by Selena Scott
On the surface, Phoenix was offering her those things. Quitting the center, moving his place of residence, job-hunting, those were all the grandest and sweetest gestures a man had ever made for her. But none of them were permanent. It was like serving delicious food on used paper plates. She couldn’t enjoy it when she knew it was going to get taken away. But if they subtracted all the grandness of what he was offering her, the boyfriend part, the commitment part, then maybe she could enjoy the rest of it.
His eyes were unblinking, dark and shuttered. “You’re saying you don’t want me to be your boyfriend.”
No. Actually she was saying that she desperately wanted him to be her boyfriend but her heart wouldn’t be able to take it when he left. But she wasn’t about to tell him that.
Ida cleared her throat and sat up. She felt vulnerable when the sheet pooled at her hips but she kind of hoped that her blatant nudity would take a little bit of the sting out of what she was about to tell him. She picked her words carefully, so as not to lie, even if she couldn’t quite bring herself to tell him the entire truth. “I don’t think us becoming boyfriend and girlfriend is a good idea.”
His eyes, which had stuttered out on her bare chest zipped up to her face. “You’re going to say no when I ask you, even if I have a job,” he said flatly.
“I won’t have to say no if you don’t bother asking,” Ida said with a twisted, sad little smile on her face.
He frowned at her. “Is this because I don’t have a job? I told you, I’m getting one next week. I’ll be a better boyfriend then.”
“No! Phoenix, it’s not that. I swear. It’s that…” She trailed off, trying to gather her thoughts. Everything made so much more sense when they weren’t naked and pressed against one another. “Look, the center is extremely important to me. The most important. Besides Wren, I kind of don’t have much else going for me. Taking care of the shifters that come through those doors,” she bit her lip, “it’s the honor of my lifetime to be doing that work. After what happened with my brother… yeah. I’m not going to risk failing anyone. And getting all tangled up with you just to have you leave in a couple weeks or months or whenever you’re all healed up, well, I already know that it’s just going to screw with me. It’ll affect everything. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to commit to someone who is not only going away, but who doesn’t even plan to be the same species as me in the future. That’s, like, the ultimate break up, Phoenix. And I’m not into doing that to myself.”
As she spoke, his hands had found their way to her hips, holding her still next to him. She only realized how tightly he’d been holding her when suddenly his hands flew off of her and into his own hair. “I wish that didn’t make sense,” he growled, low in his throat. One of those hands that had been so tight on her hips reached up to gently touch her cheekbone. “I don’t want to hurt you, Ida. And if you’re saying that being your boyfriend would hurt you when I left, then… I won’t ask.”
That was what she wanted, so she didn’t understand why his words made her stomach sink like a stone in a pond.
He touched her cheek again. “Do you also want to not be together in this way?” He gestured to their nakedness.
Yes, I do! Everything inside her screamed. “I want to say yes,” she whispered.
He waited, his eyes dark.
“Do you think we could keep hooking up,” she asked after a moment, “ and not make things too complicated?”
His brow furrowed and his eyes got darker. “You’re saying that you want to keep getting naked together but I won’t be your boyfriend.”
She couldn’t tell from his darkened expression exactly what he was thinking, but she didn’t think it was good. “I- I think that would be best. Look, if we’re hooking up, we’re bound to catch some feelings, right? But this way, I’ll be able to keep a lid on things. I’ll keep my heart in check. I’ll know, for a fact, that we’re never going to be serious. We’re not getting married or moving in together someday. There are no golden retriever puppies in boxes under the Christmas tree for us. I won’t get confused. If you’re my boyfriend and you’re doing boyfriendy things then I’m gonna get all mixed up. I’ll start to hope, and then you’ll go back to the wilderness and I’ll be crushed. So, yeah. I think that if you wanted to also, we could just kind of be friends. Friends who get naked together.”
These words all came out in a rather explosive rush and when she was done, she had pretty much no clue what he’d thought about any of it. He blinked at her with those dark eyes and she was reminded again of that first time she’d ever met him. How different he’d turned out to be than she’d first thought, but still, those eyes could be unnerving.
“If that’s what you want,” he said eventually. “Then that’s what we’ll do. I don’t want to go back to before, when I didn’t know you. I don’t want to lose you. So, we’ll be friends who get naked together.”
“That’s great!” she squeaked. Her voice sounded like the cartoon squirrel version of herself. She glanced at the clock. Damn. It was too late to send him home. Her traitorous stomach swooped. He was going to have to sleep over. She knew that the intimacy of that act ran counter to every point she’d just tried to make, but she couldn’t in good conscience kick Phoenix out of her house at two A.M. “You can sleep over if you want!”
Her voice was seriously so high and squeaky that she almost winced after each word.
“Ida,” he said quietly. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m great!”
