by Selena Scott
He smiled back at her. “You’re right. I don’t care. I’m a wolf. Manners pretty much mean nothing to me.” He cocked his head to one side. “You look different.”
She shrugged. “This is how I look when I spend time with a friend. Sorry if you were expecting a ton of makeup or fancy clothes or something.”
“I’m expecting nothing, Diana,” he said and for some reason, his simple wording made a warm feeling swell up inside her. She thought, that just like everything he said, he really, truly meant those words. She was just starting to understand. She’d said they could be friends and he hadn’t shown up with a rose between his teeth, attempting to change her mind. He was really going to try to be her friend. “I like the way you look right now. You look… relaxed. And like you’re only thinking about one thing. It’s nice.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Do I usually look like I’m thinking about more than one thing?”
He raised his eyebrows right back. “Always. I think you have a master plan and about forty little other plans that are constantly running in your head. And somehow you keep them all in line with one another.”
She blinked. How had he known that? Was she really that transparent?
“But not right now,” he continued on. “Right now your hair is loose and you’re wearing normal clothes and you’re all fed and cute and, yeah, I think you’re thinking about only one thing. Now, I’m not sure what that one thing is, but maybe someday I’ll find out.” He balled up his napkin. “Dessert? There’s a vegan ice cream place a few blocks this way.”
“Oh. Sure. Yeah.” Diana rose up and followed Orion, bussing her tray after he did his.
She stared quizzically at his back and right before they left the sandwich shop, Pretty Boy caught her eye again. He gave her a strange look, like he still couldn’t figure out why a girl like Diana might be spending time with a guy like Orion. But this time, it put Diana’s back up. Seeing that judgmental look on the man’s face made her realize just how judgmental she’d been this entire day. How many assumptions she’d made about Orion. About this man who’d offered her friendship and kindness and instead of accepting them with an open heart, she’d seen only the motives of other men. She wondered if she’d ever seen Orion clearly before this moment.
She looked away from Pretty Boy and followed Orion out onto the street. It was a nice spring night, maybe a touch chilly for ice cream, but nice enough for a stroll. “Orion?”
“Yeah?” His hands were in his pockets and his boots clopped heavily on the sidewalk as he strolled along beside her at an easy pace.
“Do you think of me as judgmental?”
He considered her words for a disconcertingly long time before he finally shook his head. “No. I think of you as observant. Observant of patterns.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean like this morning, when you searched my pockets for drugs. You noticed that I was acting differently and you used all the things you’d ever seen or learned to make a guess about what might be going on. You weren’t judging me, you were using your brain.”
She considered that. It was a generous interpretation. “What about vain?”
“Vain? You mean, like, you probably think this song is about you?”
She burst out laughing.
He blushed a little. “I’ve been trying to catch up on pop culture!”
She laughed some more. “It was a great reference. Not exactly current, but still great.” She sobered a little. “Yeah, I guess that’s the way I mean it.”
“No.” He barely had to consider that one. “You’re not vain. If anything, you act like you’re not as beautiful as you are. You act like a normal woman when you should be…” he trailed off, thinking hard. “If you acted as beautiful as you are, you’d be a famous movie star by now. Or a model. Or, I saw this movie the other night, this beautiful woman convinced a bunch of brothers to fight to the death over her. Terrible movie. Waste of time. Couldn’t sleep afterward. But still, if you were vain, I think you’d be doing stuff like that.”
She shook her head at him. “Have you always been this sweet?”
He blinked in surprise. “Oh. Maybe? I don’t really think of it as sweet. It’s just the way I am, you know? I don’t understand why some people are rude. It doesn’t make sense to me.”
He looked over at her while she pondered his words.
“Diana, do you think you’re judgmental or vain?”
She pursed her lips. “Sometimes. I think sometimes I have everything figured out and then somebody goes and really surprises me.” She knocked her shoulder against his. A spark buzzed between them and she wondered if he’d felt it.
***
He could watch her eat that weird green ice cream for a century. He didn’t want to, as Wren would have put it, ‘perv out on her’, so he didn’t watch each bite travel on her spoon and disappear between her lips. But he could have.
She was surprising him tonight. First with her appearance, her hair in a loose, wavy bun at the base of her neck, her casual jeans and a T-shirt. Sandals that showed every one of her turquoise painted toenails. And then with her demeanor. He was used to assertive Diana who expected the best from everyone around her, who knew the answers to everything, who had every second of her day plotted out and didn’t spend a second doing something that deviated her from the plan.
But that was not the person who’d eaten a sandwich across from him. Tonight’s Diana been quiet and befuddled and sweet. It was almost like, in her normal life, she wore some rigid suit made of metal and after work she just sort of slipped it off and got comfortable. Orion liked it. He liked it a lot. Maybe too much.
Because he was barely keeping a lid on it right now.
He couldn’t help but watch as she lazily licked at the ice cream on her spoon, her eyes falling halfway closed.
