She had one hand fisted in the front of my shirt and the other splayed against the wall beside my head, and her horns were about two inches from my temple, and I could feel her heart going through her ribs into mine, fast and getting faster. The knot in her shirt had come loose on impact. It was hanging open now, and the white fabric had gone somewhere off her left shoulder, and there was a great deal of crimson visible and a strap of something black and lacy that had absolutely not been chosen with the thought that anyone would see it today.
"Okay," she said, and her voice had dropped an entire register. "Okay, so, um."
"You’re on my leg."
"I’m aware of where I am, Belmont."
"Just checking."
"Shut up." Her tail curled. It came around and settled against the outside of my thigh, the spade tip resting there, and I don’t think she did it on purpose, and that made it significantly worse. "Theo Park is going to tell literally everyone."
"Theo Park is going to take that to his grave and then apologize to us at the funeral."
Her laugh punched out of her, and the laugh moved her hips, and the movement dragged her thigh against me in a way neither of us had planned for.
"Hnn—" She bit it off. Her eyes went wide and gold and she looked down between us and then back up and something in her face crumbled from surprise into something considerably more dangerous. "Oh. Oh, that’s, wow, okay, hi."
"Maribelle."
"You’re hard."
"You landed on me."
"I landed on you like eight seconds ago!"
"You’re on my leg with your shirt open and your tail on my thigh, I’m eighteen, do the math."
She made a sound I had not previously heard out of a human being. It was somewhere between a laugh and a whimper and it came out through her nose, breathy and broken at the edges, and her forehead dropped forward onto my shoulder while her whole body shook against mine. She was giggling, helplessly, into the fabric of my blazer, each little hiccupping breath pressing her chest against me in a way that was doing absolutely nothing productive for the situation.
"This is the funniest thing that’s ever happened to me," she said, muffled against my shoulder, voice trembling with barely suppressed laughter.
"Get off."
"In a second, I’m having a moment." Her hand was still fisted in my shirt, knuckles pressed against my sternum. She was still shaking, tremors running through her frame in waves. The tail around my thigh tightened fractionally, the spade tip curling against the outside of my leg. "You know I have a passive, right?"
"Pheromonal charm. It’s in your file."
"You read my file?" Her head lifted slightly, just enough for me to catch the edge of her expression, something between incredulity and delight playing across her features.
"I read everybody’s file."
"That’s so creepy, I love it." She lifted her head properly now, propping herself up on the hand still planted against my chest, and there was a flush high on her cheekbones. Crimson skin does something with a blush that I genuinely had not been prepared for. A deeper wine color climbing up under the surface, darkening the red into something richer, warmer, spreading down the line of her throat and disappearing under the collar of her half-open shirt. "So you know it’s always on. Low grade. Makes people, um. Agreeable."
"I noticed."
"You noticed." Her golden eyes narrowed, pupils contracting into thin vertical lines. The amusement in her expression shifted, tilting toward something sharper, more focused. "Belmont, people don’t notice. That’s the whole thing. It runs under conscious perception. Eden’s known me since we were nine and he still thinks he just likes me a normal amount."
"He does just like you a normal amount."
The shaking stopped.
She went very still against me, and her tail went still, and for a second and a half, Maribelle Kennedy wasn’t performing. The playful demon vanished. What was left was just a girl, looking at me with something fragile and unguarded in her golden eyes.
"You can’t say stuff like that," she said quietly.
"Why."
"Because I’m currently sitting on your thigh."
Fair.
I moved my hands, which had still been on her waist, and that was the mistake, because moving them meant my palms slid across bare crimson skin, and Maribelle’s whole spine arched.
"Ah—nn, hah—"
Her hips rolled. Not on purpose. It was a nervous system event, and it dragged her down the length of my thigh and up again, and the sound she made the second time was worse than the first, thinner, wetter at the edges, and her nails scraped down the front of my shirt.
Which is when the toxin hit.
I felt it go in through my collarbone, four thin lines of it, and I felt Apathy Toxin do what Apathy Toxin does, which is head straight for the part of the brain that produces the desire to keep doing anything at all. It should have dropped me. Epic tier, more potent on men because of the hormone interaction, and the file said trained heroes with high constitution can resist it, and I’ve read enough of these documents to know what resist means. It means you stay standing and you feel like garbage.
Demigod ate it in under two seconds.
Absolute disease immunity. Significantly enhanced poison resistance. Some cosmic idiot had put those words in a description block and here we were.
The lethargy touched the edges of me, warm and heavy, a hand pushing gently down on my shoulders, and then it just went away, and what was left behind was a very pleasant floating feeling that had absolutely no interest in making me stop.
Maribelle felt me not stop.
She jerked her hand back and stared at it, at the four faint gleams still on her nails, and then at my collarbone where four thin red lines had already stopped bleeding, and the wine flush drained straight out of her face.
"Oh no. Oh no, Belmont, I scratched you, I never scratch people, I’m so careful, I’m always so—"