Hero's Bride

by C. J. Scarlett

  In a panic, she picked a Mexican restaurant in town; she figured she would need tequila to get through this and Mexican restaurants didn’t exactly scream romantic first date. She went on taco Tuesday with her friends or got a group together to see if she could demolish the nacho plate. It sent a clear message—

  Right?

  She was going nuts and for absolutely no reason. Dr. Tekkin may not even have thought that way. Though she was certain at this point he had no spouse or girlfriend to speak of, that didn’t mean he actively sought to fill the gap in his life. What’s more, even if he was, it probably wouldn’t be with her. He’d made no secret of how unintelligent, uninspiring, and completely unprepared he considered her in virtually all aspects of life. She didn’t exactly make a good match for a dragon shifter trying to change the world one lecture and underground protest at a time.

  “You could wear sweatpants, that’ll send a message,” Trish said. Alessia had her open on Skype to help her pick out clothes the night of the dinner.

  “I’m not wearing sweatpants,” she said, rummaging through her tiny closet, each time wishing something new would appear like a kid who continually opened the fridge hoping for a new snack.

  “Why? You want to ward this guy off. That’s one surefire way to say ‘absolutely no sex appeal to see here,’” Trish said. “Unless you don’t want to ward him off?”

  “It’s not that either,” Alessia snapped, her face going red quickly from neck to ears. “I just don’t want to dip into one extreme too far. I don’t want to dress like some skank hoping to get lucky and I don’t want to dress like I’m going out for a dinner with my best friend or something.”

  “So just put on some damn clothes and call it a night,” Trish said. “It’s not that complicated. Dress like you’re going to class or something.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “You’re absolutely ridiculous and always have been,” Trish huffed. “Your weird desire to constantly exert your power in the form of the clothes you wear has only ever led to us being late for dinner reservations and you know it.”

  Alessia narrowed her eyes but went into the closet and told herself she would wear the first thing she pulled out. Turns out it was a red-and-black sundress. Not exactly the casual she was hoping for, but she could turn into something else by throwing a cardigan over it. That certainly sent a no-touching message.

  “Just remember the safe word in case he tries to kidnap you… again,” Trish said.

  “I’ll be sure to work ‘pickle’ into a text conversation as casually as humanly possible,” Alessia said, giving Trish a small salute.

  “Otherwise, text me on the other side. I need details,” Trish said.

  “Will do.”

  They signed off. She was not alone in the fray. That was the one unfortunate thing, Trish could help her get ready. She could talk her up. They could plan a safe word to keep her from getting abducted in some sneak attack from his group. But she couldn’t go on the date with her. Even when it was just about college boys and not professors with ties to dangerous political entities, Alessia had never been much good at this part. Trish was a natural and she wished desperately she could bring her along. But that’s not the way life and adulthood worked.

  So, there she was, staring in the mirror, trying to think of all the interpretations her outfit could encourage, all the ways she could make a run for it if this turned out to be a trap. One thing was for sure, this wouldn’t be a boring night.

  Chapter 12

  It was like all he owned were white t-shirts and ratty old band shirts. Alessia somehow doubted he was a fan of that many bands. Today it was The Clash. “They were the only band that mattered, according to the Rolling Stones,” he said when he saw Alessia looking when she first opened the door. “Original punk.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe you’re some hardcore punk?” she asked, crossing her arms. “I’d say that’s a little cliché but you’re also a lot closer to suburban middle-class kid hoping for a tiny rebellion than full-fledged punk.”

  He shrugged. “I like angry music, but I don’t feel the need to dress angry. T-shirts and jeans work just fine for me.”

  Alessia rolled her eyes but couldn’t fight the smile that came after. He smiled too, and stepped out of her way so she could join him in the hallway and turn to lock the door. They walked down the hall, towards the elevators and she told him she wanted to go to El Loco Elm just off campus. He smiled and said okay and that he could go for some guac, and they got into the elevator. As soon as the doors closed, it was like a vacuum of silence overtook them.

  They stood a respectable distance apart. It wasn’t the space for lovers or friends, but two people on an elevator trying to keep a reasonable distance from the stranger next to them. If this was supposed to be some kind of date, they were doing that part wrong, for sure. They stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor together and he held the door as Alessia walked through.

  The first trial of the night came in the form of running into Erik. He was out with his backpack on, reading over some papers in his hand. He happened to look up at the exact right moment Alessia swiveled her eyes in his direction. At first, the recognition was friendly, with a smile attached to it. And then it turned dark when his eyes moved over to the man standing next to her, who walked in pace, and stopped when she stopped. There was no hiding it, they didn’t just happen to be out on campus, walking the same direction at the same time.

  “Doing something fun?” he asked, barely swallowing the bitter tone in his voice.

  “Mexican,” Alessia said. “Dr. Tekkin offered me an apology dinner.”

  “Ah.”

