Piper's fingers glanced longingly over a particularly good bottle of moscato—ugh, I could use some of this right now—but she passed over it in favor of chamomile tea. As she boiled water on the stove, she tapped out an arrhythmic beat against the counter and considered the different directions this conversation could take them. Jason washed up the stack of dishes that had been left in the sink from yesterday, uncannily quiet and offering no hints.
Once the tea was poured and the dishes washed, the two of them picked up their steaming mugs and leaned against the counter. Piper's heart pounded anxious and heightened in her neck as she watched her boyfriend stare into his drink.
"Please don't take this the wrong way," he blurted finally, "but I have to tell you something that's been bothering me."
This, of course, was the worst possible way to start any conversation. Her pulse skyrocketed, and her grip around her mug tightened. Maybe I can sap some heat and magically turn it into a backbone.
He scratched the faded decal on the porcelain. "I know we've been… physical."
Oh, Lord. Was he going to try sex ed? "I'm twenty-one years old," she broke in. "You don't have to give me the birds and the bees talk. I got it from, like, three of my dad's secretaries when I was twelve."
He flushed bright pink. "I wasn't—that's not what I meant."
"Well, what, then?"
"I just—we haven't exactly talked about it."
"You're right. Our mouths are usually otherwise engaged," she agreed sarcastically.
"Piper!"
He'd never raised his voice before, even though he sounded anxious rather than angry. She pressed her lips shut, tried to squelch her own unease, and let him talk.
Jason settled back down. "Sorry. I… we need to talk about it. This isn't…" He stared at his feet, dark pink. "…something I've done before."
Well, he's the epitome of lawful good, so I kind of figured, but… Piper shifted her weight. "Are you… embarrassed? Or nervous? Or—" A new option, one that hadn't occurred to her in their hotter moments, made her insides twist with disappointment. "—do you not want to? We won't have sex if you don't want to." If he was asexual or wanted to wait until marriage, she'd be disappointed, but she wouldn't try to force him to change.
He glanced up at her, a wry smile curving his lips and the stapler scar. "The problem isn't that I don't want to. I just need time, I think. To straighten a few things out first."
She exhaled lightly, unwilling to admit to the relief relaxing her shoulders. Does that make me a bad person? "Okay, let's talk. Like what?"
Swallowing audibly, Jason set his mug aside and jammed his hands into his pockets. "This is a big step."
"It's not a marriage proposal," she said quietly.
Averting his eyes, he breathed out something she couldn't make out, and then he said, "I love you."
She thought for a second she might drop her mug, hearing those words out loud coming from his mouth for the first time. She didn't, but she set it beside his just in case. "I love you too."
His eyes darted back to meet her gaze, and the blue hold felt intense, electric.
"And because I love you," she continued, feeling warm deep in her bones at having finally admitted it, "I don't want you to do something you're not comfortable with."
Jason gave a half-laugh smile of relief. "Thanks," he whispered, and it was enough.
Jason and Reyna's grapevine for prank-turned-fire gossip had started (or rather, ended) with a girl named Allison, a then-junior who'd worked a brief stint on student government. Piper had never met her, but Jason knew her. (Granted, Jason knew everyone.) So on Saturday, Jason hung out at Nectar and Ambrosia in wait for this girl who had five minutes to spare between study sessions.
But Allison appeared, as promised, although her tense shoulders and exhausted complexion showed she was unhappy to be there. And she only blanched further when Jason brought up the fire.
"We heard it from you first," Jason said as Piper handed the bedraggled senior a triple cappuccino.
Tired eyes flared open. "That was forever ago," she said shortly, which wasn't an answer. When they didn't move on, she continued, "I don't know. I didn't even end up going, I just heard it might be a thing."
"Who did you hear it from?" he asked, his patient tone almost parental. Disappointed Parental. And it did the trick.
The senior averted her eyes and swigged from the cappuccino. "A girl in my hall. She graduated last spring."
So she's long gone. Piper mumbled a strong word under her breath.
Allison glanced at her. "But her boyfriend knew about it too. Ben Eighmey? He's a fifth-year senior this year. Go ask him." She backed away and, when they didn't follow, darted out the double doors into the cold.
