by Selena Scott
He lifted his head. “Ida—”
But she didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. She was suddenly trouncing on him, her fingers at the collar of his shirt, yanking it to one side, kissing feverishly at his collarbone. He was delirious with want for her, it didn’t even cross his mind how close she was getting to his injury until—
“Shit.” He sat up quickly and pulled away from her, fixing the soft cotton of his shirt back into place, unable to stop himself from placing his palm down over the point of pain, even though he knew that it wouldn’t help.
Nothing helped, not really. Well, nothing except for Ida. Because if he was being honest, he hadn’t thought of his injury once in the last hour. Not once.
“I’m so sorry!” She was suddenly sitting up as well, her feet folded underneath her, her red hair all a mess, her cheeks pink and her hands over her mouth. “I forgot about the scarring. I’m so, so sorry.”
“I forgot about it too,” he admitted. “For a minute at least.”
“Is there anything I can do?” she asked, rising from the bed with an ease he envied. He missed being able to jump right up. He missed being able to offer help to someone and really mean it. He missed being useful.
He shook his head and actually felt a little bit dizzy. He lifted a hand to the top of his head and breathed hard. “I think I need water.”
“Yeah. Wow. Me too, actually.” Ida pulled her phone from her purse. “Oh, my god we’ve been making out for like two hours. No wonder we’re thirsty! We need food! We need water! We need a freaking break before our lips fall off!”
She was standing beside the bed and every new thing she listed, she clapped her hands sharply, a smile on her face.
Phoenix was fairly certain that she was doing to him what she had done to the grumpy man at the farmer’s market. She was being so freaking cute and charming that she was distracting him from his own mood.
Did he care that she was using her own particular brand of magic on him? Did he care that she was obviously trying to get him to forget about his injury and just come out and play?
Nah.
In fact, he kind of liked it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Quill frowned at himself as he pulled back out of the parking spot and re-parked, correcting his awkward angle.
He was usually an extremely adept parallel parker.
The only explanation for his awkwardness right now was the undeniably unfortunate fact that he was nervous.
Jesus.
Like a middle schooler about to ask a girl to dance, he had butterflies in his stomach. All because the woman who sat in the passenger seat of his car might not like the place he’d decided to take her.
He turned off the car and hesitated for a second. Some loud, laughing kids scrambled past on the sidewalk outside of his car, their backpacks jouncing against their backs.
It was a good reminder for Quill. Those kids wore their backpacks because they’d just gotten out of school. Because it was freaking 3:00 on a Tuesday afternoon. Because this was not a date. This was a work function and frankly, it was ridiculous that he be this nervous about it.
He was a caring mentor, sure. But since when did he care this freaking much?
The ride over had been twenty eight minutes of complete silence since he’d picked Dawn up from her new house. That had been intentional on his part. No longer was he going to chat into the void. After observing Ida’s easy manner at the flea market, he’d realized that he’d been unintentionally pressuring Dawn to give him what he wanted. Conversation. Progress. An outward show of how impressed she was with him.
It was not a good look.
So, even though he’d wanted to come in and check out her new place -it was in a bright pink Victorian castle that looked haunted, who could fault him for being curious?- he’d respected the fact that she’d been waiting quietly on the sidewalk for him.
“It’s, uh, this way,” Quill said, pointing with a thumb over his shoulder, locking his car and trying to get his nerves under control. She followed him down the busy sidewalk. When they had to pass a group of homeless people, as one inevitably did in Portland, Quill turned to help guide her around them in a wide berth. But as he turned, he saw to his mystification, that she waded right through the group, apparently not seeing any difference between them and the other people on the street.
To Quill’s utter astonishment, she greeted a particularly dirty looking older man, wearing an outsized basketball jersey and torn shorts. He had open cuts on his legs and a feral look in his eye.
“Hello,” she said to him. “How are you today?”
“Been better, been worse,” the man said tilting his head back to look up at Dawn and squinting against the sun.
“All right,” she said with a nod and kept walking, greeting two other people in the group of ten or so before she kept going, catching up to Quill.
“A lot of people tend to avoid the homeless,” he told her, point-blank.
She just looked at him with those haunting green eyes, like she could right through to his deceitful heart, and pursed her lips. She said nothing. Of course. Because she’d rather talk to a dirty man on the street than she would to her own mentor.
Quill was starting to take this personally.
“We’re here,” he told her, stopping in front of a large, many-windowed building taking up almost an entire block.
She took a step forward, a frown on that plain/pretty face of hers as she peered through the windows, trying to figure out where the hell he’d taken her.
He saw the moment she figured it out. And honestly, it kind of made up for everything else. Her wide eyes expanded, a gasp caught in her throat. One hand came up into the air, as if to reach through the glass and grab at the display of books behind the shiny pane of glass.
“It’s, uh, a bookstore,” he explained unnecessarily. “Called Powell’s. Biggest in the country, I think. But yeah. It’s cool. Wanna go in?”
She was already walking toward the doors when he caught up with her.
