by Selena Scott
His hands stroked over her shiny hair, down her shoulders, over her back. Her skirt was too tight for him to step between her legs but he was so large that he just sort of melted over top of her. She felt like she was in a tent. A huge, warm tent that was attempting to protect her from the entire world at once. The only issue was that she wasn’t crying because of the world. She was crying because of herself.
Because he was him, patient and sweet, he didn’t push her to talk. He let her cry for a good long minute and then, when she was gathering herself up, he got her a glass of water. She drank it down to the bottom and slid off the counter.
She wetted a paper towel and just pressed it over her eyes for a moment, leaning over the sink. She turned back to him and let the paper towel fall onto the ground with a wet splat.
“I need a bath.”
He looked mystified but still patient.
Diana marched into her bathroom and drew a bath. She mixed in all the essential oils and bath salts that a woman could possibly have wanted at a crossroads like this. She sat on her knees next to the tub, mixing the water with her hand and thinking of her mother. She knew that Orion was behind her, in the bathroom door, and she didn’t turn. She flicked off the bathroom lights, lit the candle next to the tub, and quickly stripped off her clothing. She knew he was watching her. There was nothing on this earth comparable to the electricity of his gaze. But she wasn’t trying to put on a show. She was merely at loose ends. Unable to make this situation into something appropriate. It was already so far off the rails there was no hope of getting it back on. They couldn’t even see the rails from where they were. Their traincar didn’t even use rails as far as she was concerned.
She stepped into the bath and pulled the bath curtain so that he couldn’t see her anymore. The swirling oils were magic, she’d always thought so. The scent and spiral of them. Her mother would have said a prayer before she’d gotten in the tub. Diana said nothing. She didn’t know any prayers to say. She let herself sink under the water completely before she sat up and brushed the scented water from her eyelids.
“This isn’t normal,” she told him through the shower curtain, knowing full well that he was still standing in the open doorway of the bathroom. “What we’re doing together isn’t normal.”
“Okay,” he said gently.
She yanked open the shower curtain a few inches so that they could see one another’s faces. She almost yanked it back closed. For the first time that night, she was letting herself get an eyeful of him and it was almost more than she could take. He was so beautiful. His shoulders pushed against the seams of his T shirt, his feet planted far apart, he was in need of a haircut because it was starting to fall onto his forehead and she knew he liked to keep it shorter than that. His eyes were dark in the dim light, every feature blunter than the last. He looked like someone had carved a man into the bottom of a rubber stamp and then smacked him onto this earth with the richest ink. Every line was complete, official, inarguable.
This here, was not a man you played games with. This was a man you thanked god you got to come home to. This was a man you womaned-up and told the truth to.
She took a deep breath and pulled her knees up to her chest. “I’m not sure why it’s so hard for me to just tell you how I feel.”
His shoulders loosened an inch. “Oh. I know why.”
She pulled her head back in surprise. That had not been the reply she’d thought he’d give her. “Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yeah,” he said with a casual shrug. “Because you’re in charge of everybody in your life. All the shifters at the center. All your employees. Even the ones you consider friends. Ida. Quill. You’re in charge of the people who were supposed to be in charge of you, too. Robert. You’re in charge of everyone and everything.” He cleared his throat. “Except for me.”
She pulled her knees tighter against her chest.
“And I think, Diana, that you can’t tell me how you feel because you never tell anyone how you feel. Because people who are in charge of everything don’t get to have complicated feelings. They’re just supposed to make sure everything gets done. That’s their only job. And if they can just do that, then everyone else gets to live their wonderful, complicated lives. And that’s supposed to be a reward enough.”
His words rang a bell deep inside of her. She both felt as if he were teaching her something she’d never known and reading a part of her private diary all at once. He was explaining something to her that she’d never fully let herself see before. It was wonderfully painful. Like a good, hard massage on muscles she hadn’t known were tight.
“How…” she trailed off. “How could you know that?”