This was another part of her that he hadn’t expected. She was… a sensual creature. He’d supposed that from the ankle-breaking height of her heels, her taut ponytails, the fact that he’d never seen her consume anything at work but hurried sips of black coffee, that she didn’t care for the sensual side of the world. He figured that she didn’t care all that much for a variety of colors on her plate, or the scent of a fresh-baked bread, or the taste of cold beer with salty pretzels —all things that Orion had come to love about living in the human world. But he’d watched her devour her sandwich with a single-minded enjoyment, even licking sauce off her thumb at one point, and he’d been humbled, knowing he’d made assumptions about her.
As he watched her enjoy her ice cream now, her long legs stretched out in front of her, one of her sandals dangling from her big toe, her eyes watching the sky go a deep, velvety black, he was downright embarrassed to have misjudged her so greatly.
She’d asked if she was judgmental. But maybe he was the judgmental one. He’d seen her in one context -at work- and assumed that that was who she was, entirely and completely. Sure, getting to know people was still kind of new to Orion, as he’d lived exclusively with his family his entire life, but still, shouldn’t he have automatically assumed that she was more complex than she seemed? Didn’t each and every person have a rich and often surprising variety of personalities?
She finished her ice cream and he took her bowl and tossed it away. There was nothing else to suggest that they do together but he really didn’t want the evening to end. To ever end.
“You want a ride home?” she asked with a little bit of a yawn at the end of the sentence. He wondered how early she’d woken up. No matter what time in the morning he got to the center she always beat him there.
“Yes.”
He liked the bus, but he was positive he’d like a ride from Diana better.
They were cruising down the road about ten minutes later, Orion rolling down the window and taking a sniff of the night air every time she asked for the next direction.
She gave him a strange look before her expression cleared and her eyes went large. “Hold on. Are you givi
ng me directions based on your sense of smell?”
He shrugged. “It’s my best sense. And I can’t read the street signs. I memorized the bus routes for the most part. But it’s kind of a new ballgame in a car.”
“Wow. I— that’s remarkable. You’re remarkable. Your whole family. Sometimes I can’t believe you guys are real.”
He felt like he grew another inch at the compliment. “Thanks. You know Dawn just got her driver’s license.”
“I know. Quill mentioned that. It’s a real accomplishment.”
“She took me for a spin in her car on the last full moon day.”
Diana’s brow furrowed. “She already has a car? Quill didn’t mention that to me in our check-in. How’d she afford it?”
Oh. Shoot. He’d missed that. It was one of those things that slipped right past Orion because he hadn’t been born into the world of humans. He’d been born into the wilderness, knowing nothing of human customs and habits except for what his parents had told him before they’d died. It hadn’t occurred to him to ask Dawn how she’d paid for the car. Honestly, he’d just kind of thought, driver’s license, car, now she’s a driver.
In retrospect, that was pretty dumb.
“I… don’t know.”
Diana glanced at him from the driver’s seat. “I don’t think her part time work at the library would be anywhere near enough to have gathered up a downpayment on a car yet. I hope she didn’t buy anything on credit.”
Orion didn’t even know what that meant, but his heart was racing now. This was what had scared him about the human world. There were so many hidden dangers that not only did he not spot, he didn’t even know they existed. He couldn’t protect his siblings in the human world. And now maybe Dawn had gone and gotten herself in trouble with something called credit.
“Don’t worry,” Diana said, momentarily slipping her hand over his shoulder and giving it a squeeze. “I’ll look into it. I’ll figure it out. If she’s gotten into any trouble, I’ll make sure she doesn’t stay in it.”
A fist squeezed around Orion’s heart and then just sort of hung limply in his chest. He’d spent so long taking care of his siblings in the wilderness, he’d never even imagined what it might feel like to have someone else help him take care of them in the human world. And when that someone was Diana? A woman he trusted above all else? Well, the relief was almost painful it was so acute.
He suddenly got the very intense urge to pay her back somehow. But what could he do for her?
“That’s, um, my house, actually,” Diana said, pointing out the window toward a small house with a surprising tangle of bushes and plants and trees in the front yard. “It’s a little overgrown right now, but it’s home.”
“We don’t live very far from one another,” he remarked in surprise, recognizing the edges of the neighborhood he lived in with his siblings.
“Really? I never came to see the site that you guys moved out to. I just trusted Ida and Quill to tell me that it was good enough for you three.” She was quiet for a second as he steered her down the last road that led to his house. “For some reason I pictured us living a lot—”
“Farther away from one another?” he chuckled. “Me too. I always think of myself as still living in that cave in the woods. And I guess I pictured you in some sparkling castle on a hill.”
She laughed. “Far from it. You saw how much of a fixer-upper my house is. I bought it with the best of intentions, but who has the time?”
Her mouth dropped flat open when he pointed her toward the driveway that led to his house.
“This is where you live? I’ve always wondered who the hell would ever…” she trailed off, her cheeks going pink. “I, uh, always thought this was a hair salon.”
“Wren, our landlord runs her hair salon on the first floor. But the kitchen, dining room, and the top two floors are all ours.”