She didn’t feel great though. She felt all stirred up and buzzing from the best orgasm of her life. She felt warm and loopy from the intimacy of making Phoenix come in her mouth. Being naked with him. About to sleep the night next to him. She felt raw from talking about her brother. And she felt so, so regretful that things had to be the way they had to be. She knew that she was right. She couldn’t afford to get close to Phoenix just to lose him. Her life had already been torn apart once when she was a teenager and she’d barely survived it. Losing Phoenix, and in such a permanent way, wasn’t something she ever wanted to face. She had to protect herself.
But protecting herself didn’t mean she had to deprive herself of every good thing he had to offer. Right? Which was why she was currently giving him a guest toothbrush and a glass of water on the nightstand and not able to stop herself from cuddling into his hot, smooth skin.
The intimacy of it all threatened to overwhelm her. He’s leaving, you fool! He’s more wolf than human!
His arms were around her, one hand firmly planted on her ass, and he hadn’t said almost anything since her speech from before. She wondered if he could feel the panic radiating off of her.
All she wanted was to surrender to his heat. To all the good things that he was. She couldn’t afford it. She had to make space between them somehow.
“Phoenix?”
“Yeah?”
“You know how we’re gonna be friends who get naked together until you go back to the wilderness?”
A pause. “Yeah.”
“Well, I, um, won’t get mad if you want to do that with other women too. Like I said, we’re not committing to one another, so there’s no reason for us to be exclusive.”
A much, much longer pause. “Go to sleep, Ida.”
She closed her eyes and tried to calm her racing heart. She hadn’t planned on Phoenix’s place in her life. But this was how it had to be. She was convinced that this was how it had to be.
***
The Director hung up the phone and stared, unseeing, into the hated Florida jungle that he’d been so unceremoniously sequestered to. The words of his agent echoed in his head.
The Wolf siblings could sense other shifters. They could identify them.
A swooping triumph filled his gut, but he pushed it down. He couldn’t afford to prematurely celebrate. Just because two of his best agents happened to have eyes on three of the most valuable shifters he knew of didn’t mean that everything from here on out was
going to be easy. The agents still had a long way to go. They still had to gain the full trust of the Wolf siblings. They had to convince them that their lives would be better spent serving their country. They had to remove any and all obstacles.
Yes, this was all far from over.
For a long time, The Director sat and simply contemplated the options. It was no question that he wanted all three of them. He thought of Phoenix’s feral savagery, his strength. He thought of Orion’s sheer size, his hunting ability. He thought of Dawn’s speed, her ability to hide in plain sight. Yes, he wanted the set of them.
But the brute force necessary to take them all at once, he simply didn’t have the resources.
“Wolves are pack animals,” he reminded himself in a low, almost deranged voice. There was a very good chance, that if he got one of them, the others would follow.
He messaged his Agent.
Concentrate on Phoenix. He’s still the weakest link. Hobbled by pain, but he’ll heal. And we’ve already seen that where he goes his brother and sister will go too. Get close to him. Remove all obstacles. Make him ours.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“What’s up your butt?” Orion asked the next day as the two brothers made sandwiches at the counter.
“What?” Phoenix asked, his brow furrowed angrily.
“It’s a human saying. One that I like very much. It means why are you so angry right now?”
“I’m not angry,” Phoenix said, smashing the top piece of bread onto his sandwich so hard that it left finger indents. He frowned. “I’m just— being a human is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.”
“Trouble with Ida?” Orion asked through a huge bite of peanut butter sandwich. “When I didn’t hear you come home last night I figured everything had gone according to plan.”
Phoenix frowned. Last night had been the most effervescent, transcendent night he’d ever had. It had also been one of the most deflating.
He shoved his sandwich from one side to the other on the plate, picked it up and put it back down. “Humans don’t follow their own rules.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Diana laid out all these rules for how to get Ida to be mine. House, job, stability, how to treat her, little things to do for her. And now Ida just wants to be friends. Friends who get naked together. I don’t get it.”
Orion pushed himself up to sit on the counter and finished the rest of his sandwich in one gigantic bite, his eyes settled on Phoenix’s sandwich for a moment. “She wants to be friends who get naked together?” His brow furrowed. “And how is that different from you being her boyfriend?”
Phoenix had asked himself that same question last night while he was brushing his teeth in her bathroom. He’d listened to her blisteringly sad tale about her brother. He’d understood, unfortunately, what she was talking about when she said that it might just be too hard to get close and then have to go their separate ways. But then she’d confused him with all this line-drawing she’d done. They could have this but not that. He was stuck trying to figure out the difference between the this and the that. It had all seemed fairly arbitrary to him.
Until they’d started to fall asleep and she’d said that horrible thing. That thing that, even now, made Phoenix want to punch his sandwich.
“She said it’s okay for me to have other naked friends too.”
“Oh.”
Orion’s tone said it all.
“Yeah. Apparently the difference between boyfriend and naked friend is that you can have lots of naked friends.”
“And that sounds bad to you?”
