by Selena Scott
“Hi, hi. Sorry I’m late. I got caught up at work. Oh, hello. Do you two know each other?”
Diana stared at Orion as he strode up to the table. He looked… awful. He wore torn jeans, boots, and a very sweaty T-shirt that read “Fisher’s moving” across the chest. He had beads of sweat on his forehead, his brown hair was sticking out every which way, and honestly she could smell him from across the table.
It wasn’t a terrible smell. In fact, in another circumstance, she might have thought it was an incredibly alluring scent. But right now, she could only gape at him.
“Are you bleeding?” she asked him, taking in the back of one of his hands.
“What? Oh, crap. Yeah. I banged my knuckles on a doorjamb at work. Hold on, I’ll go clean up in the bathroom.” He turned to the pretty boy who was gaping at him as much as Diana was. “Didn’t catch your name, but you’re welcome to eat with us if you’d like. I think there’s some extra chairs over there.”
And then he was striding away toward the bathrooms and Pretty Boy was staring down at Diana again.
“Tell me this isn’t a blind date,” he said with something like mystified fascination crossing his face.
“No, no,” Diana waved her hand through the air, hoping it would help some of the mystification that she herself was feeling. “We’re just friends. Meeting for a sandwich after work.”
“Right,” the guy said, still looking like he couldn’t possibly believe that Diana was there to meet the sweaty guy who’d just walked in. “Okay, well, I’ll leave you two to it.”
A minute or so later, Orion was back. His hair was wet and slicked back and dark with water from the sink, the collar of his red shirt a dark maroon with all the dripping water from his beard. He’d obviously just dunked his head under the water.
She blinked at him. “Here.” She dug through her purse and pulled out a bandaid.
“Thanks.” He took it, slapped it on his bleeding knuckle and then leaned back in his chair and just grinned at her. “Hi.”
She couldn’t help but just blink back. “Hi.”
She was going to have to take a second to recalibrate here. She’d been so certain that he’d cross every friend line in the book. Wine and dine her. She’d been so sure that she’d have to remind him that they were only friends and it didn’t matter if he dressed up for her or scared away other men. They were just friends.
But yeah. Looked like he’d gotten the memo on that one.
“Is that guy not gonna join us?” Orion asked, peering around the restaurant and then waving at Pretty Boy, who was still studying them from a far corner.
“I don’t know him,” Diana said simply.
“Oh. Okay. Sandwiches, then? I’ll go order for us.”
“Turkey reuben, please. And an iced tea.”
He nodded and was up at the counter, ordering for them. A few moments later he was back, carefully setting up their numbered plaque so that the servers could see where to deliver their food.
“So,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “How was the rest of your day?”
Diana cleared the cobwebs from her throat. “Busy. But maybe not as busy as yours? Looks like you had a lot going on?”
He waved one hand. “Not more than usual. The boss called me in this afternoon for a last minute moving job. Which I’m always grateful for because he pays more money if you come in without being on the schedule. Usually most of our jobs are on the weekends, so it was kind of nice to have something to do on a Friday afternoon.”
“Are you liking it? The moving gig?” She herself had been the person to get him that job. She knew the owner and had placed other shifters with him before. She knew that Cory, Orion’s boss, wasn’t bigoted toward shifters, which was kind of a rarity in this town. She’d hoped that Orion wouldn’t shirk the job the way he’d shirked all of his other mentors, but so far it had been four months and he was still holding strong.
“I really like it. Gives me something to do with my time. And I get to see people’s houses, which is interesting to me. Besides, the money is nice. Means I can buy a friend a sandwich if I want.” He smiled at her, nothing suggestive about it. It was just a true, genuine grin.
Her stomach flipped. She wished he were in fancy clothes and had brought her flowers. She’d be letting him down gently right about now and all this would have been so much easier. Instead he was smiling at her in a sweaty shirt, his eyes staying firmly above her shoulders.
“All right,” the waiter said as he brought a tray of food over for them. “I’ve got two iced teas, a turkey reuben and a tempeh reuben with vegan cheese.”
He put the turkey sandwich in front of Orion and the tempeh in front of Diana. As soon as he left, they switched their plates.
She couldn’t not ask. “You ordered a vegan sandwich?”
He already was two-handing the gigantic sandwich, a quarter of it chewed up in his mouth. “Yeah.”
She blinked at him and couldn’t stop herself from wondering if maybe he didn’t know what tempeh was? Or what vegan meant? He’d only been in the human world for a year, after all. “Why? You’re partial to the flavor or something?”
“No,” he laughed, shaking his head and swallowing. He set the sandwich down and drained half of his iced tea in one big gulp. “I’m vegan.”
The bite of turkey sandwich in her mouth froze. She quickly chewed and swallowed, positive her eyes were the size of chicken eggs. “What?”
He laughed at whatever expression her face was making and didn’t bother repeating himself. Instead he drew a little design over his fries with the ketchup and started in on them.
She simply couldn’t go on from this new information. Could barely process it. “Orion, you’re a shifter. A wolf shifter. What do you mean you’re vegan?”
