Pillow Biting

BL Jones

“ We should’ve kidnapped Mei and brought her with us,” I tell Caleb, looking around the large, open-plan bed shop in mild dismay. “She would know what togs are, and why there’s a rating system for them.”

There are at least two dozen beds lined up on either side of us, in varying sizes and designs, gated off by thick ropes like we’re at a car show or a very boring zoo, where the exhibits are made up of fabric and foam.

Caleb shrugs, although he seems equally overwhelmed by the vast number of beds to choose from. “It’s a duvet thing.”

We moved into our new flat last week and got away with sleeping on the floor with a mix of blankets and pillows stolen from the agency’s barracks… until Mei found out and almost died from sheer exasperation. She ordered us to put on our big-boy pants and go get proper beds like the adults the law mistakenly declares us to be.

If it weren’t for the weird tension still floating around between Mei and Caleb, she’d have probably marched us straight into town and harangued us into buying all our furniture at once. She would’ve drawn up a list and checked each item off one by one, leading her two pet idiots from shop to shop.

In another life, I’d be living in a new flat meant for four people rather than two.

It was always the plan for us to all move in together: Caleb, Mei, Rex, and me. But then Caleb and Mei had their final— this is it, this is the big one, fuck you, and goodbye— breakup, and Rex is gone, with no determined date as to when he’ll be back, if ever.

No. He will come back, he has to. Caleb needs him. We all do.

“Du vet ? What the fuck is a du vet .” I shoot Caleb a dubious look. “Now you’re just making up words. You’re as bad as Tim the clipboard king over there, with his bloody togs and his bloody thread-counting, or whatever the fuck.” I jerk my thumb at a short, alabaster-skinned man with a pencil moustache, wearing a cheap suit and a name tag. He’s hovering nearby, waiting to swoop in and try to hock the shop’s overpriced, foamy merchandise.

“What are you on about?” Caleb frowns, slapping at my raised arm. “Stop pointing aggressively at Tim, or he’s gonna call security, and I am not getting banned from another big shop because of you, mate. I refuse. It took us years to shred that rep last time. We only just got our mall privileges back after the water fountain-seagull incident.”

“Because of me?” I scoff, offended by the insinuation. “Bollocks.” I whack his chest with the back of my hand. “You’re the delinquent who goes around punching mannequins and stealing beads.”

Caleb makes an indignant squawking noise of protest. “Okay, hold on, I didn’t steal beads , you pushed me into a ‘make your own jewellery’ display, and some accidentally fell into my hoodie.”

He grabs at his hood for emphasis, like he’s going to tip a load of beads out of it and recreate the consequences of my betrayal, which is bullshit. It wasn’t entirely my fault.

We were shoving each other, and I just accidentally pushed him into that display. He’s the drama llama who chased me out of the shop in a mad need for vengeance before checking that he didn’t have beads in his hood.

Him getting tackled by the jewellery-shop police was a situation of his own making, and quite frankly, I will not be blamed for his negligence.

“But you did punch a mannequin that one time,” I point out, mostly just to see Caleb go off.

“You threw it at me!” Caleb accuses.

“I was testing your reaction time,” I say blithely. “That’s what fellow vigilantes do for each other.” I cross my arms, grinning at him. “You are welcome .”

Caleb grumbles irately. “Keep talking and I’ll smother you with the next hefty winter duvet that I see.”

He’s stupidly easy to poke sometimes; it’s ridiculous. He’s a ridiculous man. I love him so much it hurts to look at him, all grumpy and gorgeous as he is. I want to kiss that scowl off his face, just so I can keep putting it back there and taking it away, over and over again. But I’m used to suppressing those needs after so many years of practice.

“Again with the fake word,” I scoff. “Du vet is not a thing, Cal.”

Caleb strides over to a bed, stepping over the rope—absolute bloody rebel that he is—and all but punches the edge of a queen-sized bed, decorated in a plumage of blue-and-white pillows. “What’s this, then?” he demands, like he’s a detective and this is the final piece of vital evidence that wins him his career-making murder case.

“That’s a duvet,” I say guilelessly.

Caleb pulls an exasperated face. “Yeah, T, that’s literally what I just said.”

“No, you said doo-vet,” I argue. “It’s pronounced doo-vay. A doo-vay is a cover sheet on a bed. A doo-vet is a lie.”

“Nah,” Caleb says, obstinate. “It’s doo-vet, mate. That’s how you say it.”

“I mean, you’re very wrong, but okay.”

Caleb gets immediately and hilariously defensive. “Piss off, I’m not wrong, I’m?—”

I clutch at my chest, smirking. “You’re so wrong, you don’t want to be right?”

“What’re you on ?” Caleb punches the innocent bed again. “That doesn’t even make sense ?—”

Like a magician at a children’s party, Tim suddenly appears in front of us, clipboard held tightly to his chest as if it’s his one and only shield against bickering shoppers. He slaps on a frighteningly wide smile and says, “Hello, can I assist you two with anything today?” He has a very strong Midwestern-American accent, which is jarring. Danger is a pretty multicultural city, by England’s standards anyway, but I haven’t met that many Americans who aren’t tourists.

I exchange a look with Caleb, me excited to have a new person to drag, kicking and screaming, into our business, Caleb horrified by the future events he can probably see unfolding.

“Here, Tim,” I say, stepping up closer to him, “help us settle something important. What is this?” I gesture at the bed Caleb assaulted.

“Important?” Caleb mutters in disbelief. “Really? Is that the right word?”

I hold a finger up in the universal “hold on, shut up” signal, keeping my attention on Tim. Caleb huffs in the background, but he doesn’t say anything else.

