* * *
As soon as they got the door to Lily’s apartment locked and dead-bolted behind them, Conrad dropped. Luckily, his knees held up just long enough to dump onto the nearest obliging furniture—a couch, as it turned out, and hey, one that looked like it hadn’t just barely survived a world war.
A pretty tasteful couch, actually. Like the kind of thing he’d expect a girl to have in her apartment, a yarn afghan folded on the back, a pillow at the far end with some kind of flower on it. And Conrad’s brain finally caught up to the rest of him, wheezing and gasping, to remind him—that giant pile of dirt he’d fallen into? Yeah.
All over the really tasteful couch.
“Shit,” Conrad hissed and jumped up. “Aw, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t even think—”
Lily dropped her bags on the floor next to his, plummeted onto the couch in a cloud dust.
“Screw it,” she said, smiling. “I am too exhausted to care.”
She bent down to rummage through her bags and, hey, alright, this girl was an angel—apparently both kinds.
But angel or not, there was exhausted and there was Exhausted. He was pretty sure Lily was the second, capital and all, because she was almost as pale as the still clean straps of her dress, even her lips just a tad too white, and Conrad didn’t know a hell of a lot about things like that, but he was pretty sure that was not a Good Sign.
“Are you okay?” he asked, leaning back next to her.
Lily froze, halfway to tearing open a bag of beef jerky with her teeth, looking almost guilty and, wow, okay, apparently Conrad found the cave woman thing sexy as hell because, worried or not, his stomach did ten different kinds of acrobatics just then.
“The escape hatch takes a ton of magic,” Lily said, and yeah, there was a definite blush at the tips of her ears as she ripped the bag the rest of the way open like a human. “If I don’t shovel gorge myself the next three minutes, I will swoon like no one has ever swooned before.”
And that was fine, alright, probably just a protein thing, but Conrad started to ask if she was sure she was okay and, whoa, holy shit. Apparently hunger was a linebacker or something, because it nailed his ass like the Spanish Inquisition.
For a second the entire room rocked on its axis and almost fell off the universe. Conrad’s head floated off somewhere near the ceiling and, hey, Dignity, what the hell? But the moment passed without a manly swoon and, okay, things were cool. Hopefully Lily hadn’t noticed. But no, judging by the look on her face, she totally had.
Conrad flashed a lopsided grin and dug out his own bag of beef jerky.
“Just ignore me. My body thinks I actually have an excuse to be this hungry or something.”
Lily blushed, her bottom lip caught between her teeth and, oh wow, sexy as hell. Conrad forgot the cave woman entirely.
“I, uh… used you as a battery to get us here,” she said, red to the roots and, okay, apparently they were both winners at this whole existence thing. “Sorry about that. We’d have been stuck otherwise, and I like my eyes where they are.”
Conrad laughed. “You know what? Do not worry about it. You are absolutely welcome to use me any way you possibly can if it keeps us from being eaten alive. Anytime. I mean that.” And then, because the entire situation was kind of his fault and that sure put a damper on the whole pretty girl embarrassed over possibly offending him thing, “I’m really sorry you got dragged into all this.”
Lily grinned and, wow, okay, since when was it that easy to make the awkward go away? “They’d have found me anyway. Trouble tends to do that.”
“You too?” he blurted and his mouth, fuck, it’s called a filter, has he heard of it? “I mean—that’s so weird.”
Lily laughed, passing him a chocolate Twinkie and, wow, really? Since when had they made chocolate Twinkies?
“I guess we’re both pretty weird.”
And Conrad laughed too, because this girl? This girl lit up with the best kind of sunshine and took him back to her really nice apartment even though he almost got her killed on probably more than one occasion he didn’t even know about yet. She didn’t even seem to care that the Norse kinda-god of chaos would probably end up camping out in her apartment, too, and yeah, she was pretty much his all-time favorite person right now.
“They should make you a saint,” he told her, and immediate hunger satisfied, wow, was he exhausted. “You’re that awesome.”
Her couch was so really super comfortable—they made these at an IKEA on this plane of existence?—and Conrad felt half asleep already. But right before he passed out, he caught Lily blushing all the way up to her ears.
Which, wow.
Awesome.