by Selena Scott
***
It was the second time in a week that Dawn found herself outside of Quill’s apartment door. This time, she had much less of a clue as to why she was here.
The first time had been much more simple. She’d suspected that Quill was going through a hard time and she’d done what she would have done with her brothers. She’d inserted herself into his life and she’d made a good faith attempt at distracting him.
She’d called him her friend that night. She hadn’t intended to. In fact, she hadn’t even considered that to be a truth until she’d said the word out loud. Until she’d seen the look on his face upon hearing it. It was in that second that Dawn realized that the word meant as much to him as it did to her.
Ida and Wren had started referring to themselves as Dawn’s friends with such an easy, low maintenance confidence that she’d instantly understood them to be people with lots of friends. The word wasn’t an earthquaker for them. But Quill? He’d looked as shaken to have heard it as Dawn had been to say it.
She’d never really had a friend before. And from the looks of things, it might have been a long time since Quill had one himself.
Dawn had soothed both of them by reading to him, both of them drifting off side by side on his couch. She’d woken up alone around nine am.
A little embarrassed and off-kilter —she hadn’t meant to sleep over— she’d quickly washed up in the bathroom and made her way through the kitchen. There’d been a perfectly wrapped blueberry muffin sitting atop a note.
Thanks for the company -Q
She frowned now when she thought of that note, standing outside Quill’s door again. Reading was a mysterious and magical skill. It had opened up an untold number of doors for Dawn. It was a window into an otherwise incomprehensible world for her. She adored every single book she’d ever read, simply because a book held the answers to all its own questions. Every book was it’s own solvable mystery.
But handwritten notes from someone who already confused you in the first place? That was a whole different kind of reading. He hadn’t used any punctuation. Was she supposed to be reading excitement into it? Thanks for the company! No. That didn’t sound very Quill-like. Or should she be reading sarcasm into it? Thanks for the company. Womp womp. She hoped that wasn’t the way he’d meant it. And for that matter, he hadn’t used a salutation either. Or even bothered to write his full name. She hadn't expected a Your Friend, Quill. Or even a Best Wishes, Quill. But -Q was just confusing.
“You’re here again.”
Dawn jumped and whirled around. He was standing at the top of the stairs in the hallway outside his front door. She’d thought he was inside. Nope. Apparently she’d been so caught up in her thoughts about Quill, she hadn’t even noticed his scent intensifying as he’d approached. But did she notice it now? Definitely. In fact, it was pretty much the only thing she could think about as he walked toward her, stepped past her, and unlocked his door.
His scent was distracting. Like rain on hot pavement. Ice cubes dropped into a cup of tea. Like metal and leaves. He smelled like two different men at once.
“Yes,” Dawn said faintly. “I, uh, came over to talk to you.”
He held the door open for her and closed it behind her once she’d stepped inside. He crossed to his fridge and poured them both glasses of orange juice. He drained his completely, set the glass in the dishwasher and brought hers over to her.
“Something wrong with your phone?”
“Huh?” she asked, staring down at glass of orange juice in her hands. His fingerprints were on the side of the glass. Proof he’d been there. She could smell him and feel the heat from his body, even as he pulled out a chair and sat down three feet from her. All these things were evidence that he was living and breathing and right there. But as he scrubbed his palms over his tired face, Dawn got the distinct feeling she was observing a ghost.
“Is there something wrong with your phone?” he asked again. “Is that why you showed up here to talk instead of calling me?”
“Oh.” Dawn shifted on her feet, feeling distinctly foolish to be standing here in his kitchen, holding a glass of orange juice she was too nervous to drink. How to explain to him why she was here when she wasn’t even sure of the reason herself? “No. My phone’s fine. I just wanted to talk to you in person, I guess.”
His brow furrowed. She saw now just how purple the bags under his eyes were. Taking a deep breath, she pulled out a chair from his table and sat down across from him. She took a long drink of her juice and attempted to ignore the fact that her hand was shaking for some reason. Quill, she saw, did not ignore it. His eyes tracked the tremulous movement of her hand, missing nothing.
“Go ahead.” With his face lined with fatigue and some unnamed worry causing his shoulders to slump, he didn’t exactly look like a receptive audience. But she’d driven all the way over here, hadn’t she?
“Watt came back.”
“What?” He’d all but frozen. He’d been there the night that Watt had attacked Ida. He knew how intense it was for him to show up in their lives again.
“A few days ago. Watt came back, knowing that one of us would likely catch his scent and track him. It was Orion who talked to him.”
“Is he still here? In Portland?”
Dawn shook her head, trying to read Quill’s mood. His adrenaline was clearly up, but he wasn’t moving. “No. He cleared out right after their conversation. Orion says he was… scared. Like he was being hunted or something.”
Quill made an indistinct noise. “What did he say to Orion?”
“He said a few things that we don’t understand. About a program. About a Director.” Dawn shrugged, her eyes dropping to the table. “I’ve been doing some research, trying to find any mention of that in any of the shifter history archives online, but I haven’t had any luck. But that’s not why I came over here.”
