Over three years ago.

~Lucifer

Trony had bought me a nice little pile of books. They were in a book bag next to me in the passenger seat. The angel had handed me the fancy-looking purple cloth bag filled with filthy goodness as a reward for “finally taking a shower.”

I’d not wanted to take the books for showering, but then it would have been wrong to let perfectly good romance novels go to waste. Additionally, I needed something to occupy my mind while following Nelly more routinely.

Last night—I’d just picked out a manwha Trony had found for me—he’d gone home from the police building. I’d casually watched his apartment, not even for very long, but the manwha was explicit, and I didn’t want to drive while hard rods were inserted into soft holes.

Then, just when they’d climaxed together, I thought it was finally time; I thought Nelly was going to go to my place, knock, ask me—beg me—to allow him to fallate me. Him leaving his building in the middle of the night sure looked like it, because why else would he do that?

I’d dropped the manwha to follow him, ready to double park and teleport to the door to welcome him into my bed, but no.

He’d taken several wrong turns before I’d admitted to myself that he wasn’t going to see me. In the end, he ended up near a building site. The place looked like a flooded sinkhole in the ground in the construction lights the police had brought along with them.

“Not his secret necromancer lair then.”

I put the car in park and reached for another book from the bag, looking forward to reading in the dark, glad I didn’t need light to do it. I settled in while rain slicked my windshield, diluting my view of the goings-on at what was apparently a fresh crime

While Nelly was out there playing in the mud, I finished the entire book and the first three chapters of another. Both the manwha and the novel had featured a character getting sick from being in the rain, and I was looking forward to that. Once Nelly was sick, all I’d need to do was be there when he fainted from his fever at which point I’d be able to carry him home and put him in my bed.

I ached to do that now. I ached to at least hop out of the car and walk right up to him, see if he knew my name or not. If it was amnesia after all, if he’d not returned to my door because of amnesia, things would simply make so much more sense.

Either way, when I looked up from the end of chapter three, Lionel was talking to some fucking human, and then they were shaking hands and continuing their conversation.

The human was smiling.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I tossed the book back into the bag and leaned over the steering wheel. “Walk away. Just walk away, Nelly.”

They were still talking. The fucking human kept on smiling. At Lionel.

Presumably, there were already dead people in that hole. If I hadn’t been positive they’d call Nelly to talk to this human if he ended up dead, I would have risked tossing him into the hole too.

I let out a long breath when they finally went their separate ways, Nelly heading to his car, the human fucking off to wherever the fuck humans fucked off to when they were done fucking around with what they shouldn’t be fucking around with.

When Nelly took off his shoes and decided to walk through the rain in nothing but socks, I smiled.

“Looks like he’s running a fever already, poor thing, and doesn’t even know what he’s doing.”

I made sure to follow close behind his car.

#

Nelly was going shopping. Wearing only socks.

I followed him up on the escalators. I liked escalators, especially the ones going up, because it made it easy for people to look at me and admire what they were seeing. My audience this early in the day consisted of no more than some hungover person and a lady emptying the trash cans.

Nelly also drew attention. He’d done something to his socks that made them noisy on the polished floor, and one of the shopkeepers craned their neck to look after him as he made a beeline for a coffee shop.

I stayed back. A bookstore was conveniently located for me to keep an eye on him and on what they had on display.

“Hmm.”

A bookseller walked over to me, a smile on her face, her apple cheeks rouged by desire.

“That’s our romance reads. Anything in particular you are looking for?” she asked sweetly.

I turned my head to show off how my hair had fluffed up with the humidity.

“I don’t think you have what I need,” I said, looking up to Nelly as he was smiling at the frowning coffee person. At least they had the decency not to smile back.

“I can order what you want if you have a specialty request. Do you want to come inside and tell me?”

The bookseller sounded hopeful, and I breathed out in relief. Hopeful was the right reaction for a human to have when I was talking to them. Asking me to come inside was the right reaction for a human to have when they saw me.