He slanted her a look through the candle light. “I’m the oldest of three orphans, Diana. A hunter who hates killing animals. You don’t think I’ve learned things about hiding my feelings for the greater good? You don’t think I haven’t spent my life trying to make sure that my siblings got to have the best of everything, only to lay down at night and wonder who made sure that I got to have those things?”
“I’ll make sure you have those things!” The words were out of her mouth before she could even register that she’d been thinking them.
He laughed and took a step into the bathroom. “Diana, that’s the whole problem. You thinking that you can give everyone everything while you live on the crumbs.”
He took two more steps and plunked down on the closed toilet. She pulled the shower curtain back a few more inches so that they could still see one another.
“I just meant that I want to make sure you’re all right,” she said quietly.
“I want to make sure you’re all right,” he replied with a small smile on his face.
She let out a long breath. “It’s dumb but… I never realized that you and I were so similar in that way.”
“It’s not dumb,” he said with a shrug. “We’re completely different in most ways.”
A quiet descended over them and Diana instantly recognized it as him giving her a chance to gather her thoughts.
“I’m not proud of it, Orion,” she said eventually. “But I’m scared of what the neighbors think. What Robert thinks. What my employees might think. My mother…” she trailed off and made a pattern in the essential oils pooling at the surface of the water. “My mother was so looked down on in this community for the way she interacted with men. Having men come and go. Getting pregnant but not married. I decided a long time ago that I’d be involved only with reputable men with whom I definitely had a drama-free future ahead. I never, ever thought I’d be doing … this… with a client. Ugh. It makes me feel so unprofessional. But I couldn’t ignore you. Couldn’t completely step away. I thought. Maybe I could just be friends with you. So, that’s what I’ve been trying to do but now I’ve catapulted us into this weird alternate reality where we’re not friends and we’re not lovers, we’re something very much in between.”
Orion surprised her by laughing, leaning forward with his long arms and pressing two fingers to her lips. He leaned back, that soft smile still on his face. “Diana, I don’t know much about the human world, but I’m pretty sure that if my dick has touched your pussy, we’ve left the whole ‘friends’ thing pretty far in the dust.”
She blushed to the roots of her hair and buried her eyes in her upturned knees.
“But I think I understand what you’re saying,” he continued. “You want to do this right. One way or the other. Ideally, you wanted to do this right in a friendship way. But we couldn’t fight the way we feel and we woke up with my dick in your panties. You were worried what the neighbors would think about you having a man sleep over at your house for sex. But instead of cutting out the sleepover part, you cut out the sex part.”
She groaned and buried her face even deeper.
“The way I see it,” he continued. “We have two options. We can completely cut each other out of our lives. Which is, you know, never going to happen as far as I’m concerned. Or, we could start ov
er and try to do this thing right.”
“What do you mean?” she asked carefully.
“I mean that we could forget about the whole friendship thing and just date. Or, you know, court.”
“Court?” The word was almost foreign to her ears.
“Sure,” he shrugged. “I mean, we could cut out the gray areas. I could tell you how I feel. You could tell me how you feel. I could show up here with flowers and a clean shirt and make sure you eat a nice dinner. We could, you know, kiss like normal people. After a little while, we could start sleeping together. And maybe after that we figure out how to live together or something. I don’t know. I’ll be in no man’s land a little because I’m obviously no expert on any of this, but I could learn.”
“Right,” she said, her stomach suddenly turning into a joyful dolphin flipping circles in the moonlight. He wanted those things with her. She’d suspected for a while that he wanted those things with her, but to hear him say it out loud… well, that was something else. “Right.”
She took a deep breath.
Hearing him lay it all out like that, say it out loud and with no fear, it made her want to match him. It made her want to be better. It made her want to to give both of them exactly what they wanted. It made her, for once, not worried about protecting herself. She felt like an oyster slowly opening toward the sunshine, showing the pearl it had worried it’d lost years and years ago.
