by Selena Scott
Watt’s eyes got very round. “What? Who?”
Phoenix nodded to the lithe blonde who Watt had been flirting with a few minutes before. Even now she was eyeing Watt with an almost predatory eye.
Watt’s eyes were even rounder now. “She’s a shifter?”
Phoenix gave a curt nod. “Yeah. Python shifter.”
Watt looked back and forth between Phoenix and the python. “How do you know?”
Phoenix shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s something I’ve always been able to do. Orion too.”
“And your sister?”
Phoenix shrugged again. “I don’t know. She probably hasn’t spent enough time around any human populations to be able to distinguish who is a shifter and who isn’t. But maybe. Not all shifters can do that?”
Watt shook his head. “I don’t know much about it, but I’ve never heard of anyone being able to do that before.” Watt narrowed his eyes at Phoenix. “You can not only tell who is a shifter, but you can tell what kind of shifter they are?”
Phoenix frowned and shook his head. “Not always. There’ve been some shifters that I couldn’t tell what they were.” Most recently, Wren. He’d known she was a shifter, but he’d had no clue what she was. Some folks were better at hiding it than others, he supposed. “And it’s not like I’ve gone up and asked everyone what they were in order to confirm my guesses. I could be wrong, I guess.”
“Still. Wow. That’s a hell of a magic trick.”
Phoenix turned to Watt, there was a strange expression on his friend’s face. It made Phoenix uncomfortable. The entire time that they’d known one another, Watt had never given Phoenix shit for being a shifter. Phoenix knew that there were plenty of people out there who were plenty scared or suspicious of shifters. Watt had never seemed like one of them. But now, his friend was looking at him with something that looked like trepidation, a nervousness that had never been present before. Phoenix honestly hadn’t thought of his ability to sense other shifters as scary. But apparently it was something that Watt was going to have to get used to.
Phoenix stifled a sigh. Just one more thing he didn’t understand about human culture. He lightly clasped Watt’s shoulder. “All right. Why don’t you show me a thing or two about women.”
“Right,” Watt said with a shake of his head, like he was trying to clear the cobwebs that Phoenix’s revelation had inserted into his brain. “You wanted to flirt with girls. And kiss some of them. Really get to the bottom of why we nitty the gritty. Am I right, my brother?” He clasped Phoenix’s shoulder, and just like that, there was Watt again. No longer freaked out, simply silly Watt, wanting to hook up his friend.
“Right,” Phoenix stated firmly, glad that the weirdness of the moment before was gone.
And thus commenced one of the more awkward hours of Phoenix’s life. Watt was surprisingly skilled at bringing groups of women toward them, summoning them with some human trick of charm and smile and laughter. It seemed, however, that Phoenix was equally good at repelling them.
“You have to speak,” Watt reprimanded, when the most recent cluster of women floated away back to the dance floor. “You can’t just stare at them. I thought you’d said you’d hooked up before?”
“I have. But I didn’t want to have sex with any of them.” He pointed at the flock of women who had just been standing around them. Sex wasn’t the point of tonight. The point of tonight was kissing, which Watt had already done twice with two different women. But Phoenix hadn’t particularly wanted to do that with any of them either.
“You’re saying that you can’t turn on the charm unless you’re into one of them?”
“I guess,” Phoenix said with a shrug. It wasn’t exactly like he’d fooled himself into thinking he had ‘charm’. But he’d done this song and dance effectively before. He just didn’t want to tonight.
“All right then, brother. Pick one. Pick a girl you’re attracted to and I’ll try to get her over here and then hopefully you’ll talk to her and not scowl at her and you’ll finally learn the biggest advantage to having these crutches.”
“Advantage?”
“Yeah, dude. Girls love a guy with an injury. I can’t explain the correlation, but it seriously makes them want to take their pants off.”