And yet, the necromancer. How many corpses would it take for him to go on his knees in front of me?

As I contemplated this, Nelly made off with an unreasonably large cup of coffee in his hand.

“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” I told the bookseller and made off, her huffing gasp of protest echoing behind me.

I caught up with Nelly in a shoe shop where he was looking at a pair of flimsy canvas shoes, not what most powerful necromancers would go for when building their army of the undead. He was holding on to the coffee as if it were a daiquiri at a pool bar, and the bags under his eyes were complimented by pale skin as dry as sandpaper.

In the manwha, the sick main character had been red in the face like a crustacean thrown into a boiling pot of water. Hmm.

I glanced at the shoes he was bending closer to get a better look at. “Green is the color of death,” I told him.

He flinched and turned, clearly lost in thought. When he laid eyes on me, I scratched under the collar of my shirt to give me an excuse to pull it down, let him see just a glimpse of what was underneath.

“What the fuck? I gave you your fucking money back. I owe you nothing!”

Aaah. He was going red in the face now. I smiled, and my mouth watered.

“All I mean to say was that green is a good choice for a necromancer’s shoes. Hmm. I think for that, you owe me a compliment in return.”

He had the cutest little frown line on his forehead. I ached to lick it.

“I owe you nothing!”

The shoe seller poked out their head from around a shelf, and Nelly saw, flinched.

I lowered my head. “Are you feeling alright, Nelly? Your face is all red.”

He was glaring. I loved it.

“Of course I’m fine. Why the fuck wouldn’t I be fine? More importantly, what the fuck are you doing here? Are you following me?”

The first rule of romantic stalking was to never tell your stalkee that you were doing it, so I beamed and said, “I’m here for a new pair of shoes, of course. What else would I be doing at a place like this?”

He glanced around, looked at the floor, and I thought I saw him curl his toes as if he wanted to hide those hideous things on his feet. Once I had my way with him, his toes would curl for different reasons.

“Oh,” he said, nothing more. There was a trace of innocence there too—no, something even softer than that. I wanted to rub myself all over him, explore, taste, but he was turning away from me. “I guess that makes sense. Don’t let me keep you then.”

The store worker had come closer, and Nelly had seen them. I smiled. I could work with self-consciousness.

“Nelly, you’re not wearing any shoes.”

He turned his head, once more focusing me in the vise of his coppery eyes.

“Don’t you think I fucking know that? Why the fuck do you think I’m here?”

“If you’re not feeling well, I can take you home. You look like you’re running a fever.” I leaned closer. “Let me check?”

Nelly stepped back, his atrocious foot coverings clunking like hooves.

“Don’t fucking touch me. I’m fine.” He looked around, mildly panicked, then pulled a shoebox off a shelf, black canvas shoes rather than green. “I got to go.”

With the shoes in one hand and the coffee in the other, he left me standing there, heading for rubber boots that were too ugly to be kinky.

I sighed, catching the shop person’s eye and giving them an apologetic shrug. They smiled right back at me, clearly ready to come over, so I walked away.

I pretended to look around, picked up the left of a pair of shiny dress shoes, rubbing them suggestively right in Nelly’s line of sight. I heard his sharp intake of breath, then the high-pitched squeaking of rubber shoes being moved around. I bent over to reach for another pair of shoes, making sure my shirt and jacket rode up as I did so.

Nelly was grumbling noisily behind my back, and my smile stretched. I heard a few fucks and other little nothings in there, and it made me want to gag him.

Before I could even try on a pair of shoes and walk up and down with them in front of him, I heard his noisy sock things on the floor as he headed to the register, awkwardly carrying his coffee, a pair of rubber boots, and those understated canvas shoes.

Necromancers and their fashion sense.

I picked out something that would do for a night out and followed him. Carrying all those shoes, it was really only a matter of time before he was going to faint.

