Page 59 of How (Not) To Raise The Dead

My jaw clenches as I turn to face him. “Did you hide the spoons, Malachi?”

“Use your fingers,” he says smoothly, returning his gaze to the cat, a small, wicked smirk playing at the corner of his mouth. “You’re quite fond of those, aren't you?”

“You hid the spoons to try and... what? Get to me?” I huff, leaning against the counter. “How old are you again? Because right now you're about five.”

He holds up his hand, inspecting his human-looking nails, and hums. “Perhaps I did. I find that when I am inconvenienced, I like to share the experience. It feels more... equitable.”

“Inconvenienced?” I repeat, the word coming out as a dry, incredulous rasp. “What are you even on about?”

He barks out a laugh. “One moment you're practically coming apart in my hands, but the second I’m ready for my own pleasure, you’re treating me like a common pest. In my realm, we call that whiplash. It’s remarkably rude. Even for a mortal.”

I stare at him, my mouth falling open.

Oh. Oh, I see.

The centuries-old demon is sulking. Because in my panicked, ‘after-intensive-therapy-with-my-sister-and-invasive-doctor’ state, I cock-blocked him. That’s what this is. It’s beyond absurd.

“That’s why you’ve hidden the spoons?” I ask, my temper rising with hot prickles under my skin. “We were in a public construction site, and I was post mental breakdown!”

He scoffs. “Don’t insult my intelligence,” he says, dropping the petulant theatricality for something much darker and far too perceptive. “The location didn't bother you. The tears didn't bother you. You were perfectly willing to let me take you apart against a concrete pillar right up until the exact second your conscience caught up with your biology.”

He leans forward, gaze pinning me to the cheap linoleum and stripping away the last of my defenses.

“You didn’t push me away because of the dust, Eden. Or the therapy. You slammed the door in my face because you realized you were actually enjoying yourself.”

The anger drains out of me all at once, leaving me hollowed out and exhausted. I stare down into the abyss of my tea, the fight completely gone.

“I wanted it,” I admit quietly. “I wanted it just as much as you did, but I hated myself for it. I felt like I was betraying Matthew. Like if⁠—”

“You think you were cheating?” He barks a harsh laugh. “Are you serious? What do you think he’s going to do? Come back and tell you you’ve been naughty? He’s a pile of ash in a jar, and I am the one who’s here.”

“If you’d let me finish,” I hiss, “you’d know I was about to say that it’s because it felt real. And it scared the shit out of me. And yes, maybe it felt like a betrayal against Matthew because I don't even know you, Malachi.”

It’s true. Feeling that good felt like a crime. It felt like I was erasing Matthew with every gasp I let out. Every time my back arched, I was moving further away from the man I’d tried so hard to bring back, and the guilt that followed was a black tide, swamping me until I couldn't breathe.

“And yet you still wanted it.” He tilts his head. “But tell me, Eden... did you think of him while I had my fingers inside you? Or was I the only thing that felt real?”

Ouch.

The question smacks me exactly where he meant it to. I want to lie. I want to scream that I was thinking of Matthew the whole time, that I was grieving and mourning and being the perfect girlfriend to a dead man.

But I can’t.

For so long, my life has been a muffled room where the only sound was my own heartbeat. But yesterday, Malachi had reached into that room and turned the lights on. He’d made me smash things until my muscles screamed, and then he’d made me feel a pleasure so hot it had nearly erased my name.

“I wasn't thinking of him,” I whisper, the admission washing over my tongue with a ripple of self-disgust.

He hums softly. “It’s a violent transition—coming back to the living. And rather poetic, isn't it? That you had to meet someone from the land of the dead to finally feel a pulse again. But also a waste of perfectly good momentum,” he scoffs, his tone shifting back to that insufferable, dry arrogance. “And I didn’t particularly enjoy being left with an aggressively hard cock for the rest of the day.”

I let out a startled, wet laugh, the sheer absurdity breaking the tension in one single snap. The absolute nerve of this creature.

I open my mouth to snap back—to tell him exactly where he can shove every single one of my teaspoons for that comment—but Vesper lets out a guttural yowl from his arms and jumps down, her back arched into a mountain of fur. Her tail’s puffed up into a bottle-brush, claws scratching frantically against the tile for purchase as she skitters backward.

The air in the room ripples with a fuzzing energy like the static before a massive summer storm.

“What did you do?!” I snap.

He looks at the cat, then at his own human-skin hands—fingers flexed as if checking for invisible strings—then back at me, his expression a mix of indignation and genuine confusion. “Nothing.”