by Selena Scott
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 cupboard 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 didn’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.
Her eyes were cast down, staring at his mouth. His lips didn’t look any different than they had before. But they were different, she knew. She’d just given him his first kiss. She’d never done that for someone before. Her chest was vibrating with a whole pandora’s box of emotions that Ida only acknowledged by the rattle in her breath. Those feelings needed to just stay where they belonged, deep inside of her. They had no place coming out right now. No sir. She could deal with those when she crawled into bed tonight. Not now. Not when she was still gripped in his lap.
“You- said-“ he gasped, “that- I can’t- ask- again.”
His words were ragged and sounded painful. Her eyes jumped up from his mouth and landed on his eyes. And for the first time since she’d met him, she saw something vulnerable. Something pained.
“What?” She’d thought that she was still crystal clear in her thinking, but his words seemed to make their way to her through a soupy fog.
She was dimly aware of his pupils dilating and closing, his fists tightening and flattening against her in a corresponding rhythm. “You said,” he got out, gasping for a tight breath of air. “That I couldn’t ask again. But,” his arms tightened around her. “I need more.”
His eyes were on her lips again, but she could still read that mystifying note of vulnerability there. She’d never seen him look anything other than utterly confident, almost disdainful with it. But here, he looked needful and alarmed and straining against himself in order to respect her wishes.
It was that that had her leaning against him again. This time, of their own accord, her hands linked behind his neck as she pressed forward, let their mouths touch for a second time. He made a noise into the kiss, almost before she’d even touched him, the margins between the beginning of this kiss and the moments before seeming razor thin. The effect was that Ida felt as if maybe she’d never stopped kissing him. The air around them was suddenly too warm and cocooning as she kissed his bottom lip again.
He made another noise, moved his mouth, imitated her kiss, just the barest hint of suction. He was more boisterous than she was and when he tasted just the tiniest bit of her inner lip, his hands scrambled against her clothing, closing into fists as he sucked at the soft, wet parts of her bottom lip.
She’d never been kissed like this in her life. It wasn’t the smoothest kiss she’d ever had, but then, Phoenix wasn’t the smoothest guy she’d ever met. He was honest, and instinctual, and primal, just like this kiss was.
He was overwhelming her, all tight grip and his lips on hers, starting to lean her back. If he leaned her back any more, she knew she’d be gone to this kiss, to him, in a way that she couldn't afford to do. She nipped at him with her teeth and he grunted, pulling away immediately, blinking hard to make his eyes focus on her.
“You bit me,” he said in a low, sandpapery voice. His tongue came out to lick a
t his own lips.
“You were overwhelming me,” she told him. “And sometimes people bite when they kiss. As long as it’s not too hard, it’s nice.”
They bite when they have sex too, she thought. But she hadn’t lost her mind so far as to bring up sex at a moment like this.
This time he was the one leaning forward, if only to give her the sweetest kiss of her life. His eyes were open, on hers, dark and searing, and patient. He wasn’t sucking at her bottom lip like he’d been before. No. This time he was patiently pressing his lips to hers, reading her.
He was trying not to overwhelm her again, she realized. And damn if that didn’t just crack her in two.
With a light moan in her throat, she pushed forward and licked his lip with her tongue, pushing at the seam of his mouth and opening him up. She tasted his surprise, the melt of his pleasure, the glancing, metallic flash of his sharp teeth. And then he was pressing his tongue back against hers and leaning himself into the couch, holding her tightly against him.
Their tongues slid and pushed and pressed and it wasn’t artful or pretty, she was sure. But jeez it felt good.
He fit her against him much more firmly and it was then that she realized she was straddling him, his hands in fists at her back, her body jogged slightly higher than his so that he was tilting his head back to receive her kiss.
She made a noise and so did he, her hands finding their way into his hair, her tongue compulsively tasting him over and over again. She hadn’t meant to get lost in this kiss. Just as she’d been sure he hadn’t even meant to like this kiss. But here they were and she just knew that she could kiss this man forever—
“Wait!” Ida scrambled up and danced out of reach of his arms before he could snatch her sweater again. “We can’t do this.”
Her words came out choppy and breathy and entirely unconvincing. She stood five feet away across her living room and fought the air for more oxygen. She had the sneaking suspicion that he was taking all the good, breathable, available air with those big, mannish lungs of his. How much fuel must it take to run a body like that? He was a marvel, a miracle, an animal engineered to perfection.