When I walked up behind him at the register, he looked at me over his shoulder.

“Hey,” I said.

“Are you fucking following me?”

I raised a brow. I didn’t know how to look innocent seeing as how I wasn’t, but I gave it my best shot.

“I’m simply buying shoes, Nelly. I’m really glad you recognize me just now. And know my name?”

He rolled his eyes, mumbling a few more fucks. Hearing the word from his lips did things to me. Maybe he hadn’t been out in the rain for long enough. I needed him to faint, and fast.

The shoe seller came over and started on Nelly’s shoes. “Do you need a bag?”

“Just for the boots. I’m going to put on the other ones.”

The seller clicked his tongue. “You can’t return them after wearing them.”

“Yeah, thanks, I wasn’t planning to.”

Nelly either lacked in social graces or his cold was getting to him. I was hoping the latter.

I waited patiently, but the interaction really didn’t take that long. Nelly had his wallet with him this time around, and in under a minute, he was ready to leave.

I held out my arm to stop him. “My name, Nelly. I just want to make sure you’re not—”

“I’m not suffering from fucking amnesia. Lucy, okay? You’re Lucy.”

“I am,” I purred, watching color rise to his cheeks while he hurried to a chair to get his new shoes on.

Getting him to say my name, to acknowledge me, was the smallest of magic, but I had to work with what I had. He was stubborn for a necromancer.

I bought the shoes and managed to catch up with Nelly just as he hurriedly grabbed the sock things that looked like the tiny coffins of big dreams.

“You’ll get blisters if you break in those shoes without wearing socks.”

His grip tightened on the socks. It sounded like the fabric was breaking under the strain.

“I’ll be fine. I’m on my way home. I just pulled an all-nighter, and all I want is sleep.”

He left the store and headed for a trash can to get rid of the socks.

“Resting is probably a good idea if you’re feeling under the weather. Maybe I should put you to bed.”

The socks dropped into the trash with an echoey noise. He froze and stared up at me.

“I’m not sick. I don’t have fucking amnesia, and I’m not sick, okay? All I want is sleep.”

I smiled. “Well, in that case, would you like to see my bed?”

I’d not meant to stoop so low, but seeing as how Nelly was not at all accommodating—

“Oh, fuck off.”

And he walked away from me, just like that. I could tell his new shoes were chafing against his heels, and he’d come home bleeding if he kept this up. He was being quite unreasonable.

I had longer legs and therefore no trouble catching up with him.

“Have you considered surrounding yourself with a few undead things? Like the zombie I found you under, but imbued with your own power? I’d like to see all the things you can do with a small force of the walking dead around you.”

“Fuck. Off.”

I was salivating. “Say please.”

He turned the corner to the elevators and stopped to hit the button.

“Fine. Fuck off, please.”

“Lucy.”

He tilted his head up at me. It made him look younger. “What?”

“Fuck off, please, Lucy. Say it.”

His mouth fell open. Despite the cold he might or might not have, his lips were a very faint rose color, more pale than rose if I was being honest, but something I could work with.

He lifted his large coffee and drank what little was left in there in one go.

“Please fuck off, Lucy.”

“That’s it. You remembered my name.”

“And you’re still here.”

“That’s because I’m taking the elevator down to the parking garage. How about you?”

He narrowed his eyes at me. The elevator arrived, but Nelly didn’t get on. Instead, he headed for the escalator without another word.

I sighed, looking at the empty elevator. There was nothing for it. I’d have to take it now, so I did.

For the entire ride, something akin to guilt snuck up on me when I thought about Nelly’s sensitive heels and the way those shoes would hurt them. I hadn’t planned for that. I should have been in the process of listening to his feverish confessions of love by now, not feeling guilty for things that weren’t my fault at all.

Annoyed with myself, I tossed my new shoes onto the passenger seat next to the novels and drove off.

Things were not going my way, and I didn’t know why.

#