Page 30 of The Devil Wears Nada

When the room swims back, she's still there, loose and flushed and breathing hard, and she huffs out a small laugh. "Hope you got your money's worth, HouseMoney."

It's the best and worst hour I have ever had.

She signs off with a soft, "good night," and I sit alone with a fact I can't wave off like my usual bullshit.

I got what I wanted. There’s no question about that. I had her alone. The problem is, all it did was make me want more, and I can't tell the two men on earth who'd understand because I took this from them.

That’s the downside of being the guy who always gets what he wants. You wonder if you're a giant dick, and whether someday everyone will find you out.

Actually, you know you are a giant dick.

Elias and Theo are going to know I did this. Maybe not tonight, but eventually.

Let them. I'd do it again tomorrow.

That's the part that should scare me, and it doesn't.

That's how I know I'm already gone.

9

AGGIE

Beck Cross booked me for himself.

I saw it come through, the solo reservation sitting where our three-headed slot usually goes, HouseMoney's handle all by its lonesome, and I knew exactly which of my bosses had done it and exactly what it meant. I told myself it was a business win. A whale spending stupid money, cha-ching, more off the loan. I told myself that right up until midnight, when the man who flirts with the espresso machine and morning-gorgeouses the entire building, came on alone and, somewhere in the middle of it, stopped performing and talked to me in a voice I had never heard him use. He almost sounded scared.

Fuck me.

I’m inches from fucking myself out of the best situation I’ve ever been in, inches from breaking

all my carefully laid plans and rules. But I don't just want the money anymore. I want them. Not Diablo's whales, not the handles glowing at the top of my board, but Beck, and Theo, and Elias. The actual men, the ones whose coffee I fetch and whose flights I book. I want them individually, specifically, and in embarrassing detail.

Which is a problem of epic proportion. You cannot run a con on three men you're falling for. Wanting them is the exact thing that gets someone like me caught.

So like the idiot that I am, I keep going anyway.

My phone buzzes on the desk. SAL PETRAKIS. I watch it ring, thumb hovering, and I let it go to voicemail the way I've let the last four go to voicemail, because Sal doesn't call to say hi, how’re you doing? Sal calls about a number with a due date, and I don't have the number yet. But I do have more of it than I did last month. I'll call him back when more becomes enough. I flip the phone face-down. Later. Everything's later.

It's nearly seven when the office empties out, everyone peeled off to dinners and families and actual lives. I'm in the little kitchen off the lobby rinsing the coffeepot, because coffeepots don’t rinse themselves, when the light shifts and I know without turning around that it's him. Elias moves through a room so quietly, you feel him before you hear him.

"You're still here."

That’s three more words than I’ve gotten out of him all week.

"Somebody has to make sure the coffeepot doesn’t turn into a science project,” I say lightly. I don't turn around. I can't, not yet, because I don’t trust myself.

He doesn't answer. Nor does he leave. And that's how I know tonight is different, because Elias not only delivers his one sentence, but he also stays. I finally turn around, and he's closer than I thought. Close enough that I have to tip my chin up. Close enough that I can see his lips are tight and his eyes are not on the coffeepot.

They're on my mouth.

And every alarm I own goes off at once, because this is the man who might know. This is NoComment. This is the voice that told me it wanted to watch me lose my mind. He is standing eighteen inches away under buzzing fluorescent lights, looking at my mouth like he's already lost some long argument with himself about it, and I should step back. Agnes would step back.

I don't step back.

"Agnes." He says it low, and my own boring name in his voice nearly topples me because it's the exact voice, the one from all those late nights. For one terrifying second, I am certain he is about to say the other name too, Diablo, right here, under the lights, and end my whole life in one word.

He lifts a hand instead. Slow. Like he isn't sure he's allowed. And he tucks a piece of hair behind my ear, one knuckle grazing the edge of my jaw. My entire world shrinks down to that half inch of contact and I stop breathing. He stops breathing. We stand there together on the edge of a thing I both want and dread in equal amounts.