6. Chapter 6 #2
" Fuck! " I slam my palm into the mat and get up and kick the edge of it, which achieves nothing except hurting my foot. "It was right there. It was right there, I had it—"
"Good," Voss says.
I round on him.
"Which part of that looked good to you?"
"The part where you nearly shifted."
"I didn't shift. That's the entire—" I gesture at all of me. "Still this! Still exactly this!"
"Yesterday," Voss says, "you were not nearly shifting."
He writes something on his board, and tucks it under his arm, and starts walking toward the shed like a man whose afternoon has gone broadly to plan.
I stand there breathing.
Soren picks up my water bottle from where it went sometime in the last twenty minutes and holds it out.
I take it. Drink about half of it. Try to make my hands stop shaking.
"Your teaching style is terrible," I say.
"It worked."
"I didn't shift."
"You almost did."
"Almost isn't—" I stop, because I've just looked at him properly.
He isn't smiling. But his eyes look softer.
"Don't look so smug," I say.
"I'm not."
"You absolutely are."
"I'm not," Soren says, and goes to talk to Voss.
Ander's still there.
He's twenty feet away and he hasn't moved, and when I catch him he doesn't do the decent thing and pretend he wasn't looking.
"What?" I say.
"Nothing."
"You have a very expressive nothing."
His eyes go past me — to Soren, over by the shed with Voss, sleeves still shoved up — and then come back to me.
"Nothing," Ander says again, and walks off toward the residence.
Fine. Great. Cool.
The rest of them are packing up. The third-years are heading in, somebody's arguing about dinner, the light's going that color it goes in October at about four thirty.
I put the water bottle down.
I shut my eyes — and then open them again, because that's the part I've been doing wrong. Eyes open. Nobody's giving me anything. Nobody has anything to give.
I don't reach for the clearing. I don't reach for the bear.
I reach for the place I was sixty seconds ago, going backward off the edge of a mat with all of Soren coming down on me and my entire body deciding, without consulting me, that it had had enough of this.
Heat.
It's small and it's fast and it's gone almost before I've registered it — a flicker under the skin, the base of my skull tightening for half a second and letting go.
Still human. But it's there.
"Again," I say.
Voss stops, halfway across the training ground. He turns around.
Soren does too. I roll my shoulders.
"Again."
By nine o'clock I have taken the world's longest shower and discovered eleven separate places that hurt.
I'm face-down on top of my bed in a T-shirt and shorts with one arm hanging off the side, doing an inventory. Left hip: bad. Both shoulders: worse. Something along the right side of my ribcage that objects to breathing in but not to breathing out, which seems like a design flaw.
I hear a knock.
"It's open."
Torres comes in, shuts it behind him, and stands there looking at me for a second.
"How bad?"
"Everything hurts."
"How'd it go?"
"I almost became a direwolf."
"Almost?"
I roll onto my side, which is a mistake, and I let him hear about it.
"I felt it," I say. "For like a second and a half. All of it — the heat, the skull thing, the smell of the entire county. I had it and then I went looking for it and it left."
Torres considers that.
"You couldn't do that yesterday."
"Oh my God."
"What?"
"You're the third person to say that to me."
"Because it's true."
"Because it's true ," I repeat, in a voice, and he doesn't take the bait, which is annoying of him.
He comes over and sits on the edge of the bed by my hip, and doesn't say anything else about it, and that's the reason I like him.
"Which one's worst?"
"All of them are worst."
He gets a hand on my shoulder and presses with his thumb, and I make a sound like a wounded animal.
"That one," he says.
"Yeah."
"Turn over."
I go face-down again and he gets both hands into it properly, one knee up on the bed, working the whole slab of muscle over my shoulder blade, and it hurts and it's incredible and I stop being a functional adult somewhere around the second minute.
"You're enjoying this," I mumble into the pillow.
"A little."
"Sadist."
"You spent your afternoon letting Soren throw you on the ground for fun," Torres says. "Your opinion on what's normal isn't worth much."
