by Selena Scott
“Humans make this kind of thing so complicated,” he said after a minute. “Why can’t sex just be sex? It’s plenty pleasurable all on its own.”
So … he had had sex. She narrowed her eyes at him, trying to figure him out. She wondered how much she could ask. It wasn’t really her business.
“What?” he asked her, apparently reading a question in her expression.
“Nothing. Not appropriate for me to ask.” She waved a hand in the air and reached for the remote, intending to turn the television back on. But he nudged her hip with his socked foot.
“Come on. Ask me. You won’t embarrass me.”
She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth. “You talk as if you’ve had sex before.” She cleared her throat and forced herself to make eye contact.
He nodded curtly. “I have.”
“But you’ve never kissed someone or seen women’s underwear in real life.”
“Right.”
“I really don’t understand how that’s possible.”
His face tightened down. “We would leave the bar, go somewhere private, usually her house. She’d get naked, we’d get into the position and have sex. Then I’d leave.”
Ida felt a little faint. “The position?”
“Yeah.” Now he was looking at her like she was the crazy one. “The sex position. The one you have to get into to have sex.”
“And what position is that exactly?” She was equally intrigued and horrified.
His brows battened down. “She’s in front on her hands and knees, I’m in back. Sex.”
Wow. It all became stunningly clear to her. Most likely the only sex he’d ever witnessed in his life had been between animals. With the male of the species mounting the female from behind. It might have never even occurred to him that there was more than one way to do it. He’d never even heard of foreplay until today! Holy moly.
Ida faced front and let her mind race for a moment. A hundred questions scanned past. Should she correct him? Find him a picture book about sex? Just butt out and let him figure this stuff out on his own?
A solution came to her.
“I’m gonna schedule another meeting with Quill for tomorrow or the next day. I’ll hang with Dawn and you and Quill can … talk.” She’d make sure to prep Quill on the situation and let him handle it however he was going to. That was going to have to be good enough. Because this conversation was very close to crossing lines, if it hadn’t already.
“Why?” he asked her skeptically.
“Because there’s some things he’ll know how to talk to you about that I don’t know.”
He frowned. “I don’t want to talk to Quill about sex.”
“Well. It might be better than talking to me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m getting all …” she pointed to her cheeks to the hair that was starting to stick to the sweat at the back of her neck. “Nervous.”
“Talking to me about sex is making you nervous?”
Damn him. He looked more like a wolf than she’d ever seen before. His eyes pierced, her, unblinking, confident.
She sighed in what she hoped sounded like exasperation. “Yes. It is. Because it is a sensitive subject and I’m no expert.”
“You haven’t had sex?” he tipped his head to the side, obviously trying to understand.
She frowned. “Yes, I have. But I still don’t know how to talk to you about it. There’s a lot to, um, fill you in on and I’m not the person to do it. Quill will know how.”
“You’re saying there’s a lot I don’t know.”
She cleared her throat. Apparently he thought that sex was only a doggy style affair, so yeah. “I think you’d benefit from a sex ed course of some kind. But maybe a conversation with Quill to start out.”
“What don’t I know? It never seemed that complicated to me.”
Now he was looking a little agitated. Great. She’d aggravated his injury and now she’d aggravated him emotionally. She wasn’t winning any awards for mentorship today.
She cast about for a way to describe it. “There’s more, um, variety than you think. Just like there’s all those different ways to kiss someone? Well, there’s all different ways to have sex with someone, too. Different, um, things you can do. Different positions. It’s all a part of a greater, ah, tapestry of, um, pleasure.”
Oh, god. Tapestry of pleasure? She sounded like a middle aged health teacher trying to encourage her young students that sex could fun! But only with condoms, after the age of eighteen, and with enthusiastic consent. It wasn’t the coolest that she’d ever felt in her life. Luckily it effectively doused her libido.
She popped up. “Okay! Time to take you home!”
He looked like he wanted to argue, but he said nothing, just grabbed his crutches and took one last look around her house. The ride home was very quiet.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Phoenix remained very confused about his conversation with Ida even as he crutched his way into physical therapy that evening.
He found, however, one upside was that he no longer felt bad about Watt. Now that he understood a little more about why humans kissed, he no longer felt the fog of confusion surrounding the knowledge that Watt had kissed Ida before.
It also helped that she hadn’t felt the same way about the kiss as Watt apparently had. He still didn’t really get why someone would want or need to kiss before having sex, but he could understand Watt wanting to have sex with Ida. She was attractive, he’d begun to realize, despite the silly glasses and clumsiness. She had a body type, short and very soft, that he’d never been attracted to before. But the more he got to know Ida, the more he viscerally understood why someone would want to have sex with her.
He didn’t begrudge Watt the urge.
That didn’t, however, explain the immense relief he felt at the fact that Ida hadn’t reciprocated the feelings toward Watt. She had every right to have sex with whomever she wanted, just like the women that Phoenix had slept with had every right to sleep with him. But still, he just didn’t like the thought of her and Watt together.
“Dude, you’re in never-never land tonight!” Watt crowed as he snapped his fingers in front of Phoenix’s face. “You all right? Never seen you so spaced.”
“I’m all right. I just had a confusing conversation today.”
“About what?” Watt asked, flopping down on the mat next to Phoenix and running through the preliminary stretches along with him.
“Sex.”
“Ah! Do tell, my friend.” Watt waggled his red eyebrows at Phoenix and Phoenix couldn’t help but laugh.
