by Holley Trent
“Let me text my dad first. I’ll be right back.”
For fuck’s sake.
Perhaps her communicating with him was the polite thing to do, and her parents probably expected it with her living at home, but she was an adult and certainly could be expected to do her own thing on occasion. He tried to be as respectful as he could to his elders, but if they were going to get in the way of Will courting their grown daughter, there was going to be some static. He’d spoken to the chieftain Ollie about his dreams and what they could mean as Ollie’s similar dreams had drawn him to Norseton for Tess. Nothing would have kept him away from his fated match, and they’d had plenty of obstacles between them.
Will kept his lips pressed together and watched her sashay out of the room. He was hard-pressed to imagine a more delectable sight than Erin in those inadequate “pants,” walking barefooted through his home. He liked the idea very much, actually. Seeing her curled up on some soft surface and making herself comfortable in his space.
Before the dreams, he hadn’t given the neighbor girl any thought in years, except in passing. Of course he remembered her, and the image of her face was burnished into his mind for him to access whenever he passed by her parents house, but he’d never given her much consideration. He hadn’t been there at the point when she’d stopped being a child. She was years past that point, and he was glad he’d missed it. If he’d been around, he’d probably feel a hundred percent more unsavory about the things he wanted to do to her. It wasn’t her naivety that turned him on so much, but her malleability. She had a mind that could be changed and for the better. That was hard to find nowadays because everyone was a fucking cynic.
She returned, clutching her phone, and wearing a scowl on her pretty face.
“Did he not take the news the way you wanted?”
She rolled her eyes and plopped back onto the mattress. “He wasn’t mad about dinner, but he did ask a bunch of questions about what I was doing and where I was.” She clasped her hand over his mouth before he could speak the question on his mind. “Don’t even ask. He’s overprotective, but that this place is small enough that he’d know all my friends. And I couldn’t lie, so…”
She pulled her hand off his mouth and picked up the binder.
“What’d you say?”
“I told him I was in the business district and not to wait up. I turned off the phone. Makes me wish I’d moved out already. I’m always waiting for the perfect timing for things, but perfect never comes, and I end up making myself miserable.”
“Worry about one thing at a time.” In his opinion, her not having moved yet was a good thing. He’d obviously want her to move in with him when she was ready. No need to create extra work.
“You’re right. At the moment, my biggest concern is finding a permanent job that I actually like, and once I do that, I can scour the Afótama web for a roommate and a grown-up place to live. So, question one.” She tapped the page as if to redirect his attention, not that he needed it. As a pretty proficient telepath, he was used to quickly filtering information and shifting gears as necessary. Sometimes, he could walk through a room and pick up bits and pieces of telepathic chatter from every direction, but common decency made him block the conversations out. He may have been an occasional voyeur, but he wasn’t much of an eavesdropper. “How old were you when you had your first psychic experience, and what was it?”
“Hmm, I was fourteen, and in the second or third stage of puberty, I think. I imagine my first experience was much like that of many of many other Afótama children. It was a weekend, so I’d slept in. I walked into the kitchen for breakfast. My parents were having a telepathic conversation over coffee about some insignificant thing—landscaping the front yard, if I’m remembering correctly—and I butted in without thinking. I didn’t realize what I’d done until they gave me that shocked stare. You know the one.”
Erin laughed and turned the page. “Yep, I know the one, although the stares I got came much later than yours, I think.”
He leaned over and pressed his pen’s tip to the paper again. “How much later?”
“I…wanna say I was around sixteen.” She narrowed her eyes and clucked her tongue. “No, definitely sixteen. I had just started drivers’ ed. But we’re not talking about me. Stop distracting me.”
He jotted down Delayed onset of telepathic communication skills. He didn’t know what the postponement could indicate, but it was unusual enough to note for further research. He didn’t think Erin was so unique—there had to be plenty of other Afótama whose psychic gifts didn’t develop until well past adolescence. He’d be finding out soon enough, seeing the trends for himself, if there were any to be seen. “Okay.” He dropped the pen and rolled onto his side to face her. “You have my full attention. Next question. By the way, are you hungry? Do you want dinner?”
“You’re distracting me.”
“You missed dinner. A woman can’t live on chocolate croissants, no matter how good they are.”
“I’ll pick up something on the way home. The Chinese food place is open until one a.m. now. New York City ain’t got nothing on Norseton.” She grinned and wriggled her eyebrows.
So damn cute. His mind was a battleground of simultaneous compulsions to tweak her nose and slip a finger between her lips for her to suck until he told her to stop. He’d have to be careful with her. She may have been a grown woman, but she’d been sheltered in their insular community for her entire life. She’d never been anywhere, as far as he knew. Now, he had to know.
“Have you ever left Norseton?”
“Ugh.” She gave his shoulder a playful nudge and adjusted the binder on her lap. “Of course I have.”
“How far did you go?”
“I went to Texas once.”
“For what?”
