“Laaaaame,” Rachel groaned.
“You hold no love for her, yet you would see her lie with your friend?” asked Theresa. “Why?”
“Sure,” said Jason, “but that’s why I offered to go sleep in the living room. I mean if you feel weird, anyway. I can keep my hands to myself.”
“Oh, please,” Rachel said with a roll of her eyes, “it’s just sex. She’s got her hooks in him already anyway, he might as well at least get laid in the deal.”
“That would only make things worse,” Daniel pouted.
“You sure about this?” Amber asked. “We can just go to sleep?”
“What, you’re not wiped out?”
“Physically, sure, but after everything I’ve been told tonight? I’m kinda wound up again. I want to lay down, but I don’t know if I’ll fall asleep.”
Jason shrugged, stood, and pulled the sheets back. He gestured for her to get into the bed. “It’s not gonna eat us.”
“You sure? You don’t think any Satanic sex stuff has gone on in here?” Amber asked, only half-jokingly.
He winced. “I think they’ve got a bigger bedroom for that-“
“And the living room, and the kitchen counter, and the balcony,” Rachel smirked.
“-and it’s not something I want to give a lot of thought.”
“Dining room table,” Rachel continued, seemingly distracted by the personal memory exercise, “that one time in the closet, the shower, the bathtub, the other shower…”
“Could you please stop talking about that?” Daniel asked.
“What? It’s my home. You don’t like what goes on here, then GTFO, buddy,” Rachel grumbled, jerking her thumb over her shoulder.
Amber crawled into the bed, still wearing the robe. Jason turned out the lights and got in beside her. To the angels, the room hardly darkened; there were shadows now, but the light shed by their halos and their natural radiance remained.
“You seem quite proud of your sex life,” said Theresa.
“Yeah, maybe I am. Maybe I’m thrilled to be in the relationship I’ve found. But I don’t go putting it in anyone’s face-‘cept right now, ‘cause you two uptight bitches are sitting here in my home pissing and moaning about a couple of people maybe getting it on. When the hell did we all get so fucking uptight about fucking?”
Jason and Amber settled in. They shifted a bit. “Comfy bed,” observed Amber.
“Better than what I’ve got at home,” nodded Jason.
“Angels fuck. Angels fuck all the time,” Rachel continued, ignoring the renewed wince on Daniel’s face. “When did we all get wound up? I mean we don’t have orgies in front of everyone or anything, but nobody ever felt ashamed about it.”
She turned to look at the pair of mortals laying on the bed. “She totally wants to fuck him,” Rachel said again. “Wow, look at her. Staring at the ceiling fighting with herself over it. That’s a whole big bag of conflict there.” She turned to Theresa. “So I get the guilt over building this whole relationship on a foundation of bullshit, but what’s her other damage? She’s already gone this far with him, what difference does it make if they bump uglies?”
“Amber does, in fact, suffer from a guilty conscience,” Theresa answered.
“That can just make it hotter. Worked for me the first time with Alex.”
The other two angels glared at her, fuming with wide eyes. “There is also the matter of her professional standards,” Theresa continued rather than engage with Rachel’s over-sharing. “Ordinarily, fostering this sort of a relationship with the subject of an investigation would destroy the case, get her fired and quite possibly even sentenced to prison. Those rules likely do not apply here, though. She is not entirely comfortable with that, or with what she has already done… and her superior refuses to clarify the matter.”
“Wow,” Rachel frowned. “Sucks to be her. And poor Jason.”
“Tell me about it,” Daniel sighed.
“Do you think Rachel’s really an angel?” asked Amber in the darkness.
“I think she’s something that we would call an angel,” said Jason, “but what an angel actually is may not be what we think.”
“What’s that mean?”
Like Amber, Jason stared up toward a ceiling he could not see. “Think like a scientist. You can make observations, right? She’s got wings, and a bright ring of light around her head, and she can do amazing things, right?”
“Yeah, Jason, I’d pretty much call that an angel.”
“Okay, but when you see a big animal in the ocean with tentacles and huge eyes, do you automatically think ‘sea monster?’ Maybe you would’ve a hundred years ago. But now you know better, and so you might think, ‘Oh, maybe that’s a giant squid.’ You only know better, though, because other people have taken the time to make the observations and study them over time and gather evidence.
“Now, we both know that all this supernatural stuff is real. I’ve seen demons and werewolves and shit now, right? But that just means that I can study them-theoretically, anyway, ‘cause I don’t want to make a habit of this shit-and then I can figure out what they really are. And then they go from being a ‘monster’ to being a specific kind of animal.
“I’ve known Rachel for like a month. I can say offhand that she’s an angel because she fits a popular image, but to be rational about all this, it’s not like I have a firm, scientific explanation of what an angel actually is.”
“You said Alex went to Hell.”
“I did, but again, that’s just a convenient term. I know he got pulled into some other dimension, or maybe he got transported to someplace that exists in this dimension but we can’t normally get to it. But do I know that was Hell? Do I know that’s really where bad people go when they die? How do I know I’m not jumping to conclusions about something that could be rationally explained if I had more data?”
“Know what I like best about Jason?” asked Rachel. “He’s smart.”
“So you say,” Theresa frowned. “After all he has seen and experienced, he still doubts. I would not necessarily call that intelligence.”
“Not givin’ up on being an atheist then, huh?” Amber mused. “After all this?”
Jason nodded. “Anytime God wants to come out and prove to me that he exists, I’m happy to hear him out. But it might be a tough thing to manage.” He smiled at Amber’s snort of laughter. “Is Rachel an angel? Sure, I guess, but I don’t know what that actually means. I just know she’s my friend.”
“Aww!” Rachel blushed. She stepped forward. “I wanna hug him! But now I can’t! Dammit… Amber, hug him, you cold-hearted deceitful-“
“I like being your friend,” Amber said.
“Aww,” sighed Rachel. “Dammit. She meant that. Bitch.”
“Even with all the crazy supernatural bullshit?”
“Yeah. Even with. You handled it well.” She took his hand and squeezed it. “The world went crazy and you kept your head. Your friend might be a bad ass with a sword and Rachel might be an angel, but you were the one who made me feel like I might get out of that alive.”
Rachel blinked and stood back. She watched as Amber leaned in closer to him, her hand moving from his chest to slip around his neck. “Wow,” she said. “She meant that.”
Jason propped himself up on his elbows, meeting Amber’s lips with his. The two kissed softly, but hungrily.
“She did,” Theresa agreed quietly. “Oh, my Amber.”
Their kiss deepened. Whatever her nervousness over her mission and regulations, Amber found her immediate needs and emotions more pressing. After all she had learned, she was surer than ever that Jason was one of the good guys. She still didn’t know her real boundaries. Perhaps this was okay. And perhaps, even if it wasn’t, there simply wouldn’t be proof…
She broke off from the kiss then, her forehead leaning against Jason’s. “I’m not ready yet,” she confessed.
Rachel groaned loudly. “Well, they’re in for the night, I guess. Up to you two whether you’re gonna stand around and gawk like a couple a’ fuckin’ pervs or go check on your other charges or whatever, but I’m late for a three-way.” She stepped through the bed, pausing only to look at Daniel. The angel looked on at the pair on the bed with both hands covering his face, though his fingers spread enough to allow him to see. “Daniel, seriously? C’mon, she just red-carded herself. It’s over.”