by Selena Scott
As it was, Diana was the one who burst out laughing. “Betcha didn’t see that coming, did you, Robert.”
Robert turned on his bar stool and his mouth dropped flat open. “She came out from the bed? And she let you hold her?”
Orion tried not to preen, but he didn’t try too hard. “Like I said, animals mostly like me.”
“I guess the vegan thing makes a little more sense now,” Robert said after a minute. “If animals take so kindly to you, I suppose it would be harder to eat them.”
Orion hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms before, but he supposed that, yeah, that was one way to put it.
“So. Orion. What do you do?”
Orion had long since learned that as vague as this question sounded, when a human asked it, they really only meant one specific thing.
“I work for a moving company. Diana found the job for me. I can’t read or write, but I’m strong.” He shrugged. “She thought it would be a good fit for me. She’s right. I like the work.”
“You can’t read or write?”
Orion shook his head, vaguely aware that Diana’s attention was bouncing back and forth, keeping close track of the conversation, her eyebrows raised.
“Nope.” He shook his head. “My siblings and I lived in our wolf forms for most of our lives, up in the hills. We came in to Portland last year, after the wildfire up there. My brother was injured, we incurred a hell of a lot of hospital bills. And now, here we are, trying to figure out how to be human.”
“Well, I’ll be.” Robert scratched his chin. “You must know the mountains pretty well, then. I’ve spent some time up there myself.”
“Dinner’s ready.” Diana started plating the food and Orion set the cats down to wash his hands, join the two of them in the dining room. The cats sat at his feet the whole meal as he and Robert talked about the wilderness that surrounded Portland. All the ways the landscape had changed over the year. It wasn’t the most scintillating conversation ever had, but it was better than the dead silence of before. Orion wished that Diana would chime in. She never did, though.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“How the absolute frick did you do that?” Diana asked the second they were pulling down the driveway and back toward Orion’s house.
Orion screwed up his eyebrows. “I told you already, animals like me.”
“No, no. Not the thing with the cats. I’m asking how the hell you charmed an entire conversation out of Robert like that.”
“Oh.” He pulled his brow down. “I just talked to him.”
Diana shook her head and stared out the windshield. She didn’t even know why she was surprised. Orion wasn’t the first client to want to spend extra time with her. He was just the first to successfully do it. There was something about this guy that made the people around him soften up. Open up.
“He loves you, you know,” Orion said after a minute.
“I know,” Diana said. “I think I just remind him of my mom. And that makes it hard for him to be around me. He misses her a lot still.”
“So do you.”
“Yes.”
It had rained while they were in Robert’s house so everything had a dreary, dripping paint look as she drove them through side streets to get back to Orion’s.
“Is the house still decorated the way your mother had it?” Orion asked.
Diana looked over at him when they pulled up to a spotlight. “How did you know that?”
He shrugged. “Nothing in there really looked like Robert to me. He seems like a pretty simple man. But all the stuff on the walls, the furniture, even the colors of the paint, it all seemed like someone else had chosen it all.”
“Yeah. My mother had a very specific… vibe.”
He rolled his head to look at her. “You know I have no idea what that means, right?”
She laughed and it sort of ended on a long, rolling sigh. When she spoke about this with other people, she used loose terms, euphemisms, tried to soften the reality of it a little bit. But she couldn’t exactly do that with Orion. First of all, he’d never understand what the heck she was hinting at, as he probably didn’t even know that people like her mother existed. Second of all, she really didn’t think that he was going to judge her, or her mother, the way so many people did.
“My mother was a witch.”
“What?”
“Well, sort of.”
The light turned green and she kept driving, grateful for a place to put her eyes.
“You mean, like, black hats and black cats? I saw some on Halloween.”
She laughed and shook her head. “No. I mean, yes. Those are witches. That’s what people usually think of. But my mother wasn’t quite like that. She was part of a religion. It’s called Wicca. She was Wiccan. And considered herself to be a witch.”
“Oh.” Orion’s brow furrowed and he didn’t say more.
Diana waited. And waited. Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe he was someone who was going to judge her mother—
“Do they get naked and do stuff in the woods?” he asked suddenly.
Diana’s eyebrows rose. “Some of them do. Yes. At really important times of the year. Or for special ceremonies.”
Orion nodded. “Phoenix and I saw a group of them maybe ten years ago. We often see campers and hikers in the mountains. Most of them are so annoying. They leave a bunch of trash behind or build huge fires that make the mountain reek for a week. But those ladies, the witches, they were really respectful.” He was quiet for a second. “They were the first naked women Phoenix ever saw.”
That made Diana grin. “But not the first naked women you ever saw?”
He pinched his lips and gave a sweet, innocent version of a smirk, devoid of any arrogance. “I’m older than he is. And my interest in that sort of thing… developed earlier.”
