Mate - 34

Indecent. Filthy. Outrageous. Lewd, in the best possible way. Those are the words he’s thinking of.

S HOWERING FEELS LIKE A THOUSAND FOUNTAIN PENS SCRAPING my body head to toe, but smelling like blood, grime, and my deranged aunt’s homemade tea is worse than the pain, so I grit my teeth and do it anyway.

Heat, I’m starting to realize, might not be a misnomer. I put on a sleeveless top and shorts, sweating despite the cool November air. When I walk into the living room, Koen is facing away from me, talking on the phone about winning friends and influencing people. Regular Alpha stuff.

I lean against the doorway, eager to observe him, unobserved, for a moment. The strain in his broad shoulders constricts my chest. But he must pick up my scent, because he spins around to face me, and it feels a little like his senses are sloping the room, giving him no choice but to roll toward me, and—

The phone slips out of his hand and thuds against the wooden floor. Several pieces break off and skitter in every direction, but he doesn’t even glance at them.

“I think you dropped your phone?” I say, pointing at his feet.

He keeps staring at me. Suddenly, I feel immensely aware of my body. The way it pushes against the clothes’ fabric. My exposed skin. Koen’s dark, shifting eyes roaming it.

In a heartbeat, he crosses the room and cups the side of my head to inspect the base of my neck. That’s when I remember. “The stains?” I trace the green ribbon-like twist below my palm. “It’s not blood or anything. Just dye.”

“Who did it?”

“Nele.”

“The Human girl marked you?”

“Irene instructed her to. And you know how it is, when you’re in the middle of an unlawful detainment and people start asking wacky stuff of you, and you really don’t wanna say yes, but you decide to pick your fights and throw them a bone so that maybe later when you refuse to rob a bank they won’t take it too personally, and . . . Koen?”

After several seconds and a substantial amount of effort, he manages to tear his eyes away from my neck. His Adam’s apple shifts.

“I cannot figure out whether you’re offended by these, or . . .”

A step back. He clears his throat. Shoves his fists in the pockets of his pants. “Not offended,” he says, hoarsely.

“Glad to know that I’m not a walking insult. What are they?”

“Markings. Around your glands.” He licks his lips. “They are used in mating ceremonies.”

“Right. Irene had grand dreams for my Heat. I showered, but they didn’t come off.” I shuffle my feet. His eyes on me are feral. Carnivorous. He’s a predator, tracking every movement of a prospective kill. “Koen? You’re being a smidge weird about this.”

“Right.” Another step back— somehow, he drifted closer again. “Did they do the one on your back, too?”

“Yeah, but maybe it washed off.” I lift my hair. “You can check— ”

“Don’t.”

I freeze.

He swears under his breath. “The marks are . . .” He jerks a hand through his hair. Opens his mouth about four times before settling on “Beautiful.”

“Beautiful.” My face tingles with heat. “That’s not the word you were thinking.”

“No.” His jaw tightens.

“I can scrub harder. Or cover them.”

“Absolutely fucking no .” At last, his mouth softens in one of those self-effacing, disarming smiles that I already know I’ll bring to my tomb.

Confusing, all of this. I busy myself and crouch down to pick up the phone. The screen is cracked, but the other pieces easily fit back together. “Here. Wanna call them back?”

“It was Lowe. I’ll text later. Say that you tackled me.”

“Credible. Did you tell him I was missing?”

“And promptly regretted it. The Vampyre called for updates every ten minutes.”

“Did you give her your number, or did she just help herself to it?”

“The latter.”

Unsurprising. I look down at my toes. Study them for a minute. “Can I ask you not to tell her about this ?” I make a vaguely neurochemical-imbalance-shaped gesture. “She’d never let me live this down.”

Koen crosses his arms, stern. “I doubt someone who’s regularly having interspecies sex has a single toe to stand on. Besides, she rarely needs to ask to find out shit.”

He’s right. I just feel so . . . exposed. Wrung out.

“Why are you so ashamed of this, Serena?” He sounds genuinely confused.

“I don’t know.” I snort out a laugh. “Maybe it’s just easier to worry about what people are thinking than about . . . about the real shit.”

“Such as?”

“That my father killed your parents. And you killed mine.”

I can’t believe it all fits in exactly ten words. Our pasts, woven together. One— no, four more reasons we could never work. As though we needed them. They come with a garbled mess of questions that I haven’t even begun to wrangle free. Do I resent him? Does he hate me? Am I angry? How much of this is his fault? Should I carry my parents’ sins? Can I forgive? Can he? Is there anything to forgive here?

He’s just as stumped. Fiddling with these impossible thoughts. Gives me a stuck, resigned look and says, “Couple goals, am I right?”

I laugh. The low, rolling sound that slips out of him could be laughter, too. We regard each other like that, no judgment, no fear of being judged. I could live in this weird limbo for the next century.

