by Selena Scott
“Glasses,” he croaked. “You got glasses.”
“Yeah. They were giving out coupons for eye exams at the library the other day and I thought I might get one, because now that I read, my eyesight is the most important to me. And I went to the place and got an exam and the guy said that I’m actually a little farsighted and could use reading glasses. So, I bought these!”
She held up a pair of wire-rim spectacles that were dorky and cute and he all but groaned when she slid them on. Her haircut framed them perfectly on her face and he cursed himself for his predilection toward nerds. There was just something about a dorky woman that really ground his gears and right now, Dawn was checking all his boxes.
Carefully keeping his tone neutral, he looked away from her. “That’s great. I’m sure your eyes won’t get as tired now.”
He could feel her eyes on the side of his face. She had this intense stare that always made him want to squirm, like she could see right through him. He never wanted to know what she saw when she looked at him.
“Are you all right?” Dawn asked quietly after minute.
“Yeah. Why?” He swung his eyes back to hers for just a second before he had to look away again.
“You seem… tired,” she decided. “How was the full moon for you?”
She was obviously aware that Quill was a shifter as well, but he’d been careful never to shift in front of her. Or anyone really. Shifting was a tender, vulnerable thing for him. And it would become clear exactly who he was if anyone ever saw him in his bear form.
“Fine.”
“You always spend them alone, huh?”
He shifted uncomfortably. They’d spoken about their lives as shifters very little since he’d become her mentor. Thought he desperately wanted to know more about her shifting life, as was everything with Dawn, sharing was a two-way street. And he couldn’t justify giving up almost any information about his personal life to her. Things were complicated enough.
“Yeah.”
“Well, if you ever wanted…”
Don’t invite me, don’t invite me, don’t invite me, he chanted inwardly.
“You could come with—”
“Hey, you two.” Phoenix strode up onto the porch and interrupting Dawn.
Quill nearly sagged with relief that she hadn’t been able to extend her invitation to join she and her brothers on the full moon.
“Hey, Phoenix.” Quill took his opening. He had to get out of here. “I’ve gotta split. Dawn, enjoy the books. I’ll see you sometime this week.”
He didn’t even wait for her to look at him, or to say goodbye. He launched himself off the porch and into his car, practically peeling out of the driveway in his haste to say goodbye.
If she’d invited him to come shifting with them, he would have had to tell his boss. Not Diana. His real boss. His secret boss. The Director. And the Director would have forced him to go with them. To learn everything he could about the Wolf siblings’ shifts. He would have had no excuse not to go. Right now, his excuse was wearing thin as it was. He told the Director over and over that they didn’t trust him enough to bring him along on the full moon. And in that way, he’d been able to make sure they were still safe from him. From the Director. From everything that Quill had to do to them.
His stomach cramped. Watt had failed six months ago, to bring Phoenix in. And now he was gone. Disappeared. Quill was the only one left. Fo so long, this whole thing had been simple. Quill was just doing his job. Not his job as a mentor at the center, but the job he’d been recruited for years ago, as an angry, tortured kid in the internment camp.
Watt had failed, and Quill couldn’t fail.
But that didn’t mean he had to take every opportunity that fell his way. He could take this slow.
Dawn’s face flashed in his mind, grinning at him, her glasses catching the light, framed by her haircut.
Slow. He had to take this slow.
CHAPTER FOUR
Something was off in the center. It was… too quiet. Shifters were usually an energetic group when they were all put together. There was always someone yelling or laughing. There was always a frenetic energy whipping off the nervous ones, hiding in plain sight. There was always some overzealous, unruly predator at the top of the food chain who didn’t realize he was scaring the daylights out of the hare shifters.
But today, there was a really calm vibe in the center. And it was freaking Diana out. She didn’t understand it. She was sitting in her office, tearing through her paperwork, but she couldn’t stop glancing up at her open door, trying to get a glimpse into the main room of the center, figure out what the hell was making everything so calm out there.
She was much too busy to investigate, mostly thanks to Orion Wolf and his endless need for new mentors. Did he not realize how much reassignment paperwork she had to do every single time he tantrumed himself out of a mentor and into a need for a new one?
“No, of course he doesn’t realize that,” she muttered to herself. The man might have been living in the human world for a year, but that certainly didn’t mean that he understood anything about bureaucracy. Why would he assume paperwork if she’d never even told him?
“Diana?” a timid voice said from her door.
“Ah. Claire. Come on in.”
Claire was one of the newest mentors and had a little bit of a church-mousy thing going on. Did Diana think that she would even remotely be able to handle Orion as her mentee? Um. Not exactly. Was Claire one of the very last mentors on the roster whom Orion hadn’t yet run through? Yes. Definitely.
“You, um, said you wanted to discuss something with me?” Claire crossed and re-crossed her legs, eventually tucking her fingers under her thighs, her bottom lip between her teeth.
“I wanted to talk with you about placing another mentee in your schedule. I’ve been impressed with the work you’ve been doing with your current roster,” -that much was true at least- “And I think you could do with a bit of a challenge. Someone who will help you expand your skill set a little bit.”