She laughed. Now who was talking in euphemisms? She already knew, from their entrance interview, that he’d slept with women but hadn’t had any relationships. He and his brother used to come down off the mountain in their human forms a few times a year to find women to sleep with. When she’d spoken to Phoenix about it, she’d gotten the impression that his view of sex had been very narrow, not especially creative. But she figured that was Ida’s problem, not hers. Orion, however, had been very soft when he’d spoken about his former partners. Though they’d been a means to an end for him -a solution for horniness so that he could go back to the mountain and live in peace- he’d genuinely enjoyed each woman’s company, learning from them, connecting with them, if only for a night.
At the time, Diana had thought it was sweet, respectable. Now though, it kind of made her want to spit nails. She didn’t examine the feeling very closely.
She cleared her throat. “They were doing some sort of ceremony?”
“I guess. They were dancing in the full moon. We had shifted to our human forms so we didn’t watch very long. It felt different than watching in our wolf forms.” He knocked his fist against his leg. “So those kinds of decorations, the pictures on the wall and all the stuff dangling in the windows, that’s Wiccan stuff?”
“A lot of it. They were charms and spells that she’d made. For happiness, for protection, for luck. That kind of thing. She didn’t dabble in any of the negative side of it. Some witches will try to bring bad things down on other people. But that wasn’t my mother. Mom was a very positive person. Despite…” She cleared her throat again.
“Do witches usually marry people like Robert?”
Diana laughed. “I don’t know. I’m not sure what witches normally do. I’m not one of them. But, yeah, I understand your question. I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why Robert and my mother got married. What they liked about one another. They were so different. There was genuine love there, even now, he still grieves for her. But yeah, they were kind of an odd match.”
“She was very beautiful.” He glanced at her. “I noticed in the pictures on the walls. You look just like her.”
“I found an old pict
ure of her the other day,” Diana confessed. “And it honestly took me a minute to figure out if it was me or her.” The wheels in Diana’s head turned for a while. When she spoke next, she did so without thinking, simply because she was comfortable with Orion at that particular moment. Later, she’d realize that she’d never spoken to another person about this topic. “Honestly, it surprises me that he’s never changed anything about the house. I get it that while I lived there with him he wanted to preserve the memory of my mother for me. But all the Wiccan stuff, well, he hated it when she was alive, so it’s kind of weird that he’s kept it all intact for so long.”
“He hated it?” Orion asked in confusion. “Why would he marry her if he hated it so much?”
“It was just a small part of the whole. She was smart and funny and whimsical. Beautiful like you saw in the pictures.”
“Okay. Then why would she want to marry someone who hated her religion?”
And here was the tricky part of the conversation. Not just the conversation, but of the truth. The reality that Diana had had to piece together bit by bit as she’d grown older. “My mother… had kind of a reputation.”
She could feel him blinking at her.
“You know that I have no idea what that means.”
Diana shifted, turned onto another rainy side street and was surprised to see that they were already so close to his house. “Besides the witch thing, which a lot of people around here didn’t like, there was also the men thing.”
Orion just waited.
She sighed. “She’d slept with a lot of men, I guess. She partied when she was younger. Did drugs. Drank. Wasn’t ashamed of her body or her desires. You know, the way girls are supposed to be,” Diana said sarcastically, with a roll of her eyes. “She made a lot of people uncomfortable and they spent a lot of time talking about her, spreading rumors.”
“But not Robert,” Orion guessed.
“Right,” Diana said immediately with a brisk nod of her head. “Not Robert. He didn’t love all the witch stuff, especially when she’d drag me along for it. But he never judged her either. I don’t think he cared about her past. He was just happy to be with her. And my mother needed that.”
“Everybody needs that,” Orion corrected.
Diana glanced at him as she pulled into the driveway of the big, pink house. “Maybe so.”
Orion unbuckled his seatbelt and then looked at her with confusion, his eyes going to the keys that she wasn’t taking out of the ignition. “You’re not turning the car off.”
“That’s true.”
He just stared at her, his expression stolid, patient.
She sighed. “I can’t come inside, Orion. Last weekend was… really unprofessional of me.”
His brow furrowed. “I wasn't aware that friends were supposed to be professional with one another.”
“You know what I mean. I fell asleep in your bed! Ida saw my parked car! You’re a client, your sister is a client. I can’t do something like that again.”
“I really don’t think Ida cared.”
“That really doesn’t matter. The whole issue is that she knows. That’s the hard part.”
“Right.” He turned back to the windshield and eyed his house. There were lights on in the kitchen and the second floor. Ida’s car was parked in the driveway. People were definitely home. “Okay.”
“So, this is goodnight,” Diana said firmly. “Thank you for coming along to dinner with me and Robert. You made it a really pleasant evening.”
“Wait. Just wait.” He unbuckled himself. “Seriously. Don’t drive anywhere. I’m gonna be right back.”
“Orion,” she frowned.
“Seriously. I’ll be right back. Don’t leave. I get what you were saying about Ida. I understand. Just don’t leave.”
And then he was unbuckled and jogging up to the house, around the back. Less than three minutes later he was jogging back toward her, a small bag in his hands. He threw the passenger side door open and slid in, a huge grin on his face. “Okay. Ready.”
She furrowed her brow at him. “Ready for what?”