His hands work down my back and across, and I stop tracking the conversation, and then I stop tracking anything at all. Nobody's evaluating me. Nobody's writing on a board. Somewhere past my shoulder blades my brain just puts itself down.
Then his hands change.
Not a lot. Same muscle, same slow pressure, but his palms start staying longer than they need to, and when they come back up my sides his thumbs drag under the hem of my shirt against bare skin.
I turn over.
He's got one knee on the bed and his sleeves shoved up over his forearms, and his hair's still damp from his own shower, and there's a look on his face — the exact one he gets when he's caught and isn't remotely sorry about it.
I take a second, because I'm allowed.
He's big through the chest and shoulders in a way that has nothing to do with a gym, and right now the lamp is highlighting the line of his throat and I want to kiss that spot so badly.
"Torres."
"Yeah?"
I pull him down.
He comes so fast we knock heads.
He kisses me hard. His hand slides straight up under my shirt and mine go into his hair. He gets my shirt off. I get his over his head and throw it away and I put my hands flat on his chest because I love the warm heavy weight of him.
"Shut up."
"You were making noises."
"I'm going to make a different noise in a—"
He gets his mouth on my breast and I make a different noise.
We lose our clothes fast. My shorts end up somewhere behind the headboard. His jeans get as far as his knees and stay there for an embarrassing length of time while neither of us cares, because I've got my hand around him and he's got two fingers in me.
He's so hard it makes me feel unhinged. He drops his forehead onto my shoulder and swears against my skin and his hips push into my hand, and I feel the whole of it come back at me through the bond — his, mine, indistinguishable — and my back comes off the bed.
"Torres—"
"Yeah."
" Torres. "
"I know."
He curls his fingers and kisses me and I nearly go off right there, and then he stops.
"Don't you dare—"
"I'm not, I'm—" he's laughing, he's actually laughing "—Jess, my jeans."
"Take them off!"
"That's what I'm doing!"
He gets them off. It is not graceful. He comes back up over me and I hook my leg around him and pull, and then something along my ribs seizes up and I make an entirely different sound.
He stops dead. "What?"
"Rib."
"Which rib?"
"The right ones. All the right ones."
"Okay." He's up on one arm. "Okay, hang on—"
"If you say we should stop I will end you."
"I wasn't going to say that." He gets an arm under my knee and shifts me over onto my good side, and comes in behind me, chest against my back, and drapes his whole weight along behind me. "Better?"
"Better."
"Yeah?"
" Yes , Torres—"
He pushes into me and we both stop talking.
It's slow for about three seconds, which is all the patience either of us has, and then his arm locks low around my waist — carefully, which I notice and can't do anything about because his mouth is on the back of my neck and I'm already coming apart.
"Don't stop."
"Not going to."
"Don't stop, don't stop—"
I come with his arm crushed around me and my hand fisted in the sheet, and I hear him say my name, wrecked, into my hair, and then he goes too, hard, hips stuttering against me, his arm tightening around me.
Afterward neither of us moves for a long time.
He's still curled around my back with his face somewhere in my hair and his hand resting flat on my stomach, and all I can hear is my heartbeat thundering and us breathing.
Eventually he props up on an elbow and starts examining me, because he can't help it. His thumb finds a mark on my hip. Then another on my upper arm.
"You're going back out there in the morning?"
"First thing."
He puts his mouth on the bruise on my arm, once.
"You really felt it?" he says. "Your wolf."
"Yeah."
And it comes out differently than it did earlier, because earlier I was furious about it, and now I'm not.
I found it again.
"Then you'll get there," Torres says.
"Voss said basically the same thing."
"Yeah, but you like me more."
"That's true." I turn over — carefully — and put my face in his shoulder.
He gets an arm around me.
Then he reaches over my head, picks my alarm clock up off the nightstand, looks at it, and sets it down again.
"You should sleep," he says, and doesn't move, and neither do I.