by Selena Scott
Oh. It hit her all at once. Arturo, in the armchair, was sitting in a patch of sunlight that was spearing in through the kitchen window.
Any room that Arturo typically entered, he went straight for the darkest corner. If there was a shadow, Arturo was normally leaning directly into it. But not today. His face was upturned, his eyes closed. He didn’t look peaceful and he didn’t look like he was enjoying it. No. He looked like sitting in a patch of sunlight was something he was making himself endure.
Why would he do that?
“Oh! Morning,” Celia said, finally spotting Martine where she stood in the kitchen doorway. “There’s coffee in that Thermos thingy over there and we saved a plate of breakfast for you.”
“Thanks,” Martine said automatically, stepping further into the kitchen. She felt, rather than saw, Arturo’s eyes open across the room. She felt the two black beams of his gaze follow her across the room.
“You slept late today,” Caroline called to Martine.
Martine nodded, poured her coffee and took an immediate, scalding sip, hoping to cover the blush of her cheeks with her mug. She wished Arturo would close his eyes again, but she could feel him continue to study her.
“You must have needed it,” Celia said, also studying Martine. “Because you look great. Man, talk about some beauty sleep.”
“What?” Martine asked in confusion, her fingertips automatically rising to prod at her own face.
“Yeah,” Caroline agreed. “Seriously. You look like you just got back from a spa or something.”
Martine was spared from having to reply by Thea who spoke to Arturo through furrowed, skeptical eyebrows. “You, on the other hand,” she told him, “look like something the cat puked up.”
“Apparently he had a long night,” Jean Luc chimed in, not bothering to raise his eyes from the newspaper.
Martine almost choked on her coffee and busied herself by grabbing her plate of breakfast and sitting on the opposite side of the room from Arturo. Oh God. What would she say if Arturo told the group what had happened? She could barely explain what had happened to herself, much less a group of people with eyes and questions and judgments.
Even worse, she realized, he had the power to expose the fact that she’d been leaving the group. She knew that Arturo didn’t care a whit about group unity. He might even find it funny to reveal that she’d been leaving the group to venture out on her own. She knew, without question, that the group would view it as a betrayal. She wasn’t part of the seven, but to them, she’d been there from the beginning and they relied on her to stay. She knew that in the backs of their minds, having Martine up their sleeve had always been a comfort to the group. Finding out that she’d been venturing out on her own would shake them up—it might even make them more vulnerable to the demon. Martine squeezed her eyes shut, felt Arturo’s gaze on her, and silently begged him to keep his mouth shut.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jack asked, looking back and forth between Jean Luc and Arturo.
“It means nothing,” Arturo said. “I shifted last night and apparently that woke up Jean Luc and sent him into a hissy fit.”
“Wait…” Tre cut in. “I think I dreamed about that. Weird. I can almost remember but not quite.”
“Me too,” Jack said, squinting to remember. “I had the weirdest dream. It was a shifter dream, but it was also a sex—never mind.”
Thea turned a 180 in her seat to raise her eyebrows at Jack. “Does that explain the lovely little wake-up call I had at 2 in the morning?”
“Oh!” Caroline chimed in. “Jack woke you up at 2? Tre woke me up at 2!”
“Huh,” Celia said, cocking her head to one side. “Sounds like we were all getting busy around 2 am last night.”
“Not all of us,” Arturo said.
“I’m even more confused now than I was last night,” Tre said. “Hold on. You shifted and somehow that woke up Jean Luc and then gave me and Jack sex dreams? How does that figure?”
Arturo shrugged lazily, though it did very little to mask his extreme annoyance with this conversation. Martine kept her eyes glued to her breakfast.
“Maybe the three of you are all in love with me,” Arturo said acidly. “And dreaming about me shifting is enough to rev your engines.”
“Arturo,” Thea said. “Not to be rude, but I don’t think anyone is sexually attracted to you right now. I’ll say it again. You look like something the cat puked up.”