Jason rubbed his eyes and let his fingertips drag at his cheeks. "All right, I know Eighmey. I'll shoot him an email, try to set something up. Somehow I was hoping this would be more direct."
Piper gave him a small smile and a triple shot. "Well, we're closer than we were five minutes ago. We'll get there." He downed the espresso in one quick swallow, and she made a face. "I have no idea how you drink that."
"Very carefully," he teased.
"Ooh! I saw that! More later?" Leo bounced up and, though he glanced around, he looked back to Jason and his empty shot cup with something like an impressed look on his face.
"More what?" Jason asked. "Coffee?"
Leo shook his head. "Nah, killing shots! I wanna go out tonight."
Piper scrunched up her shoulders. "Sorry, bro. I have a roommate date with Annabeth tonight."
"I have an away game," Jason said. "We probably won't get back till ten."
"Damn," said Leo, and he pulled out his phone just before Reyna swept in through the double doors. He looked up, and his whole expression lightened. "Queenie, hey! I was just about to text you!"
"Oh?" Reyna said, her eyebrows jumping a little. She leaned against the counter with a tiny smile.
Jason glanced at Piper in surprise; she gave him a well no duh look. She would have to ask Leo for the okay to catch him up later.
"Yeah! You wanna go out for drinks tonight?"
She stiffened, and her expression closed off. "No."
"Sure?" he prodded. "It—"
"No," she snapped, crossing her arms. "I don't drink. And I have to run errands today. Thanks anyway."
He backed off then, hands up, clearly reeling at the sharpness in her tone. "O-okay. That's cool. No worries."
Piper wanted to ask what had gotten Reyna's hackles up about just going out for drinks, but the president still had her arms crossed in a No Questions No Suggestions posture, and it was probably better for Leo's wellbeing to just move on. So she updated them on the tiny progress she and Jason had made, and then the four of them hit up the cafeteria for an early lunch. Leo didn't bring up the bar idea again, but he did tell his favorite bad jokes until Reyna uncrossed her arms and laughed. Piper beamed good work thoughts at him with her best-friends telepathy and hoped the goodwill would last.
Reyna all but collapsed into bed that night, barely even managing to pull all her limbs under the covers before she fell asleep. Her unusually pleasant dreams—vague but definitely involving a track meet and, for some reason, a human-size talking donut—began to clang at obscene volume, and she half–woke up and realized that the noise was her cell vibrating against her headboard. Sleep blurring her vision in the dark, she fumbled for the phone and eventually managed to extricate it and press Answer Call.
"What?" She yawned and swiped at one eye with the heel of her free hand. Someone had better be in the hospital.
"Hi, queenie," came Leo's too-loud voice, metallic through the line. He sounded like he was wearing that dumb grin, way too happy for… She checked the alarm clock. 1:03 am. Way too happy for 1:03 am.
And he certainly didn't sound like someone was in the hospital. "What d'you want?" she mumbled. "Try'na sleep."
A few people in the background were shouting incoherently. "But it's waaay more fun to be up," Leo insisted over them. "I been up for, like, I dunno, mosssa the day already. And I'm funner than you."
"No shit," she muttered. He was a little hard to understand, but she suspected that mosssa was meant to be most of.
"Geeez, Reyna," he sighed. "You're so…"
Subconsciously she held her breath. This was it. He'd stayed up long enough he realized what a shit friend she was.
"…pretty," he finished with a sigh. "Ssso, ssso pretty."
She exhaled shortly, wary. She knew she was pretty, but it certainly didn't merit a middle-of-the-night phone call. And on top of being too loud, he was slurring. Realization kicked her in the gut. She sat up straighter, wiping the sleep from her eyes. "Leo, are you drunk?"
Leo laughed. Too hard. "What?" he asked when he'd caught his breath. "Nooo. No way, the Super-Sized McShiz can totes hold his liquor. Hey!" He made an unh noise that sounded like it might have been accompanying a waving gesture—waving over another glass.
"How many have you had?" she demanded.
