I may not always know what's right, but I know I want you here tonight.

The shower was magnificent: cooling water sliding over the skin, the scent of spiced orange, the sensation of all the sweat and emotional knots slipping away down the drain.

The sensual touch of another.

Showering about covered Mallos’ quota for ‘things normal people do’ for one day. The day was ticking on, and he certainly wasn’t about to waste any more of it on mundane things like towel-drying and searching the apartment for the clothes Croe had discarded earlier. He followed her a few steps behind, drying magically as he walked. His thick hair always took longer to dry than skin, so he left it slightly damp, trusting in the Mediterranean sun to finish it off relatively quickly. A pair of pale blue denim jeans and a white shirt had formed around him by the time Croe had even started towel-drying her hair.

“Lunch.” He repeated vaguely, as though lunch wasn’t something he thought about very often. Mallos mostly controlled his hunger with divinity. With a little wrist flick Morgana had once described as cute, the clothes he and Croe had removed earlier soared across the room and folded themselves neatly on the coffee table. “Do they have coffee,” he scoffed, “of course they have coffee. This is Spain, not England.”

He fiddled around with his phone, mostly clicking the back on and off, until she was ready to go. The entire top floor of the hotel was taken up by Mallos’ penthouse suite, accessible only by lift or teleportation. The apartment was very modern, all glass and monochrome, which was in sharp contrast with the faded red upholstery and peeling yellow paint in the lift. The number for Mallos’ floor didn’t appear in the lift buttons, either: his was the eleventh, but the lift only went up to ten. It took them down to a shabby, empty lobby, where a bored-looking receptionist was doodling on a magazine.

“Sigue trabajando duro.” Mallos told him, tossing him a euro as they left.

They stepped out into the powerful summer heat. Granada, in August, easily reached temperatures approaching and sometimes even surpassing forty degrees centigrade. The hotel behind them, labelled El Alhambra Hotel in peeling letters, opened out directly onto a road. Mallos turned deliberately away from the Alhambra palaces and led Croe down a narrow street lined with white and yellow buildings. With the ease of someone navigating a place they knew well, Mallos slipped down a few more side-streets, ducked under lines of washing and brought Croe out into a slightly more open street cluttered with an open market. Colourful fabrics obscured most of the buildings, people bustled, vendors shouted advertisements. A couple of bare-footed children ran past them, arguing in Spanish.

Mallos gestured one way down the street. “Restaurant way,” he said, before gesturing in the other direction, “or street food.”

He shrugged, indicating his non-preference.

Mallos
I've learned enough to know I'm never letting go