Martine snuck a glance at Arturo. She couldn’t help thinking that Thea’s assessment was a tad harsh. Martine had, in fact, seen cat puke before and Arturo didn’t look that bad. He looked rumpled and disheveled and unkempt and exhausted and irritated and a little dirty. But he was still almost paranormally handsome.
“I see you’re not even attempting to veil your insults any longer,” Arturo replied, one menacing eyebrow raised.
“I’m not saying it to be rude,” Thea said, making Jack snort. “All right, maybe I’m being a little rude. But I’m also just making a point. Why are you wearing those tiny clothes again? We found you ones that fit.”
Arturo was, in fact, wearing old sweatpants and an old T-shirt that they’d scrounged up at Thea’s farmhouse in Montana. Eventually, they’d tracked down some athletic wear that fit Arturo’s long frame a bit better.
Arturo sucked his teeth, his eyes out the window, looking for all the world like he might just ignore her point-blank question. But then, finally, “I tore my clothes shifting last night.”
“Ah,” Jack said, sitting next to Thea at the table. “And we’re back to this mysterious night-shifting again.”
Arturo stood up. “I’ve told you everything I’m going to tell you about it.”
Martine felt a nearly swamping relief sweep over her. He wasn’t going to tell anyone what had happened last night. Her leaving, their fight. The warm, tense touching they’d done. The glowing energy. The flexing heat between his legs. The liquid warmth between hers.
For now, at least, it remained a secret.
“Oh, don’t leave in a huff,” Thea said. “Would it make you feel better if I admit that I’m being an asshole?”
Arturo ignored her, striding out of the kitchen and Thea lunged forward and grabbed him by the shoulder.
“I was just trying to suggest,” she said, “in as dickish a way as possible, that you go to that mall we passed about twenty miles back and get some clothes that fit.”
Arturo glared at her. “You want me to go to a mall?”
Caroline laughed. “I’ll go with you! Shopping can be fun. Trust me.”
“I’ll go, too,” Thea said suddenly. Malls weren’t her thing any more than they were Arturo’s. But the group was still mildly suspicious of Arturo’s intentions around the very innocent Caroline. Apparently he needed a chaperone.
“I will not be going,” Arturo informed them.
“Oh, please?” Caroline asked, rising up from her seat, her chestnut hair shiny over her shoulders and her hands clasped in prayer in front of her chest. Her big, white smile was what finally did it. “It’ll be fun, I swear. And you’ll be more comfortable in clothes that fit.”
Arturo looked down at himself and had to admit that he’d prefer to wear a shirt that didn’t gather at his armpits and show an inch of skin at his belly. And perhaps he’d like to wear pants that didn’t end at his calf and scrape a seam over his man parts.
He didn’t bother answering, just turned on his heel and left the room.
“Be ready in twenty minutes!” Caroline sang after him, a big grin on her face.
***
There were many things that Arturo hated about modern life. He hated cars. He hated advertisements on the radio. He hated how strangely flabby most men seemed to be. He hated how skinny women were expected to be. He hated the long, white line an airplane left behind, cutting the sky in half. He hated the constant hum of electronics.
But… he did not hate these clothes.
Arturo stood in front of a three-way
mirror, Caroline grinning and clapping her hands behind him and Thea yawning in a chair. He turned one way and then the other. He wore jeans that fit him well. They were dark in color and a little tighter than he thought he’d like to wear. But he had to admit that they felt good. Secure. On top he wore a deep blue button-down with small black arrows patterned across every inch of it. It was soft material and buttoned to his throat.
Call him vain, but he looked good. He looked big and slim at the same time. The color of his clothes made his eyes look darker and more menacing in a good way.
He missed the charmed smile that Caroline shot at Thea in the mirror. Thea, naturally more closed off than Caroline, wasn’t completely charmed. But she had to admit that it was a little fun to see Arturo strut and preen himself like a leopard.
