Mara
By the time I’m cleaned up and redressed, my folder is tucked into my tote bag, and my thighs have stopped doing that stunned tremble, Aaron is pulling a long-sleeved shirt over his head in front of the mirror.
I’ve lost a full minute of my life watching him do it.
The line of his shoulders inside the fabric.
The easy way he rolls his sleeves up to the elbow and smooths the front of the shirt down, catching my eye in the mirror and holding it, one eyebrow lifting.
“I don’t mind staying in bed,” he says. “First day really is a drag.”
I snatch my tote off the chair hard enough that the strap whips over my shoulder, and he laughs, holding his hands up in surrender.
“Hold on, baby, hold on. I’m messing with you.
” He crosses to the chair by the window and slides into his shoes, grabs his own bag, slings it over his shoulder, and comes back to me and leans in for a kiss I don’t deny him.
I smooch his lips once, grinning, and he smiles against my mouth and then heads straight for the coffee pot.
“I love this coffee station you built for me.” He’s pouring into a disposable cup, measuring his cream and sugar and the cinnamon he insists on, fixing the lid. “It’s a nice touch.”
Heat crawls up the back of my neck. I built it for him a couple weeks after we moved in. Set it up while he was in a meeting so he’d find it already finished. When he came home and stopped in the doorway, he looked at me like I’d hung the moon in our kitchen.
“Let me walk you to your classroom,” he says now, sliding the lid on his cup.
“No, Aaron.” I lift my tote onto my shoulder and level him a look.
“Please—“ he starts. The pout comes out, bottom lip pushed out, and my tail swings up and brushes firm against his cheek. I kiss his mouth anyway. He is ridiculous, and I lost this fight the moment he walked out of that bathroom.
He’s at the door before I’ve finished picking up my bag, holding it open, his free hand sliding into mine as I step past.
Outside the faculty suites the morning hits gold across the campus paths.
The air smells like late-summer grass, and students are moving in loose clusters between the wings.
A lioness in a cream sweater waves at me as she passes.
A wolf shifter from the science faculty dips his head to Aaron, and he nods back without breaking stride.
I look up at him as we cross onto the main path. “Are we visiting the pack this weekend?” I ask him.
Aaron’s mouth pulls down into a pout around the rim of his cup. “Do we have to?” My ears tip back and he cringes slightly.
“The community lands is supposed to be temporary, Aaron. It’s been a year. I’d like to settle somewhere.”
“All right, all right, baby.” He sighs, but his eyes are smiling at me over the coffee. “Levi’s been itching to show us the floor plans for our cabin, anyway. He won’t break ground on the foundation until we approve them.”
He takes another sip, and his scent shifts, just enough, that faint under-note of I’m not telling you something he can’t quite school out of himself when I’m paying attention. My lion sits up inside me.
“How long has he been waiting?”
“Well—“ His eyes slide sideways, and his free hand flicks once at the air like he’s trying to wave the question into something smaller. “I mean, it hasn’t been, like, that long—“
“How long, Aaron?”
He sighs long and theatrical, and his shoulders drop under the strap of his bag. “Six months.”
I snatch my hand out of his and start walking toward the Lion Shifter Wing without looking at him, my tail lashing once against the back of my calf. He catches up in a few long steps, coffee sloshing in the cup, his free hand held out like he wants to take mine back and knows he hasn’t earned it.
“Mara. Hold on—“ His hand brushes my elbow and I shake it off without slowing down.
“So you don’t want me to live with your pack,” I throw back over my shoulder, my tail lashing hard.
“That is not it at all, Mara.” His voice has dropped and gone serious.
“Six months, Aaron.”
I don’t answer him the rest of the walk.
He stays at my shoulder and I let him, but my ears are flat and my tail is lashing.
The students around us give us a wide berth.
At the door of the Lion Shifter Wing I stop and turn on him.
He stops too, lifts the cup halfway to his mouth, and thinks better of drinking in front of me right now.
“Do you want me to be honest with you?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He glances around. A lioness passes with her eyes flicking up to us then training themselves very carefully on the ground. He waits until she’s past. Then he looks back at me and points at the apex of my thighs without an ounce of subtlety. “That thing right there.”
My mouth drops open, and my tail comes up and loops around his face, my tassel pressing firm over his lips. “Shh. We are in the Lion Shifter Wing.”
