Chapter 8 #2
“You look…” he chokes out. “Extremely cosy.”
“Thank you.” I beam at him. My heart hammers against my ribs.
Why do I feel like my frumpy pyjamas are more revealing than his nakedness?
“There’s…um, only one bed,” I pat the mattress at my feet. “We don’t have a spare room. Well, we do, but that’s off-limits. And I’d prefer if you sleep on top of the covers.”
“That’s okay,” he says softly. “We can share. Luckily, I’m small.”
“Rafe, you are a filthy liar,” I grumble as I pick up the luxuriating cat for the fifth time and move him back onto his side of the bed. “You said you’re small. Small cats don’t take up three-quarters of the bed.”
I wouldn’t have to if you didn’t keep moving, he grumbles inside my head. I just get all comfortable and warm and then you move away and take the warm with you.
“That’s because I’m boiling hot! And I feel weird with you all pressed up against me,” I say. “This is the bed I shared with Warrick, and…”
If you’re so warm, why don’t you put on something that’s not made for an Arctic winter?
“I’m not defending my pyjama choices to a cat.” I smooth the blankets over myself and turn away from him. “Stay on that side of the bed.”
He hops over onto my pillow and gives me a look of utter desolation. You said I’m not allowed under the blankets, so if I don’t press up against you, I don’t get warm. I’m left out here in the desert of frozen tundra, bereft of the one comfort that could keep me from freezing—
“Okay, okay, fine.” I lift my arm. “You can nestle in here. But absolutely no funny business.”
I assure you, My Lady of the Fuzzy Pyjamas, I am a beast of utter seriousness.
Rafe flops down against me, his head resting on the pillow. In a few moments, his tiny body reverberates with the biggest, loudest purr, followed by an adorable little whistle through his nose. It’s like sleeping beside a tiny, rumbly train engine.
Okay, this is actually quite nice…
I wake up with a start to light streaming in the windows and a tremendous sense of wrongness.
I shake my head as the sleep slowly falls away.
What is it? What’s wrong? I’m here in my bed, I’m in my room, and I’ve kicked off my pyjama bottoms in the night because I was hot, and there’s Warrick sleeping beside me, his arm thrown over me, his warm chest pressed against my back and his erection—
No, not Warrick.
“Argh!”
I leap away from Rafe, dragging the blankets with me, which only means that his long, naked body is exposed. How did he shift back into a human, burrow under the covers behind me, and pull me against him without me even waking up?
A stripe of warmth flares across my stomach where his arm was resting, but it’s nothing compared to the heat immolating my cheeks.
“Argh!” Rafe hamster-wheels his feet. He yanks the covers back, and he’s stronger than me, so they rip from my hands, and now I’m the one who’s cold and completely, utterly exposed.
Eeep. I pulled off my pyjama top, too?
I’ve been in bed, naked, with Rafe? How did this happen?
I think my whole body is blushing.
Rafe freezes. His eyes rake over my body before resting on my face, and I don’t feel cold at all anymore.
“What happened to your bee pyjamas?” he asks.
It takes me far too long to answer because his tail is flicking with agitation and his cock is right there, bobbing between us, and I knew it was big, but now it’s long and hard and I can’t…I didn’t know they made them like that.
“Wh-what happened to ‘you can only stay the night if you stay in cat form’?” I growl back. The bees are back in my belly, doing their excited dance as I remember the feel of his hardness against the back of my thigh.
“It was an accident. I can’t always control when I shift! You let me climb under the covers to be warm, and then I shifted in my sleep and…”
…and then you put your arms around me, and you got hard…
We regard each other.
Rafe screws up his face, as if he’s physically in pain, and turns to face the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I didn’t mean to make you feel unsafe.”
“I—”
I feel safe with you.
And that’s the problem.
I never should have let him stay here, in the bed that I’ve shared with Warrick for fifteen years. Precisely because of how safe he makes me feel.
“I’m sorry, too. I set us up for failure. I should have given you some blankets on the sofa.”
Why didn’t I do that?
At my words, Rafe recoils, as if someone’s slapped him.
“Here,” he mumbles, tossing the blankets at me.
He grabs one of my decorative cross-stitch pillows – this one has a pattern of bees flitting around a gardening trowel – and places it over his, um, rather substantial appendage.
I swallow. “We’ll just forget all about it.
You can use the bathroom first. I promise I won’t look. ”
He rolls over to face the wall, giving me a view of his cute little butt and the tail thumping against the sheets.