Phoenix felt his lip curl as nausea rose up in his gut. The idea of a woman being attracted to him because he was injured was deeply, inherently repellant to him. It made the wolf inside of him feel even more trapped and restless. Having any attention paid to his injury made him feel like he was one second away from some more fit animal extincting him.
Watt, however, didn’t notice Phoenix’s aversion to that statement. “So, who do you like? Pick any girl.”
Phoenix looked around, casting about for that woman with the coppery hair. It looked like maybe she’d left. He sighed. Apparently the woman he wanted to do this stuff with wasn’t in the bar tonight.
He didn’t want to flirt with these women who shouted into his ear and smelled like liquor and sucked on their lips when Watt told them he was shifter. He definitely didn’t want to flirt with someone who thought his crutches were hot. No.
He just wanted to be close to someone warm. And sweet. Who was a good, patient listener and never made him feel dumb for not understanding human stuff. Who was mindful of his injury, but never drew attention to it. Who smelled good and felt good and reminded him of all the best parts of falling asleep in the sun.
Phoenix rose up on his crutches. There was probably a more polite way to say all this, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t be a perfect human all the time. He was mostly wolf anyways.
“I’m going now,” he told Watt. “See you next week.” And then he crutched away toward a bus stop, feeling like he was finally headed in the right direction.
CHAPTER NINE
“I didn’t want to kiss any of them.”
Ida blinked at her unexpected visitor. She was suddenly, extremely aware of the fact that she had bare feet, sleep shorts, and a baggy sweatshirt currently on display. An October wind, with a little bit of a bite to it, snaked around her ankles and she stepped back.
He took a corresponding step forward and she froze. He was coming inside? At 11 pm? While he was talking about kissing?
Well, he was here already so she supposed it didn’t make sense for both of them to freeze out on her porch.
She waved him inside.
“You look different,” he informed her, his eyes catching on the high, messy bun she’d yanked her hair into right before she’d washed her face.
Not a stitch of makeup on. She wasn’t even wearing earrings. Her hair wasn’t done. And she certainly wasn’t in a dress and heels. She supposed she must look like the stuffed animal version of herself right now.
He frowned at her. “No glasses.”
Yup. Not even those. Which was why she was squinting at him as she closed the door behind him. “I was just gonna get in bed. What are you doing here, Phoenix?”
“You can’t be Glasses without glasses,” he said, and if she hadn’t known exactly what he was talking about, she would have thought he was speaking pure nonsense.
“I never asked to be Glasses, you know,” she said drily. “You’re the one who came up with that.”
He huffed, as if that were neither here nor there, and then started crutching in toward her kitchen. “Can I have water?”
“Yes. But, seriously. What are you doing here?”
“Watt took me to a bar to kiss women.”
“Ah.” I didn’t want to kiss any of them. Now she was catching up to speed. “And you didn’t want to kiss any of them.”
“Right. But he kissed two of them.”
Ida sighed. “Sounds like our Watt.”
“He thought that if I tried it out, I would understand why humans do it. Better than having someone explain it.”
“Makes sense.”
Phoenix stood over her sink and downed a glass of water in four impressive gulps. He set the cup back in the cupb
oard and Ida made a note to explain about washing dishes to him. She didn’t exactly consider now to be the time. Not when he was so agitated.
He turned and crutched into her living room, sitting where he had earlier that day.
“You’re certainly making yourself comfortable,” she told him.
“Your home is much more comfortable than mine. It’s nice to be comfortable.”
And he didn’t get enough of that in his life. She bit back remorse about his living situation. It seriously was the first thing she wanted to rectify for him, but she had trouble seeing how she could fix it. His government-allotted checks could only be used on government housing. And to pay for his own housing he’d need to get a job. To get a job he’d need skills. And most likely, he’d need to be much more recovered from his injury than he currently was. So. Yeah. He was stuck for the time being.
