Vampire With Benefits by E.J. Russell

Author:E.J. Russell [Russell, E.J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Published: 2018-11-14T00:00:00+00:00

Spending time with Cas was more enjoyable than Rusty had anticipated. The guy was hopeless at any real construction work, of course. Rusty hadn’t expected any less. But he was surprisingly good company. The stories he told about Hollywood in the silent era? Man, Rusty had never realized what a different world it was for queer people there, compared to the rest of the country back then or after sound came along.

Rusty’s plan had been to power through the repairs as quickly as possible. But you couldn’t rush drywall mud, and they’d gotten a string of cold, rainy days that had put a literal damper on everything and slowed the curing process way down.

He hadn’t expected Cas to stick it out, actually. He’d thought, yeah, maybe a day or two, then Cas would ask to go back to his fancy house in Portland, close to the nightlife that was his literal night life. But he’d surprised Rusty there again.

“If you’re staying, I’m staying.”

“It can’t be that interesting for you here. No clubs. No bars. No anything, really.”

“First, I don’t drink, so the bars aren’t really a loss. Clubs? Eh, I can take or leave them. And second, this place has something very interesting indeed.” He smiled with a hint of fang—which was happening more frequently as the days wore on. “The company.”

Rusty snorted. “Oh yeah. I’m really interesting.”

“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re a great listener, for one thing, and in case you haven’t noticed, I dearly love to talk.”

“You could find a listener in any of those bars.”

“Those people listen only until you leave them a big enough conversational gap so they can leap in and talk about themselves. They’re not listening. They’re waiting. You’re an active listener. You take it in. You ask questions. You want to learn more.”

“The stuff you’ve done is way more interesting than my life. I went to college, sure, because what else was I going to do?”

Cas set down his paintbrush. “You act as if going to college is a trivial thing. That it denotes a failure on your part, but it most assuredly does not. You took your instinctive aptitude for building and learned enough to build for anyone, not just your fellow beavers. You have a successful company.”

“How do you know?”

“I googled you, of course. Do you know how unusual it is for any construction company to have no negative customer reviews? I also know that you have the best employee retention rate of any contractor in the state.”

Rusty shrugged as he poured more paint into the roller pan. “It makes sense to pay good people to stick with you. Otherwise you’d end up with those negative customer reviews, right?”

“Mm-hmm. So tell me. Why don’t you have any beaver shifters on your crews?”

Rusty nearly dropped the paint bucket. “What? How do you know that?”

“When Fletcher the Fuckhead—”

“Cas. You can’t keep calling him a fuckhead.”

“I’ll stop calling him a fuckhead when he stops acting like a fuckhead. I mean, seriously, Rusty? Why are we painting this room again? It was perfectly lovely the way it was.

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