Chapter 25
“Right there. Right there, baby. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, god, that’s so good. Harder. Harder, baby. Fuck. Fuuuck.”
Nadja smiled collapsed to the bed next to Robbie’s prone form.
“My thumbs are sore,” she said with a laugh.
Robbie rose up onto his forearms and looked down at her. “Aren’t you some sort of immortal demon or something, Doc? I wouldn’t think your kind ever got tired, especially not after a little back massage.”
“Immortal demon trapped in a human body, sir,” she corrected. “Or something. And your back is a mess. More knots than a sailboat.”
He bent his head toward her and kissed her.
Nadja didn’t think she’d ever get tired of kissing Robbie.
She hadn’t done much kissing in her thousands of years of existence.
She’d avoided it almost categorically, in fact.
But now it was new and exciting and made her heart race.
Every time he leaned in, she felt as if the organ shivered in her chest. And then there was the way he cradled her jaw in his palm, his thumb on her cheek and his fingers wrapping behind her neck, the way he sometimes dragged his thumb over her bottom lip, the way she wanted to bite it.
Not hard, just enough to leave the indent of her teeth, a lover’s mark, even if it was temporary.
Another thing to get used to was the feeling of having energy—at full capacity—that was entirely new.
She’d never felt so full in her life, so strong.
Even kissing him, being kissed by him, filled her well in a way nothing else ever had.
She could feel the energy coursing through her body with every swipe of his tongue against hers.
Robbie kissed her cheek and then her neck before blowing a raspberry, loud and mortifying against her pulse point. She shrieked with laughter and tried to wiggle away from him, but he was stronger now, too.
His hair was growing out from the buzz cut he’d had when he walked into her office the other day. He had the beginnings of a beard as well. It suited him. She stopped struggling and lifted her hand to feel the bristles. He rubbed his cheek against her palm, much like a dog would. Nadja smiled.
“You’re scruffy.”
“Like a wolf?”
She laughed. “Like a ragamuffin.”
He dropped his chin to her chest. “I can shave.”
She shook her head. “Only if you want to. I like it.”
He smiled. Not his full smile, but the one that she had come to realize meant he was feeling shy.
“I like you,” he said.
She rubbed over the soft shortness of his hair and felt that familiar free fall of when he kissed her, but more somehow.
“I like you, too, Robbie,” she whispered.
Her life in World’s End had once seemed ideal, or as ideal as it could have been under the circumstances of banishment.
But it felt rather empty and gray when compared to the technicolor that Robbie injected into everything he touched.
She’d had a house, plants that she kept buying with a heart full of hope and then inevitably killed despite all of her best intentions.
She’d had Magda, her only friend. She’d had clients that she always looked forward to seeing, like Hank Dove.
But had she laughed? How often did she smile?
Magda made her smile, mostly because Magda was bananas, but this was different.
“Wanna go steady?” Robbie asked.
“Aren’t we already?” she said with a laugh.
“I guess you’re right. Mating feels about as steady as it gets.”
“Fake mating,” she said, and regretted it the moment she did.
Robbie’s face fell.
“Right,” he said. “Fake mating.”
He pushed himself up off of her and moved to climb off the bed but stopped when she grabbed his forearm.
“Hey,” she said, her throat feeling thick with remorse.
He stopped, hovering over her, his weight in his hands, his head hanging.
She released his forearm to hold his cheek again, using her hand to tip his chin so that he was looking at her.
He looked so vulnerable, so easily broken.
She realized that she’d never seen Robbie look fragile.
Nothing broke him. Not the challenging childhood he’d told her about or couch surfing across the country.
Not working for dangerous men and doing dirty work out of necessity. Not loneliness. Not loss. Nothing.
He just let things bounce off and kept going. He’d get knocked down and get back up again. And again. And again. He was a fighter. He was resilient.
Nothing had the power to hurt him. Nothing but her.
“I like you,” she whispered. “I do. I like you so much, Robbie.”
It was, perhaps, the truest thing she’d ever said. She liked him so much that it almost felt like more than that. Almost. But enough like it that she knew she was at the precipice of that almost, the place where like dropped off into something terrifying.