“Are you going to sit down?” he asked her.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
Instead of answering, seemingly at the end of his patience, Phoenix leaned one unexpectedly long arm out from the couch and snagged the edge of her sweater. He gave her two sharp tugs which had her stumbling toward him. When she was close enough, he snagged her behind the legs and lifted her next to him on the couch.
Ida blinked at the place where she’d just been standing and then blinked down at where she now sat. Which was very, very close to where he sat.
In fact, her bare leg pressed up against the side of his jeans. “Phoenix—”
“I think you should kiss me.”
She blinked at him. There was no way she could have heard that right. She must be misunderstanding him.
“Wait.” He shook his head. “That came out wrong.”
Ah, yes, of course. There was a misunderstanding. She waited patiently, her heart frozen in her chest, for him to clarify what he’d meant.
“You told me that it’s human etiquette to ask, not tell. So, sorry. I’ll try again. Ida, will you kiss me?”
Aaaaand she was back at square one on the whole understanding what he was talking about thing. “You … what?”
Her vision was blurry without her glasses on, but she could tell that he looked just about as confused as she felt.
“You said that if I wanted to kiss, I should ask,” he said slowly. “So, I’m asking. Will you kiss me?”
“You don’t have any interest in kissing,” she vaguely repeated his words from earlier that day. “You said there’s no point to it. That it’s a stupid human thing.”
He shrugged. “I still think I should try it.”
“With me,” she said blankly, her brain scrambling to catch up.
His eyes lifted from her lips to her eyes. He shrugged again. “Yeah.”
She could really think of nothing else to say. And could anybody really blame her? It was 11pm, she’d already had a full, confusing, sexually tense day before any of this kissing nonsense started. She was still processing what Diana had really meant about crossing lines and keeping her job or losing her job. And to be honest, she was still processing what it really meant to have a crush on a client. To have a crush on Phoenix. Now, here he was, looking at her with those dark, unforgiving eyes, frowning in a complicated sort of way as his big old body took up more than his fair share of her couch.
“I mean,” he said after she was quiet for too long. “I’m not expecting to like it.”
Ida laughed, a knee jerk bark of an exhalation. Wasn’t this just one of the things that she really liked about him? His ridiculous, oblivious honesty? His blatant unconcern for human etiquette made him very easy to read. And honestly, he’d just made this whole complicated situation much easier for her to respond to.
Because maybe he was right. Maybe he wouldn’t like kissing at all. But Ida knew for a fact that she did like kissing. And she especially liked kissing people she had a crush on. So, yeah. It would not be smart on any level for her to kiss Phoenix tonight. Case closed. Problem solved. Sayonara, big boy.
She took a deep breath and stood up from the couch, preparing herself to gently kick him out of her house, but was stopped half a step away when he snagged her sweater again.
“Why are you running away?” he asked. “I made you scared of me?”
She looked down at his dark eyes, square jaw, stern unnerving expression. His grip on her sweater. Was she scared of him? No. Was she scared of what he might do to her heart? Absolutely.
“I’m not scared of you.”
“Good.” He gave her another abrupt tug and this time she tumbled into his lap. She stiffened, worried that her weight might have hurt his injury, but he tightened his arms around her waist and drew her closer. She was close enough to be able to make out every line of serious earnestness around his lovely-dark eyes. “Will you kiss me?”
“Phoenix,” she said in frustration when she realized that he wasn’t going to settle for anything less than the crystal clear truth from her. “You might not like kissing, but I do. And I don’t do it with just anybody. It’s important to me. It makes me … feel stuff. So, no. I’m not going to kiss you.”
“Who would you kiss?” he asked, his eyes even darker than before, flicking back and forth between her irises as if he were scrambling to catch up to her line of thought.
She was starting to get frustrated now. “I don’t know! Someone I trust! Someone who I have nice, bubbly-hot feelings for.”
The dead eyes were back as his jaw set and for the first time since they’d sat on the couch, he leaned away from her. “And that’s not me?”
“I—” She turned away from him. “Crap,” she muttered to herself.
