Chapter 18
18
“You’re in a good mood,” Seth said the next day at work during their overlap hour between shifts.
“What do you mean?” Alex whipped around, feeling caught for no good reason. She certainly hadn’t been daydreaming about Possessive!Devin at the community center. The way his eyes went hot when she slipped on his shirt. It wasn’t her fault. It was a beloved werewolf trope.
“You’re humming while trimming Toast’s nails,” Seth pointed out.
Toast, the forty-pound Chihuahua-beagle mix on the exam table, grinned at her, his tongue flopping slightly out of his mouth.
Seth got up from where he’d been editing Toast’s file on the exam room’s ancient computer to come over and nudge her arm. “I recognize the signs of new love.”
“Oh no. No, no, no.” Alex winced. That was too many nos. “I’ve just been drinking more water.”
Besides, it wouldn’t be new love anyway. More like zombie love, brought back from the dead.
“Sure,” Seth said in the voice of someone who very much didn’t believe her. “Well, listen, I brought you something.”
He dipped out of the room for a moment, then returned to hand her a brown paper envelope.
Alex opened the parcel to find a manga titled One Piece , the bright, playful illustration on the front immediately making her smile.
Seth pushed his hair out of his eyes. “It’s the first volume of one of the greatest series of all time. I figured you needed an accessible entry point.”
“Thank you.” Alex hugged the gift to her chest, a piece of himself that Seth wanted to share with her. This was the deepest kind of friendship, in her opinion. Sharing stuff you loved, the stuff you got weird over, with someone else. Hoping they might get weird over it too.
“Does this mean I get to compile some of my favorite Kirk/Spock fanfic for you?” Alex considered herself an expert curator.
“Kirk/Spock, really?” Seth wrinkled his nose. “I always shipped the captain and Bones.”
Alex smiled. “I can work with that.”
It was the strangest thing in the world, that somehow Devin Ashwood visiting her hometown made her see it with new eyes. That his liking her made her like herself more. Enough to stop hiding in plain sight.
Seth gathered his stuff to head out but popped his head back in one last time to say good night.
“Hey, you know the guy you’re definitely not falling for is outside, right?”
“What?” Alex looked up from where she was finishing with Toast.
“He stopped over a little while ago to hang out with Lou. That horse is skittish around almost everyone, but for some reason he’s calm around Devin.”
“Probably because they’re both high-strung and too pretty for their own good.”
“For what it’s worth”—Seth rapped on the doorway with his knuckles—“I always think it’s a good sign when an animal likes someone.”
Alex couldn’t help thinking about Devin saying his wolf wanted to be around her.
“I’ve always thought that too,” she said softly.
A bit later, after making sure Toast and the other patients were squared away, Alex headed out back.
She found Devin outside the fenced-in pasture, petting Lou’s nose, their heads pressed together like coconspirators. They were quite the pair: beautiful, anxious, extraordinary, discarded.
Devin must have had prior exposure to horses. He moved around Lou too easily for the experience to be completely new. Alex knew he rode the same stunt horse for at least a few episodes when Colby went undercover as a Montana forest ranger in season 5, before, like everyone else that character loved, Brian Dempsey killed him off.
“Oh hey,” Devin said when she approached. “Your face looks different.”
Alex immediately thought he must see something revealing on her features. Some of her conflicted crush bleeding through.
But no. He squinted. “Did you move your eyebrows?”
Alex ignored him. It was possible that she’d put on a little more makeup than normal, some mascara and a few flicks of brow tint. Clearly, she shouldn’t have bothered.
Their odd-couple friendship and even the sex might work against all odds, but every time she let herself think that maybe Devin liked her—in a real, grown-up romantic way—he reminded her that was impossible.
“You hungry?” he asked somewhere around midnight when they sat in the office together: Alex catching up on data entry while Devin swiveled in Seth’s chair, tossing a rubber-band ball from his desk in the air. “I bought food.”
“Takeout?” She looked over eagerly.
“Better.” He got up and grabbed a brown paper shopping bag from the break room. “I’m gonna cook.”
“You realize we only have a microwave here, right?”
“Not a problem.” Devin rooted around in the bag and came up with some kind of metal appliance. “Brought my own hot plate.”
“Wow,” Alex said. “What inspired this?”
“You always get hangry halfway through the shift.”
“No, I—” Except, she did. Usually she started rooting around in her purse for dried mango around now. He’d noticed? Wait—he cared?
“I can hear your stomach,” he reminded her.
Oh. Well, that was decidedly less sexy than listening to her heartbeat.
Devin began unloading several containers of Very Veggie Cup Noodles, a jar of crunchy peanut butter, and a bottle of hot sauce onto Seth’s desk.
