“Oh.” Earnest reached over, tossing her the shirt and shorts- Ronnie snaked a hand out from under the covers, then frowned as she picked up the shirt. “Um…how old is your sister again?” 

Earnest paused, then smiled. “She just made a century.” 

“I thought she was in business school,” Ronnie said flatly, turning the garment over in her hand and clutching the sheet tightly with the other. “Did I hear you correctly?” 

“Not your turn,” Earnest chided, smiling at her. When she scowled, he sighed, folding his hands behind his head. “Why do you think you misheard me, Ronnie?” 

“Because whoever is wearing this is either a child or a model, of which I am neither,” Ronnie answered, handing him back the shirt. “Sorry, but there’s not a shot in hell that I’m going to fit into this shirt.” 

“Hmm.” Earnest got up from his chair and walked over to a dresser, pulling out a rolled-up t-shirt and tossing it at her. “This might be better.” 

Sniffing the garment and getting a whiff of a delicate floral aroma, Ronnie carefully unrolled it, only to frown when she noticed a pair of light blue underwear stuck to the back of it. “I think you might want to do laundry again,” she said irritably, tossing the shirt back at him. “Looks like your girlfriend forgot something.”

Earnest easily caught the shirt and then raised an eyebrow. “It’s clean, I assure you.” He removed the underwear from the shirt, then went to the drawer and found another, carefully unfolding it and showing Ronnie that there were no unwanted undergarments attached. “Let’s try this again.” 

Ronnie took the shirt, glaring at him the entire time. “Should’ve known,” she grumbled, carefully pulling the shirt over her head. Trying not to think about the fact that the shirt had that same warm aroma lingering just beneath the detergent, she scowled. “Seems like you get around,” Ronnie snapped, adjusting the shirt and crossing her arms in front of her chest. “Any more surprises I should be on the lookout for, like a bra under the pillow?” 

“Nope,” Earnest replied, his eyes flickering that warm yellow again. “Color me surprised,” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed and peering over her face. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d almost say you sounded jealous, Rainmaker.” 

“In your dreams,” Ronnie huffed, stiffly sitting up. “I’m just trying to know what I’m up against for the night, that’s all… don’t want to get ambushed by your harem or something.” 

She tried to move, but Earnest rested a hand on her arm and halted her progress. “Are you jealous, Ronnie?” 

Ronnie rolled her eyes and scoffed, trying to jerk away. “Yes!”

Instantly, all the color drained from her face. Ronnie clapped her hand to her mouth, mortified at what had just come out of it. “Yes!”

She shook her head again, cleared her throat, then tried again. “Yes!”

Horrified, she looked up at Earnest, who was outright laughing at her. “What the fuck did you do to me?” 

“I didn’t do anything,” he replied, laughing so hard that tears started streaming down his cheeks. “You’re the one who says she knows everything about planars… I thought you knew you couldn’t lie during an exchange like this.”

She had known, damn it all, but she hadn’t thought about it when she’d made the deal. Well, that just summed up Veronica Taylor, didn’t it? She looked before she leaped every fucking time, and she was doing it again right now — however, with him laughing at her, she was far too pissed off to care. “Who was your dosthy?” 

The mirth vanished and took the room’s warmth with it, but the transition was so quick Ronnie didn’t catch any flicker of emotion before his eyes settled into a stormy grey. She pointed a finger at his face. “And don’t you dare give me a one-word answer, since you’re the one who said we should know enough better before we move forward with the epic.” 

The stormy grey turned steely before his eyes flickered rainbow-hued. Of course, Earnest would mask when he was bound by honesty — things were never that easy.

But to her surprise, he looked away and sighed. “Her name was Amelia,” Earnest said quietly. “She was an archivist for the Louvre Academia, her life’s work to build inroads among planar communities and human through a shared love of art. I was in Paris on task, and she was my liaison. Amelia was gracious and beautiful. She knew enough about my kind to rebuke me at first, worried she would shame me if she accepted my advances. I’d fallen so far from grace by the time I met her, it hardly mattered who I slept with.” 

He shook his head, running a hand over his chin, seeming a bit lost in memories. Then he shrugged, the motion so casual it almost felt like a slap compared to the darkness in his voice as he added, “We loved each other, and deeply so… no matter what they said, what we shared was not sin.” 