The ancient pipes take a long time to heat up, but today I don’t wait; I step straight under the frigid water, hoping that it will shake off the warmth pulsing through my veins and the dancing bees in my belly. I need the water to slough away the idea that maybe I like him looking at me.
I haven’t felt desired in a long time. Warrick was obsessed with me when we were trying to have a baby, but after we found out that I couldn’t, he turned cold in bed.
He’s still affectionate, still has his arm around me in public always, still holds my hand, still needs his kiss before he leaves for work, but he hasn’t wanted sex in years.
And I think about those lines and lines of purchases in his secret bank account, the sexy lingerie and the hotel rooms, and I hate him with an intensity that has me gripping the bottle so tight that lotion shoots to the ceiling, and suddenly the boiler kicks in and the water turns scalding, and I yelp and leap out.
Rafe is gone when I step out of the bathroom, wrapped in three towels. I dress quickly in a maxi skirt and a t-shirt of a green man from last year’s Midsummer Festival, and pad downstairs. Something catches the corner of my eye. Something different about the sitting room—
The quilt.
Someone – and I suspect I know who – has taken down all the photos of Warrick and me from the photo wall, and hung my quilt in their place. I step in close, drawn by the vivid red flowers. My fingers brush the shimmering gold thread we used for the bees’ trails and around their wings.
“I think it looks perfect,” Rafe says as he comes up behind me and presses a warm mug of tea into my hands. I take a sip. It’s just the way I like it.
I think of what Warrick would say if he saw the quilt on the wall. And I think of Rafe’s hardness pressing into my thigh. I press my thighs together as a warmth flutters its wings in my belly.
“I think so, too.”
I don’t ask what Rafe did with the photographs. This time, I’m not taking down the quilt.
Rafe spins me around so that I’m facing him.
His two ear ‘tufts’ stick straight up, giving him a look of Siamese-cat mischief, but his face is unusually serious – a dark line forms between his eyebrows.
“Listen,” he says. “I shouldn’t have insisted on staying with you, or on being under the covers.
I can’t control what I do when I’m asleep, but I was the one who orchestrated the ah, situation we woke up to.
You are blameless, Autumn, and I’d tell your husband that if he ever finds out.
I know that you’re doing everything you can to help me get rid of my curse, and I didn’t mean to take advantage of that.
I’ll be a good boy from now on, I promise. ”
I swallow. I can’t help but compare his apology to one of Warrick’s. Warrick would apologise all the time, usually after he made me give up something I wanted to do, but I’d always come away from it feeling guilty myself.
You are blameless, Autumn.
Goddess, how I wanted that to be true.
“Rafe, I…there’s something I should tell you.
” I stare at a spot behind his head. Am I really going to do this?
Am I about to say something I can’t walk back?
But then the object I’m looking at comes into focus, and it’s the wall clock with the minute-hand ticking towards half-past eight, and the reason Rafe was here at all last night slams into me.
“We’re late!”
“Huh?”
“We need to get to the council building,” I cry. “I’m about to miss the test!”
The answer is that assistance dogs and witch’s familiars are allowed in a restaurant, Rafe’s voice echoes in my head.
“That’s not the answer. Assistance dogs, yes, other pets only if the owner permits, but no animals are allowed in the food prep or storage areas,” I whisper, glaring at the Siamese cat washing his paw on the windowsill. “Can you go away? I’m trying to concentrate.”
As soon as I turned over the paper and saw the multiple-choice questions and the dots to fill in, all my old anxieties flooded back.
My chest carved out and I sucked in breath after breath, but there’s never quite enough air.
But then I remembered all of the silly skits from the night before, and I used my pen under the line of text to keep myself focused, and I slowly read each question under my breath, and the answers were right there.
I’m helping. And who are you calling a pet?
“You’re cat-helping, which is not the same thing. Go away and sniff Mr Muffins’ butt or something.”
“Is everything okay, Mrs Abernathy?” Councillor Douglas looks up from his papers. He’s the only other person in the community centre, and he’s been charged with administering my test.
“Er, yes, sorry. I was just…thinking out loud.”
“The test rules don’t allow for auditory processing. I’ll forgive it this once, but don’t let it happen again.”
He sounds like a schoolteacher. It should be illegal for a schoolteacher to be that handsome—
He’s not handsome, Rafe snaps inside my head.
“Shut up,” I mumble. “Stop listening to my thoughts.”
“Mrs Abernathy, this is your final warning.”
“I was just clearing my throat.”