“Don’t worry, recipe’s vegan. I checked.”
And so she watched in some combination of shock and awe as Devin Ashwood cooked for her.
He painstakingly used scissors to cut up scallions and squeezed lime on top before handing her a doctored foam cup of steaming noodle soup.
Alex sniffed a little, stirring the mixture and getting warm spice and nuttiness.
It might be glorified college dorm room food, but she couldn’t help but be charmed by how nervous he looked waiting for her to take a bite.
“Well?” He had his hands on his hips, braced for her verdict.
Alex blew on a forkful and then took a bite. The flavors actually played together perfectly, sweet and salty with a bright acid pop.
“Pretty good.” She hummed.
Devin finally pulled out a chair at the break room table and grabbed his own cup. “My mom used to make this for me.”
“Oh?” The little he’d mentioned his parents since they met made Alex assume he didn’t have any positive associations.
But of course that was never the whole story. As a child of divorce she knew better. Even after all these years, sometimes when she was sick or overtired, Alex fell asleep imagining her mom’s hand in her hair, pushing back the wispy bangs she’d had as a preteen, her perfume like a field of wildflowers.
“Do you miss them? Your parents?” Alex held very still, not wanting to disturb whatever made him feel like sharing.
Devin stirred his noodles for a moment.
“I don’t even know where they are. They could be dead. But I think I miss the idea of them. Not the parents they were but the parents I wish they’d been, ya know?”
Alex nodded. “I haven’t spoken to my mom in over a decade,” she said, the weight of it heavy and somehow shared.
“As a kid I got jealous watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air .” Devin smiled ruefully. “Like, why didn’t I have an Uncle Phil and Aunt Viv to take me in?”
The conversation shifted to lighter topics as they finished their meal. When Alex asked what Devin did during his downtime at the hotel, he admitted to watching Wheel of Fortune reruns when he wasn’t working out or practicing meditation.
As she went back to updating patient files, he pulled up an episode on his laptop, scooting over in Seth’s chair so they could both see.
“You’re good,” she accused, several rounds in. He kept solving the puzzles before the contestants.
He knuckled at his eyebrow sheepishly. “I used to watch a lot in my trailer on set.”
Alex felt herself tucking this tiny detail away in the hope chest of her heart. This inconsequential fact about Devin Ashwood that would never make it into a magazine profile. That she could never tell her friends.
The group chat this morning was abuzz with the kind of daily life updates they shared like bulletins, knowing they’d get read at some point in their separate time zones. Cam’s daughter was starting swimming lessons this week. Eliza secretly hooked up with her coworker on a business trip.
Alex’s updates were stilted, edited around a huge Devin-shaped hole. The more time she spent with Devin, the more she wanted them to know, and the less Alex felt like she could tell them. The closer she got to him, the more distant she felt from her former self, the one that had once been a fan, then a hater. She was now somehow a friend…with benefits.
For so long, fangirl was the group chat’s shared identity, the part that brought them together across time zones and space. By getting close to Devin, the real him, Alex forfeited that kind of relationship and in turn robbed her friends of some of the distance that made speculating about celebrities feel harmless and safe.
If Cam and Eliza knew how much time she spent with Devin, how he’d touched her, they’d be mortified. Cam had written in detail about a fictional version of him. Eliza probably still had sketches of his face saved in old notebooks. The NDA was a scapegoat keeping Alex from having to make the choice about whether to embarrass or hurt them.
Alex had underestimated the depths of this secret when she signed on to help Devin in that Dunkin’ parking lot. She’d assumed this would be a fleeting interaction. That eventually it would become a story she could share without too extravagant an emotional cost. She thought she knew the narrative. Devin Ashwood is eccentric. Devin Ashwood is obsessed with Colby. She always assumed that video of him on the Venice Boardwalk would be the start of a great story, but Alex never imagined her role in it would be so…complicated.
At least hanging out with a werewolf who could sense changes in your core temp was convenient. Devin grabbed her sweatshirt off the hook by the door when the AC got a little carried away, draping it over her shoulders in the same moment that her arms broke out in goose bumps.
“Thanks,” she said, turning and finding him closer than she’d anticipated, his hands braced on the back of her chair.
Spending time with him, trying to train him, it was all simultaneously harder and easier than she’d anticipated. She could rewatch and research and try to prepare herself a hundred different ways not to fall for him, but Alex had no defenses for the sweet swell of his cheeks when he smiled at her. For the way the heat he gave off made her want to curl around him.
While Devin harnessed his control, Alex was unraveling. And if he agreed to her idea for this last trial, she’d be going so much further.