“Or…” she started breathlessly. “Or you could get in the tub with me.”
She stared up at him through the crack in the shower curtain, refusing to let her eyes drop, to even let herself blink. Her knees were up at her chin, her hair in wet stripes over her shoulders and down her back. There was something about having wet hair that had always made her feel both vulnerable and powerful at once. Like she was unprepared for the adult world but also like she was some ancient nymph or mermaid, floating in her natural element. She supposed it was her natural disposition doing some sort of battle with her mother’s ideology. Practical and magical all at once, a constant tug of war in Diana’s heart.
Orion was as still as stone where he sat on the closed toilet. He stared at her as if her words were written across her face and he was trying like hell to decipher them. Her sentence hung in the air between them, echoing like a voice in a well. Get in the tub with me. Get in the tub with me. Get in the tub with me.
Would he refuse? Had he already made up his mind to court her properly? Was he determined to do this thing the right way?
He came to life all at once, wordlessly rising to his feet and yanking his shirt off over his head. In the time it took for the shirt to fall to the floor, he’d already wrestled the zipper of his pants down, and then they too were on the floor. His socks came next and then he was skinning out of his underwear and Diana could feel her eyes turn into full moons as she took in the gorgeous landscape of his body. Rugged as the mountains he’d grown up in, scarred, muscular, sinuous strength and aggressively shadowed, he yanked back the shower curtain and for a long second just stood right over her.
Her eyes dropped to his cock hanging heavily between his legs.
Mamma Mia.
That… yeah… um… holy…
Okay.
Get it together, Diana!
Her mouth hung open but she didn’t stay immobile for long because Orion was practically falling into the tub with her. Her legs shot out flat and she slid down as he laid himself over her, growling happily and settling himself into the water.
With his added mass, the water rose precariously high, drawing almost perfectly level with the edge of the tub. Diana couldn’t help but laugh in delight at the absurd weight of him, the almost puppyish clumsiness with which he’d thrown himself into her suggestion. Their bodies were completely cinched together, just by dint of the size of the tub, their clasp almost friendly in nature, like two people on a crowded train who found themselves pressed in by the passengers on either side of them.
But things didn’t stay friendly for long. Orion growled happily again and then clasped her around the waist and rolled them so that she was on top and he was flat on his back. Water slopped over the side of the tub, slapping the bathroom floor. The shower curtain, still halfway pulled closed, hid them from the world, from any and all consequences. The heat of the water was a cocoon that justified this closeness with him. She was never leaving.
His hands slid down to her ass and he took two handfuls, scooting her up his body so that her face was level with his.
Diana turned back and saw that his feet were up out of the water, long as he was, planted flat against the tile wall. Something about that was just unbelievably hot to her. His humongous feet, his hairy legs, the fact that he didn’t remotely fit into this tub.
When she turned back around he was grinning at her. If she’d been standing she would have gone weak in the knees. The man was so gorgeous. And uncomplicated. And hot.
“This was a much better idea than mine,” he told her, that smile just widening even further.
Diana laughed but her laughter died the longer she looked into his eyes. Their bodies were wet and pressed together, his dick firmly jammed into her thigh, her breasts smashed against his chest. It was the most intimate position she’d maybe ever been in with a man and yet she pretty much completely forgot about her entire body except for her lips, which were on fire for him. Her eyes dropped to his mouth. They hadn’t had sex yet, but somehow, his mouth felt inexplicably like the final frontier. She knew, without a doubt, that when she kissed his mouth, she’d lose something that she could never, ever get back. But it didn’t scare her. She didn’t want it back. She wanted to toss that thing away from her like a diamond ring into the ocean. Whatever it was that she was about to lose, well, Diana figured it had probably belonged to the world in the first place. It had only been hers to safekeep for a while, and now it was time to give it back.
The scent of lavender and rose water became intoxicatingly strong as steam from the bath swirled around them. She was drawn forward, toward this man, on a rope made of desire and rightness. He was drawn toward her as well. There was no pulling away, no arguing with a moment like this.