Quill waited, not interrupting her, but Dawn got the distinct impression that his mind was racing a mile a minute.
“I came over because Watt told Orion that we shouldn’t trust anyone. Not a single soul.”
Quill stiffened then and leaned back in his chair, his chin tipping up. “You came over here to tell me that you don’t trust me?”
Dawn laughed immediately, caught off guard by the absurdity of that idea. “No! Of course not.” She frowned. “How can I explain this… Right after Orion told me and Phoenix about this whole thing, the three of us made a list of all the people that we could trust. And Diana was on Orion’s list. He left the house to go talk to her, to find her, but by coincidence she was already on our front porch, wanting to talk to him. He picked her up and dragged her through our kitchen, straight up to his room. And… there was something about it. The way they were together…” She was doing a crap job of explaining, she was sure of it. And it wasn’t helped by the burning in her cheeks. For some reason, she was having a very tough time looking at Quill right now. She gulped the rest of her orange juice and was embarrassed by the trembling clack of the empty glass against the table when she set it back down. “I guess something about it just made me want to come over here and talk to you. You think I came over to tell you that I don’t trust you, but really, it’s the opposite.”
She finally looked up at him. That had been a lot for Dawn to say. Even though she was talking way more now than when she had first come to Portland, she still wasn’t used to long speeches. And she definitely wasn’t used to long speeches where she meanderingly tried to figure out her feelings as she went. She usually chose her words carefully, using as few as possible. This conversation felt vulnerable and sloppy and it was almost painful to look at Quill right after she’d finished.
His brow was down, his dark hair tumbling over his forehead. He looked… angry.
“You should leave, Dawn.”
He stood up from the table so fast his chair scraped. Dawn gaped at him. This was not what she’d expected at all. She’d sort of assumed his reaction would be something like the way he’d
reacted to her calling him her friend. A little tender and pained and scared, maybe. But with an underlying sweetness. She was not expecting her friend’s face to turn into an irritated mask of frustration, maybe even rage.
“Dawn,” he barked when she still hadn’t moved a long moment later. “You need to leave.”
She jumped at his tone of voice, but didn’t stand up yet. “Why?”
She was utterly bewildered. Quill was often a little bit terse, course, impatient. But he was never an outright asshole.
He gritted his teeth and scrubbed his hands over his face again. “Because I’m your freaking mentor, okay? This is my job. You can’t just show up at my house whenever you feel like it.”
She stood now. She suddenly wondered exactly how old Quill was. Because in comparison to his large, irritated presence she felt young and stupid and exposed. She instantly ran an internal reel of everything about the human world that he’d painstakingly taught her over the last year —coins in the parking meters, how to tell if a melon was ripe, gassing up at a gas station. He’d never once made her feel stupid. But she couldn’t help but feel like a royal idiot right now. Just some stupid girl who hadn’t even known how to swipe a debit card before he’d shown her.
“I thought…” she said weakly and couldn’t even fully finish the sentence. “Friends.”
“Yeah, well.” He threw his hands up in the air, looking like he wanted to finish that sentence but not knowing how. He raked his fingers through his hair and paced away from her. “I don’t have that luxury, Dawn.”
“Because you're my mentor? Because it’s your job?”
He stared sightlessly out the window over his sink. There was nothing to see but black sky. “Sure. Let’s just say that’s the reason. It’s easier that way.”
Her brow furrowed. That was pretty much the most confusing answer ever. “Um. What?”
“Don’t make me— Dawn, you and me as anything other than mentor and mentee, it’s just not going to happen.” His back was to her still. His wide shoulders filled out his T-shirt unapologetically, but there was something about his strong stance, some subtle, unnameable shift that made him look distinctly defeated.
Dismay and embarrassment curdled together in Dawn’s stomach. In a moment of cruelly timed clarity, Dawn suddenly understood everything. Why she had come over the other night to comfort him when she’d thought something was wrong. Why she’d instantly added him to her ‘people I can trust’ list. Why she’d come over here to tell him, in person, that she trusted him completely. Why her eyes always seemed to stall out on his shoulders and hair and eyes.
She was an idiot. How could she not have seen this before?
How many romance novels had she read at this point? Certainly enough to have clued herself in on this long ago.
She had a crush on this dude.
He finally turned around and her humiliation was complete, because though she’d only discovered this truth moments ago, she could clearly see in his eyes that he knew. There was something in his expression that told her so. Maybe it was mostly sadness, but there was something else there, something just soft enough for Dawn to interpret it as pity.
She had a crush on Quill and he pitied her for it. In fact, he was actively discouraging her from it right that very second.
“You’re right,” she heard herself say, and was utterly shocked by the lack of a tremble in her voice. “I— don’t know what I was thinking. I’ll leave.”
Though she hadn’t grown up practicing human manners, there was an elegance and reason to them that appealed to Dawn. It was this determination not to appear as a complete mess that had her stepping calmly to his dishwasher and sliding her glass inside.