He turned his head and kissed her palm.
“I like you, too, Doc,” he said.
“I’m with you,” she said. “Are you with me?”
He relaxed. Lowering his rangy body onto his forearms then, feathering a kiss against her forehead, whispering his response against her skin. “Yes. I’m with you. I’m always with you.”
She knew he was late for his duties. People were counting on him. He had to go make dinner for the whole pack who, he grumbled, ate as much as a professional football team. She knew she should let him go about his business, that she should find something to keep her busy as well.
Instead, she drew him down, wrapping her arms around his shoulders and pulling him so that he rested his full weight on top of her. She kissed him slowly, hoping that she was telling him with her body in a way that she couldn’t tell him with words just how very with him she was.
And he, always with her, as he said, kissed her back.
The first two times they’d had sex had been combustible. Thrilling and intense and wild enough to make her heartbeat pound in her ears. But this time, it was slow, careful. Soft.
It was two frightened people, one probably more frightened than the other, just being with one another.
Robbie had a mother who, as he said, “loved him to pieces.” He’d had a grandmother who baked with him and read him fantasy novels and nursed him when he’d been sick.
He had a gaggle of sisters who were “nosy as hell,” but who she knew he missed.
He’d told her earlier than whenever he got a phone again, he’d probably have six hundred memes in his messages that they’d sent.
He had friends. Good friends. Friends who looked out for him and bought him nail polish and coffee and knew when his birthday was.
Robbie had been loved. He was loved in a way that Nadja never had been, in a way she still wasn’t.
It made standing at the precipice of that big feeling all the more terrifying. Because Robbie had grown up speaking the language, and all she had was a phrasebook checked out from the library.
When it was over, they lay side by side, the sheet tangled around their limbs and Nadja felt that worry grow bigger.
It made her want to back away from the edge, to retreat away from the free fall because she didn’t know how to glide, let alone fly. How the hell did you love someone?
But then he kissed her forehead again, something he did when she was spiraling. As if he knew. As if he could tell and wanted to send his affection straight through the shell of her skull and into her whirring brain.
She watched him get dressed, noticing how differently he put on his deodorant than her, how differently he put on a shirt. How good he looked against the dappled afternoon light filtering through the curtains.
And then, as if he knew that she would lay in bed and panic when he left, he held out a hand.
“Come on, Doc. I could use some help tonight.”
Nadja took his hand like a lifeline. She dressed.
Put on her own deodorant. Pulled her hair back with a clip that had a butterfly on it, no doubt borrowed from JJ’s nieces.
She held his hand as they strolled to the mess hall and blushed when he slipped an apron over her head and twirled a finger, encouraging her to turn around so that he could tie it around her waist.
She blushed even hotter when he stepped into her, wrapping the ties around her front and tying the knot against her belly, his hands lingering, pressing her gently backwards into the solid safety of his body behind her.
She looked up and saw the calendar on the wall, each day with a meal plan written in Robbie’s blocky handwriting, the previous days crossed off.
A day, three days from then, was circled in red, the whole square of the date haloed in red permanent marker. Nadja looked in the top left corner of the square and saw the tiny italicized words Full Moon.
Robbie bent his head and kissed her neck, just above where it slanted to meet her shoulder, sucking gently on the spot as she stared at that bold, red circle.
Her mind went to claiming marks, how his teeth against her neck would make a red circle, how her blood would well and rush to the surface to meet him, to be tasted by him. To be taken by him.
The pack would expect that. That’s what they’d been promised, after all. A mating ceremony at the full moon.
Robbie stepped away from her, landing a light swat to her ass before he turned for the walk-in fridge. “Come on, babes. We’ve got work to do.”
She lifted a hand to her neck, feeling the lingering dampness of his kiss, the dizzy vertigo of one looking down from a great height, staring over the edge of a precipice between the relative safety of liking and into the vastness of something else entirely. Something more. Three days.
I said I’m with him, she thought. So be with him.
With a nod, she turned her back on the calendar and followed Robbie into the startling coldness of the walk-in.