“I would do it all over again,” he murmurs at last, eyes never letting go of mine. “Even knowing what it did to you. And for that, I’m sorrier than I’ll ever be.”

We are not Human.

His pain squeezes my chest. “I don’t want you to . . . If when you look at me you see Constantine, I don’t want you to— ”

“Serena.” He shakes his head. “When I say that I would do it all over again, I also mean that I would go through what he did all over again. If it brought me to you.”

It’s a lovely thought: that the mistakes of our parents could have as little impact on our relationship as a butterfly flapping its wings. That us is a choice we can make. That we might not be constantly running out of time. Too lovely, maybe.

I lift my fists. “Right or left?”

He snorts. “Fuck this losing game.”

“Do you really want to renounce one of two prizes, both of inestimable cash value— ”

He takes my left fist, gently peels my fingers back, and holds my eyes as he brings my palm to his mouth and—

“Ouch.”

“It’s what you get.” His lips brush against the soft bite he left there. I try not to shiver as he slides lower, to the mark on my inner wrist. His eyes do odd things as he inhales deeply.

“Killer,” he murmurs. “You smell . . .”

“Good? Bad? Musty? Like beignet?”

He lets go of my arm. Runs his tongue over his teeth. “Close. You smell close .”

I feel close, too. “You chose left. Therefore, you get a premium— ”

“Cut the crap.”

“Fine. I’m going to show you something. Come.”

He follows me to my bedroom, but when my hand wraps around the doorknob, he grips my wrist to stop me.

“Give me a second,” he orders. Trancelike. Foggy.

“I— Why?”

“Your scent is really intense here.” It takes him a little more than a second, but he does get himself under control. Ushering him inside feels like an epoch-making moment, which might be dumb of me. We’re not co- signing a mortgage. I’m not even asking him to be my emergency contact for spinning class. The way I hold my breath doesn’t make sense.

And yet here I am. Wringing my hands as some guy looks at the weird, fort-like structure of pillows, blankets, comforters. Everything is plush, knit, soft. Last night I moved the bed into the alcove by the window, and above it I strung the fairy lights Ana must have left months ago. They tinge the place a warm, blurry yellow, much better than the unforgiving ceiling lamp. Also: they make the numerous items of Koen’s clothing I’ve pilfered harder to spot.

“Remember when Layla mentioned nests?” My voice trembles. “I’ve been working on this for a while. Honestly, I’m just relieved that this new penchant of mine for acquiring shit is just a phase. And . . .” I notice that the placement of the lavender velvet pillow is off. “Sorry, this is a bit . . .” I move closer. Rearrange it over and over until it’s just right. Deal with a domino-like cascade of imperfections that need to be fixed right now . A minute— or seventeen— later, a moment of clarity smashes into me. I look back at Koen. “Am I being absolutely insane?”

“I . . . believe this might be common,” he says. Uncharacteristically diplomatic.

“God. Do you— do you like it?”

He stares at the bed with a blank expression that my single brain cell interprets as disapproval.

“I can redo it. Right now, if you— ”

“Don’t . . . I’m sure it’s pretty. My instincts don’t really lean toward the aesthetics and architectural integrity of nesting.”

I frown. “What instincts do you have?”

“They are much less wholesome.” His laugh is a half groan. “Less about making nests, and more about . . . wrecking them.”

Because that’s the point of a nest. I made it in a fugue-like state, an automaton on a flow experience. But while I was obsessing over every square inch of it, I never stopped to wonder what I’d do once it was ready.

It’s obvious now that I made this one for Koen to—

Yeah.

I should not be this blindsided.

“What was in the right?” Koen asks, voice rough-edged. He’s behind me. Closer than a moment ago.

“What?”

“If I had chosen the right hand, what would I have gotten?”

“Nothing as exciting as a mound of blankets.”

“That’s for me to judge.”

I turn around. “I would have told you something.”

“What?”

“Can’t say, or you’ll have both prizes.”

“Would it be that bad?”

“It wouldn’t be realistic. I told you, real life requires choices.”

He grunts, annoyed, and leans back against the desk. A thousand warm little pangs gnaw at my body. Comfort and hunger and heartache and love and inevitability, all swirling in my belly.

Maybe tonight is different. Maybe it wouldn’t be too bad, to bend the rules of reality. “I would have told you that . . . that you don’t have to do what you’re about to do.” My heart thumps slowly, loudly. Feverish. “If you help me through my Heat, it’ll be at great cost to you. If the Assembly ever found out, it would be a disaster. So I would have told you: thank you, I appreciate the offer, but I cannot ask this of you.”

“You don’t— ”

“Need to ask. Yup, that’s what you would have said. And I would have pushed back a little— told you that I’m willing to deal with this on my own, because I wouldn’t want you to regret it afterward.”

