I slid down from kneeling to outright sitting on the kitchen floor, pressing my head against foxy’s. “If I’m not nothing, then I’ve lived my whole life wrong. Failed everyone I loved when they needed me. Not because I couldn’t help, just because I didn’t.”
He snorted and leaned back in his chair a little, his shoulders dropping a few inches. “That’s bullshit. You can’t use magic before you know you have it. Everyone else failed you, not the other way round. That father of yours is a real peach.”
I imagined Dad’s response to being called a peach and had to laugh, but quickly brought myself back to the subject a moment later. “I could have healed him if I were some kind of arcane mage.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe you’d be able to heal, maybe not. I was never partial to healing, myself. Too much fine work, too many complicated moving parts inside a person. I’m a little more ham-fisted. I pack a little extra punch in a fight, mostly. I can do other things if I need to, but usually a fist to the face ends things.” He lifted a hand into the air and then, flexing the fingers, he balled them into a fist one at a time.
“The idea of arcane magic, though . . . There are so many possibilities. It’s like having a blank slate. You could really do . . . anything with it. Anything at all?” I was being pathetic and whiny, I could hear it in my voice and my words both, so I shook my head and stood without waiting for an answer. Yeah, so I was jealous of the thought. Having so many options with magic sounded like a dream.
He stood to follow me as I went. “Yes. Well, no, but yes. It can be used for anything, but it tends to shape itself into forms that suit the mage using it. It’s not that different from any other kind of magic.”
“Then why doesn’t anyone know it exists?” I stopped in the living room. This was the part of the evening where I usually stripped down to my boxers and sat in bed, reading. I didn’t think that was the best plan with a houseguest, even if I hadn’t invited him.
I hadn’t exactly told him to leave, either.
Foxy took off down the hallway and into the bathroom, so I turned and followed him. That was odd behavior for a fox, right? Even if he was someone’s—not my—familiar. Did he know how to use a toilet?
When I got there, he was standing in the bathtub, looking at me expectantly. “Are you asking for a bath?”
He just kept waiting, and when I didn’t move, braced his front legs against the tub edge and leaned up to inspect the knob that turned on the water. Then looked back at me.
I checked to see if Gideon was behind me—he was not—and shrugged. “Sure, why not? Bathtime it is.”
Almost an hour later I sneaked out of the bathroom and into my bedroom, wearing nothing but a towel. I’d go sit in the living room with Gideon when I had put on some clothes.
I thought I still had some pajamas Beez bought me a few years earlier. They were covered with little blue flowers, some kind of joke or test or something because I’d said that wearing a floral print didn’t affect my masculinity. Maybe Gideon would find them funny, but at least I wouldn’t be wearing my usual pajamas—boxers and nothing else—in front of him. Next to him, with his enormous shoulders and giant, muscle-y muscles, I felt even more small and scrawny than usual. The guy had almost a foot and maybe eighty pounds on me.
Well, except that he didn’t have any pounds at all, what with being incorporeal. Bet he’d still look a thousand times better in nothing but boxers. Not that a man like him wore boxers. He probably went commando and fuck my life I was not going to think about that.
I untucked the towel and went to drop it on the floor when a throat cleared behind me. I almost dropped it anyway in shock, but just managed to cling to one corner and slapped the other hand—a little painfully—against my groin to hold the whole thing down. I spun around to find Gideon sitting against my headboard, with his feet up on my bed. My first instinct was to tell him to get his