Claire gulped audibly. “You’re not talking about Orion Wolf, are you?”
Crap. Diana cleared her throat. “Actually—”
“Because I’m pretty sure he worked things out with Carl,” Claire rushed into saying, apparently not caring that she was cutting her boss off.
Diana must have misheard. “What’s that?”
“Carl and Orion. I’m pretty sure that they worked things out. I think they’re still matched up.”
“That… would be very surprising.”
“I’m almost positive. I just saw them out in the bull pen going over their plan for the next week.”
The center was housed in a renovated police station and they still referred to a lot of the rooms with the same names that the cops had when they’d been using this facility. The bull pen was the main room right outside Diana’s office. The one where the palpable calm was emanating from.
Without another word to Claire, Diana rose from behind her desk and strode to her open office door.
The calm hit her like a down pillow to the face. There were, in fact, four or five mentor-mentee pairings scattered around, chatting softly about this or that, some of them going over paperwork, some of them sharing cell phone screens or books. In the distance there were two mentors heating up lunch in the small, but workable, kitchen. And, lord have mercy, tucked into a far corner, sat Orion Wolf, listening intently to something that Carl was saying to him.
Diana blinked, unwilling to believe what she was seeing. She’d spent months praying for the very sight in front of her. Orion Wolf playing nicely with a mentor she’d assigned to him. And now it was happening and she could barely believe her eyes.
As she stared, Orion said something to Carl who nervously laughed, shook his head and gestured at the papers in front of him, apparently explaining some process or another that the two of them were going to have to go through.
Stymied, Diana continued to watch. A few seconds passed b
efore Orion, sensing her gaze, looked up and made eye contact with her across the room. She braced for him to leave his mentor in the dust. For that proprietary look to come over his face. For him to ignore every other living thing in a fifty yard vicinity.
But…
He simply nodded to her, acknowledging her, and then turned back to Carl, pointing at something on the papers in front of them and asking a question.
Diana did some more blinking.
A single nod. And not a dude-bro-‘sup sort of nod. There’d been nothing cocky or smarmy about it. No. This had been a professional dip of the chin. Solemn eyes, no mirth.
Huh.
Claire made a sound behind her and Diana realized that she still had business to attend to. Giving her slightly confused head a little shake, she turned on her heel to walk back into her office. Normally graceful and aware of her surroundings, Diana’s shoulder accidentally clipped the doorjamb and she stumbled on her heels. She glanced involuntarily back over her shoulder, but Orion hadn’t been watching her, his eyes, instead, were trained on Carl.
Weird.
“Diana?” Claire asked, halfway rising from her chair. “Are you all right?”
“What? Oh. Yes. You know what, Claire, I’ll need to check into Carl’s status as Orion’s mentor and get back to you, but for now, there’s nothing else I need from you today.”
“Okay!” Claire chirped, jumping up and practically sprinting out of the office. Apparently that was exactly what she’d been hoping to hear. “Bye! Have a good weekend!”
And then she was gone and Diana’s only company was her racing mind.
***
She worked until quitting time, deciding to go home at a reasonable hour tonight, even though most nights she worked well through dinner time. The bull pen was cleared out and the last cars were pulling out of the parking lot. Diana raised her hand in a wave to her departing employees as she rounded the corner of the building to her car.
She stopped in her tracks. She realized now that she’d been expecting to see a certain someone leaned up against her car.
But there was no one there.
It wasn’t that Orion waited by her car every weekday after work, but on the days that he was in the center, especially on the days that were so busy she didn’t have a chance to chat with him, he was almost always there.
But he wasn’t there. And her car looked kinda lonely all on its own.
That was ridiculous. A car couldn’t be lonely. She got in, revved the engine and went home.
The next week went much the same way. She saw Orion at the center on three different days. She received three separate nods and one professional hand wave.
He didn’t wait at her car even once.
And her phone had started to be suspiciously silent. The last text she’d received from him had been the voice memo she’d complained about the morning she’d caught him with the cigarette. He hadn’t called her either. He usually called a few times a week either to say hello or to ask her a question about human culture. Sometimes a curiosity, sometimes it was something he genuinely needed help with.
Diana found herself with a lot more time on her hands than she usually had. She had no Orion-related paperwork to take care of, there was no one to chat with her outside her car for half an hour after work, and no texts to hem and haw over, wondering if she should respond or not.
It was exactly what she’d begged him to give her.
***
“All right,” Diana said a few days after that, catching Orion in the hallway outside the men’s room. It was late afternoon on a Friday and they were almost alone in the center. Carl had left just a few minutes earlier. She strode up to him, her hips ticking side to side in time with those tall, clicky shoes she wore. She had her hands on her hips and a fierce look on her already fiercely featured face. Her hair was pulled back in her usual tight ponytail and it swished behind her, accentuating her aggravation. In short, he could have eaten her with a spoon.
“Let me see your eyes,” she demanded, walking up to Orion so fast she backed him into the wall.