In the end, they left the mall with lots of soft V-neck T-shirts, two pairs of jeans, three button-ups, two hoodies, some pajama pants, a pair of running shoes (that Arturo had openly turned up his nose at), a pair of leather sneakers (that Arturo had obviously thought were very sharp), and a bathing suit (Caroline had utterly insisted).
Caroline stuffed Thea and Arturo full of soft pretzels and Coke slushies and shoved Arturo into a barbershop at a far corner of the mall. She gave the barber explicit instructions on how to style Arturo’s hair.
A half an hour later, Arturo strode out of the mall, weighed down with bags and feeling weirdly exposed after his hair had been shorn so closely to his skull. Twice during his haircut he’d had to bodily force himself not to throat-punch the barber who dragged a shaver against his skin. It wasn’t a natural impulse of Arturo’s to let someone touch him like that. But he’d done it for Caroline.
He’d done this whole thing for Caroline, and he had to admit that he hadn’t hated it. He actually felt a strange shopper’s high as he slid into the back of their newly maintenanced rental van. Caroline and Thea sat up front.
Arturo eyed his new bags of clothes and as they pulled out of the parking lot toward home, an uneasy heaviness settled over top of him. He felt like maybe he’d just been tethered to the ground by an iron chain. He eyed his new clothing.
Earthly possessions.
Ugh.
What the fuck was he doing letting these mortals dress him up like a doll? He wasn’t one of them and it wouldn’t do any of them any good to forget that.
Arturo was an immortal. Though they’d freed him from his bond to the demon, he would never be completely free of the demon either. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Arturo knew that his fate was tied up with that of the demon’s. He knew as long as the demon walked this earth, Arturo would exist in this half-life he’d been living for four hundred years. He would be defined by restlessness and dissatisfaction. He’d never connect with another being again.
Not that he wanted to.
He felt weighted down by the ridiculousness of the clothing at his feet. He’d gone shopping with two mortal women. How humiliating. He was not a normal man and he’d never be.
What on earth had possessed him to do this?
His reflection was tossed back milkily in the car window as the blue sky domed over top of their racing car.
He sneered at himself. He knew exactly why he’d done this. And it made him even more pathetic.
He’d let Caroline dress him up and cut his hair because he was a vain creature at heart and Thea’s words had truly wounded him. He didn’t want to be undesirable and disgusting.
As prickly as he was, Arturo’s raw, primal attractiveness was the only manner in which he ever truly engaged with a human.
The flicker in the eyes of those attracted to him, the tensing of those intimidated by him. It thrilled him, sure, but it also grounded him. He’d always have that.
But what made him even more pathetic was the fact that Arturo, for the first time since he’d become immortal, wanted his attractiveness to work on one person in particular.
It was sharply embarrassing, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Martine.
The golden lines of her body. Her rough breath as she grappled with him. The fierce fight in her eyes when she flung her fist back, her hand filled with golden electricity. But most of all, he couldn’t stop thinking of the feeling of her shifting against him.
When Arturo shifted, it was filled with a ripping, controlled pain. It was a good kind of pain, like a hard stretch after being cramped down in one position for two long. But as Martine’s shifting energy sliced right through him, he could feel what her shift felt like to her. And it wasn’t painful. It was… explosive. It was a wild scattering of her atoms in every direction. A racing energy, like a hundred thousand gallons of water over the mile-high edge of a waterfall. It was euphoric and gorgeous and utterly untamed.
He’d been in perfect awe of her. Honestly, if they’d been on their feet, he was certain he would have found himself kneeling before her.
And Arturo didn’t kneel for anyone. Not even the demon. And he’d been through centuries of torturous pain to prove it.
The whole skirmish between them couldn’t have lasted more than fifteen minutes. But Arturo had played it over and over in his mind on an endless loop. He wished, more than anything, that he could stop the memory in one place in particular. Her straddled over his lap, golden, panting, fierce and innocent at once.