He wiped his hands on his napkin and leaned back, looking out the window, trying to gather his thoughts. “I spent every day since our parents died hunting food for Phoenix and Dawn. I was better at it than they were. Bigger. Better sense of smell. Though they’re both faster than I am and Dawn is better at sneaking up on prey. But I was always the one who actually brought the meat home.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not sure why the task always fell to me. Maybe it’s because I’m the oldest. Or I’m just the only one who could really do it. But yeah. When you kill living, breathing creatures every day for the survival of you and your family, you start to have a certain respect for life. For other creatures.”
“So, you don’t eat animals.”
“I don’t eat animals that I haven’t killed. And I don’t kill animals anymore. And luckily tempeh reubens really get the job done.”
“And dairy? You don’t do that either?”
He shrugged. “We’ve got neighbors who bring eggs over that their chickens lay. Sometimes I’ll eat those. But no. Cheese, milk, yogurt, all that comes from animals that I’ll never see or know and have anything to do with besides the money I spend on them. Something about that doesn’t sit right with me. I’d prefer to eat plants, I guess.”
Diana felt a fluttering in her chest that she couldn’t explain. She quietly ate her sandwich and he ate his.
“You eat faster than I thought you might,” he observed, already having polished his plate clean using his last remaining fries. She was just finishing up her sandwich and poking around at her fries.
“What did you imagine?”
He did this thing where he pulled his face into a rather imperious expression and pretended to pick lightly at an imaginary bite of food. He used two fingers, and then pretended to daintily wipe his mouth with his napkin.
Diana watched him with a wry smile on her face that she couldn’t contain. “Life is too short to eat slowly. Besides, who do I need to have manners for right now? You? You polished off your food in about six minutes while wearing a shirt so sweaty I could practically see through it. Something tells me that neither of us care if I dispense with the manners.”
He smiled back at her. “You’re right. I d
on’t care. I’m a wolf. Manners pretty much mean nothing to me.” He cocked his head to one side. “You look different.”
She shrugged. “This is how I look when I spend time with a friend. Sorry if you were expecting a ton of makeup or fancy clothes or something.”
“I’m expecting nothing, Diana,” he said and for some reason, his simple wording made a warm feeling swell up inside her. She thought, that just like everything he said, he really, truly meant those words. She was just starting to understand. She’d said they could be friends and he hadn’t shown up with a rose between his teeth, attempting to change her mind. He was really going to try to be her friend. “I like the way you look right now. You look… relaxed. And like you’re only thinking about one thing. It’s nice.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Do I usually look like I’m thinking about more than one thing?”
He raised his eyebrows right back. “Always. I think you have a master plan and about forty little other plans that are constantly running in your head. And somehow you keep them all in line with one another.”
She blinked. How had he known that? Was she really that transparent?
“But not right now,” he continued on. “Right now your hair is loose and you’re wearing normal clothes and you’re all fed and cute and, yeah, I think you’re thinking about only one thing. Now, I’m not sure what that one thing is, but maybe someday I’ll find out.” He balled up his napkin. “Dessert? There’s a vegan ice cream place a few blocks this way.”
“Oh. Sure. Yeah.” Diana rose up and followed Orion, bussing her tray after he did his.
She stared quizzically at his back and right before they left the sandwich shop, Pretty Boy caught her eye again. He gave her a strange look, like he still couldn’t figure out why a girl like Diana might be spending time with a guy like Orion. But this time, it put Diana’s back up. Seeing that judgmental look on the man’s face made her realize just how judgmental she’d been this entire day. How many assumptions she’d made about Orion. About this man who’d offered her friendship and kindness and instead of accepting them with an open heart, she’d seen only the motives of other men. She wondered if she’d ever seen Orion clearly before this moment.
She looked away from Pretty Boy and followed Orion out onto the street. It was a nice spring night, maybe a touch chilly for ice cream, but nice enough for a stroll. “Orion?”
“Yeah?” His hands were in his pockets and his boots clopped heavily on the sidewalk as he strolled along beside her at an easy pace.
“Do you think of me as judgmental?”
He considered her words for a disconcertingly long time before he finally shook his head. “No. I think of you as observant. Observant of patterns.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean like this morning, when you searched my pockets for drugs. You noticed that I was acting differently and you used all the things you’d ever seen or learned to make a guess about what might be going on. You weren’t judging me, you were using your brain.”
She considered that. It was a generous interpretation. “What about vain?”
“Vain? You mean, like, you probably think this song is about you?”
She burst out laughing.
He blushed a little. “I’ve been trying to catch up on pop culture!”
She laughed some more. “It was a great reference. Not exactly current, but still great.” She sobered a little. “Yeah, I guess that’s the way I mean it.”
“No.” He barely had to consider that one. “You’re not vain. If anything, you act like you’re not as beautiful as you are. You act like a normal woman when you should be…” he trailed off, thinking hard. “If you acted as beautiful as you are, you’d be a famous movie star by now. Or a model. Or, I saw this movie the other night, this beautiful woman convinced a bunch of brothers to fight to the death over her. Terrible movie. Waste of time. Couldn’t sleep afterward. But still, if you were vain, I think you’d be doing stuff like that.”
