Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ari
It’s not for another five days—five days of exciting, hot sex with an insatiable shifter—that Felix remembers he wanted to teach me to skate.
I try to distract him, but somehow I still end up at the rink in the training facility late one afternoon, looking dubiously at the skates Felix is holding out to me.
He got special permission for us to be here, which meant speaking to Lurlene and Craig Voss.
Both of them thought it was a great idea for me to learn to skate, which I still don’t understand, so now I’m stuck.
I can’t think of a way to back out that won’t look unprofessional as well as upsetting Felix.
So I’m learning to skate. On ice. Eoin nearly broke a rib laughing when I told him, then asked me to film the lesson. That’s not happening.
I take the skates and sit down to put them on. “Whose are these?” I ask, and he shrugs.
“An old pair of Jared’s. He doesn’t skate much anymore, but you and he wear the same size, so I thought I’d ask if he still had a pair.”
If Jared knows, that means the king does too. Wonderful. All— My head snaps up. “Did he ask you to take video of me?”
The sheepish smile on Felix’s face is the only answer I need. “I told him I wouldn’t,” he assures me. “At least, not until you’ve got the hang of it. Then we can send a video of the two of us doing laps of the rink or something.”
I love how optimistic he is.
“Sure. Is there a trick to tying these or are they just like a regular shoe?” I toe off my sneakers and try not to sneer at the skates.
“Regular shoe,” Felix confirms, dropping into the seat beside me to put his skates on. “Figure skates are a little different, but these are hockey skates. They should be firm but comfortable.”
I doubt I’m ever going to be comfortable in shoes that have knives on the bottom, but Felix is so excited to teach me this that I force a smile and lace up the skates.
He leans in close enough that I can breathe in the scent of him and murmurs, “I know you don’t want to do this, and later I plan to show you just how grateful I am that you’re trying.”
His words go straight to my dick—and also trigger shame.
He’s doing me a favor, after all. Maybe it’s not one I want, but it doesn’t look like the PR department at the DEA is going to be able to assign someone to this job anytime soon, so I should try to act like I know what I’m talking about when I tell people how awesome hockey is.
And it’s not as though ice skating is a skill I should be ashamed of. It’s not useless. In fact, given how much of a part of Felix’s life it is, and how much a part of Felix’s life I want to be, learning how would be… smart.
That’s a thought I push away quickly, before the pessimistic part of my brain can tell me I’m stupid for thinking I can be happy when I don’t deserve it.
I shove that thought away just as fast as the previous one.
Maybe I don’t deserve to be happy, not in the lifelong-contentment sense, but I can enjoy tiny snatches of contentment and joy, moments of light in the otherwise gray penance of my life, and if I start thinking about what I deserve and don’t, my afternoon with Felix will be ruined.
So when Felix bounds to his feet and heads for the ice, I (carefully) follow.
And hesitate as he steps out onto the glassy surface, skates a sweeping circle, and then returns to hold his hands out to me.
“Falling doesn’t hurt that much,” he assures me, which I don’t believe at all. Regardless, I join him on the ice, grabbing for his hands when my feet begin to slide.
“Soft knees,” he coaches. “Keep your head up; it will help your balance.”
That’s something I’ve heard before when learning new hand-to-hand combat techniques, and I automatically obey. Before I properly register it, Felix is skating backward, pulling me along, and my body aligns itself into proper posture almost without my help. Muscle memory is an astonishing thing.
“Okay, let me do it,” I say, letting go of his hands. Unfortunately, that causes me to stop suddenly, which I both don’t know how to do on skates and was unprepared for.
My ass hits the ice.
Felix skates in a circle around me, trying not to laugh. “If I’d set up that camera like Jared asked, I’d have so much blackmail material right now,” he teases.
I scramble to my feet, letting my natural athleticism and millennia of training take over. “Or you’d have a target on your back,” I counter, keeping my stance wide for balance. “How do I do this?”
“You’re doing better than I expected already. Push off on your right foot, like this.” He demonstrates, skating slowly away from me, and I mimic his movements. It’s a bit shaky at first, but within a few strides I feel like I’m getting the hang of it, gliding pretty smoothly across the ice.
“There you go!” he calls. “Let’s do a few laps.” He falls in beside me, and we swoosh around the rink. This is a lot more fun that I thought it would be.