“My mom had to go to some training thing for her job, and Matriarch paid for me to go along. School was in summer break and my dad had to work. It was either I went with Mom and hang out in the hotel or mope around Norseton.”
“That’s all? Nowhere else?”
She shrugged. “Why?”
He blew out a long breath and twined his fingers through the ends of her hair. “You should go places. See things.”
“I should. I’d like to.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Two things. Approval and money.”
“The money part I get, but what sort of approval do you need? I don’t think you mean taking off from work.”
“No. I catch a lot of flak from my parents when I ask them why we never took vacations when I was a kid. They always gave me the third degree and were so concerned with why I was so desperate to go somewhere—anywhere. I…” She furrowed her brow and fidgeted with the top corner of the paper marked Page 12. “I couldn’t articulate why I wanted to.”
“Afótama are so enmeshed with each other psychically that pulling one’s self free from the weaving is hard to justify.”
She nodded and fixed her expressive brown gaze on him. She was so wide-eyed and curious. Eager to learn, but so tentative. Her tentativeness didn’t surprise him, though. Most people didn’t want to feel like they were outliers.
“I don’t really want to rip myself away,” she said, “but to just be clear from the link for a while and see what’s different. If I were braver, I’d put my foot down and just go.”
“Go where?”
“Anywhere. Maybe to see the ocean for the first time. Or snow.”
“The thing about being an adult is that you can make choices and not have to justify them to anyone except yourself.”
“That’s the tough part. I’ve convinced myself that I need better reasons to do things most normal people take for granted. It’s a hard mindset to break free of.”
“You’ve got to have priorities.” He traced along the edge of her jaw and across her pouting lips. So soft. He needed softness in his life, and someone who could give that tenderness to him when he wanted it. “You need to pick one thing tha
t you really want and figure out the steps you need to take to succeed. You can’t let other people distract you from your goals.”
He could tell that confusion was a chronic state for her. Perhaps she was absorbing some of it from the Afótama web. She could have been picking up bits and pieces of other people’s wants and wishes here and there and internalizing them without realizing they weren’t for her. Not everyone was equally skillful at putting up walls against the noise. Some people needed to be taught…and encouraged.
He pushed her hair over her shoulder and traced her features. Skin to skin. The gentle caress was less playful than fiddling with her hair, and that was what he wanted. If she hadn’t yet caught on that he intended to move their acquaintance to a place beyond a platonic one, she would soon enough. He didn’t want to just take her under his wing, but also make her bloom. He knew he could do that, and that he was just right for her.
“I want so many things,” she said softly as if she were afraid to admit it.
Damned shame. “It’s human to want things. I’m not going to judge you for having wishes. You don’t even have to tell me what they are.”
“But I have to tell someone.” She spit the words so fast he had to take a moment to pick through them in his mind and order them into something that made sense. She fisted the covers beside her thighs and furrowed her brow again. “I can’t hold it in all the time. I feel like a balloon that needs to let some air out or it’s going to pop. I’m afraid I’m going to pop.”
He sat up, pressed his hands to her cheeks, and tipped her chin so she’d look up at him. “Let it out, then.”
“I…I want to be good at something. I’m sick of feeling like I’m bobbing around with no direction.”
“A job, you mean?”
“Something that sticks. And I want to be on my own. I know it’s gonna be rough, but I need to get out of my parents’ orbits. They’re suffocating me. The way they are doesn’t feel right.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t explain it. Maybe it’s just my anxiety, and that I’m overreacting over nothing.” She let out a dry laugh. “Quarter-life crisis maybe?”
He kept tracing her lips, saying nothing. He didn’t think she was overreacting. Their kind tended to be more attuned to impediments to their wellbeing, even if they couldn’t quite put a finger on what they were. They could sense danger, but not necessarily know where it was coming from. Some of that was certainly some interference from others in the web—their fears projected to the people around them who mistook them as their own—but it was an evolutionary advantage, nonetheless. If someone was in danger, they might have all been.
“I feel like there’s something else,” he said.
“Because you’re reading my mind.”
“I don’t read minds, sweetheart, I’m just looking at you. You’re stressed.” He skimmed his thumbs up the lines of her cheekbones and let his fingers glide on the way down. Touch always made their kind calmer and made it easier to clear one’s mind. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he projected telepathically.
“I…” She closed her eyes and gave her head a hard shake. Then she wrapped her hands around his wrists and swallowed. “I…sometimes I just want to leave here and not come back so I don’t have to be what I am anymore and no one will know how useless I am.”
“You’re not useless.”
“What am I good for, then?” She kept her eyes closed, so couldn’t have seen his cringe, but her ears were open. There was no way she could have missed his frustrated growl.
“So much. I can say that even without having been here for most of the past twelve years.”
Without trying, she’d already helped him reknit himself back into the web, and that was something he’d been trying to do without much success for a week. He hadn’t found the right conduit to reenter—not even his parents had been quite right for the purpose—but she was wide open like an unmanned security gate.
