Cassie Alexander - Deadshifted

“Then it’ll be different from any other time we go out to dinner how, precisely?” he said, cutting me off.

I stared at him with dagger-eyes. “You are soooooooo funny.”

He chuckled, and then sobered. “Seriously, Edie. It’s important to me. Can’t that just be enough? It would be nice if I could go into my new life with you with a clean conscience.”

“And what if you can’t?” I asked his back as he started picking out a tie.

“Then nothing’s changed, has it?” he said with a too-easy shrug. “Indulge me and my personal curiosity, Edie. Please.”

Which was as close as he might get to admitting to me how much this mattered to him. It was hard to be mad at him while he was naked, too. “All right. But after tonight—promise you’re going to cut it out. If I’m not allowed to worry about the future, you can’t keep chasing down your past. I want the whole rest of this trip to be about us. You, me, and the baby.”

He gave me a beatific smile. “Deal.”

There was no way to hide the bruise on my elbow from the incident that afternoon. But the dress I was wearing was black, so hopefully it matched. The rest of me was cute at least—being on vacation meant having time to do crazy things like blow-dry and curl my hair. It was nice to blow-dry my hair for fun, not so it wouldn’t freeze when I stepped outside.

And Asher was pulled together, as always. We made a dashing pair. If my recently purchased makeup primer packaging was to be believed, we might even stay looking this way all night.

Asher didn’t change until we were alone in the elevator. Not into another person, like I knew he could, reverting to someone he’d touched before he’d been saved, but overall. His shoulders slumped a little, and the way he held his head seemed like it became less sharp and more likely to nod and agree. He pulled at the crisp collar of his suit so that it looked more wrinkled than it was, like it hadn’t been tailored specifically for him.

“Remember, I’m Kevin tonight,” Asher reminded me.

“Got it. Kevin … Private Eye, Kevin,” I agreed, trying to lighten the mood. He smiled and his hand squeezed mine.

Liz was watching for us at the door of the restaurant and flagged us down as soon as we arrived. The décor in here seemed tasteful, at least as far as I could tell from watching HGTV shows. Subdued lighting, muted colors, staff in crisp suits. Lovely exposed beams across the ceiling that any Realtor would have commented on. I was glad I’d tried so hard to dress up nicely; otherwise it would have been more than just my bruised elbow making me feel out of place.

Liz sat by the shark-faced man we’d met the prior night. His suit was impeccable, and she was wearing a yellow designer dress with a pearl necklace. Even Thomas was adorable in a little three-piece suit, although he looked uncomfortable inside it.

“Nathaniel, this is Edie and Kevin. You remember them from yesterday, don’t you?” Liz prompted her husband.

He stood at our arrival with formal manners and looked over at me. “Of course I do. I hear you rescued our little boy this afternoon,” he said, without a change in tone. Nathaniel had a flat affect, with fish-dead eyes. It’d been a long time since I worked with vampires; I wasn’t used to being stared through anymore.

“Oh, well, you know, he ran into me,” I said with a shrug.

“No, you saved him, I saw. He gets into trouble like you wouldn’t believe,” Liz said, gesturing to the empty chair beside her, which I took, and we all sat down.

She was too sweet for him by a factor of ten—and I realized that despite the money she was flashing casually here, she hadn’t discovered she could buy friends yet. She still thought she had to be nice to get them.

That, or Nathaniel creeped out anyone who tried to get too close.

“So what do you two do?” Asher-Kevin said, with the same tone anyone trying to get to know anyone else casually would use, as the waiter came up and pressed menus into our hands.

“Investments,” Nathaniel answered flatly, then turned the question around. “You?”

“I’m a doctor,” Asher said.

Nathaniel’s chin jerked up subtly at this. “What kind of doctor?”

“What kind of investments?” Asher asked back, with the right teasing tone and a self-satisfied aren’t-I-funny laugh. “No, really, I do hospice care. But I used to do oncology.”

Well, I had no doubt that there was probably at least one oncologist inside of Asher that he could draw on.

“Oh, isn’t that sad?” Liz asked, voice full of genuine concern.

Asher changed to faux suave for her sake; being a doctor got him a lot of play. “It is, but someone has to do it.”

I could see Nathaniel writing “Kevin” off as a showboat. Maybe that was Asher’s plan.

“And, you know,” Asher went on, “that’s where I met Edie. She’s a nurse.”

Liz turned to me, delighted by this less grim turn. “You two met at work? Just like on TV?”

I had the sudden urge to pick a spoon up off the table and stab myself with it. It sounded so trite when he put it like that. I felt like by dating Asher, who could occasionally be a doctor, I was letting down all nursing-kind, most of whom wouldn’t touch doctors with someone else’s used Foley catheter. But I realized I wasn’t going to have to role-play as a PI tonight; I just needed to pretend to be nice-Edie. “Yeah. Something like that,” I said, through slightly gritted teeth. “What do you do?”

“Oh, I stay at home,” Liz said. “Watching Thomas is a full-time job. He’s a little hyperactive.”

You could say that. Thomas was the process of untucking his dress shirt. Poor kid. I gave her a comforting grin. “We’re having one too. We just found out this morning.”

“Really? That’s marvelous! Congratulations!” Liz said, clapping her hands.

“Thank you,” I said, grinning a little at her cheer.

“I’d order us champagne,” she went on. “But you know that’s off limits now.”

“Yeah.” I grinned at her infectious excitement and looked over at Asher—and I could see from his face that he was displeased. We were supposed to be getting information from them, not sharing it. Whatever. I gave him a shrug.

For his part, Nathaniel was still watching all of us with disdain. I wasn’t sure which he was more disappointed in, Liz’s cheerful interest in me, or that Asher and I were breeding in an age without eugenics.

“So when are you due? Is it a boy or a girl?” Liz latched on to this safe conversational thread. “Have you thought of any names?”

I’d inadvertently opened us up an encyclopedia’s worth of safe small talk, and I gave Asher a look that made it clear I was abandoning him to his own devices at the manly side of the table. “Oh, we just-just found out. Like this morning. No ultrasounds or anything yet. I’m not even a month along.”

“I’ll cross my fingers then for you that it’s a girl. Because boys are just too much,” she said, leaning over Thomas to tuck his shirt back in.

Dinner arrived, and I found myself liking Liz more and more. She and Nathaniel lived a few hours away from us, in the next biggest city over, a fact I pretended to be surprised about. It gave us even more safe topics of conversation to have. I couldn’t tell how Asher was faring, which was fine. He could make it on his own.

Thomas was good for his part, if messy. Liz was wiping spaghetti sauce off his face when he shook his head violently. An experienced mother, she followed with her napkin—only he didn’t stop shaking, and his arms and hands followed.

“What’s happening?”

“Seizure,” I said just as he threw his head back stiffly.

Liz gasped, and Asher rushed in, pulling Thomas gently to the floor. “He’s burning up.”