  There was no delicate way of putting it and absolutely no version of talking about it that Erik wouldn’t assume something else entirely. It was a little bit satisfying, if she was honest, to let him see this and have it knock him down a peg. After all, if he was going to act like he owned her, or he had some kind of first dibs on a date with her, Alessia wanted to repay that as well. Her biggest pet peeve was men getting possessive over a woman who never agreed to a relationship with them. She knew it was something of a natural reaction, to feel like he had ownership over something he liked. But she was a person, and Erik seemed like he was used to getting what he wanted.

  “Anyway, we better get going. The place kind of fills for margarita pitches,” Alessia said, adjusting her purse on her arm.

  “Right,” Erik said with a tight, thin mouth. “Have fun.”

  Then he walked away, down the path and didn’t say a word. Part of her wished she could have done that more delicately but another part didn’t care. He needed to see that not everything revolved around him. And if this was one way to do that, so be it.

  “He seems lovely as always,” Dr. Tekkin said with an irritated grate to his voice as they kept walking.

  “He’s got a big ego; you could relate,” Alessia said and felt Dr. Tekkin’s glare at the back of her head, though she refused to turn and face him.

  “It’s not an ego,” he said. “I need to protect himself in some way. Did you ever read Dune? I doubt it. It was my favorite book when I was a teenager, all about strange powers and distant worlds. There’s this line in there, ‘fear is the mind killer’ I never forgot that. It was life altering to read for someone like me so I never let it go when I got older.”

  For someone like me. Alessia tried not to cringe. So maybe Dr. Tekkin had a little more license to walk around like a big man than Erik did. Though she wasn’t about to forgive him for everything just because he had a chip on his shoulder, she was willing to overlook some of his tendencies that were a little less desirable. It was a defense mechanism—the hard and spikey outer shell of a soft underbelly. Maybe she should stop having her defenses raised so high as well, stop trying to meet him at every turn when it came to verbal sparring and glaring.

  Maybe she should try to enjoy this night as if it was a date. She wasn’t saying she needed to think about kissing him
or if there would be another dinner after this, sometime in the future. But she could forget their past, forget the context of their relationship, forget everything she already knew about him and try to create a blank slate in front of her. This was a man who asked her to dinner. That seemed like as good a place to start as any.

  #

  The restaurant was decked out in all the colors and trappings of a Tex-Mex place hoping to cash in every year on Cinco de Mayo. Sugar skulls littered the walls, hanging in paper chains across the ceiling. Cartoon depictions of cacti and old Mexican towns hung on the walls. The music was some Mariachi Spotify station and the air around the bar positively smelled like stale, spilled tequila.

  “Now we’re talking,” Dr. Tekkin said as they seated themselves at a cocktail table in the bar area.

  “I’ll be right with you guys,” said some small, speedy waitress rushing drinks over to a table across the way.

  “Total Americanization of a culture,” Dr. Tekkin said. “But if we know that and approach it thusly, there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun.”

  “Are you ever not in professor mode?”

  “My mother always said I was a born academic. Though she was always afraid…”

  He trailed off, frowning into his menu.

  “Afraid of what?” she asked, wondering if it was wise to continue.

  “Back then, there were bans on shifters working with kids,” he said.

  She remembered. Her second-grade teacher was a wolf shifter and ended up just not showing to class anymore; the substitute with the bad breath and the loud voice became our permanent teacher after that. The same thing happened to the fourth-grade teacher Mr. Edelman. It had been a nationwide ban on shifters working in medical and children-related fields. The ban was eventually lifted, and apologies were made, but prospective teachers still had to show shifter ID cards if they wanted a job and, more often than not, they didn’t end up getting it.

  “Did you want to work with younger kids?” she asked. “I feel like anything below undergrad would make you want to tear your hair out.”

  He smiled. “No, but the entire profession was in some upheaval. My dad was a professor and he almost lost his job when he had to declare my mother and me as shifters in his household on some form.”

  She nodded, swallowing, and suddenly very interested in the list of appetizers on the menu. It was a tough subject, but one they couldn’t avoid. He was a shifter, a professor of shifter studies, and she was a grad student learning from him in a mentorship, in that capacity. Their entire professional and personal existence revolved around the topic. Maybe dinner wasn’t such a good idea when it came to trying to clear the air. Maybe a movie would have been better or an arcade or anything where the sole form of entertainment wasn’t their ability to talk to each other.

  “They have three different types of guac,” she said, clearing my throat. “I say we get the trio.”

  “Alessia, we can talk about this stuff.”

  “About guac?”

  He gave her a look and she gave him a weak smile in return. Her fingers tapped restlessly against the plastic menu and she sat it against the table. “About all this stuff. I wanted a chance to talk to you without school or our jobs, or anything else in the way. We’re friends, right? Or at least something like friends. And we should be able to talk to each other. I mean, even if we aren’t friends, we’re kind of bound by a weird circumstance, right? We’ve got this shared memory that no one else can really get in on.”

  He rambled, she didn’t know that it was possible for him to ramble nervously but there he was, pattering away. She tried not to think of it as cute. She tried not to smile. But his own nervousness was a little too adorable not to admire. Yes, she could admit they were probably friends. She wasn’t sure she’d take a bullet for him just yet or let herself be conned into helping him move, but she could admit he was someone she could talk to about certain things, and wanted to talk about certain things.