“You can’t— ”

“But you would have seen through it. So I would have asked you whether you arranged for someone to cover your absence in the next few days. And you’d have said . . . Amanda?”

He nods, displeased in that endearing way of his.

“And that’s when I would have told you how . . .” I take a deep, shaky breath. “I would have told you how vulnerable I’ve been feeling in the past year. Stripped of my life. My identity. My agency. My health. And now, of the most personal thing of all. A few hours from now, I’ll be out of my mind. I will be a creature made of need , beyond thought. And you will take care of me exemplarily, like always. You will . . . You will kiss me, and touch me, and fuck me, because it’s what I require, and those will be the memories I carry for the rest of my life: you, satisfying my needs. And I would have tried to make you understand that I . . . I want more . I would like some real memories of us. Not because we’ve been cornered into it by biology and circumstances, but because being together is what we both want . So, while I’m still in control, I would have asked you to . . . to kiss me, and . . .”

Koen doesn’t come to me. He leans forward and pulls me into him with a tug at my wrist. I offer no resistance and stumble into his arms. “Yeah?”

I nod. He hunches forward. Cups my head and uses his thumb to tilt my jaw upward, lips brushing against mine. Then he makes me wait.

And wait.

We stay there, on the brink of everything. I feel him everywhere. His scent. The steady warmth of his skin. His fingers, traveling to curve around my rib cage. “Let me make something very clear, Serena. I’m never going to regret any of this, okay?”

Our mouths are touching. I feel as though we’re made of the same stuff. Me and him, set apart from the remaining matter of the universe. “I think . . . this is going to hurt, Koen.”

“After, yeah. But not yet.”

“Not yet.”

Our first kiss is about as romantic as our first meeting, the first night we spent together, or my first visit to the ocean with him. It’s a pattern for us: unmemorable (at best) or questionable (at worst) firsts. This once, though, it might be my fault. The impatience. The lack of harmony. I should have thought this through better, but it ends up being a scrape of teeth against the corner of his mouth, the delicious drag of his stubble, a lot of sharing air and breathing in between us. My upper lip slides against his lower, because that’s as high as I can reach. He doesn’t kiss me back, but there is a faint groan in his chest, just loud enough for me to hear.

“Serena,” he sighs, and makes it better. Flips us so that I’m sitting on the desk, him between my legs, and then it’s the rough swipe of his tongue against my lips, loud breaths, the heat of our open mouths. Fingers pulling at my scalp, new angles, tongues stroking. He tastes like a distilled version of his scent. I laugh against the seam of his mouth, giddy, and he grunts, “What?”

“Just— ” He doesn’t let me finish. Deepens the kiss. Slides a hand under my top and the pleasure startles me. I grip his forearms. When he sucks the gland on my neck I exhale roughly, and say, “Just, for someone who hasn’t made out with anyone in over twenty years, you’re not as bad as you— Oof .”

He tosses me on the nest. Air whooshes out of my lungs. I’m belly-down, spread-legged. Laughing without oxygen. “It was a compli— ”

My shorts and underwear are forcefully pulled down. The mattress dips between my legs.

“I was joking!”

“So am I,” he says, dead serious, pressing an open-mouthed kiss at the base of my spine.

I quiver. Take in a big gulp of air, but my throat won’t comply.

“I saw these the first day we met. Been thinking about them.” He lifts the hem of my top and just stares. I squirm as he presses his thumbs to each side of my spine. “Dimples. Very cute. Wholesome, really. Ready to be defiled.” He leans in, and his tongue traces the cleft of the right one. “C’mon, Serena.”

“W- what?”

“I thought you were joking. Joke some more.”

I would write him a whole comedy special, if his hands weren’t squeezing my ass, making my brain ring like some kind of . . .

“Phone.” I drag myself up on my elbows.

He hums like he heard me but keeps staring down. His fingers tighten on me, acquisitive, like he can’t help taking . I turn and find him heavy lidded, his breath shallow. His biceps are tense, prepared, anticipating. His fingers stroke between the globes of my ass.

“Koen,” I gasp, “it’s your— ”

“Fuck my phone,” he says, distracted, bending to lick the other dimple, and—

“It could be Nele, or they could have found Irene, or— ”

He groans against my right asscheek. Then bites into it like it’s a piece of fruit.

“Koen!”

“Sorry,” he says. Before doing it again.

“Koen!”

“I said sorry.” He presses a kiss against the small of my back. I roll around just as he leaves the room, catching his small smile.

The caller is Lowe, wondering whether Koen’s toaster oven exploded and took him out. “All good. Serena tackled me,” I hear him say. And, after a pause, “Told you, she beat me up. Slapped the phone out of my hand. What is there to understand?” I bury my laughter into a pillow. And there, in a nest that smells like Koen, listening to talk of pack jurisdictions and Human authorities, I fall into a calm, deep sleep.