“We should talk about the act of submission.” She took pains not to whisper.
They’d both been avoiding the subject of the final test from the show. It was obviously the hardest to replicate. On The Arcane Files , Colby battled his mentor in a duel with wooden staffs. Despite every werewolf advantage, he’d had to learn to yield. To show respect. Humility.
Not exactly Devin’s natural strengths.
“I know the most obvious replication would be for you to fight someone, but I don’t actually think that’s necessary,” Alex said.
He came around to sit on her desk, facing her. “What do you mean?”
To buy herself time, Alex started twisting her hair into a bun.
Devin was distracted by the movement, tracking the flicks of her fingers against her nape.
“Well.” She swallowed. “It’s the submission that matters, right?”
“I mean, yeah, I guess. But what other type of submission is there?”
Alex stared at the ceiling.
“Seriously? Weren’t you People ’s Sexiest Man 2009?”
His green eyes widened as the full impact of what she was saying descended. He shifted a little, crinkling the papers under his butt.
“You want me to wear a collar?”
“Not necessarily.” Alex fought a smirk. He really was an innocent Iowa farm boy deep down. “There are plenty of ways to explore that particular type of engagement.”
“Okay.” He blew out a long breath. “But who the hell am I gonna submit to?”
“Me, obviously.”
He’d said he was too worried about provoking the shift if he lost control the other night, so this would be, like, an effective exercise to evaluate.
“You?” Devin blinked.
Cold dread raced down Alex’s spine. Had she read something here completely wrong?
She thought this was a controlled way for them to pick up where they’d left off the other night in the forest. This took the explosive chemistry between them and shoved it in a neatly labeled box, making it useful. Professional, even. But if he didn’t want to…
“Or we could find someone else,” Alex offered.
“No.” The word was out of his mouth so quickly it seemed like a reflex, like the doctor tapping your knee and making you kick. “It’s just”—he ducked his chin—“are you sure you’re up for it? No offense, but you were pretty…accommodating the other night.”
“Excuse me.” Her unease burned up in a flash of mortified indignation. “Are you calling me easy?”
Just because she’d spread her thighs for him in the woods didn’t mean she couldn’t also bring him to his knees.
“We’re talking about power exchange here.” Devin held up his hands. “I won’t pretend to be an expert, but I’ve seen enough porn to know that shit requires a certain, you know”—he pounded his fist into his palm—“authority.”
Alex crossed her arms. “I assure you I can handle myself.”
She might have been born weak for Devin Ashwood, but she didn’t have to let him know that.
“All right.” He still sounded doubtful. “I’m in. Letting you boss me around the bedroom sounds way better than getting my ass kicked.”
“To be clear, we both need to take the objectives of the trial seriously. This is about you giving up control. My participation will be purely as a facilitator.”
“Whatever you say, boss.” Devin smirked.
“I’m serious.” Alex found herself on her feet, her face hot. “This is a professional arrangement. I might not even get off.”
And then Devin did the worst thing he could have possibly done. He laughed.
“Sure.”
“I don’t see why I would.” The tops of Alex’s ears were on fire. “You, on the other hand, should prepare to be put through the ringer.”
“Alex,” he said, like she was being silly.
“Devin,” she replied, like the word tasted sour.
He shook his head as he got to his feet. “Are we really doing this?”
Alex raised her chin. “Unless you don’t think you can handle it.”
“Oh, I can handle it.” His eyes sparkled.
“We’ll see,” Alex said. She was taking great care not to think about him naked, his neck straining as he panted while she denied him over and over and over.
“Yeah, we will,” Devin said, closing the meager distance between their mouths until their lips barely brushed. “Because you know I can smell you.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. “I can hear your heartbeat.”
Like a call and response, her pulse sped up.
“I can taste every emotion you don’t want me to know.” Devin lowered his mouth to the hollow of her throat, flicking his tongue against her skin.
Alex made a small, high sound through her nose.
His eyes flashed silver for just a second. “You think you can stay coolly detached while you fuck me? Try it.”
Alex’s cheap bralette did nothing to hide the fact that her nipples went tight at the gravel in his voice.
“You’re real tough, aren’t you, baby? So goddamn hard to please.” Devin traced the shell of her ear with his lips. “But my face does it for you, my voice.”
He placed a featherlight kiss on her nape. “You know I’d fuck you until you cried if you let me.”
Alex closed her eyes, leaned into it.
“So go ahead,” he said, mouth against her skin. “Put me on my knees and make me edge myself for hours. Suck my dick until I’m begging. Maybe, when you get really needy, you’ll decide to ride me. But just so we’re on the same page, when you come—the second that pretty cunt starts to flutter—I’m gonna fucking know.”