by Willa Okati
Nathaniel rolled his eyes tolerantly. “Twenty-one.”
Good God. It figured, didn’t it? “And how old do you think I am? I’ll give you a hint—it’s at least twice as old as you are, plus five or six years.”
“And? I’m legal. I’m not drunk. I know what I’m doing, and I think you’re protesting a bit too much.” Nathaniel trailed his fingers along the edge of Abram’s jaw. “Don’t tell me you’re not interested. I’ll know that’s a lie.”
Such a little firecracker. Callum would have been proud. After he got through falling over laughing at Abram’s expense that was.
Nathaniel curled his fingers beneath Abram’s jaw. “I’m waiting, you know. It’s all right. Just say so.”
Abram knew when he was beaten. And why not, after all? Really, now. Nathaniel was lovely and willing, and didn’t have a soulmark or concealer that Abram could see.
Fair game.
“Enough.” Abram stood, taller than Nathaniel, a big bear blocking out the light and standing as defense between Nathaniel and the world. When he offered silently, Nathaniel took the hand he held out and stood, so close he couldn’t have slipped a piece of paper between them. “Have pity. You win, pretty.”
Nathaniel twined soft, slim arms around Abram’s neck to draw him down for a kiss. His lips were soft, and tasted of bittersweet cocoa. “Good.”
Nathaniel found that his arms didn’t quite fully fit around the width of Abram’s shoulders. He liked that as much as he liked the juxtaposition of a man with the body of a heavyweight boxer and a heart for storytelling. No one could have picked a soulmate he’d have enjoyed more. Wasn’t it funny how things worked out?
He hadn’t realized it would be like this, that meeting his soulmate would make him bold, but he exulted in it.
“God, you are tiny,” Abram said, kissing the side of Nathaniel’s neck. “Pretty as a flower.”
Nathaniel tilted his head to give the big man all the room he could to work with. He hoped Abram never stopped. The tickle of his goatee sent shivering sparks through Nathaniel, tingling clear down to his fingers and toes. He’d been half-hard for what felt like ages, and had gone fully rigid the moment Abram’s lips touched his. The man could kiss, couldn’t he?
The only shame was they weren’t anywhere near close enough in height to grind together—
Or rather, they weren’t before Abram wrapped one arm around Nathaniel and lifted him right off his feet. Nathaniel gasped in equal parts surprise and delight. The way Abram held him, he would swear he weighed no more than a feather pillow. No effort in those lovely iron muscles, but he had to brace his legs after a wobble from his knees. His cock pressed sturdy and oh so hot even through his clothes, snugging against Nathaniel.
Nathaniel approved. He clung tighter, opening his mouth for the tip of Abram’s tongue to sweep inside. Abram drew a sharp breath in through his nose. He held Nathaniel’s head still, the entirety of his hand nearly broad enough to cover Nathaniel’s whole face. What could hands that size do on his naked body?
He wanted to find out. God, did he want to find out, and he thought Abram might be about ready himself. So much for being shy. Nathaniel nipped playfully at Abram’s full lower lip. He’d come around perfectly fine, and just as he should have. Soulmates belonged together, and their bodies knew it long before their psyches did.
Sighing, Nathaniel curled his fingers in the soft knit of Abram’s light sweater, scratching over the hot skin and muscle beneath. He wanted to see what his hands looked like on Abram’s bare chest, and sooner would be better than later.
He did have a room. Cade wouldn’t use it, since he’d found that party, and from what Abram had said about being sexiled, Robbie certainly wouldn’t poke his head in before daybreak.
No reason not to, was there? Nathaniel hummed happily into Abram’s kiss. He only wanted to see one thing first, out here. He could wait until they were in the room, but he didn’t want to.
Abram’s sleeves were loose enough to slide up, even on arms as sturdy as his. Nathaniel clung to Abram with his left, not wanting to fall now, and slipped his hand beneath the bunch of Abram’s right sleeve, searching for the mark he knew he’d find on Abram’s shoulder.
And find it he did. Though it struck him as odd. Far fainter than his own, less like a brand than a scar. Strange. Maybe the variance was down to skin texture?
