by Selena Scott
“Okay, we’ll skip that. But that’s not the only good thing we could do together. Trust me, there’s all sorts of amazing human stuff we could do together.”
He said nothing, just turned to look out the window again. “I’m tired. And I still haven’t done my exercises today. Just take me back to the apartment.”
Ida did as he asked, but not because she was conceding defeat. She’d realized that she hadn’t accurately prepared for this meeting with Phoenix. She usually treated her first few meetings with clients as a get-to-know-you information gathering stage. But she realized now that she might not get any more chances. Striking out was simply not an option. She needed to regroup and make a foolproof plan.
She pulled up to his house.
“I don’t need help up the stairs.”
“I’m coming back in a few days, Phoenix.”
He grunted, one hand on the door handle.
“We have an afternoon appointment. 2:00. And we’re gonna do something really fun.”
He still said nothing.
“I’m gonna prove to you that there are great aspects of humanity. Things that you’ll love. I promise. If it takes me a year, I’ll prove it to you.”
That at least got a response. He animated, turning those dead eyes back to her. “I won’t be here in a year, Glasses.”
And then he was out of the car and gone, crutching back toward his hovel.
***
“God, Orion, will you put some pants on, please!” Dawn flung her hands over her eyes as she and Phoenix came in through his front door.
“What?” he demanded. “I’m a wolf. I’m not used to clothes. And besides, this is my house. I can do whatever I want in here.”
Whatever he wanted currently consisted of leaning over his sink while he drank straight from the faucet and pretended it tasted as good as water from a mountain stream.
If there was one thing that Orion was good at, it was making the best of things. Things he liked about being human? He liked being naked. He liked the way his human body looked. So much larger than all the other men of his species. So far, he also liked fizzy drinks like Coca Cola. He liked pancakes. He liked seeing his brother up and out of a damn hospital bed. And, yeah, he liked Diana Paul and her very tight hairdo.
He hadn’t found much else to like about the human world, so he was concentrating on the few things he did like and hoped it would tide him over until Phoenix was well enough to rejoin their wolf world.
But Dawn was standing, immobile, in his doorway, her hands clamped over her eyes and was apparently refusing to look at him until he put some pants on. And he liked to see his sister’s human face. She spent so much time hiding it, he didn’t want to be one of the reasons why she did.
“All right, all right.” He strode over to his bed area and grabbed the sweatpants he’d worn earlier in the day and dragged them on.
She peeked through her fingers and deeming everything clear, let her hands drop. “I hope you wore clothes for your meeting with your mentor today.”
Orion laughed gruffly. “Of course I did. I don’t need to give her any more reasons to be afraid of me.”
“Your mentor is afraid of you?” Phoenix asked, crutching over to Orion’s tiny couch and lowering himself down with a grunt of pain he couldn’t quite hide.
“She can barely speak to me and every time I moved she jumped about a foot in the air. I think humans are scared of true shifters.”
“I’m pretty sure humans are scared of all shifters,” Dawn chimed in, sitting down next to Phoenix.
As dingy as their apartments, three in a row, were. Orion felt a jolt of pride at seeing his brother and sister housed under his own roof. He liked the idea of being able to keep them out of the rain. Keep them warm in the winter. That was the only productive thing that had come out of his meeting with Rose that morning. She’d helped him figure out some potential ideas for where he might be able to get a job.
They were all physical work, no surprise there, as he had no education to speak of, but some of them offered good enough money. Some of them would even allow him to work outside. Now, if only he could get Rose to look at him long enough to explain how to apply for any of these jobs.
“My mentor isn’t scared of me,” Phoenix said after a minute, picking at the tape he’d wrapped around the handles of his crutches. “But she doesn’t listen to me either. Something tells me she’s going to be a real pain in the ass.”
“She seems a little …” Dawn paused, trying to figure out how to put what she wanted to say lightly.
“Dumb?” Phoenix guessed. “She seems that way, but she isn’t. She’s just hard to figure out. And she’s always happy. Like always.”
“She’ll drive you insane in a week,” Dawn guessed.
“And you?” Orion asked his sister. “How’s your mentor?”
As hard a time as Phoenix was having adapting to life as a human, dealing with his physical injuries, Orion was more worried about Dawn than he was about his brother. Because when push came to shove, Phoenix was a fighter. He was not going to let the world beat him down. Never in a million years. But Dawn? Dawn was a hider. It was a skill that had served her well as a wolf. She used her quietness, her camouflaging skills, her disappearing act, as a way of hunting. She also used it as a way of keeping tabs on humanity so that their family always knew just how far they had to go to stay the hell out of the way of humans.
But in her human form? It had become clear to Orion that instinct to hide herself away was going to be detrimental to her. She knew how to hide as a wolf, when to strike. As a human, she was perhaps hiding too well. She never spoke around humans. She shrank in on herself unless she was alone with Orion and Phoenix. Her sassy, jokey personality just kind of evaporated when they were out in public. The transition into the human world hadn’t been easy for any of them, but he was afraid that he was watching his sister melt away into oblivion.
“He’s fine,” Dawn answered curtly. “I think he’s really busy. We spent maybe twenty minutes together this morning.”