Their lips met through the steam. She tasted the essential oils on his skin. The sweat of him. The man of him. She tasted everything. The sound of his voice, his wildness, his wolf, his hunt. She tasted the pines he’d grown up amongst, the sunrise over the mountains, the ice in his paws every winter, the sunshine on his back. She tasted the shifter in him, knowing in her soul that it didn’t lend him a duality, no, it made him wholly who he was. One being. One wolf. One man.
She pulled back slowly and her lungs begged for air. She felt the moon out the window, the swirl of the water. For the first time since her mother died, Diana wondered, truly wondered, if magic was real, if this was what it felt like.
Orion’s eyes searched hers. It had been barely more than a peck, that kiss. Just lips on lips and then the barest hint of her tongue against him. He watched her patiently, almost gently, though his grip on her ass had tightened a few turns of the screw. He wouldn’t pull her back into the kiss, she knew.
She pushed back into the kiss just as slowly as she’d pulled out of it. He made a noise when her mouth came open against his. She knew, all at once, just how ravenous he was for her. She could taste his desire for her, how lonely his bed had been without her. How much he’d wanted her and for exactly how long. Her senses sparked with magic, with electricity, as their tongues slid decadently against one another. He was dying without her but still, the sweet stubborn man was not going to rush this.
Their kiss was drawn out and slow. They took deep, luscious tastes of one another, their heads moving in slow motion, the water swirling lazily against their bodies, their tongues living in one another’s mouths.
Diana tipped her head to one side so that she could finally get a good breath but the air felt as hot as the water did. Her wet hair was everywhere. She was deliciously dizzy. She fell back onto his mouth a
nd this time she was the one who was moaning, long and helplessly, she tongued against the inner slick of his lips like she was tasting ripe fruit.
His hips kicked upwards involuntarily, once, twice, and -oh- a very yummy third time. Diana’s skin slid against his and she moaned at the sensation of his solid strength, his body hair, the all-encompassing presence of him. She heard more water spill over the side of the tub and it intoxicated her. They were making a mess. They were stroking along one another’s tongues, rubbing their bodies against one another, grabbing handfuls wherever they could and making an awful mess.
“I never make messes,” she panted, pulling away from the kiss for a moment to stare into the face of the man who was wrecking her.
“Why not?” he panted back, his eyes dilating and shrinking, trying like hell to focus on her face, on her words.
“I’ve never had anyone worth making a mess over before,” she said, the truth tumbling out of her before she had a chance to edit it, alter it, even consider it.
The corners of his lips kicked up as he, hands on her ass, pressed her down against the length of his cock. “Are you saying that I'm worth making a mess over?”
Diana spread her legs and let him slip between her thighs. “God, yes,” she gasped against his lips, her lower body grinding forward, looking for friction of any kind. Everything was too wet. Too sweet. She needed rough. She didn’t want to turn back now. She reared back up to straddle him and, hands around the back of his head, took him with her. He grunted and sat up and banded his arms around her waist as another two inches of water slopped out of the tub, shampoo bottles and a bar of soap knocked asunder by one of his elbows.
She didn’t care. She speared her fingers into his hair and kissed him savagely, fiercely. The long, slow slide of their mouths became aggressive, needy. Her teeth sank into his lip and he reared up to his feet, holding her against him. Water fell off their bodies in sheets as he pressed her back to the cold tile of her shower wall and rubbed himself against her hot, slick center. The hair at the base of his dick was almost, almost enough friction, but in her eyes, the bath had softened them too much. She didn’t want a slow, romantic roll. She wanted primitive biting and scratching and no-holds-barred. She pushed off from the wall and he stumbled backward, catching himself on the shower curtain and making the rod separate from the wall. The curtain hung lamely, like a broken wing, pooling into the remaining six inches of bath water at the bottom of the tub.