Phoenix slanted his brother a look that would have had another man’s teeth chattering. It simply made Orion laugh.
“Well, why the hell does she want that?” Orion inquired. “I’ve heard that human women are predisposed to monogamy.”
“So is Ida,” Phoenix said, utterly certain in his assessment of her. “She’s trying to protect herself, I think. From when we leave.”
“Oh.” Again, Orion’s tone said it all. There was a dead sort of note in his voice. One that implied that he too had been thinking about how much harder it was going to be to leave the human world than any of them had anticipated. “Right.”
They fell into a silence, sad but companionable, and Phoenix finally got around to eating his sandwich. They were just loading the dishwasher when Orion spoke up again.
“If you are allowed to have other naked friends, is she?”
The thought froze Phoenix in place. A bad kind of electricity zapped through him.
The idea of being naked with anyone other than Ida didn’t sound good to Phoenix, but it hadn’t affected him like this. Simply because he hadn’t taken it seriously. He wasn’t actually going to go out there and be naked with anyone else, no matter if she told him it was okay or not.
But this, the idea of her hooking up -as she’d called it- with someone else, and not knowing when or if she was actually going to, made Phoenix feel panicky and sick.
“Shit. I didn’t think. I didn’t really agree to it. But I didn’t disagree with it either. What if she… I gotta find her.”
“Phoenix!” Orion called after him, but it was too late. Phoenix was already storming out of kitchen, shoving his feet into his sneakers and wrenching the front door open.
“Oh!” Ida jumped nearly a foot into the air from where she stood on the front porch, her fist raised as if she were about to knock.
“Ida.” Ignoring the shock of seeing her unexpectedly, he did exactly what his body told him to do. He stepped forward, into the autumn sunlight, slid two arms around her and kissed her into oblivion. At least, he was in oblivion.
A moment later, there was a throat clearing behind him and Phoenix broke the kiss to look over his shoulder at his brother.
Orion made big eyes at him, like, remember what you were storming out of the house for just ten seconds ago?
Right. He looked down at Ida to talk to her, but was again sidetracked. This time it was by the dozy, seduced look in her eye. Her weight was pressing back onto his arms, like he’d turned her into jelly and she could no longer stand. He looked down and saw that her fingers were fisted in his T shirt.
He suddenly knew the answer to his own question. Ida wasn’t hooking up with other people. And she most likely wasn’t going to either. He might not have known her for a long time, but he knew her well enough to know that she was utterly dazzled by him. Just like he was by her. And she’d already told him, she hadn’t liked kissing Watt. So, did he think that she was out there, kissing randoms? No. He didn’t.
“That was— Wow. I was just going to knock and then bam! Best kiss of my life. Holy smokes.” She shook her head, her eyes blurry, and Phoenix laughed. He wasn’t positive she was even aware she was speaking aloud.
“You’re here,” he reminded her. “On my doorstep.”
“Right.” She shook her head again. “I came to find you.”
“I was just coming to find you. That’s why I was racing out the door.”
“Really?” her eyes softened, and something inside Phoenix softened correspondingly. She was such a goner for him. He realized that this was something he might know better than she did. He resolved, right then and there, to let her figure it out for herself. It wasn’t his job to push her into anything. It was his job to be there when she pushed herself.
“Yeah. I just wanted to see you.”
“But you wouldn’t know where to find me.”
“I know, I was thinking that the first thing I’m going to do when I get a job is to get a cell phone so that I can be in touch with you.”
“Good idea.”
“I also want a driver’s license.”
“Also a good idea.” She looked impressed.
“What was it that you were coming to find me for?” he asked, brushing the hair back from her face, straightening her glasses, leaning down for just one more soft kiss.
“Oh!” She did a quick little jump
in the air, her hands closing on his shoulders as she danced around. “I have the best news ever!”
“What’s that?”
“I got you a doctor’s appointment!”
His internal light, which had been glowing quite brightly while he watched her dance and shimmy around on his front porch, dimmed considerably. He wasn’t sure there was a single thing on this earth that he hated more than doctor’s appointments. “Oh.”
“No. Not any old regular doctor. I got you an appointment with a shifter doctor. He’s, like, totally famous. He was the one who was responsible for shifter liberation day! He’s a total rockstar!”
Phoenix frowned. She obviously admired this man, whoever he was, and that made Phoenix even less excited about going to the doctor.
“Seriously, Phoenix, he’s holding some clinic hours at the center. He travels around the country with his wife and they perform all sorts of health services for shifters. He does amazing work. And he’s here in Portland today. I talked to him this morning and he agreed to see you in an hour so we have to get a move on!”
“I hate doctors.”
“He’s a shifter doctor.”
Phoenix just stared at her. “And that’s supposed to change things because…”
“Because he understands what it’s like to be a shifter! Come on, please come see him!” She folded her hands under her chin and gave him big, round eyes that made him want to give her whatever she wanted. Though, he supposed, that was most likely the point of eyes like those.