“And how many words did you say to him?” Phoenix asked teasingly, exasperatedly. He was much less patient with his sister’s shyness than Orion was.
Dawn frowned at him. “Irrelevant.”
Phoenix barked out a laugh that sounded a lot like he did when he was in wolf form and poking at one of them to get them to wrestle or race. “Yeah, I’m sure you not speaking a single word to him had nothing to do with why he left after twenty minutes.”
“I try to talk!” Dawn insisted. “It’s just that no words come out.” She pushed back into the couch and started pulling at one of her fingernails with her teeth. “I can’t explain it,” she said grumpily.
Orion let his siblings argue for a while. He liked the sound of it. Though they didn’t speak english in their wolf forms, wolves had many ways of communicating and their bickering back and forth needed no translation. His siblings were deeply comfortable with one another. Used to picking and teasing. Even in this strange world where they slept indoors and drank water that tasted like chemicals, some things were still constant. His relationship with Phoenix and Dawn being one of them.
He needed a job. Everything would be so much better if he could rent a nicer place than this for his family. Even if they all had to live in one room together, if they were back in the woods, someplace quiet that didn’t smell like humans, they could be happy there.
And as much as his siblings might think this was temporary, there was no telling how long the three of them would be stuck in Portland. They had to make the best of it.
Which meant a job. Which meant he needed help from his mentor. Which meant he needed a new mentor. Because Rose could barely stand to be within fifteen feet of him.
Orion smiled to himself. Sounded like he had something to chat over with Diana Paul.
CHAPTER THREE
“What would you do if I took a piece of candy from your mouth and ate it?” Phoenix asked as he leaned forward on
the exercise bike and tried to keep his face muscles loose.
Watt, his physical trainer always insisted that weird stuff like keeping his face loose would help the pain ease its way out of his body. Phoenix wasn’t convinced considering that pedaling on this fucking bike was pretty much the most pain he’d ever been in. Except for almost getting burned alive in a forest fire, of course.
Watt didn’t answer and Phoenix had to turn his head to look at him, which might have been the whole point in the first place. Watt was always doing stuff to make Phoenix move and twist and arch, all things that, if he were to do them enough, would actually help stretch the tightened scar tissue that webbed across the left side of his body. It wasn’t about stretching and twisting more than he used to pre-injury, it was about making sure he wasn’t avoiding using his body in a certain way just because his scar tissue was so tight.
Sure enough, Watt was standing behind Phoenix’s left shoulder, a funny look on his face. “You mean, like, if you put your fingers in my mouth and took a piece of candy from me?”
Phoenix chuckled. “No. The candy was the kind that had a little stick on the end.”
“This is sounding less and less hypothetical,” Watt said as he walked around to the other side and made Phoenix bend the other direction. Phoenix gritted his teeth before he forced his jaw to loosen, this was the harder direction. “Who’d you steal candy from?”
“My mentor at the New Day Center.”
“You took candy from Quill’s mouth and ate it?”
“No.” Phoenix shook his head. And now that he thought about it, he would never have done that. Something about the image felt wrong. But he hadn’t thought twice about taking something from Ida’s mouth. “Quill isn’t my mentor. But you know him?”
Watt came around the front of the bike and leaned down to change the tension settings. “Now, stand up and pedal, steady yourself against the handles.” He spotted Phoenix through the transition, watching him like a hawk, and then lifted his light brown eyes. “Yeah. I’ve worked with New Day clients before and their mentors often come in with them for a session or two.”
“Why’d you think I had Quill?”
“I dunno. You kind of remind me of one another. I guess I just figured they’d assign you to him.”
“Hm. No. It’s this girl Ida.”
Watt’s dark red eyebrows shot up and an unexpected look came into his eyes. “Ida. I know that chick. Lucky man.” He patted the handles of the bike and loosened the tension, grabbing Phoenix’s arm and helping him sit back down. “All right, let’s take it over to the stretching mats and then you can be done for the day.”
Phoenix frowned as he stepped off the bike. Normally, at this point in a therapy session, when his skin had loosened up enough for him to walk freely from the bike to the mat he was over the moon. It was the loosest and most pain-free he ever was. But today he barely noticed it. He was too caught up in that face that Watt had just made, the words he’d just said.
“What do you mean, I’m lucky?” he asked, accepting the hand that Watt extended to help him sit down. Watt was the only person whom Phoenix didn’t resent for helping him with stuff like this. Although, to be honest, he hadn’t really minded when Ida had ducked under his arm on the stairs yesterday either.
“I mean that chick is hot,” Watt answered, v-ing his legs and showing Phoenix how he wanted him to stretch.
Phoenix grunted through the pain of the stretch and forced himself to take a long breath. He played Watt’s words back. Hot had many meanings to humans, he’d learned in the last six months since he’d joined their ranks. “You find her attractive.”
Watt made big dumb eyes at Phoenix. “Uh. Yeah. She’s smokin’. Who doesn’t have a little thing for curvy redheads? Plus she’s got that whole librarian thing going for her. Mama Mia.” He pretended to clutch at his beating heart.