What mattered was the shape, and that matched. “Hello,” Nathaniel murmured.
Abram made a grumbling sound. “Leave that be.”
“But why?” Nathaniel broke the kiss to ask. He turned his head to one side, wanting a better look, and—
What?
Abram tried to protest, but Nathaniel wasn’t in the mood to listen. He took Abram’s arm between both his hands and framed the mark on Abram’s shoulder between his palms. It did match his. He was sure of that much. He’d memorized the shape of his own—an iris on the edge of blooming. They were exactly the same. Even the size of it, slightly big for him and a fraction small on Abram.
Why does it look so old…?
He looked questioningly at Abram, meaning to ask. He would have, if Abram hadn’t been clever enough to track his thought process, and if he hadn’t looked both surprised and dismayed. “Oh no. I thought you knew.”
Confused, Nathaniel shook his head. “Knew what?”
Abram was the one not listening to him, now. He touched his earlobe with a bark of consternation. “Fuck me. It figures. The damn thing must have fallen off earlier.”
“Abram, stop.” Nathaniel let go of his arm to palm the man’s face. His head twanged. “What are you talking about?”
He would have sworn that the man blushed at that. “Well…I’m a widower,” Abram said.
Oh.
“My piece of jet must have gotten lost. Here.” Abram guided Nathaniel’s hand to his earlobe. “You can feel the scar where it usually goes. God, you poor thing. That must have been a hell of a shock to find a mark on me. I should have made sure you knew. It was so long ago. Years. I am single now. Not cheating on anyone. It’s not the kind of thing I would lie about.”
Oh, Nathaniel thought again, dazed. Now that he looked, he could see the dent in Abram’s earlobe where a jet widower’s bead would normally sit, and he had no reason to think Abram was lying about that. Why would he? It wouldn’t gain him anything Nathaniel hadn’t been willing to give. Therefore, he had had a soulmate—and had lost him.
But it doesn’t work that way. Does it? It doesn’t make sense. You are my soulmate. I know it.
Then how…? I mean, why…?
“Nathaniel?” Abram sounded worried now. He tried to lift Nathaniel’s chin to make eye contact. “Look at me. Are you all right?”
Nathaniel blinked up at him. “I…”
Chapter Three
Okay then. As Fridays go, I’d have to say that one was…interesting.
Saturday morning and back home again. Abram unlocked the front door to the split-level ranch house he and Callum had bought together, mostly at Callum’s insistence. Abram would have been happy living in the city, but Callum had narrowed his eyes, beetled his brows, and said, “If I’m going to have a soulmate and settle down to housekeeping, then like fucking hell am I going in without all the trimmings. Man up and help me pick a Realtor.”
At which Abram had laughed, and kissed him. That was the secret, with Callum. Let him rant and roar, take none of it seriously, and love him always. Do that, and it’d made him putty in Abram’s hands.
Nathaniel, on the other hand…
Abram pursed his lips and whistled as he tucked the jingling key ring in his pocket, hitched the hopefully-repaired DVD player more securely under his arm, and let himself inside the home he’d shared with his soulmate for fifteen years.
And Callum had been his soulmate. No doubt about that. It’d damned near been textbook. Two strangers catching each other’s gaze across a crowded room, the prickling tingle of a soulmark branding itself on their skin from the insid
e out…Callum puffing up with indignation like a mashup of Foghorn Leghorn and Mini-Me and informing Abram that he had another think coming if he wanted to take advantage…
Maybe it hadn’t been completely textbook. But even when Abram had seriously doubted the sanity of the gods for matching him up with a pint-sized powder keg, he hadn’t doubted the truth of their bond. Mostly because once they’d met, even when they’d been apart, he’d been able to feel Callum’s touch on his skin.
He couldn’t get Nathaniel out of his head, either.
Abram rubbed absently at his shoulder, where the old mark lay dormant. He missed those days.
Maybe that was it. He hadn’t been with anyone since Callum. Not that Callum would have disapproved of him getting on with his life. Callum would have been the first to drop-kick him out of the door. If he’d stayed in practice, perhaps then a few kisses from a pretty slip of a lad wouldn’t have sent his head tumbling as topsy-turvy as a Tasmanian devil that’d been fed raw caffeine immediately before it’d broken out of its cage.