She shook her head at him. “Have you always been this sweet?”
He blinked in surprise. “Oh. Maybe? I don’t really think of it as sweet. It’s just the way I am, you know? I don’t understand why some people are rude. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
He looked over at her while she pondered his words.
“Diana, do you think you’re judgmental or vain?”
She pursed her lips. “Sometimes. I think sometimes I have everything figured out and then somebody goes and really surprises me.” She knocked her shoulder against his. A spark buzzed between them and she wondered if he’d felt it.
***
He could watch her eat that weird green ice cream for a century. He didn’t want to, as Wren would have put it, ‘perv out on her’, so he didn’t watch each bite travel on her spoon and disappear between her lips. But he could have.
She was surprising him tonight. First with her appearance, her hair in a loose, wavy bun at the base of her neck, her casual jeans and a T-shirt. Sandals that showed every one of her turquoise painted toenails. And then with her demeanor. He was used to assertive Diana who expected the best from everyone around her, who knew the answers to everything, who had every second of her day plotted out and didn’t spend a second doing something that deviated her from the plan.
But that was not the person who’d eaten a sandwich across from him. Tonight’s Diana been quiet and befuddled and sweet. It was almost like, in her normal life, she wore some rigid suit made of metal and after work she just sort of slipped it off and got comfortable. Orion liked it. He liked it a lot. Maybe too much.
Because he was barely keeping a lid on it right now.
He couldn’t help but watch as she lazily licked at the ice cream on her spoon, her eyes falling halfway closed.
This was another part of her that he hadn’t expected. She was… a sensual creature. He’d supposed that from the ankle-breaking height of her heels, her taut ponytails, the fact that he’d never seen her consume anything at work but hurried sips of black coffee, that she didn’t care for the sensual side of the world. He figured that she didn’t care all that much for a variety of colors on her plate, or the scent of a fresh-baked bread, or the taste of cold beer with salty pretzels —all things that Orion had come to love about living in the human world. But he’d watched her devour her sandwich with a single-minded enjoyment, even licking sauce off her thumb at one point, and he’d been humbled, knowing he’d made assumptions about her.
As he watched her enjoy her ice cream now, her long legs stretched out in front of her, one of her sandals dangling from her big toe, her eyes watching the sky go a deep, velvety black, he was downright embarrassed to have misjudged her so greatly.
She’d asked if she was judgmental. But maybe he was the judgmental one. He’d seen her in one context -at work- and assumed that that was who she was, entirely and completely. Sure, getting to know people was still kind of new to Orion, as he’d lived exclusively with his family his entire life, but still, shouldn’t he have automatically assumed that she was more complex than she seemed? Didn’t each and every person have a rich and often surprising variety of personalities?
She finished her ice cream and he took her bowl and tossed it away. There was nothing else to suggest that they do together but he really didn’t want the evening to end. To ever end.
“You want a ride home?” she asked with a little bit of a yawn at the end of the sentence. He wondered how early she’d woken up. No matter what time in the morning he got to the center she always beat him there.
“Yes.”
He liked the bus, but he was positive he’d like a ride from Diana better.
They were cruising down the road about ten minutes later, Orion rolling down the window and taking a sniff of the night air every time she asked for the next direction.
She gave him a strange look before her expression cleared and her eyes went large. “Hold on. Are you giving me directions based on your sense of smell?”
&nb
sp; He shrugged. “It’s my best sense. And I can’t read the street signs. I memorized the bus routes for the most part. But it’s kind of a new ballgame in a car.”
“Wow. I— that’s remarkable. You’re remarkable. Your whole family. Sometimes I can’t believe you guys are real.”
He felt like he grew another inch at the compliment. “Thanks. You know Dawn just got her driver’s license.”
“I know. Quill mentioned that. It’s a real accomplishment.”
“She took me for a spin in her car on the last full moon day.”
Diana’s brow furrowed. “She already has a car? Quill didn’t mention that to me in our check-in. How’d she afford it?”
Oh. Shoot. He’d missed that. It was one of those things that slipped right past Orion because he hadn’t been born into the world of humans. He’d been born into the wilderness, knowing nothing of human customs and habits except for what his parents had told him before they’d died. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask Dawn how she’d paid for the car. Honestly, he’d just kind of thought, driver’s license, car, now she’s a driver.
In retrospect, that was pretty dumb.
“I… don’t know.”
Diana glanced at him from the driver’s seat. “I don’t think her part time work at the library would be anywhere near enough to have gathered up a downpayment on a car yet. I hope she didn’t buy anything on credit.”
Orion didn’t even know what that meant, but his heart was racing now. This was what had scared him about the human world. There were so many hidden dangers that not only did he not spot, he didn’t even know they existed. He couldn’t protect his siblings in the human world. And now maybe Dawn had gone and gotten herself in trouble with something called credit.
“Don’t worry,” Diana said, momentarily slipping her hand over his shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “I’ll look into it. I’ll figure it out. If she’s gotten into any trouble, I’ll make sure she doesn’t stay in it.”