“What?” he barely had time to ask before she was roughly grabbing his jaw, tipping his face down, and using the thumb on her other hand to pull at his lower lids.
She aggressively peered from eye to eye. “Pupils look all right,” she muttered to herself.
She was standing closer to him than she ever had before, her hands on his body, but instead of feeling warm and turned on, the way he’d thought he might, Orion just felt confused. “Diana.”
“Let me smell your breath!” she demanded, leaning forward and pressing her face almost flush against his. She huffed and stepped back. “Walk a straight line!”
She stepped back and pointed to the hallway.
“What?” he asked again, confused at what was going on but also a little dazed by her proximity to him, to the feeling of her bossing him around.
“Do it!” Her voice was fierce enough that he followed directions just to appease her. He walked five feet in a straight line, turned and walked back to her.
She sucked her teeth. “Turn out your pockets!”
“Diana—” But he didn’t have time to finish his sentence before she’d strode over to him and shoved her hands into the pockets of his jeans. She was wrist deep and clutching hard at his thighs, dangerously close to the family jewels when Orion realized that to let this continue was to allow himself to be frogmarched down the road to insanity.
“Diana!” He took her by the shoulders and spun them around so that she was the one who had her back to the wall, her hands still in his pockets. “What the heck is going on?”
“You tell me!” she demanded, her minty breath washing over his face, tendrils of dark hair coming loose from her ponytail, her chest billowing in and out with each ferocious inhale. “You’re complying with Carl. And when I talked to him today he described you as being, and I quote, ‘very amenable’. You’ve dropped off the face of the earth, no calls, no texts. You never wait for me at my car anymore. And yesterday I wore the tightest skirt I own and you didn’t even come speak to me. So you tell me, Orion. What the heck is going on? You’ve joined a gang? A cult? You’re on drugs? You’re drunk? What is it?”
He blinked down at her for a moment before he couldn’t fight back the tremor in his chest. He let out a great, gusty roll of deep laughter, unable to stop the giddy joy rising in his heart. Goddammit, Wren and Ida were geniuses. It had taken their plan less than a week to have Diana Paul sticking her hands in his pockets in a dark hallway and demanding he pay attention to her. He couldn’t believe how well this had worked. They deserved trophies. Or medals. Or to have a song written about their genius. Or whatever it was that humans did for the best and brightest of their kind.
“Don’t laugh!” Diana practically shouted. “Shifters have a fifty percent higher chance of becoming addicted to drugs. Or being homeless. Or being recruited into violent gangs.”
He sobered a little bit. He’d heard those statistics before and they weren’t a laughing matter. He’d seen it with his own eyes in the streets of Portland. Shifters in rags, begging for food or water or money. Shifters passed out in the blinding sun, dead to the world under the weight of whatever they’d just put into their bodies. She’d noticed his complete change in personality and been terrified that he was slipping away down a bad path.
It shouldn’t have warmed him, but it did.
“You’re good at your job, Diana. How closely you pay attention to your clients here.”
She huffed. “Answer my question, Orion.”
“No. I’m not on drugs. I had a beer about six days ago but that was it. I don’t enjoy violence and don’t plan on joining a gang. And I’m still perfectly happy living at Wren’s old house with Phoenix and Dawn. Even though sometimes when Ida stays the night with Phoenix, I wish I was deaf. No one needs to hear how competent their brother is at sex. At top volume. In the middle of a Wednesday night.”
Her mouth quirked li
ke she might just smile, but there was still too much worry in her eyes. Worry that made him want to kiss those plump lips of hers. She’d been worried about him. So worried she’d backed him into a wall, prepared to do battle with whatever demons he’d been facing down. Suddenly, the year he’d spent pursuing her to no avail didn’t seem so wasted. She cared about him. Even if she hadn’t been inclined to show it.
“There’s no drugs. No drink. Not homeless,” she ticked off the list. “So, why the huge change in your attitude? Are you depressed? Or…” She bit her lip and he didn’t think she was aware that she was doing it. “Maybe you’ve met someone?” Her eyes dropped.
Orion wanted to sing. “I haven’t met anyone. I’m not depressed. I’m just trying something new, Diana.”
Her eyes lifted to his in confusion.
“You told me that quitting the center would be bad for business around here. And that I was making extra work for you with my behavior. So, I started thinking to myself, what if I didn’t make extra work for Diana? What if I did exactly what she asked me to and made it work with a mentor? What if I left her alone just like she asked? Because I meant what I said, Diana. I want to make your life better. So, this is me trying to do that.”
Diana blinked her light eyes up at him, her confusion giving way to an expression he couldn’t quite interpret. “You— I—”
She dropped her eyes from his face and for the first time seemed to register the position they were in. He had her crowded against a wall, his hands gently on her shoulders. Her hands were still shoved, to the wrists, into his front pockets. One set of her fingers were about a quarter inch from a body part of his that really, really wanted to come out and play.
She yanked her hands away from him all at once and slid out from under his hands. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes wide. Her hands went to her cheeks as she stared at him. “That was so inappropriate. I just thought that maybe you were in trouble and I went a little crazy.”