There had been something Nathaniel wasn’t telling him. Abram would bet his life. It didn’t take a genius to detect as much when after a fit of kissing as if he’d meant to mount Abram then and there, the aforementioned lad had gone pale as a ghost and backed away as if his heels were on fire.
He hadn’t even given Abram his number.
Strange. Very, very strange.
Though because life did go on—and Abram knew that as well or better than anyone—he stopped to hook the DVD player back up before he gave in to the urge to address a picture of Callum hanging on the wall. He’d chosen that one for its expression, a narrow-eyed glare and a quirked eyebrow that asked as clearly as life, ‘ What the fuck was that all about?’
Abram settled back on his heels and raised both shoulders to shrug at the photo. “Honestly? Beats the hell out of me.”
‘Well then,’ Callum’s picture seemed to say. ‘You know what to do now, don’t you?’
* * * *
Technically, Nathaniel had the weekend off. He’d asked for the time well in advance, figuring that he’d either want a couple of days to recover from a weekend out with his brothers, or that it wouldn’t hurt him to take a day or so to catch up on the leaning tower of books by his bed that he wanted to read.
Instead he found himself at the library bright and early Saturday morning and wasn’t really surprised.
They let him in, and that wasn’t surprising either. After graduating from hanging out with Robbie at the auto parts store, Nathaniel had spent every afternoon and most of the weekends in this local branch. The staff had bought him a cake when he’d told them he wanted to get a degree in library science.
Working there hadn’t been so much an inevitability as a comfortable acceptance of fate. Things that were meant to be, all falling neatly into place.
Funny how expectations could get tumbled on their heads, wasn’t it?
Weekends at the library were never predictable. Sometimes they’d have a line out the door of people wanting to use the free internet or book clubs arguing over space, and when summer reading programs were in full swing, Nathaniel was often tempted to come to work in guerilla kit, stun guns and frag grenades included.
Today wasn’t bad. A couple of librarians who could handle regular traffic with their eyes closed—and himself. He’d begged the chance to shelve books, which they all understood as polite language for ‘I’d like to read, so give me an excuse to go wander around the stacks’. And while he could have done what he wanted at home with a search engine—probably more efficiently—that wasn’t the point.
Books were. Books soothed Nathaniel like nothing else could. Books were both his Kryptonite and his opium of choice, as much Valhalla as Valium and if he couldn’t calm down and think straight while surrounded by a forest of beautiful words, then it wasn’t possible to calm down at all.
Dear God, why had he run? Nathaniel gently pounded the flat of his hand against his forehead. That must have gone over great. Don’t explain anything to the nice man. Oh no, just go pale and start stammering and then take flight. Very smooth.
But it didn’t make sense.
Drawing breath for a sigh, Nathaniel wrangled his focus back around to the ten-pound tome he’d laid open on one of the shelves with an inch or so of space to spare. It’d been written in 1994, but honestly… For all the new studies done—and it seemed like there was a new one every year—no one knew any more or less about soulmarks than they had in ancient Greece.
Probably. The more people learned, the less they knew. The Greeks had been right about that one, too.
Nathaniel leafed through pages he’d already read once, his mind adrift. He’d spent half an hour that morning in the hotel room’s en suite with a pad of paper and a mirror, copying his soulmark down as precisely as possible. It’d made his eyes cross more than once, but he’d got it done in the end, and he carried that folded-up piece of paper in his pocket. He’d have to spend the same amount of time with Abram’s mark in front of him to get an absolutely accurate copy, but why? He knew it matched his—knew it deep as his bones, and in the core of his soul.
Only that wasn’t possible. The books were as straightforward about that as anything else. No one—not even dreamers—got a second soulmate. Abram had had his. His mark, the mark that matched Nathaniel’s, was old and barren of color.
Yet it existed. Nathaniel’s shoulder itched with a low, steady tingle, as if to remind him that there was more in heaven and earth than in his philosophy.