Leo inhaled and began to count, his finger making a tink sound against each glass. She could hear it even over the phone. "One, two, thhhreee, four…" The tinking went on for a little while longer, but he stopped counting out loud, and when he started again he went straight from eight to eleven. Then he realized his mistake and starting giggling.
He was definitely drunk.
She sighed even as she swung her feet onto the floor. "Where are you?" There was no way he needed to even touch a steering wheel in that state.
"Uh… the place on Conant. Sign says all the good stuff."
All the information was on a sign he hadn't read? Ugh. That was helpful. Well, she knew where Conant was (unfortunately—it was the run-down part of the city), so she could get that far, at least. She pulled on a purple AU sweatshirt and grabbed her purse and keys from the table on her way out the door. "Why didn't you call Piper?" she asked, in an effort to keep him sentient. "Or Jason?" Surely she hadn't been his first thought.
She hadn't been. "Piper di'n't pick up," he complained. "Don't know where she went."
"Jason, then."
"I like you better than Jason," he said, sounding extremely pleased with himself.
Ignoring this, Reyna let herself into her car and twisted the key in the ignition. "I'm coming to get you," she said firmly. "You stay where you are."
"Okay," he said, agreeably enough. "You gonna come have some too?"
Hell no, she thought, but she made a noncommittal grunt.
Half an hour later, she pulled onto Conant Street, which looked even crappier in the off-white glare of street lights. Traffic was pretty much nonexistent at this hour, so she drove a little under the speed limit to look on both sides of the road for the potential destination. Nothing really popped out at her, and then she caught sight of the neon margarita glass. When she parallel-parked on the curb, another neon sign in the window flashed, "All the Good Stuff!"
Leo's comment made a little more sense now.
Reyna locked her car and strode around the hood and into the bar, clenching her jaw at the immediate cacophony. Outdated overhead music, loud conversations, the stench of alcohol and body odor. White-knuckled hands clenched bottles in various states of emptiness. As she made her way to the main line of bar seating, one man wolf-whistled, and multiple people stumbled into her, jostled her. Too much drinking, too much touching. Anxious, high-intensity emotions threatened to cloud her mind, but she tried to focus on her task: retrieve Leo.
Reyna didn't come into this part of the city often (or at all, if she could help it), so she did have the mixed blessing of knowing no one here. It made it that much easier to pick out a familiar face. Oh, scratch that. She did recognize one pair of Central transfers. One of the Stolls was drunkenly groping Katie Gardner against the wall, and Katie was groping back. Great.
Glancing away from the couple, she noticed a familiar head of curls bobbing in front of one of the TVs. She strode toward him and grasped him by the shoulder, making him look up at her and beam sloppily.
"Want one?" he asked, gesturing to the rows of bottles behind the bartender, but Reyna only wanted to get out of here.
"We're leaving five minutes ago," she told him, hooking one hand under his arm and helping him off the stool.
"That's not even possible," he laughed as she pulled a few bills from his wallet and slapped them onto the counter. The bartender nodded once at her, and she steered Leo around to head toward the door. He had to lean most of his weight on her, but he wasn't heavy, and they made it out onto the sidewalk.
"What were you even doing there, anyway?" she asked, peering around for Festus. The car should have stood out easily, but she couldn't seem to find it.
"I was… in the area," he said, sticking his lower lip out like he saw a lecture coming.
And he wasn't wrong. "What? Why? None of us live anywhere near here," she snapped, giving up on finding the thing. He must have parked elsewhere.
"Well, youuu don't," he countered, with some negative emotion in his tone that she couldn't quite identify. Bitterness? Jealousy? Generic irritation?
He started to walk off, and she jogged to catch up the few feet and cut him off. "Hey," she said, "we need to go."
"I am going."
"We can't walk around this part of town at night."
"I walked here."
"Well, that was stupid," she said flatly. "Luckily for you, I drove, so we can take my car."
He gasped, his eyebrows jumping three miles up his face as he beamed. "We can drive in your car?"
"I can drive. You can ride shotgun."