Again, Quill zipped his lid and just concentrated on following Dawn through the store. She was so freaking quick. And good at blending in. And hiding in plain sight. And the store really was huge. It took all his concentration not to lose her.
She zipped through section after section. Seeming to stop at random, yank a book off a shelf and flip through it, her eyes lit up with excitement. She carefully put each book back and then she was zooming away.
It was the manga section where she finally sat down. The colorful illustrations seemed to completely arrest her, her fingers tracing over the words on each page. She sat on the floor with a pile of pulled books next to her and Quill decided to make himself useful by choosing some books and bringing them over to her so that she wouldn’t have to get up again and again.
When the pile of books around her was at least twenty high and she’d leafed through each and every one and her eyes were the size of half dollars and Quill’s stomach had started to rumble they’d been there so long, she clutched a book to her chest and finally gave him her attention again.
“Can you,” she started, then stopped, gathering her courage. “Would you teach me how to read?”
He stared at her. For a long minute. It wasn’t that he’d never heard her voice before. It was that the combination of her steady eyes on his face, and that unexpectedly husky tone was a little bit… unsettling.
Her voice was sexy.
Annoyingly so.
And the very first thing she’d said directly to him had been an ask. One that he wanted to give her. Something swelled in his chest at the thought of being the one to give her this.
The idea was almost as sexy as her voice was.
That was annoying too.
“Uh. I could help you with that,” he said quietly, though he had absolutely no idea how to teach someone how to read, having never done it before. “I’m sure there’s a book here that could show us where to start. Why don’t you pick one of thes
e out, we’ll find a book on how to teach someone to read, and then we’ll go get some lunch.”
She clutched the book at her chest so hard her knuckles went white. “What do you mean I get to pick one?”
“I’m buying you a book.”
Those eyes of hers were seriously poisonous. Just holding her eye contact was making him weak and woozy.
“But hurry up and choose because I’m hungry.” He couldn’t keep the bite out of his tone.
She nodded immediately and, to his surprise, started to put the books back on the shelves exactly where he’d pulled them from. She couldn’t read, he knew, so she wasn’t alphabetizing them. No, she was doing this from memory. His respect for her grew another few inches. She was obviously a smart cookie.
He helped her put the books away, her clutching the one she’d chosen, and then they tromped off together to find a few books on reading pedagogy. He found two no problem and guided her to the check out counter. It was only there that he inspected the book she’d chosen.
He’d expected her to choose the largest or most colorful book, seeing as the pictures were the only part she could currently understand. But she hadn’t. She’d gone for a stylized manga, mostly black and white, about a young girl and a shadowy creature that seemed to protect her from the cruelties of the world. The young girl was drawn so innocently. The shadowy creature was drawn so spookily, obviously not a creature entirely good or entirely bad. Complicated.
Quill eyed the side of Dawn’s face as he swiped his credit card and wondered how much of the story she’d been able to glean from the book. He wondered what had drawn her to that particular story.
They were sitting down the street in the Whole Foods cafeteria area, hot bar lunches steaming in front of them, when she spoke again.
“Thank you for taking me there. And thank you for my book.”
His eyebrows raised as an unanticipated pride swelled within him, warming him wholly and completely. “You’re welcome. I’m glad you liked it.”
Just then, the group of homeless people from before sidled past the window and caught his eye. He decided to take a risk here. She’d shown that she wasn’t completely ignoring him after all. And he’d apparently done right with his choice of an outing. He decided to press her, just a tiny bit.
He opened his mouth, to ask her again about her interaction with those people from before but, shockingly, she beat him to the punch.
“You called them homeless, before.” She nodded her head toward the group of people on the other side of the glass.
Quill nodded, scrambling to pick up the thread of the conversation, wanting nothing more than to engage with her. “Yeah.”
She pushed fried rice around her takeout container. “I think that’s a human concept. Being homeless. I think of them more as… migratory. Nomadic.” She pursed her lips. “Scavengers, maybe. It’s not more or less than someone else’s place in life. It’s just different.”
“You’re describing them as part of the animal kingdom, not as a part of human culture.”
“Well,” she said in that husky voice, bobbing her head from side to side. “Three of them are part of the animal kingdom.”
“You mean that they’re shifters?” He looked over his shoulder at the group. It would make sense. A lot of shifters were homeless or destitute these days. The internment camps of yesteryear had been hellish, degrading, dangerous places, but when they’d been shut down, many of the turned-out shifters literally found themselves with no place to go. Shifters made up a huge amount of the homeless population. But still, how the hell would Dawn know whether or not they were shifters?
“Three of them are. One squirrel, one coyote, and … I think the other one was a raccoon? I’m not sure, the varmints are sometimes hard for me to tell apart.”
The breath momentarily left Quill’s chest. His hands tingled at the fingertips. The course of his life rapidly shifted direction. “Hold on. You’re telling me that you can tell who is a shifter, and you can tell what kind of shifter they are?”
“Oh. Yeah. You can’t?”
“No.”