He’d have asked Robbie, if Robbie hadn’t been completely taken up with Ivan. And more power to him, but—
Disgusted, Nathaniel slammed the book shut. Loose pages objected to the rough treatment and flew out like dandelion fluff, scattering over the floor. “Oh no,” he said under his breath. Damaged books did bad things to his psyche. His first instinct was, then and always, to run after them. Of course.
Which brought him up short when he saw that one page had landed on a booted foot of frankly immense size—a foot attached to a leg like a redwood trunk. Fitting enough, considering he’d climbed its owner like a tree the night before. Who was, for some odd reason, carrying two paper cups of tea-to-go from the library’s café.
Nathaniel clutched the book to his chest. A tiny squeak escaped him.
Abram was, damn his hide, trying not to laugh and mostly failing. “Sorry. Did you say you worked for the library or you were involved in a secret campaign to destroy them?”
Nathaniel’s lips wanted to smile too. Oh, but this was his soulmate. He knew it. Their hearts were the same.
He wondered, for a moment—did books really have all the answers?
The temptation was there to ask, but some small and kindly god smiled down on him just that once. He stood, book still in his arms, and asked like a grown-up, “What are you doing here?”
Trying very, very hard not to toss you over my shoulder and take you home with me—for starters.
Also trying, for all I’m worth, not to imagine in vivid detail what I’d do with you once I had you in my bed.
Trying so very hard—yes indeed.
Somewhere out there, Abram had no doubt, Callum was rolling on the celestial floor laughing at him.
Abram couldn’t help having a sneaky suspicion Nathaniel had intuited all that loud and clear. He coughed and held up the cups he carried. “Tea?”
“Schrodinger’s,” Nathaniel said.
Which…no, Abram wasn’t even going to try. He couldn’t begin to fathom how this little butterfly’s mind worked. “Come again?”
“I didn’t come the first time,” Nathaniel murmured—then went bright red.
Trying very hard, hmm? Abram imagined Callum asking him.
Abram groaned on the inside. He couldn’t help it, could he? The kid was too cute when flustered. “Schrodinger’s?”
Nathaniel’s cheeks were still pink when he answered, “You say it’s tea, but all I see are cups with the librar
y café’s logo. So it could be coffee, or cocoa, or even hot water. All possibilities are limitless until confirmed or denied.”
Abram’s eyebrows drifted up. Whether he was more impressed or baffled, he couldn’t say for sure. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who could elevate a cup of tea to philosophical speculation.”
“Stick around for a while. Questions like that are just the warm-up,” Nathaniel said, the pink almost gone, but leaving a shy, sheepish smile in its wake.
Like a ghost, or the passing wing of a hummingbird in flight, Abram could feel the brush of that smile on his cheek. And on his lips, too. “Somehow, I believe you.”
“I still don’t know how far it is to the horizon.” Nathaniel set his book aside. “What are you doing here?”
Abram was starting to wonder that himself. No, no, he knew. “For starters, bringing you tea. And it is tea. An infusion of dried, boiled leaves, Ceylon, like the café girl promised was the best they had on offer. With milk and sugar, because you seemed like the type.”
Nathaniel crinkled his nose. He looked unaccountably pleased. “I am.”
“Good. Because I was hoping you could take fifteen and come drink it with me.” Abram indulged himself with a study of the amber-eyed lad’s pretty smile. “Is there a private spot nearby where we could talk?”
Nathaniel blinked, but rallied like a properly tough guy. “Yes. Out back, there’s a picnic table for staff where I usually take my lunch. Follow me.”
He walked away straight-backed, head up, not looking over his shoulder once. Now that? That took courage. Abram had to admire it. Hell, Callum would have, too.
The picnic table rested in the center of a sunbeam. Abram wished he’d brought some dark glasses with him but without being asked, Nathaniel let him take the side of the picnic table that put his back to the sun. He watched as Nathaniel accepted one of the cups of tea and peeled the lid off, appreciatively breathing in a cloud of fragrant steam. For a library café, they had the good stuff and they didn’t skimp on using it. Abram tried a sip and his taste buds almost stood up to applaud.
