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Anything to fulfill Jeffrey’s wishes and continue sustaining me.
Anything.
“A pleasure,” I say.
In the few minutes we chat with Tony, I understand the flaws in his business practices and where joint ventures might help us both. We make no definitive plans, but the groundwork is set.
When we leave, Jeffrey makes a tsking noise, as he eyes the unpleasant woman from last night. Mrs. Sherman is talking to someone outside of her closed business, another of the owners, I wager, who came to their senses about her fraudulent forms to discredit Madame Mattie’s.
“Bet she’s not going to be happy when more people start knocking on her door,” Jeffrey says with a touch of delight.
Mrs. Sherman catches him watching, and rather than revel too much or meet her stare, Jeffrey heads for the farther away crosswalk to return to that side of the street.
“Hotel?” Jeffrey suggests. “If we’re starting with friends, they’d be next, and we need to keep gathering allies before she realizes she’s losing most of hers.”
“My thoughts exactly.” I follow beside him.
Jeffrey has ambition. Something to prove. Hopefully, he continues to have restraint.
Because I do not.
Chapter five
Jeffrey
“Come along, darlings, if you’d like to explore my passages.”
It’s a smaller crowd tonight. It always is on Sundays, unless it’s a holiday on Monday, but there are still enough people for me to enjoy performing.
Even if Odai watching is a little distracting.
He didn’t watch my first three tours, off somewhere else, I suppose, working on business turnaround ideas. But when I shimmy out from my hiding spot for the last tour of the night—you know, from where he was recently imprisoned behind a wall that is now somehow fixed as if nothing happened—I spot him at the back of the crowd.
“Anyone would be hard-pressed to not take you up on that offer, Mattie,” Odai calls.
Oh fuck. He’s bantering with me. “Just wait until we get to my deepest caverns.” I bat my eyes back at him.
The crowd laughs.
We play into it, almost like he was a plant to aid my performance, and he has me in stitches and nearly breaking character more than once.
Someone brings up the Devil and having a forked tongue, maybe someone who took the tour before, or just a natural progression.
“I do enjoy a good double pronging,” I say.
Odai adds, “Being spooned is lovely, knifed is better, but being forked is a test of endurance, right, Mattie?”
That fucker. “One I pass every time.” I blow him a kiss.
I actually love it, because thinking on my toes like this gets the best lines out of me, some I plan to add to my repertoire for future tours.
“So that’s the incubus’s hole?” one person jokes when we reach it.
“Would you like to check for yourself?” I urge him. “I assure you I am already quite familiar with feeling my way inside it.” I’m not, Odai is the one who’s familiar with feeling his way inside me, but the way he looks at me when I say that, the way our eyes lock, has me as hot and bothered as last night.
The patron gets the usual scare from Cas grabbing his hand, and the tour comes to an end. I could seriously do this forever, and even if I don’t need a plant in the crowd to channel my inner Mattie, bantering with Odai felt fun in a way that only makes me love it more.
There are a few picture requests afterward, including with an elderly couple who think I was a hoot, their words, but when those lingering finish following Cas into the gift shop, it’s just me and Odai.