But he couldn’t stop the memory there. Because it went on.
He winced as he remembered his pathetically boyish reaction to her. Naked girl: instant erection. He’d gotten hard so fast that he’d heard it hit her back, for fuck’s sake.
The more he’d thought about it, the more certain he became that Martine was truly an innocent. That made his reaction to her both more and less embarrassing. Less embarrassing because maybe she didn’t have much to compare to and didn’t realize how doggishly eager he’d been for her. More embarrassing because he wasn’t even sure that Martine was a sexual being and there he was popping wood. It was almost like getting a hard-on from a marble sculpture of Aphrodite. Human form… but not exactly acceptable boner material.
He generally prided himself on having a very tight leash on his desires, on his actions. It was how he’d survived 400 years under the heel of the demon after all. But fifteen minutes getting sweaty and grappling with Martine and he’d been back to pre-teen levels of self-control.
They came around a long curve of the highway, rocks red as Mars on one side and the sky as blue as a blueberry on the other. Arturo didn’t see the alien beauty of this place, he saw only Martine in his mind’s eye.
“Would you wear a dress?” Caroline asked Thea up in the front seat and something about the tone of her voice had Arturo tuning in to listen.
“I don’t know,” Thea said, just the smallest tinge of unexpected girlishness in her voice. “It’s not even real yet. We don’t know anything, you know?”
“Well, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean we can’t dream about it. If and when Tre and I get married, I want to wear a white dress. But really, really sexy. Lingerie almost. My first wedding dress was so stuffy and classic and had ten thousand buttons. I felt like I was getting strapped into a straitjacket.”
“A white dress, huh?” Arturo scoffed from the back. “Tre doesn’t strike me as a traditional kind of guy.”
“Oh, he is,” Caroline said solemnly. “On the inside, he’s very traditional, he just doesn’t always admit it to himself. Anyways, I want a dress so white and so low cut and so tight that his eyeballs melt and run down his face.”
“How romantic,” Thea said dryly, though she smiled at Caroline’s enthusiasm.
“And are you planning your own wedding as well?” Arturo asked Thea in a sickly sweet voice.
She bristled, but oddly, Thea had the sudden intuition that he wasn’t actually mocking her. He was teasing her, sure. But there wasn’t his usual dose of derision in his tone.
“No. Not really. We haven’t decided anything yet.”
“But she thinks Jack has a ring!” Caroline said, bursting with the news
, even though she knew she should probably keep it to herself.
“Oh, really?” Arturo said, his eyebrows in his hairline. He couldn’t exactly say why that surprised him.
“Caroline!” Thea chirped.
“Oh, no. Was that a secret? Did I just wreck a secret?” Caroline wilted, her shoulders up around her ears as she steered the van around another curve in the road.
Well, there was just no staying mad at that. “I didn’t explicitly say it was a secret. But I’m really uncomfortable talking about it. Can we just change the subject?”
There was silence in the car for a long minute.
“What do you mean you think he has a ring?” Arturo asked, intentionally stirring the pot.
“Arturo!” Caroline barked, suddenly militant in her mission to respect Thea’s wishes. “She said we’re changing the subject. The end.”
***
It was late afternoon when they finally got home from the mall. Arturo, still in a sour mood, intended to just toss his bags into his room, but he found he couldn’t deny his desire to change into something that fit him a little better.
So, after a quick shower, he pulled on a pair of the dark jeans, the leather sneakers, and a blood-red V-neck. It was dumb, and ridiculously human, but he felt his mood lift at the soft slide of the fabric against his skin.
He felt his mood lift further at the carefully folded arrangement of his new clothes in his drawers. Earthly possessions were idiotic and ridiculous and a waste and just something he was going to leave behind when all of this was done. But they sure did look nice all folded up like that.
As disgusted as he was pleased with himself, Arturo left his room, intending to do a few laps around the property, checking carefully to make sure the demon hadn’t been anywhere near here.