He furrowed his brow right back at her. “To go to your house.”
She choked on air. “What makes you think I’ll take you back to my house?”
Now, he looked genuinely confused. “You don’t live with any of your employees, right? So, let’s go to your house to read, that way no one will know.”
“That’s not exactly the problem.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
She couldn’t think with him looking at her like that, his body so large and so close, his reasoning so simple. She couldn’t stop thinking about how he’d been with Robert. How easy he’d made everything. She didn’t know a single other person on earth who’d ever held an hour long conversation with her stepdad. Even her mother had spent more time chatting with Diana than she ever had with Robert.
Seeing it had warmed Diana in an unexpected way. It made her realize that she often felt worried about Robert, about his happiness, something she hadn’t realized until she’d seen him chuckling along with Orion. Until she’d seen him display some happiness.
Ugh. His question hung in the air. What’s the problem?
There were problems. She knew there were problems. Hadn’t she just gotten done explaining to Orion about her mother’s issues with men? With the rumor mill?
“It’s late,” was the issue she came up with. It sounded stupid to her own ears.
“You don’t have to drive me home,” he told her. “We live pretty close.”
That’s what he thought the issue was? Double ugh. It wasn’t his fault she was fighting this internal battle. It wasn’t his fault that she wasn’t even sure which side she was on.
He dug through the small bag in his hands and pulled out the book they’d read the other night. He wagged it around a little bit, teasing her.
She laughed, groaned, and put the car in reverse. He gave a happy little sigh that went straight to the center of her chest.
***
This time, they fell asleep on the couch instead of a bed. She hadn’t even shown him the part of her house where her bed lived. So, he’d taken the hint that he wasn’t supposed to ask. He’d been more comfortable falling asleep stretched out beside her on his bed, but he wouldn’t trade this moment for the world, aches and pains and all.
Because the next morning, at dawn, he woke up with Diana’s head in his lap, the book tucked to her chest and her legs curled up like a snail. His legs were stretched outward, his arms spread along the back of the couch, and his head tipped back. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to spend a night’s rest, but what did he care? Her ponytail was spilling over his legs in a glossy wave. He wasn’t sure it got better than this.
He was aware, however, that he hadn’t been invited to sleep over. He remembered her behavior from before, when she’d slept at his house. She’d woken up and been distinctly uncomfortable that she’d accidentally slept over, indicating to him that it was rude to sleep over without asking to. He’d watched her fidget toward the door and wondered how fast her human rules of etiquette were going to have her jetting out the door. It hadn’t taken long at all.
Usually, even when he didn’t know the proper etiquette, he just tried to mirror someone he trusted, someone he knew better. Ida was a great person to mirror. She was polite and kind and thoughtful. Wren was a little trickier, because he’d come to realize that she wasn’t the most polite person to ever walk the earth. Diana, however, was the perfect person to mirror. She’d written the book on manners. Literally. Apparently there was a book that the mentors used to teach mentee shifters about human culture and manners.
So, using that as a guide, he figured it might be time to sneak out of her house, seeing as he wasn’t expressly invited to be there.
As gently as he could, he lifted her head off of his thigh, trying hard not to stroke his fingers through her hair (which he thought might qualify as creepy) or touch her with the morning
wood that was currently fighting for its life against his jeans (which he was more than positive would qualify as creepy). He slid out from under her and gently slid a pillow under her head, hoping not to wake her.
Then he had a quick, internal debate. He knew for a fact that it was illegal to pee outside, in his human form at least. And he didn’t think he could make it all the way back to his house. So. Yeah. He was going to have to use her bathroom. Which he didn’t know the rules on. Was he allowed to use her bathroom even though he hadn’t been invited to? He certainly wasn’t going to wake her and ask.
He quietly opened and closed a few doors, one was a closet, one was a bedroom that he guessed was a guest bedroom, one was a home office that looked eerily similar to her office at the center, and the last was the bathroom. He relieved himself, washed his hands, and used a little bit of her toothpaste, allowing himself to look around while he finger-brushed. The bathroom was clean, with little signs of life sprinkled around. A green plant on the shaded windowsill, a ridiculously fluffy bathmat that was crooked and folded-under at one corner. Confusingly, there were two very large candles on either side of her bathtub. He had no idea why a person would need those in a bathroom.
He left the bathroom quietly and was just turning the corner to sneak to the front door when Diana ran smack into his chest.
She screamed bloody murder, much the way she had last night at the center, but, confusingly, she also jumped straight into his arms, her legs going around his waist and her fingers digging into his shoulders.
“Oh my GOD,” she scolded him. She clutched him so tightly he could feel her heart banging against her ribs. “You scared me, Orion! I thought you’d left!”
“I had to use the bathroom,” he told her, bemused as hell. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She was still clutching him tightly and he could hear the tremor in her voice, scent her adrenaline on the air.
“I thought you were an intruder!”
He quirked his head to one side, his arms firmly around her, holding her to him. “You thought I was an intruder and your first instinct was to jump into my arms? Diana, we’re gonna have to work on your self defense.”