  “Can I get you guys started on drinks?” the waitress asked, reappearing as if from nowhere.

  Hell yes, please.

  “Want to do a pitcher?” Dr. Tekkin asked. “I feel like we earned it.”

  “Reading my mind.”

  A few minutes later, a large pitcher of bright green margarita, a small dish of salt, and some wedges of lime appeared in front of them, and it took all Alessia’s energy not to dive in and just chug away. She allowed Dr. Tekkin to carefully pour the contents out for her, squeezing the lime and placing the salt. When he finally slid the margarita her way across the table, she took a massive sip, trying to hide just how much she chugged down.

  “Am I that bad of company?” Dr. Tekkin asked, nodding to the glass.

  “I’ve just had a very stressful week,” she sighed and then laughed. He shrugged and lifted his glass as if in a toast. He threw back a fair amount as well.

  “So,” she asked, already feeling the tequila swirl through her system thanks to an empty stomach. “Do I qualify yet for your super-secret club and threshold to actually be considered a person who can talk about shifter politics?”

  He took another sip and set his glass down. “There will always be a divide. A minority will always have final say over majority allies, no matter how dedicated. But… I’m willing to admit I might have been a little harsh on you.”

  “Are you just saying that because you feel bad for kidnapping me?”

  They smiled and they both took another deep drink from their glasses, enough that Dr. Tekkin reached over and filled them both up again. It probably wasn’t exactly healthy that alcohol running through their system made things easier but whatever crutch Alessia could take at this point, she would. Besides, he’d complimented her for the first time since she’d known him—or, at the very least, apologized for something.

  There was, however, another downside to drinking. The more Dr. Tekkin drank, the cockier his face became. He had a perpetual smirk like he knew something no one else in the room did. He leaned back like he owned the entire table, head cocked to one side. She tried to hate it, tried to remember how frustrating his attitude had been for the longest time, but her vision and brain was getting fuzzy and all she could think was that he looked pretty cool in his Clash t shirt, ripped jeans, and sure face. It was hard not to be impressed by him, to believe his smirk. It infuriated her in an entirely different way, something closer to excitement. She wasn’t sure she could tell the difference anymore.

  “No, the point is the Jedi were basically this awful cult organization that brainwashed kids.”

  That was another thing… turns out he was a total nerd. He hid it well, under the muscles and the ripped clothes, but he was a total dork and his eyes lit up a little too much when he started talking about these things. The sure look went away in the face of babbling about space and old TV shows, all sorts of other things. She realized, by the time they finished the pitcher, that it made him a little too human. That’s what was scary about it all. He was a complete person hiding underneath those layers. It was frightening to think about, and incredibly tantalizing. Or maybe she was just drunk and had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

  They ate through their shared plate of chips and guacamole and salsa, and their respective taco dinners. They laughed a little too loud sometimes and earned some glares from other people trying to enjoy whatever date or dinner they were on themselves. It was more fun than Alessia thought she’d have with him. And it was just him. It wasn’t even the shifter part of him, the politics that seemed to color his entire existence, talk of class. He laughed about being a nerd in high school, about his favorite band, his favorite TV shows, and food. She talked about her own complete ignorance of virtually everything he named.

  By the time they were done, it had been hours and she hadn’t even noticed.

  #

  The mood changed, however, when he walked her home. The air around them changed; suddenly she remembered she was out to dinner with a man, a man who paid for h
er, and was now walking her home. She was out to dinner with a man that she didn’t want to admit she found fairly attractive. Alessia never liked that cliché, the line between love and hate, but there certainly was something to be said for the line between total irritation and sexual chemistry. In her sober mind, she never would have admitted that she could feel something like that for him, or that all her red-faced rants about him masked something else. But right now, she knew she was attracted to him. She knew she wanted to fill his arms and his chest. She knew she liked how he smelled and how much closer he walked next to her than earlier when they’d been walking to dinner.

  When her apartment building came into view, she knew the night was almost over, the dream, the fantasy would be dead soon. She had to think of something to say, something to do. She didn’t want this to be the last time they were alone together. She didn’t want to go back to how things used to be, to their professional relationship. Alessia wanted to talk to him more about his Dungeon and Dragons tournaments and how ironic that was and she also wouldn’t mind testing to see just how soft his lips actually were.

  “So, that wasn’t so bad,” he said when they got to the front door. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked on the balls of his feet, the universal symbol for awkward stalling. She could work with that.

  “No, it wasn’t,” she said and, before she could stop herself, she leaned forward and placed a kiss on his stubble-covered cheek. The skin was warm even if his five o’clock shadow was rough and she pulled away to see him completely still. This was the moment, this was the test to see where things stood with them. She’d thrown out a line, all she needed was to see if he would take the bait or if he would head off running and that would be that.

  He didn’t move. He just watched her with an intense gaze. She decided that was a good thing. She gave him plenty of chances to flee, to run off and never deal with her again. He wasn’t going anywhere; that was as good as anything else.