He understood Diana’s reaction because honestly, he’d never really seen another house like this one before either. It was layer up on layer, tall and skinny. Pink and old fashioned with white curlicues of woodwork adorning it at every corner. He couldn’t imagine a much further aesthetic from what he’d grown used to when they’d lived in the mountains, but maybe that was part of what he liked about it. He appreciated the distinction between his life as a wolf and his life as a human.
“It used to be her grandma’s, I guess,” Orion continued. “She left it to Wren. And Wren lets us stay for free because she doesn’t want to live there but if there isn’t someone there every night then her brother breaks in and does illegal stuff.”
He froze and slapped a hand over his forehead.
“Shoot. I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.” He turned and looked at her with chagrin on his face. “Can we just pretend that I didn’t say anything? There’s nothing going on in that house. It’s a perfectly perfect place for us to live. There are no secrets. Nothing to wonder about. Nothing at all. It’s just a big, pink house that our friend is kind enough to let us live in. The end. No one is keeping secrets from you. And it definitely wasn’t Ida’s idea to keep it a secret—”
Diana burst out laughing and leaned across the console of her car, slapping a hand over Orion’s mouth and preventing him from saying anymore. “Good grief, you tattle tale, stop talking!”
When they’d grappled in the hallway that morning, Orion hadn’t fully allowed himself to sink in to the sensation of her so close to him, touching him. The moment had been too fraught, too upset, too intense. But now? In her dim car, her leaning over toward him, her warm hand on his face and her hair messier than normal? Well, now Orion let all those warm-hot feelings rush over him.
Her eyes were lit from the side by a streetlamp and they looked otherworldly, like some gemstone that only the gods knew of. Those high cheekbones were lifted in a soft smile, the high arches of her eyebrows flattened with mirth, and her mouth? Her mouth pulled over her teeth, her lips going tight in a way that made Orion want to pull her mouth open with a thumb, make her lips plump again. He was fascinated by this new version of Diana that he hadn’t even imagined. He hadn’t even known she was an option. But here she was in sandals, tempting him to push past friendship immediately.
No! He couldn’t. She’d asked for friendship and that’s what he was going to give her. It would be beyond pervy to kiss her right now. He didn’t want to say one thing and mean another. He didn’t want to disrespect her like that.
“I’m no good at secrets,” he told her from behind her hand.
If possible, her expression went even softer. “I know. It’s really disarming.” She pulled her hand back. “Annoyingly so.”
He wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but he sensed that he hadn’t ruined anything by accidentally spilling the beans to Diana about their living situation. Ida had been scared that the illicit nature of the terms of their rental agreement wouldn’t sit well with her rule-following boss and had thus instructed everyone not to mention it. But Diana seemed inclined to ignore the offending information.
“Can I see the house?” she asked after a second, both of her hands on the steering wheel, her fingers tapping in a way that said she was nervous, which surprised Orion, because he’d never once seen her nervous before.
He was charmed for all of a moment before a blanket of suspicion fell over him. He narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
She took in his expression and burst out laughing. “Orion, suspicion doesn’t exactly look good on you.”
“Well,” he said, wiggling uncomfortably, “I don’t want to bring you in to see the house if you’re suddenly gonna decide that it’s not an okay situation and kick us all out. Because we really, really like living here!”
She eyed him for a long time, her smile fading eventually into a thoughtful look. “You really think I have that power, Orion? The power to kick you out of your house?”
“Not physically. I’m significantly stronger than you are.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes.
“But
yeah,” he finished. “If you told me it wasn’t a good place to live, I’d listen to you. And I’d bring my siblings with me.”
And there was that soft expression on her face again. She shook her head, like she had no idea what the heck to do with him. “You really like living there? It’s clean? The building is safe? Ida and Quill both visit and think it’s an acceptable place for you to be?”
He nodded.
“Then I won’t rain on anybody’s parade. I promise.”
But now he was just plain confused. “Then why do you want to see it?”
She tossed her head back into the headrest, her eyes on the ceiling of the car. “Oh my gosh, forget it! I was just curious about where you lived, how you lived. But if it’s just inconceivable to you that—”
Her words cut off with a muffled squeak when it was his hand that covered her mouth this time.
When she’d done it to him, he’d thought of it as almost a utilitarian gesture. The fastest way to get someone to stop talking. But he’d never done this to anyone before and he was startled by the intimacy of it. He could feel the heat of her mouth, the softness of her lips. His fingers twitched and he had her by the jaw in a loose grip. It was a heady feeling, to have a grip on a woman like Diana.
He’d heard a children’s nursery rhyme the other day and it popped up in his head at that very moment. Catch a tiger by the toe.
He’d been left to wonder why anyone would ever want to do that. The tiger would surely maul you if you caught it by its toe. But now, he understood. No matter how dangerous an animal was, sometimes you just had to be near to her.
Diana’s eyes burned into his over the top of his hand and his fingers flexed, his hand large enough to press softly into the flesh on the underside of her chin. Some emotion part of the way between anger and curiosity was simmering in her gaze. Her mouth opened under his palm and he snapped his hand back, not wanting to get bitten.
“Come inside,” he said after a fraught moment of silence between them. “Come see where I live.”