“Thank you for the juice.” She cleared her throat. Maybe if she were more comfortable with her newly discovered feelings for him, she wouldn’t have sought a way to explain them away, but she was supremely uncomfortable, embarrassed and chagrined. “I haven’t been in the human world very long, as you know.” Of course he knew. He’d been there with her practically since day one. “And sometimes I still get things wrong. How to act. What’s… appropriate. I’m sorry for pushing.”
She strode to the door and yanked it open only to jump when suddenly he was standing behind her, one big hand pressing the door back closed. She felt his breath on the back of her neck, could feel the heat from his body even through his shirt. “Dawn,” he said in a gruff voice that sent something skittering up her spine.
Some instinct told her not to turn around. She’d faced down a bear before, in the wilderness, and she knew better than to make eye contact with a bear shifter in a moment like this.
“Yes?” she asked in a quiet voice, her hand still on the door knob.
She felt his breath again on the back of her neck. Tension, or something like it, gave her goosebumps.
“Never mind,” he said lowly, dropping his hand and stepping away from her. “Drive safe.”
This time when she opened the door, he didn’t stop her.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“I’ve never woken up next to a woman I slept with the night before,” Orion confessed in her ear as the dawn light cracked through his blinds. He was twined around her and impossibly heavy. Diana would not have previously classified herself as a woman who enjoyed being slowly crushed to death, but here they were. Apparently Orion’s heavy-ass body had made a believer out of her.
“I’m honored to be your first,” she said drily, turning her head to the side to catch his eye.
“What?” he asked, pulling back to better see her. “Why that tone of voice?”
“Orion, I do not want to talk about the other women you’ve slept with.”
He squinted at her. “Why?”
She pouted her lips at him. “Why do you think?”
“It’s not like they have anything to do with you. Not really.”
“Oh, come on. Would you want me to talk about the other men that I’ve slept with?”
His eyes lit up with curiosity. “Yes.” Then his eyes clouded with discomfort, his upper lip curling. “Wait. No.”
She laughed at his reaction, but he was still battling through it.
“I really want to know. But I don’t want to know. I’m confused,” he ultimately decided.
Now she was really laughing. “Welcome to modern dating. Where the only thing worse than curiosity over your person’s past love life is actually knowing about your person’s past love life. Trust me. The specifics are better left in the past. For both of our sanities.”
“Well, it’s different for me, because I don’t have a past love life. I have a past sex life. But no love.” He pouted. “You actually loved some of these guys.”
He said the word ‘guys’ in the way that most people would have said ‘fools’.
“You’d prefer that I slept with a bunch of men I didn’t care about at all?”
“Yes,” he said with a resolute nod of his head. Then his eyes did that clouding over thing again. “Wait. No. I wouldn’t prefer that.” He groaned and dragged a hand over his face. “Ugh. I’m confused again.”
Now Diana didn’t have a hope of controlling her laughter. She decided that the least she could do was put him out of his misery.
“Orion, when I’m here with you, just like this, are you wishing that I was one of the other women you’ve slept with?”
“God, no. No. Are you kidding me? I’ve waited to have you like this for a year.”
Even though he’d said things like that before, his words still zipped through Diana’s system like a shot of whiskey. His desire for her was enough to make her feel warm and loopy. But his devotion to her made her downright drunk. Threw her equilibrium off. She tightened her grip around his neck with her arms, shifted her legs so that they more firmly gripped his waist. He, still caught up in the throes of the conversation, absently hitched her leg higher on his hip, trailed his wide-palmed hand up the outside of her thigh like touching her was as natural as breathing.
/> Speaking of breathing, she was going to have get back into the habit of breathing normally around this man. She took a long, soothing breath.
“Right. Exactly,” she replied. “None of the other people we’ve been with are here, are they? Isn’t it just you and me in this bed?”
He grunted.
She ran her fingers through his short hair. “And for the record,” she continued. “There’s lots of ways to love someone.”
“Hmm?”
“I mean, yes, technically I did love some of the men that I’ve slept with, but probably not in the way that you’re thinking.”
His eyes lit with interest and mischief and a little bit too much understanding for her comfort. “Is it… perhaps… because you’re starting to become familiar with a new kind of love?”
“Oh, god.” She rolled her eyes at the ceiling.
“Don’t be shy, Diana.” He rolled on top of her, his eyes practically sparkling now. “You’ve been with a real man and now all those other dudes seem like nothing in comparison. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. You can admit it.”
“You can go ahead and blow it out your ass, Orion,” she said, working hard to keep her face straight and her laughter inside. The last thing she wanted was to encourage him in a moment like this. The fact that he was pretty much completely accurate in his teasing assessment of her love life was neither here nor there.
“Don’t be ashamed, Di. Go ahead, you can say it. You’ve never loved anyone the way you love me. I know it’s true.”
“You’re a butthead.” She took a knuckle and worked it between his ribs on one side, making him yelp and wiggle away from her.
“Yurp,” he gurgled. “So ticklish there!”