He raises his eyebrows at me over the curve of my tail, and I hiss, “Grr, Aaron—“
He pushes my tail away from his mouth with the back of his. “You wanted the truth. I just want to be with you. Laid up in that.” He points again, lower this time but no less shameless, and my tail comes around full force and cracks him across the back of his head.
“Ah—damn, Mara—“
“I want to start a family with you, Aaron.” The anger has drained out of my voice all at once. I press my lips together, but my face gives me away anyway.
The tease falls off his mouth. His coffee cup lowers to his side, and his face goes soft.
“Okay, baby. Okay. I swear I’ll get on it.
” He steps in closer and tries to pull me in, but my face is already saddening at the corners of my mouth, and he feels it under his hands and tips his forehead against mine. “Please don’t give me that face.”
I let him pull me into his arms. His arm goes around my waist and his other hand stays careful with the coffee.
“I’ll go see my mother at lunch,” he says into my hair. “Let her know we’ll be there for the weekend. I’ll take you to Levi’s personally, and I’ll tell him right in front of you to start breaking ground on our home.”
“You promise?”
He pulls back enough to look at me, and his eyes aren’t on my mouth this time.
They’re taking all of me in, and his voice drops low.
“Mara. When you so much as pout at me, baby, it makes me want to fall to my knees right here in front of everybody. Whatever you want, you tell me. I will move the Witching Glen to get it for you, if that’s what it takes. ”
Heat climbs my neck.
“You’re about to start your teaching position.” He presses a kiss to my forehead, lingering there, breathing me in once. Then he steps back, pulls the door open, and holds it for me. “Go in there and be a teacher, baby.”
I start to step inside, the smile already breaking across my face. And then halfway through the door a wave of something hits me, and my tail goes up on alert behind me, and I turn back to him.
“Aaron. Do you want to build a family with me?”
His face goes serious, his brow tightening at me across the threshold.
“Of course I do, Mara. Please—don’t let me have ruined this day for you.
It was supposed to be special.” And then his mouth curves.
“Get back out here and kiss me, right now, or I swear to Mother Fate I will drop to my knees in this doorway and grovel until you smile at me, and I don’t care how many lionesses walk past.”
“No—“ I gasp, stepping back out to him, my hand flying to his elbow as his knees actually start to bend, “—Aaron, stop—“
“Don’t play with me, Mara. I’ll do it.”
I laugh, and I grab his face in both hands and kiss him fast and hard. “Okay. Okay, I’ll let it go. I love you.”
“I love you more.”
I step back and look at him one last time, and then I walk into the Lion Shifter Wing for real.
Behind me the door eases closed, and I catch one last glimpse of him through the narrowing gap, leaning against the wall with his coffee, watching me go.
I climb the stairs with my tail swaying behind me.
I’m ten minutes into my first class when I pass out the first assignment, and a voice from the second row lets out a long wounded sound.
“It’s the first day, Mrs. Blackwood.”
The stack of papers in my hand stops, and I’m suddenly aware of the weight of them against my palm.
My lion sits straight up inside me.
I turn slow, and the lioness who spoke stiffens in her chair the moment she sees my face.
She is young, tall even sitting down, her hair in two thick braided coils.
Her tail goes still. I know her. She’s from my pride.
Her mother used to bring braided sweetgrass to my mother’s kitchen every new moon when I was small.
“I’m sorry, Professor, I—“ Her hands come up, placating, her tail tucking tighter under her chair.
“What’s your name?” I ask her.
“Amani, Professor.” She says it carefully, like she’s waiting for me to correct her.
“You can call me Mrs. Blackwood. That’s fine.”
Her shoulders drop in relief. “Thank you, Mrs. Blackwood.” She tries it out, a nervous smile lifting one corner of her mouth.
I nod at her, and then I look out at the rest of the class and I gather myself. “About this assignment. I know it’s the first day. You weren’t expecting to walk out of here with homework today. But I’m giving it to you anyway, and I want you to understand why.”
I come around to the front of my desk and lean back against it.
“In a pride, a young lioness learns who she is through the lionesses around her—her mother, her aunties, the elder who watched her tail go wild.” A few quiet laughs ripple through the room, and I let them come.
“She learns by being with other lionesses. By being touched, watched, corrected, and held.”