Page 3 of Coached By the Grumpy Gargoyle

What happens next is entirely my fault.

The coat sleeve swings. My heel catches the table leg. The plate tilts in my hand, and the last slice of Sunday French silk slides neatly off the china and lands chocolate-side down in the dead center of Coach Bram Stryge's lap.

Nobody moves. He looks down at the ruin on his gray slacks. I look down at the ruin on his gray slacks.

He lifts his head, and those green eyes fix on me, and he goes very, very still. Carved still. The kind of still that comes right before something extremely not-still.

"Well," he says, quiet and low, like a teacher scolding a toddler. "Now nobody gets it."

And something in me snaps clean in half.

Because that's my pie. That was my week, my one good thing, my hard-won spoils, sitting in whipped ruins on the lap of the smuggest granite man in Maine, and he thinks that's the end of it.

I reach across the table, into his lap, and grab a handful of pie directly off the crotch of his pants.

His wings flare. Just a sharp snap of slate membrane behind his shoulders.

I straighten up, look him dead in the eye, and eat it. Out of my bare hand. Chocolate silk and crushed crust and whipped cream to the second knuckle, in front of Mathilda and half of Saltford Bay, and I hold his gaze the entire time, chin up, like a woman accepting a medal.

It's the best bite of pie I've ever had in my life. Spite is an underrated seasoning.

Bram's mouth parts just slightly, and his eyes go darker as they track the whipped cream from my fingers to my lips. The look on his face is furious and hungry at once, and my body likes it far more than my common sense does.

Something happens low in my stomach that I am declining to examine.

"Worth it," I say, with my mouth full.

Then I take my napkin, wipe my hand, drop it on the table, and walk out.

The bell over the door rings. The November night hits me like a slammed freezer, and I keep going, coat half on, heels going way too fast down the harbor row for a sidewalk this frosty and a skirt this short. Click-click-click-click, the walk of a woman who has just eaten pie out of a coworker's lap in front of half the town and desperately needs to put distance between herself and the witnesses. The cold bites straight through my tights. The gulls on the streetlamps watch me pass with what I can only describe as scorn.

Shits and giggles. I ate pie out of his lap. With my hand. I made prolonged eye contact while doing it.

Monday is going to be a rich, full day.

I'm past the second streetlamp, building to a really quality spiral, when the air changes.

There's a sound like a soft thunderclap, a single deep whump of displaced night, and seven feet of gargoyle drops out of the sky and lands on the sidewalk in front of me.

I shriek. Full volume, hands up, one heel skidding on frost, the whole undignified package. He lands the way big things shouldn't be able to land, silent and graceful except for that one clap of air, wings flared wide and dark against the streetlamp before they fold away behind his shoulders like the night zipping itself back up.

He's also holding my purse.

Fuck. Me.

Apparently I forgot my purse at the Wandering Gnome and didn’t even realize it, because I stormed out after ruining my reputation in front of the entire town. So much for my win of the week.

"You forgot this," he says, flat and cold.

I press a hand to my sternum, where my heart is attempting to exit through my ribs, and take a moment to hate everything.

"You did this on purpose to scare the soul out of my body.”

My voice comes out two octaves high.

"Faster than walking."

"It's a purse, not a transplant organ." I snatch it by the strap, careful, his talons on the leather and my fingers nowhere near them, and hug it to my chest. Then the obvious hits me. "You could've just given it to me Monday. At school. Where we both work. Like a normal person."