She opened her eyes, and the plaintive, desperate sadness in them were like a trigger. Without hesitation, he pulled her to him and wrapped his arms around her. He buried his face into her hair, and let her cry out all of her silent tears.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “You don’t have to have everything figured out. You’re not less than for not having been able to.”
She sniffled and pulled back from him, dragging her forearm across her wet eyes. “Gods, I’m a mess. Here I am falling apart in front of you like I can’t control myself, and you’re almost a stranger.”
“I thought we were working on fixing that.”
“You don’t have to try so hard to be nice to me.”
He didn’t think wanting to fuck her until her toes curled quite managed to fit anyone’s definition of “nice,” but he didn’t see the point of correcting her. Besides, he wanted more than that. Afótama mating was an arcane sort of phenomena that no one really understood. Harvey—Tess’s other chieftain—had said that he and Tess had been half-mated since they were kids because they’d been so close. He’d been her best friend and protector. He couldn’t remember there being a time when he didn’t love her. But even Harvey couldn’t explain how it happened. He just knew that it did, and it was a certainty to him as sure as the fact that water was wet.
As Will studied the tearful woman in front of him, his certainty became surer.
She was his. A mess, but of course she was because he had some of what she was supposed to have. Now, he needed to figure out how to share it.
What belonged to him belonged to his mate.
CHAPTER FIVE
Erin closed the binder, set it on the floor, and snatched up her phone. “I’ve gotta get out of here.”
Way to go, dipshit.
Will had looked at her like she had two heads, and she probably deserved it. She’d gone and vented her spleen and told him in explicit terms just how pathetic she was, and then she’d cried.
Maybe I can plead PMS.
Will jogged around her and blocked the doorway before she could pass through it. “Where are you going?”
“I know you have a lot to do. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”
“Who said you were wasting my time?” His bright eyes seemed to hold a glint of a dare that she didn’t understand. “Why do you think you need to hurry out of here? You don’t have to leave unless you’re uncomfortable here or just don’t want to be around me anymore. I know my personality can be intense at times.”
She hadn’t thought so. She liked that he was straightforward. She didn’t have to guess so much with him. “It’s not that. It’s…”
Gods. He had wet, black splotches on his T-shirt from where her eyeliner and mascara transferred onto him. She would have to offer to wash it for him. Ruined yet another thing.
“What is it then? Truth, Erin.”
“I…” I what? She batted at her hair and tapped her foot against the floor as she tried to make sense of all the thoughts in her brain that refused to congeal into a coherent thing. Start with something sure, and get that out of the thought pile. “I like your personality. I like the way you…steer me.”
Steering. Yes, that’s what it is. She tried to pluck one more thing out of the pile. Something certain. “I’m…confused.”
“I can tell you are, but am I confusing you? Am I making you uncertain about something?”
She shook her head. “That’s just my personality in a nutshell, I guess. I don’t compartmentalize well, and everything blurs together.”
“I see. And me telling you that I do want us to get to know each other better set off alarm bells in one of those other parts of your thoughts?”
“I think so.”
“Do you want to get to know me better?”
She certainly wasn’t going to lie about that. He was intriguing, for one thing. Smart. She’d never thought smart could be so sexy, but she’d never known anyone whose full package was anything like Will’s. His sexiness was blended up with his articulate intelligence and tha
t indefinable Viking swagger she occasionally encountered in the community. The chieftains had it. Jody had it. There were a handful of others, but the confidence was rare enough that she couldn’t describe the phenomenon. She just knew people who possessed the uncommon trait were desirable—that Will was desirable. Unobtainable, certainly, but definitely desirable.
She nodded.
“One thing at a time, then, okay?” He set his large hands on her shoulders and rubbed down her arms.
Instinctively, she pressed her body against his and lost herself to the warmth of his embrace. Her tense muscles uncoiled and her breathing slowed. Her eyelids drifted shut. “Thank you.”
“Did you forget that people like us have to touch?”
“I never forget. I just…there’s been no one.” A pathetic confession, but she didn’t see the point of lying.
“It’s okay to get your needs met by people who don’t live here, if you have to.”
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. “You had to.”
“Indeed.”
“What’s being with an outsider like?”
“You want to have a conversation about my sexual history while standing in a doorway?”
“No, I didn’t to imply that—I—”
He pushed up an eyebrow.
She hadn’t meant to imply it, but she did want to know. “Your history is none of my business.”
“I disagree. Would you like to go have dinner?”
“Wait. What?”
“Dinner. You said something about Chinese. There are other restaurants still open, though, if you’re in the mood for something else. I’ve been craving chicken parm all week. Every time I walk past the Italian place that’s on the way to the executive mansion, my mouth waters.”
“No, I meant about the—”
“Are you ready?” He crooked his thumb toward the hallway. “Or we can wait a while, if you’d like, and catch a late movie right after.”
“With me dressed like this?”
“You could run home and change if the workout clothes bother you that much.”
