw. “So I’m exhausting now?”
She really was, and how she didn’t already know it remained an eternal mystery. “You’re good, Rhodes,” he reminded her, leaping to cut her off before she got needlessly defensive. “You’re good, okay? Just accept that I wouldn’t bother hating you if you weren’t.”
“Varona, that presumes I care at all what you think.”
“You care what everyone thinks, Rhodes. Especially me.”
“Oh, especially you, really?”
“Yes.” Clearly. “No point denying it.”
She was agitated now, but at least that was an improvement on weak and insecure. “Look, whatever,” she muttered. “Just… see you. Tomorrow, I guess.” She pivoted away, heading up the block.
“Tell Ezra I say ‘sup,’” he called after her. She flipped him off over her shoulder.
All was well, then, or at least the same as it always was.
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. ?a va?”
“Oui, ?a 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.