Tim clutches his clipboard a little tighter and visibly resists the urge to step away from me. I sigh inwardly and back up, having no desire to make the man feel genuinely intimidated. Sometimes I forget how big I am. I’ve always been the tallest and broadest in the room, even when I was a kid, and people tend to react to my size with instinctive discomfort or occasionally outright fear. My tendency to be loud and physically expressive probably doesn’t help although that’s mostly unconscious so it’s not like I can stop that any more than I could stop myself from growing bigger and taller than anyone else.

With the space between us re-established, Tim manages to get out a response to my question, eyes darting between me and the duvet. “Uh, it’s a …. comforter?”

Interesting.

“Huh?” Caleb shoots the duvet a squinty-eyed look as if he suspects it of camouflage or some other such duplicity.

“He’s American,” I say when Caleb glances back up at me, “it doesn’t count. They have a vendetta against Us and therefore cannot be trusted with vernacular-based opinions.”

Tim doesn’t look like he knows whether to be offended or not. He opens and closes his mouth a few times before saying, “I’m not sure if that’s a fair?—”

Caleb swoops in like the hero he is and tries to save the shop assistant from himself. “Just walk away, Tim,” he encourages. “Don’t let yourself be dragged down to our level.”

Tim peers at Caleb with admirably surreptitious appreciation. He’s been trying not to let his gaze catch and linger on Caleb too much. I understand the need, and I’m more than used to watching people struggle to hide their very obvious attraction to Caleb.

Caleb is the level of gorgeous that draws just about everyone’s attention. He has those classically handsome features and the artfully messy, dark-brown hair. Over six foot and impressively muscled, although more the sleek-and-compact type rather than bulky. My favourite thing about him is his storm-cloud grey eyes. As with all Liquid Onyx survivors, there’s a distinct other ness to them, the iris one solid colour rather than a mix, and an internal fire that makes them almost appear to be glowing from the inside.

There’s a broken-boy sadness to Caleb as well, in the soft downturn of his full mouth and the heavy aura of cynicism he emanates, the life-weary grit to his jaw, and the haunted look in his eyes when he sketches. These days, he rips up and throws away every bit of art he creates. He’s quite literally that damaged-but-beautiful artist archetype come to life. People can’t help but be drawn to Caleb’s specific brand of magnificent destruction, like those storm chasers who are always running full speed towards the danger.

But none of them know where that pain comes from like I do. I was there when all that despair was born inside him. I saw it grow from his heart and branch out through his body, a corrosive weed, until he carried the weight of it all like a thick layer of lead coating his bones. They don’t know what it takes to alleviate that pain if only temporarily. Not like me. I know Caleb, better than my own heart can sometimes take.

“You don’t need help?” Tim asks, his gaze thoughtful as it darts between Caleb and me.

“From a professional therapist?” Caleb responds, wry and quick. “Yeah, probably, but you don’t need to concern yourself with that right now.”

Feeling bad at the deflated slump of Tim’s shoulders, I raise my hand to get his attention. “Do you have any race-car beds?” I ask him. “Or ones with a slide?” I make an excited noise and click my fingers. “Or with a secret cupboard underneath?” I grin at him. “I like my furniture to have the potential for secrets.”

Captain Buzzkill steps in to ruin my bonding moment with Tim. “We are not getting a race-car bed, T,” Caleb says. He sounds so sure, and I can’t have that. Gotta keep things interesting around here.

“Oh, come on,” I wheedle. “I’ll let you have the first go in it.”

“I don’t want ‘a go’ in a race-car bed!” Caleb huffs. Liar .

“I mean. Seriously,” I say, aghast. “Who even are you if that’s true?”

Caleb gifts me with the great-grandmother of all scowls. “I’m a twenty-one-year-old man, that’s who, and twenty-one-year-old men don’t sleep in race-car beds.”

He’s being so fake right now, it’s unacceptable.

“I don’t remember you signing a contract on your twenty-first birthday saying you would, from that moment forward, become a boring weirdo who doesn’t like race cars anymore,” I say, scrunching up my nose at him.

Caleb opens his mouth to retort, then pauses as if considering something. “Who would have delivered that contract, do you think?”

I shrug, then think it over for a second before offering, “Some kind of uptight pigeon with low career goals?”

Most people might be stumped by that, but not Caleb. We’re both too well-versed in the bizarre back-and-forth after growing up in the same family as the chaotic-nonsense machine himself, Rex Nova.

“Can pigeons be career orientated?” Caleb ponders.

“Well, yeah, I think so. Like, some of them went to war,” I reason.

“ Did they, though?” Caleb asks doubtfully.

“’Course,” I say, defending my pigeon knowledge. Which I definitely have. “Like, back in the 40s, they were heroes and shit.”

“This feels like an animated film you watched one time,” Caleb says, brows furrowing. “You really need to stop basing your animal information on Pixar shit, mate.”

“Okay, if you’re gonna be a hater about my pigeon intel, different idea.” I hold up my hands in a wait, listen to this gesture. “How about a fairy in a teeny-tiny grey suit?”

“Nope,” Caleb says pensively. “I don’t think you can say ‘fairy.’ I read a thing that says it’s still offensive to some people.”

“You need to stop deep diving Reddit posts,” I tell him. “Besides, I already asked, and Rex said I could.”

“Rex doesn’t get to decide everything just because he’s gay,” Caleb says dryly. “He’s not their king .”

“Well, Rex means ‘king’ in Latin, so,” I counter. Brilliantly. “Plus, if there was gonna be a king of the gays, I think our Rex would be a strong contender.”

I raise my hand and tick points off on my fingers. “He’s tough as nails. He’s snarky and mean. He’s got good decision-making skills when it doesn’t include talking. He’s well-liked by the gay populace?—”