Phoenix frowned and cocked his head to one side as he watched his friend. Watt was his physical therapist, but he was also the only friend that Phoenix had made since he’d come to Portland. Although, right now, he wasn’t feeling very friendly toward him and he wasn’t altogether sure why.
“Librarian thing?” Phoenix remembered that libraries were those places that humans went to borrow books they later returned. From what he’d observed, they mostly let those books gather dust on their coffee tables before they remembered they were due back at the library and then returned them late. But either way, he hadn’t thought much about them, considering he and his siblings had never learned to read or write. He didn’t see how a library employee had anything to do with Ida.
“Yeah, the glasses, the sexy, pent up, collar-buttoned-up-to-here thing. Or maybe that’s more of a teacher fetish. I dunno. Either way, chick is hot.”
Now Phoenix was completely lost. He’d observed enough about human culture to know that there was a deep reservoir of human sexuality that he didn’t understand. Just like everything else, humans had a penchant for making sex much more complicated than it had to be. He got horny, of course, just like every other mammal on earth, but in the past when he’d chosen to do something about it, he hadn’t bothered with all the extra trappings. He saw no reason for sex to have any frills or muss or fuss. It was like when he needed to climb to the top of a mountain. Why would he spend time circling the mountain when he could just sprint to the top? It didn’t make sense to him.
“I went on a date with her once.”
Phoenix’s attention was back on Watt. He knew what a date was, and for some reason it hadn’t occurred to him that Ida went on them. He grunted.
“Didn’t get as lucky as I wanted to.”
Apparently the word lucky also had a lot of meanings. He grunted again. “What’s that mean?”
“Eh,” Watt shrugged, showed Phoenix the new stretch they were going to start incorporating. “All I got was a goodnight kiss on her doorstep and then she never called me again.”
Watt had kissed Ida.
Phoenix … did not like that. At all. He thought of the pink candy that had died her tongue like a raspberry. He thought of the dainty bites of food she’d taken at the restaurant. And then he thought of Watt’s mouth against Ida’s mouth.
Kissing was not something that Phoenix was naturally inclined to want to do. It was one of those frills he’d never seen the point of before. If the goal was sex, then people should just cut to the good stuff in his opinion, life was too short. But even though it wasn’t something he wanted to do with Ida, he really, really didn’t like the idea of Watt doing it to Ida.
He grunted again and then Watt clapped his hands together. “Good session, man. You’re starting to look really good. If you keep your exercises up at home, I think it’ll be just another month or two before we can get you off the crutches.”
“And onto what?” He’d gone from a hospital bed to a wheelchair to crutches. Phoenix assumed there’d be another inevitable step before he’d regained the bodily freedom he so craved.
“Mm, maybe a cane for a while, but honestly, you might just be back to full walking at that point.”
The rush of joy that news came riding in on was so acute it almost made Phoenix dizzy. Only a few more months, if he did his exercises, and he’d be walking again? His body would have healed enough? He couldn’t help but think that meant that he might be able to shift again at that point.
Ten minutes later, he crutched his way out of the physical therapy clinic and to the bus stop. His conversation about Ida was wiped from his mind by the idea of returning home, back to his normal life, his wild life. His wolf life.
***
“I brought you a presssssssent!” Ida sing-songed as Phoenix opened his door to her the next day. He had a strange look on his face, frowny, as usual. But there was something else there. A look of confusion, maybe? He glared at her lips and she immediately rethought her choice of bright pink lipstick. People said the shade wasn’t kind to redheads, but she’d thought it was cute when she’d slicked it on in the car! Ah, well. You
live you learn.
She held up the two shopping bags on either side of her and waggled them around, hoping to draw Phoenix’s attention there instead of her bad makeup choices. It worked.
He didn’t ask what was in the bags, but she hadn’t expected him to. Part of the planning she’d done for this appointment with him had involved preparing her own expectations. She’d expected a breakthrough on their first appointment, for the two of them to suddenly become besties, and that had been silly and naive. Baby steps. That was the new name of the new game. And if he didn’t speak for the whole time? That was just fine.
“Can I come in?”
“In here?” he looked behind him and Ida felt, viscerally, how much he hated his accommodations. Which was tricky, because he didn’t like being in public either. She was going to have to find some neutral ground and fast.
“Just for a minute. I want to show you what I bought for you.” She’d had to guess on his sizes, but she’d pretty much bought him a complete wardrobe. She’d been picky about what she’d bought, and though Portland had the best thrifting in the entire world, she’d actually made her purchases at the mall, quickly blowing through his clothing stipend from the center and moving on to her own credit card. She had a little money to burn, and though she’d never spent personal money on a client before, it had given her a warm feeling to do so for Phoenix. Plus, she was absolutely certain that he was going to love everything she’d chosen.
Today, he wore the cookie monster shirt again and the torn up Christian Grey jeans that, in her opinion, were hotter to read about than they were to see in real life. She thought that he would definitely like her choices much better.
She strode in behind him and sat herself down on the couch. “Ta-da!” She held up one T shirt after another, all in neutral or dark tones, made of wicking material, with no scratchy tags. “Trust me, this fabric is pretty much as close as you can get to being naked with clothes on.”