This detail didn't seem to bother him much; he only mumbled "I love your car!" to himself and followed her to the vehicle in question. She unlocked it, opened the door for him, and then made sure he got himself all the way in before she shut it and went around to the driver's side.
She had just pulled out onto the road when he informed her, "I get carsick sometimes."
"Not this time," she warned him, but he was already looking a little waxy. "Keep your mouth shut. Where am I taking you?"
"I thought you said to keep my mouth shut," he said through pressed-shut lips.
She groaned. "Just tell me where to go."
He waved one hand for her to turn ahead. After a moment, he asked, "How come you never drink, Reyyyna?"
"Mouth closed," she ordered. And then, even knowing he probably wouldn't remember any of this, she answered, "Because drinking turns people into idiots or…" Her voice caught. She forced herself to focus on the road. "…Or worse. And I'd rather not even start."
"Plus hangovers are a bitch," Leo mused, oblivious. But this thought must have been too much for his drunken carsickness, because he clapped one hand over his mouth. "Pull over," he managed.
Reyna pulled onto the shoulder just in time for Leo to fumble his way out and vomit, his whole body convulsing in the heave. The stuff splattered audibly on the pavement. Ugh, the sour smell turned Reyna's own stomach, but she pressed her lips together until the urge to add to the mess faded. Please, God, let him have missed my Mustang, she prayed.
Leo convulsed a few more times but brought up only bile, and after the final time he spat and got back in the car, his face twisted up at the lingering taste. Empathy hurt her heart as she looked him over; throwing up was vile.
"How much farther?" she asked him softly.
He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and moaned unhappily as he gestured ahead.
She glanced in that direction, but she could only see more of the grass-and-dirt patchwork and, a few yards away, something that looked like it might be a shed. "Further down this street?"
"'S right there," he mumbled.
"Are you sure…?" she started, but a sinking feeling was growing in her gut. She looked again, harder this time.
What she had thought was a large shed might, by a stretch of the imagination, pass as a tiny house. The overgrown grass around it barely covered the dirt it sat on. The flat roof needed some shingles replaced, and the faded paint was chipping just about everywhere. The only signs that anyone had visited in the last decade were the tire tracks packing down the dirt driveway and the ultra-high-tech lock and security system that decorated the front door.
"Oh, Leo," she sighed. "Don't tell me."
But Leo was already out of the car and tromping through the grass-dirt patchwork. She followed him to the front step, catching up as he began to fumble with his key ring. She recognized his keys for work, Festus, Katoptris… and the bronze one she'd never seen him use. It was this key that he shoved at the center lock (unsuccessfully, due to his being the farthest thing from sober) as he tapped out some code and pressed his fingerprint to a scanner.
Who's really going to break into this house? she wondered sadly.
Eventually he got his key in the lock, and he twisted it and shouldered the door open. He went in without saying anything to her, and though she wasn't sure if she was allowed in, she figured she should follow just in case he puked again or hurt himself.
She stepped through the doorway and found the interior slightly less horrific than the exterior. The walls sat bare but mostly clean, and the minimal furniture seemed to primarily function as storage for his works-in-progress, based on the tools and pieces piled on them. A couple of textbooks and notebooks lay spread out on the kitchen counter, looking for all the world like he might actually have been reading them at some point.
Leo stumbled toward the bathroom. "Gotta shower," he muttered, pulling off his shirt a second before Reyna knew to avert her eyes, and she didn't quite regret the view of skinny-repair-boy muscles she got before she looked away.
Deciding she couldn't leave in good conscience, she glanced around for somewhere to perch until he'd washed off the vomit and the bar smell. The furniture was all pretty solidly taken up by mechanical stuff she didn't want to mess with, so she chose to stack his school things in one corner of the counter and jumped up to sit where they'd been. She considered looking in his fridge to see if he had anything to eat or drink, but what she might find (or not find) would probably only upset her more, so she opted to just sit.
How has he managed to keep this hellhole a secret from everyone? she wondered, almost impressed even as she was hurt and worried. She had known his mailing address was a diversion, but for no one to have ever come over, or dropped him off at home, or even asked to drive past it… I guess you only see what you want to.
Tonight she saw the truth whether she liked it or not.