around my shoulders.
I turned. David was worth the resulting skipped heartbeat and raised pulse level on a visual level alone-smooth golden skin, dark auburn hair that glittered with red highlights in the sun, lickable lips, and eyes of an impossible bronze color behind a pair of gold-rimmed glasses. He was back in his usual uniform: blue jeans, a comfortably faded cotton shirt, an antique ankle-length olive coat.
David didn't look like a Djinn, most of the time. At least, not most people's idea of one, since that included pantaloons, loopy earrings, and bare, rippling chests. Not that his chest, when bare, didn't ripple satisfactorily. Far from it ...
"I thought you were resting," I said, to get my mind off of the image of him, shirtless. I tried to make it sound stern, but he made it difficult when he leaned into my space. He slipped his fingers through my magically straightened hair, tilted my head back, and came very close to kissing me.
And, teasingly, didn't. Warm, soft lips just barely brushing mine.
"It's been too long," he said. "I want to stay with you for a while."
My pulse jumped into high gear. I knew he could hear it. Feel it through the brush of our mouths. I'd left him alone in the bottle for more than a month, hoping he'd be stronger for it, although I hadn't capped the bottle and sealed him inside. I just... couldn't bear to do that. It was too much like prison.
"You're sure?" I asked. My voice didn't sound too steady. It sounded breathless with excitement, actually.
"Just say the word."
"Which one?"
"The one you didn't learn from your mother." He made a low humming sound at the back of his throat, not quite a growl, not quite a laugh. I could almost forget how fragile he was at the moment. My body wanted to forget, but then, it had Attention Deficit Disorder, big-time.
"Are you-" I hated to ask it-it was like asking someone with cancer how the treatments were going. "David, be straight with me. Really. Are you feeling better? Are you strong enough to-to do this?"
Because David had, since I'd met him, been through even more than I had. He'd fought demons and split himself in two to give me life when I died, and he'd allowed an Ifrit-a kind of Djinn vampire-to drain him nearly dry. He wasn't really healed from any of that.
Worse, I wasn't sure he could really heal. Jonathan, high muckety-muck of the Djinn world, hadn't been all that clear.
But today, he looked almost... normal. Maybe I'd been right. Maybe time healed all Djinn wounds.
He smiled. At close range, that was a deadly weapon. "Don't worry. I'm strong enough to spend a little time with you," he said. His eyebrows-fabulously expressive, those eyebrows-canted upward. "Unless, of course, you have a date?"
Right on cue, the back dock door banged open, and Cherise began flip-flopping down the steps to the parking lot. I looked over David's shoulder and expected him to mist away-like Djinn usually did-but he just turned to take a look as well. Which meant that he'd decided not to leave, but just to disguise himself with a minor use of his powers, a don't-see-me kind of magic that would direct Cherise's attention away from him...
"Whoa! Who's the hottie, Jo?" Cherise asked, focused directly on David. She came to a hard stop, wiggling her tanned toes in the designer flip-flops. Those bright blue eyes swept him head to toe, narrowed, and sparkled. "My, my, my. Holding out on me. Bad friend. No biscuit."
It was possible that David was just in the mood to be part of the human world for a while. He did that, sometimes; that was how I'd met him. It had taken me days to figure out that he wasn't entirely human, but in my defense, I was just a little distracted at the time with people trying to kill me.
What I was afraid of, though, was that David was visible to Cherise because he was too weak to magic himself out of being seen.
If that was the case, I couldn't see any sign of it in his body language. He looked relaxed, open, and friendly.
"Hi. My name's David," he said, and held out his hand. Cherise took it and made the handshake look way too intimate.
"I can be a friend. A really, really close friend." She pursed