“Really?” Chaos brightened immediately. “How interesting.” He leaned forward across the table. “What else are you afraid of? Your enemies? The ones with the guns?”
“My enemies, yeah,” Cooper agreed. They weren’t exactlyhisenemies. He was Ivan’s hacker, not a leader of the Mafia himself. But Sergei certainly scared the shit out of him. “But also just…I don’t know.” How the hell did he explain to a powerful demon that sometimes he got nervous just running errands? He pushed the ketchup bottle around some more. “People can make me uncomfortable. Interacting with strangers. Trying to make small talk and getting lost in what they think of me. I get anxious. I don’t have it as bad as some—I’m not stuck in the house or anything. But it’s like a muscle you have to exercise. When I leave it too long, it atrophies. I have to build it back up.”
“Fascinating,” Chaos murmured. It didn’t sound like he was taunting Cooper, but his response didn’t exactly make sense either.
“Not really,” Cooper hedged. He didn’t want to, like, trick this demon into thinking he was something special. “It’s common enough.”
“Laugh for me,” Chaos ordered, like that was a normal thing to request of someone for no reason.
Cooper gave a nervous chuckle, darting his eyes reflexively to see if anyone was looking at him making a fool of himself. But everyone near them was minding their own business.
Chaos made a face. “That’s not a real laugh.”
“It’s hard to do on command.”
“Well, I can’t mate with you if I’ve never heard you laugh.”
Cooper froze in his seat as their waitress appeared, placing an inhuman amount of food on the table. He stayed frozen long after she’d left.
Eventually, he found his voice, although it came out thready and strange. “I’m sorry, you can’twhatwith me?”
“Mate with you,” Chaos said absently, studying the plates in front of them. “Bind our souls and our bodies for eternity, keeping me here in the human realm and giving you an unnaturally long and youthful life.” He looked hopefully at Cooper’s plate, as if he hadn’t just said the most insane thing Cooper had ever heard. “Now can I watch you eat a french fry?”
6
Chaos
Even though Chaos had asked very nicely, Cooper didn’t start eating a french fry for Chaos’s entertainment.
To speed things along, Chaos selected one and held it to his puppy’s lips. Brow furrowed and gaze distant, Cooper opened obediently before chewing on the fry absently. After only a moment, he opened his mouth again and let the half-chewed fry fall out.
“Hot,” he explained, keeping his mouth open, as if to cool it with the diner’s air.
Chaos nodded. “Fascinating.”
The fries had barely been warm to the touch, as far as he could tell—humans were such delicate things. Chaos would need to be careful with Cooper’s fragile body when it came time to mate.
Speaking of. “Do you think we should get to it today, or would you like an—” Chaos paused as he thought of the human term. “Extended engagement?”
It took Cooper a moment to respond, even after his mouth had seemingly recovered from the scorching heat of the innocent french fry. His gaze kept darting to the table, to the side, to somewhere beyond Chaos’s shoulder. “Can I ask why you’d want to, um, mate with me?”
“To stay here beyond the terms of our contract, I must bind myself to a human permanently.” Chaos grinned, wishing he had his lovely sharp teeth to display. “I choose you.”
At some point, Cooper’s hoodie string had migrated to his mouth, and he was nibbling on it nervously. Perhaps it was tastier than the molten french fry. “Is that because I’m the first person you saw?”
Chaos had a feeling the question was a trap. He put on his most innocent face. “No…”
Cooper’s lips twitched, and then he let out a sigh, dropping his hoodie string out of his mouth. “I don’t think I’m actually the mate you want.”
“You’re not?” Chaos looked him over. Heseemedlike a perfectly acceptable specimen. Chaos liked looking at him, and he liked all the varied emotions that ran through him at any given moment: the curiosity and the dread, the embarrassment Cooper was so prone to, the one that turned his cheeks and ears red. Chaos had never had need to feel embarrassed before, so it was delightfully novel to feel it through the soul piece in his chest. Uncomfortable and tickly.
And as for Cooper’s physical form…
Well, Chaos thought he would be quite nice to touch some more. His hand was already incredibly pleasant to hold, cool and firm in Chaos’s grasp. And despite Cooper’s slender limbs and nimble fingers, he had a wonderful softness to his middle and his rump. Squishy and fine.
“I’m boring,” Cooper told him, almost gently.
That stopped Chaos’s daydreams short. He cocked his head, frowning. “I’m not a fan of boring.”