Ronnie swallowed. She couldn’t really find anything worth saying besides, “Oh.” 

“Why did you feel shame when I touched you during Lirianna’s show?”

She blinked a few times and pressed her lips together, shaking her head at the question. “That’s none of your business.” 

“Neither was Amelia,” Earnest said, his tone cool.

Shit. He had a point, and in her eagerness to take a shitty shot at him, she risked missing out on more important answers on the events at the casino — like how people seemed to know him, but couldn’t talk about it, and that whole ‘your grace’ thing. After thinking a little longer, Ronnie cleared her throat — it wasn’t like it mattered or anything, since this was shit from years ago. “I’m guessing it had to do with Lirianna’s roofie. Or Bacchus and his portal.” Another thing she wanted to better understand — honestly, she wanted to understand everything that had happened that night since she didn’t like feeling outgunned. 

“You’re able to say that right now because part of you truly believes it. But as I told you, such things cannot create emotions, only enhance them. And, since sirens of Lirianna’s caliber aren’t satisfied with shallow emotional feeding, whatever you felt was real. Maybe it was stronger, but it was true. The feelings were yours, just as mine belonged to me.” 

She rolled her eyes. “Whatever, I’ll just tell you — not like it fucking matters. Look, a while back, I was sick of being peddled by Vent whenever some planar needed a virgin for some ritual or some shit.” 

Earnest blinked and frowned, but Ronnie blushed and focused on the window over his shoulder. “And I wanted to be normal for five minutes. I’d never been on a date, hell I’d never really even done anything normal human girls do. No sleepovers, no high school, no painting my toes and doing my hair, nothing. So when I turned twenty-one and could finally go to a human bar — we don’t need to talk about how much planar liquor I’d already had by then, I blew off a calling from Vent and told him I needed vacation time. He gave me three days, and I was determined to be human, whatever the hell I thought that meant back then.”

“It was some college dive bar… I don’t even remember the name of the place. Full of cute guys — human guys, so at least I knew I wouldn’t get turned into a mouse, or burned alive, or stuck under some new contract. I met some guy named Greg—if it was his real name. We played pool, he bought me drinks, told me I looked pretty. I knew what he wanted. It was what I was looking for anyway, but at least it was all out on the table with no manipulation. He asked if I’d go to his car with him, and we kissed a bunch when we got there — when he asked if I wanted to fuck, I said yes.” 

Earnest stayed silent, but Ronnie kept talking. “It was okay, I guess? He didn’t get me off, and it was over pretty fast, but he didn’t hurt me or anything. Then he helped me get dressed and offered to get me a cab — it was clear he didn’t want me going back into the bar with him.” Ronnie laughed, a fresh wave of shame washing over her. “I took the twenty bucks and told him I’d find my own ride. I mean, I’d gotten what I went there for — one real human experience, and I was no longer a virgin pawn piece in planar games. After that, even if Vent owned the rest, I could control that part of me, at least.” 

Ronnie wiped her eyes, not sure why she was upset. She hadn’t thought about this in years, and now it’d been twice in one night. “I wasn’t expecting much, but I didn’t expect to feel…stupid? Dirty? Hell, I agreed to it and wanted it.”

Why was she still talking? What the fuck?

She waved a hand and forced out a laugh. “Anyway, I went back to Vent the next day and said I’d save those two vacation days since being a normal human was just a different kind of lame. I thought he’d be pissy about the virginity thing, but he never said a word.” 

Earnest looked at the floor now, his arms still crossed. “And I take it you haven’t been with anyone since?” 

“Not your turn,” she said with a smirk, wiping her nose.

His chuckle was humorless, and he still didn’t look at her, but he sighed and agreed. “Alright. Ask away.”

It should have been a hundred other questions, but she asked, “Why… why did you kiss me at the slots?”

Now he looked at her, eyes green. “I meant everything I said. You are an exquisite woman, Ronnie. I wanted to kiss you, and you didn’t object — had I known the shame you would feel, or what Lirianna would do later, I would have refrained.”

She licked her lips, glancing away from the intensity of his gaze. “You make it sound so simple.”

“At the core, such things usually are.”