Felix gives me a few tips as we go, mostly around directional adjustments, and I get more and more confident.
We might only be going in one direction, but I’m in control of my movements now and don’t feel as though my feet are going to go out from under me.
Not because of anything I did, anyway, but I’m sure I’ll fall again at some point.
Ice is slippery, and I’m balancing on metal blades.
“You should probably teach me how to stop,” I say finally. “Unless you plan for me to still be doing this when the team arrives for practice tomorrow.”
He laughs, and I grin in response.
“You should do that more often. It suits you.”
I slide him a sideways look. “What? Make bad jokes?”
“No, smile.”
I hate that my instinctive reaction is to wipe all expression from my face, but I hate even more that Felix notices and his face falls in response. I force myself to smile and make a joke. “We elves are solemn and serious beings. Nobody would take us seriously if we looked happy all the time.”
Instead of making him laugh again, or even roll his eyes, my (admittedly terrible) joke seems to make him sad. I want to grab his hands and ask him what’s wrong, but since I haven’t learned how to stop moving without falling over, that likely wouldn’t go the way I want it to.
“I wish you could be happy all the time.”
It’s a direct hit, and I glance away. “I am happy,” I assure him, and right now, this afternoon with him, it’s true. “I’ve never smiled all that much, but that’s just resting bitch face.”
The flat look he shoots me is proof that he sees through my lies. “Whatever. If you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to, and fuck knows you don’t have to smile for the benefit of other people, but please don’t bullshit me.”
I’m so used to hiding my feelings behind polite falsehoods that it takes me a few seconds to force the words through my throat. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
Even though he tries to hide it, I see the flash of hurt. “Then let’s practice stopping—and turns. And when you’ve mastered those, we’ll do some drills.”
I match the forced lightness of his tone. “Drills? You’re going to make me work?”
He shrugs. “Yep. You’ll learn what it’s like to be a hockey player, and you’ll be a better skater.”
We spend some time with me practicing stops—and falling, because apparently that’s part of the process—and I try not to dwell on that hurt. On the fact that I caused it. On how much I hate myself for it.
Felix has shared a lot of deeply personal stuff with me, some of it because of an enforcement report, some of it because until recently he was at the mercy of his hormones.
I didn’t exactly present myself as a caring and supportive person, and yet he still took the risk of telling me things I’m sure he’d rather have kept private.
Now, especially, he shares more than that with me.
We spend a lot of time together, and not just sexually, though that’s a big part of it.
For the past week, we’ve been together most nights—eating, talking, fucking, sleeping.
And mornings—sleepy wake-up sex, shared bathroom routines, idle chatter over breakfast. That’s not nothing.
It’s not unreasonable for him to expect me to give him something of myself.
But I can’t.
I can’t give him anything more than I already am.
He can have my body, and I’ll gladly worship him with it.
He can have my thoughts and feelings about work; everything I’m legally allowed to tell him, I will.
He can have my friends—some of them were already his, anyway.
If he wants to know about the elvish bond with growing things, I’ll talk until my tongue falls off and show him my magic until I drain myself dry.
I’ll pet and cuddle him in both of his forms, I’ll watch him play hockey—fuck, I’ll even learn to play myself.
I’ll do everything I can to interest elves and dragons in this sport he loves.
But that’s all. I can’t offer more than that.
I can’t tell him where I came from or how I spent my youth.
When he talks about his family and his childish foibles, I can’t match them with mine.
I can’t tell him why, unlike so many of my people with our long, long lives, I will never change my field of work.
I can’t tell him why I’ll always be loyal to Raeulfr, regardless of whether he’s king or not, in this life and my next.
I can’t tell him why my smiles are infrequent. I can’t tell him why happiness is something for other people, not me. I can’t tell him about my penance.
I can’t plan a future with him, no matter how much the desire for it burns inside me. But I can’t ever tell him why.
Because if I do—if I tell him any of it, if he knows the truth—he’ll hate me. I might have grown beyond the person who did those things, but they’re still the foundation of me. Someone as soul-deep beautiful as Felix could never love a person whose foundation is so rotten.
I’ve always known I was destined for a life alone. That any connections I make will be fleeting. I’ve accepted it as part of my penance, and though it hurts, my soul will be stronger for it. But I couldn’t survive the pain of having Felix hate me.
So instead, I’ll slowly but surely push him away.