“I don’t know, but I’ll certainly trade you sitting there all uncomfortable, and half-defensive, for being your lover.” He waggled the hand he was holding out in the air.
I went close enough to take his hand. We stood there holding hands. Neither of us tried for anything closer. We just stood there, him still leaning against the door, me fighting the urge to pull against his hand, and looked at each other.
The smile slipped a little, leaving a much more serious look behind. The happiness remained like the glow that lingers pushing against the dark when the sun has gone below the horizon, but you know that true night is only a thought away-night, when the monsters come out to play.
I didn’t want to be the monster to Cynric, the way I was to Larry. It wasn’t a fair analogy, but I was tired; not physically, I’d slept, but emotionally. I was just tired of the shit, everyone’s shit. I was also wondering where Brice was, not because I wanted a rescue from Cynric’s talk, but because we needed to get these bastards before nightfall.
Cynric squeezed my hand and shook it a little. “You’re thinking too hard, and it’s not about me.”
I had the grace to look embarrassed, but didn’t lie. “I’m wondering when the other cops will come and give me a ride to the party.”
“You know it scares me every time you leave for work with the police.”
I nodded. “I know.” We had another moment of just looking at each other, still holding hands from a little distance.
“Nothing I can do would make you not go,” he said.
I sighed. “No,” I said.
“Can I hug you?” he asked.
I looked at him, startled. The change in conversation was too fast for me. “Hug me, yeah. I mean, why not?”
“Because I think we’re fighting, and you’ve gone all work serious.”
“I don’t think we’re fighting.”
“We were both thinking about having a fight,” he said, smiling.
I smiled a little. “Yeah, we thought about it.”
“But we’re not going to,” he said, and made it a question with the uplilt of his voice.
“I don’t think so.”
He frowned and pulled on my hand, bringing me closer to him. “Don’t take this wrong, Anita, but why aren’t we fighting?”
I realized he’d stopped pulling me closer, leaving me a few inches of distance, so I could decide if I wanted to close the distance or not. Cynric had learned what not to do in the last year. It was figuring out what to do that was the problem with dating me, or so one of my ex-boyfriends had said.
I went to him, closing the distance between us. I was left standing almost the same as before, looking up at him, his arms around me, but my hands on his waist and upper hip, keeping that last bit of distance.
“I don’t want to fight,” I said.
“Me either,” he said.
I nodded. “Good.”
“You’ll stop coming to the parent-teacher stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you’ll stop being weirded out by our age difference?”
I laughed then, and shook my head. “I’m twelve years older than you are, Sin.”
“I know.”
“But it’s not just the age difference; it’s the when of the age difference. You’re eighteen and I’m twelve years older than you are. I’m thirty, and you’re eighteen; that is a big age difference.”
“You said I could hug you,” he said.
“You can,” I said.
He glanced down at my hands where they held us apart. “Not without forcing the issue, and you don’t like that, at least not from me.”
I moved my hands around his waist, slowly, reluctantly, feeling the firmness of his body and the softness of his skin, so that I wasn’t sure whether to say his body was muscled and hard, or soft and tender. He was both, all of it.
His arms slid slowly tighter around me, drawing me in against his body. I let my fingers play up his back, tracing the edge of his spine, the muscles of his lats where they traced under his skin like the faint shape of wings, as if with more weight lifting the angel wing shape would spring out of the skin and rise like a white feathered dream above his back. One of my lovers, more a fuck buddy really, was the Swan King, the leader of the swanmanes. I knew what it was to have sex surrounded by feathers and the strength of wings, but Sin didn’t need wings to be special. I wrapped myself around his upper body, laying my cheek against his bare chest, so I could hold the warmth of his skin against me, and just like that it wasn’t enough. He was my tiger to call, my blue tiger, and it wasn’t just him that was tied to me; because of a lot of metaphysical things I could tie people to me only as tight as I was willing to be bound to them. My power was a double-edged sword, and I could cut someone only as deep as I was willing to be cut.
Sin wrapped his arms around me, curled me in against his body, and I let him do it. I let myself be small, and curl against the front of his taller body, so that he could hold me tight, and enjoy the fact that no matter how in charge I was, in the end he was bigger than I was, and no amount of years would change that. One day he would be twenty, but I’d still be six inches shorter than he was, and I could admit, at least silently in my own head, that it wasn’t always bad to be smaller.
He held me tight, and laid his mouth against my hair, and asked, “Can I kiss you?”
“Why ask? Why not just try?”
“Because you’re in one of those moods where what you want changes every few minutes.”
“God, am I that hard to deal with?”
“Challenging,” he said.
“Oh, that was diplomatic,” I said.
“I want to kiss you.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes,” I said, and went up on my tiptoes, balancing against his chest. He took the hint, and leaned over to bring his face next to mine. We kissed, a soft touching of lips.
He drew back, studying my face. I started to ask what was wrong, but whatever he saw on my face must have pleased him, because he kissed me again, sliding one hand through my hair, so that he cupped the back of my neck and head, and the kiss grew from something chaste to a caressing of lips and tongues, and then a small sound escaped him, and his hands were suddenly eager against my body. He reminded me that he was more than human-strong, and there was a reason that lycanthropes weren’t allowed to play with humans. They were fragile. The fingers of one hand dug into my upper arm, bruising, and if I’d been human-fragile I might have been more than bruised, but I wasn’t human, and sometimes I liked it rough. The bruising, the pain, tore an eager sound from my throat and made me press myself against him. His body was hard, and it made me cry out again and press harder against him.
“Anita.” He growled it almost against my lips, and the first trickling rise of his beast flared across my skin like a spill of something warm, almost hot, sliding everywhere along my skin.
“God,” I said, and got that first glimpse of tiger inside me, that great blue-and-black beast that rose to him.
There was a loud throat-clearing and a knock on the doorway. We both turned, startled, toward the sound. Nathaniel looked apologetic. “You guys are fun together.”
“How long have you been watching?” I asked.
“Not long, but the police just pulled up outside.”
“Shit,” I said. I looked back up at Cynric. “I have to go.”
“I know.” And then he smiled. “But I know you’re sorry to leave me now, and that helps.”
I wasn’t sure how to take that, so I ignored it and went for the door, adjusting the weapons and straps as if