Of course he couldn’t. He’d never in his life heard of another shifter being able to do that. The possibilities opened up before Quill. He’d thought that Dawn was just a stepping stone, a task to simply endure while he got to know the brothers.
His eyes fell to Powell’s bag on the table next to them. The books on reading. Her sharp brain. Her ability to hide and blend in and identify one shifter from another. The book about an innocent girl and a dark creature, undecided on whether or not to protect her from the world, or take her from it.
His eyes found Dawn’s again.
Maybe, just maybe, he’d underestimated her.
***
“So, this boyfriend thing. It’s like a mate?” Orion asked as he gripped hold of Phoenix’s hand and practically hauled him up the craggy trail.
Phoenix knew that were Watt or Ida to know that he was tromping around a backwoods trail on his crutches, they would call him crazy. But to Phoenix, staying cooped up inside was what would really drive him crazy. He needed the outdoors. It was his true home. As much as he loved Wren’s place, the scent of dying leaves, the stink of decomposition, the sound of fresh, rushing water, wind, chill, sun through the trees, encroaching twilight, these were the things that made a home a home to him. He knew that he would heal much faster if he could get time out in the great outdoors.
Orion agreed with him and practically hauled and dragged him through this entire hike a couple of times a week. His older brother was the only person whom Phoenix would accept this kind of help from. The only person for whom Phoenix could be certain pity was not a factor in the least. Orion simply wanted his brother to be well and to get well.
“No. I think husbands are more like mates,” Phoenix said with a grunt as he fell into step alongside his brother, willing his breath to even out. He ignored the pain in his left side and just kept trudging along.
“So, then what is a boyfriend?”
Phoenix shrugged. “I think it just means that we have sex with each other and not other people.”
“Oh.” Orion nodded, like that made sense to him. “I can see why you’d want that with Ida. She’s sweet. And cute.”
Phoenix nodded. She was both of those things. She was also confusing. The other night, after all the kissing, they’d gone down to the kitchen, had long drinks of water, and then she’d left.
He’d sort of been expecting for them to have sex after all that. His body certainly wanted them to. His erection hadn’t gone down until the next morning.
Maybe there would be no sex with him until he was her boyfriend? Maybe she was waiting until he got that job and then could officially ask her? Jeez, he hoped Diana would hurry along and find him some employment. Phoenix was no expert on the human body, but he didn’t think his body could withstand this sort of restraint for too much longer. He might get a permanent injury. Dick strain. Or something.
He made a note to ask Watt about that.
Maybe this whole thing was going to be just as complicated as the whole kissing thing. The touching thing. All the ways that humans showed each other what they wanted. The slow climb toward sex.
“Orion, do you know about kissing?”
“Sure,” his brother answered, brushing aside a low hanging branch as he hiked. “I like it.”
“Me too. How did you find out about it? I didn’t really know until Ida showed me.”
“A woman kissed me a few years ago. She showed me a lot of things I hadn’t known about.”
A light went on in Phoenix. His brother knew some answers! This was great news! He was tired of having to ask Ida for everything. He’d prefer to surprise her with things he’d learned on his own.
“What sort of things?”
“Humans like to touch a lot when they have sex.”
“Right. I learned that the other night.”
Orion turned and looked at Phoenix through squinted eyes
. “Do you know what porn is?”
Phoenix shook his head. “Never heard of it.”
A boisterous grin lit up Orion’s face. “Oh, brother. I’m about to make your year.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s something I learned about a few years back as well. A woman I was with showed it to me. But since then, I’ve had no way to access it. Then Diana gave me this.”
Orion reached into his pocket, pulled out something shiny and black that made the sunlight spear into Phoenix’s eyes. Phoenix stopped in his tracks and stared. “Hold on. You have a phone?”
“Yeah. After the last mentor quit on me, Diana decided that she didn’t want me out in the world completely ‘unarmed’ as she put it. So, she gave me this phone and showed me how to make it do stuff.”
“Don’t you have to be able to read to use a phone?”
“No. Not really. Look.” Orion pushed a button with his big thumb and then held the phone up to his mouth. “Phone. Call Diana.”
A moment later there was Diana’s irritated voice on the other end of the line. “If I’d known you were going to call me six times a day I’d never have given you that damn phone.”
Phoenix’s eyebrows raised. He’d never heard Diana sound so unprofessional. She must really hate Orion.
Orion smiled at the phone. “But without the phone I’d be alone and defenseless in this big, scary world.”
She scoffed. “We both know you’re about the furthest thing from defenseless.”
Orion’s voice dropped an octave. “Are you saying I’m dangerous?”
Phoenix looked back and forth between the phone and his brother’s face. Maybe… Maybe he’d misinterpreted Diana’s tone. Because it didn’t seem as hostile a conversation as it had at first. It seemed an awful lot like Diana and Orion were flirting with one another.
Huh.
“Did you call for a reason?” Diana said in a brisk tone that didn’t quite cover her breathlessness.
“Nope. Just wanted to hear your voice.”