One firm finger found its way under her chin and she felt her face being tipped back toward that dark gaze of his. At some point they were going to have to talk about his tendency to manhandle, but right now, it was pretty much just scrambling her brains.
“Or maybe,” he guessed, pulling her into those singe-hot eyes of his. “It is me but you don’t want it to be?”
“You’re pretty smart for a wolf,” she grumbled quietly.
He smirked, not taking offense to her statement in the least. “Wolves are smart.”
“We’re not kissing.” She straightened to scramble off his lap but his arm banded around her waist, holding her in place.
“It could just be once?” He suggested. “Quickly?”
She frowned. “You really think that would satisfy your curiosity on the matter?”
He nodded. “I think so. I definitely don’t want to do what Watt was doing in the bar.” He curled a lip. “It looked unsanitary.”
She couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re genetically related to animals who sniff each other’s butts and you think a little tongue kissing is unsanitary?”
He scowled at her, a barely noticeable light of playfulness behind his dark gaze.
She scowled back, just as playful.
His arm was still banded around her waist, his eyes calm, but also beseeching. As forceful as his presence was, he really was asking her.
“If I were to say no, one more time, and really mean it, what would you do?”
He blinked at her in slight confusion. “Like I’d have a choice? I’d go home. Or, maybe we’d watch TV and then I’d go home because I kind of liked doing that earlier.”
She growled low in her throat and glanced away. He was making this difficult. What good was having a crush on a caveman if he didn’t act like a caveman all the time? It would be so much easier to send him away if he was bossing her around and demanding things he had no right to demand. It might even make her crush on him dry up and blow away, like dust in a desert wind. Which would be trés convenient. But he was being all sweet and thoughtful and, besides his arm around her hips, not forceful in the least.
Even now, he was just patiently watching her, blinking those alert, dark eyes like he had all the time in the world. And she supposed that when he was in his wolf form, he often had lengthy, quiet stretches of time when he did
n’t have a to-do list. There was no next-next-next when you were a creature of the wild. There was only now-now-now.
That attitude was unfortunately very appealing. She’d never been the sole and complete focus of a man before. Especially not a man she wanted so badly.
Ida shoved all thoughts aside. She let her mind go to that blissful, unworried place of feeling, not thinking. For a moment, there was no Diana, there was no center, there was no power disparity between a mentor and a mentee. There was just her, a woman in PJs, and him, a man whose lap was quite a comfortable place to be sitting.
She sighed. He was right. One little kiss wasn’t going to be hurting anything. And then he’d let her up and it would all be over.
“Fine,” she huffed. “We’ll kiss. Once. Quickly. The end. And then you can’t ask for it again, okay?”
“Okay,” he agreed immediately. Then his eyes left hers and flicked down to her mouth.
Ida licked her lips and she watched his pupils follow the movement. He’d never looked quite so man-like to her before. Not human, exactly, just man. His jaw was tight at the corners, every ounce of his focus on her mouth. His wide shoulders were rigid, at attention, sitting up, ready, his arm at her waist strong and unyielding. She bit her lip.
His nostrils flared.
She placed her hands gently on his shoulders and his arm around her waist involuntarily flexed. He was breathing faster, his eyes still glued to her mouth. He was either treating her like she was a threat to his very existence, or like the thing he wanted the most in the world, she honestly couldn’t tell.
Why was she dragging this out? She’d promised herself it was just going to be quick, a little nothing of a peck, but here she was making a meal out of it. A meal that might just slice and dice her heart if she wasn’t careful.
So, she leaned forward while he kept perfectly still, his eyes tracking her movement, and she gave him a kiss. She pressed her lips against his for just one, warm moment, telling herself it was so that he could really understand the feel of a kiss. But kissing was more than just pressing against one another. So, with that thought in mind, Ida put her lips at the seam of his mouth and kissed, with just the barest of suction, at his bottom lip. She let it linger for half a breath before pulling away.