“Wolves don’t kiss. And I’m trying to figure out why humans do and what it has to do with sex. The answers I got were not satisfactory.”
“Well, no wonder. No answer you’re ever going to get will be satisfactory. It’s something you have to experience. Seriously. If we went out and found some chick for you to kiss, you’d understand the whole thing in like half a second.”
Before Phoenix could respond, or even really consider the wisdom of that statement, Watt was bouncing up and squinting across the gym. “Hold on, I see an old client of mine and I think he’s about to wreck himself on that deadlift. Gimme a sec.”
Phoenix sat alone, still stretching and thinking. Maybe Watt was right. Maybe he should just find some pretty girl and —
“You’re a shifter, aren’t you.”
A man sat down next to Phoenix and leaned back on his palms, eyeing him from toes to hairline.
The man had a closely shaved head and tattoos on his fingers. There was a cold look in his eye that Phoenix immediately distrusted.
He didn’t answer the man, just turned his head away and kept stretching, though his body had noticeably tensed.
“You don’t have to answer me. I know you are. I can sniff out your kind from a mile away.”
Phoenix’s eyes tracked back to the man. He knew, from the scent, that this man was not a shifter. Just a hateful human.
&nb
sp; “Let me guess,” the man said. “You’ve got no money to your name, barely got any social skills, and now you’re just living fat off my tax dollars? Yeah. I’ve heard this story before.”
Phoenix felt rage rise in his blood stream and it wasn’t because of the man’s words as much as it was the man’s toxic, angry presence.
“Listen,” the man said. “If you ever get sick of being a useless drain on society, you give me a call. We can put you to work. Make you a little money.”
The man shoved a piece of paper into Phoenix’s hand and rose.
“Everything all right here?” Watt asked, a frown on his face as he stood over Phoenix, as if protecting him.
“Peachy,” the man replied. “Just making friends.”
Watt’s eyes tracked back and forth between the man and Phoenix. Phoenix said nothing.
“Right. McGrath, why don’t you come with me.” Watt took the bald man by the arm and dragged him away from Phoenix.
Phoenix watched through narrow eyes as Watt and the man exchanged terse words at one end of the gym. When Watt came back he was frowning more than Phoenix had ever seen him frown before.
“If that guy talks to you again, you let me know,” Watt said, holding out a hand to help Phoenix stand up.
He looked to one end of the gym where the man still stood, watching him and he felt something uneasy trip its way down his spine. “Right.”
“All right. Let’s get on with the session, yeah?” Watt led Phoenix over to the treadmill. “And afterward, we’ll hit a bar or two, find some PYT for you to kiss.”
Phoenix’s eyebrows rose. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. He didn’t mind the thought of finding someone to kiss. Maybe it would even be good for him.
***
The agent was finally back at his home. He lay down on his bed and looked at the ceiling for a long, long time.
He knew he needed to call the Director, to give an update. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. There was something about Phoenix Wolf that felt different than the other recruits, he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
On paper, Phoenix was a perfect candidate for the program. He was naive of human culture, ignorant to the dangers of the world. He was also in an incredible amount of pain. Something that always made candidates easier to shape and mold and inoculate to the discomforts of acclimating to the program. And best of all, if they got their hooks into Phoenix, there was a very good chance that Orion and Dawn could be enticed as well. Three for the price of one.
The agent had been observing Phoenix for a while now and been encouraged by what he’d seen, his chances. But the interaction today had almost gone horribly awry. That asshole at the gym shouldn’t have interrupted them. He’d nearly wrecked everything.
The agent picked up the phone and dialed the Director’s number, his thumb hovering over the send button.
He couldn’t afford another mistake. He was very aware what would happen if he made another mistake.
***
Phoenix did not enjoy loud music. He did not enjoy the taste of alcohol. He did not enjoy crowded rooms filled with creatures whom he didn’t know.
In short, he didn’t enjoy bars. Something he’d forgotten until he’d stepped inside one with Watt.
In the past, bars had been a means to an end for him. The equation had been simple. Shift into human form, wash body in stream, dress in his father’s old clothes, walk down the mountain to the nearest town in the evening, enter bar, find attractive woman, start talking to her, touch her a little bit, wait for her invitation to leave, leave with her, have sex, go back up the mountain.
All of it had had such a point. This however? Did not have any sort of point that Phoenix could tell. People draped themselves all over each other, screaming in one another’s ears, and from what he could tell, very few of them were leaving together.
Human rituals. So apparently important. So stubbornly opaque to him.
“Stop scowling at all the pretty girls!” Watt shouted in his ear as he came up to Phoenix, holding out a glass of water, since Phoenix had refused his offer of beer.
There were pretty girls around? Phoenix had yet to notice any. He glanced around and was surprised to note that there were, in fact, several sleek, thin, dark haired women scattered among the crowd. The kind of woman that he’d been attracted to in the past. In fact, the only kind of woman he’d ever had sex with before. It was kind of weird that he hadn’t even clocked them.
Instead, he found his eyes catching more on the curvier women who populated the tables and dance floor. And on one woman in particular with her coppery hair. Seemed his type was changing. He wasn’t a fool enough to wonder why.
“Sorry,” he grumbled back to Watt. “I’ll stop scowling. But don’t chat up that python shifter anymore. She’s not in control of her shift. Wouldn’t want her shifting during sex by accident.”
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.