Chapter 12

It was like all he owned were white t-shirts and ratty old band shirts. Alessia somehow doubted he was a fan of that many bands. Today it was The Clash. “They were the only band that mattered, according to the Rolling Stones,” he said when he saw Alessia looking when she first opened the door. “Original punk.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you’re some hardcore punk?” she asked, crossing her arms. “I’d say that’s a little cliché but you’re also a lot closer to suburban middle-class kid hoping for a tiny rebellion than full-fledged punk.”

He shrugged. “I like angry music, but I don’t feel the need to dress angry. T-shirts and jeans work just fine for me.”

Alessia rolled her eyes but couldn’t fight the smile that came after. He smiled too, and stepped out of her way so she could join him in the hallway and turn to lock the door. They walked down the hall, towards the elevators and she told him she wanted to go to El Loco Elm just off campus. He smiled and said okay and that he could go for some guac, and they got into the elevator. As soon as the doors closed, it was like a vacuum of silence overtook them.

They stood a respectable distance apart. It wasn’t the space for lovers or friends, but two people on an elevator trying to keep a reasonable distance from the stranger next to them. If this was supposed to be some kind of date, they were doing that part wrong, for sure. They stepped out of the elevator on the ground floor together and he held the door as Alessia walked through.

The first trial of the night came in the form of running into Erik. He was out with his backpack on, reading over some papers in his hand. He happened to look up at the exact right moment Alessia swiveled her eyes in his direction. At first, the recognition was friendly, with a smile attached to it. And then it turned dark when his eyes moved over to the man standing next to her, who walked in pace, and stopped when she stopped. There was no hiding it, they didn’t just happen to be out on campus, walking the same direction at the same time.

“Doing something fun?” he asked, barely swallowing the bitter tone in his voice.

“Mexican,” Alessia said. “Dr. Tekkin offered me an apology dinner.”

“Ah.”

There was no delicate way of putting it and absolutely no version of talking about it that Erik wouldn’t assume something else entirely. It was a little bit satisfying, if she was honest, to let him see this and have it knock him down a peg. After all, if he was going to act like he owned her, or he had some kind of first dibs on a date with her, Alessia wanted to repay that as well. Her biggest pet peeve was men getting possessive over a woman who never agreed to a relationship with them. She knew it was something of a natural reaction, to feel like he had ownership over something he liked. But she was a person, and Erik seemed like he was used to getting what he wanted.

“Anyway, we better get going. The place kind of fills for margarita pitches,” Alessia said, adjusting her purse on her arm.

“Right,” Erik said with a tight, thin mouth. “Have fun.”

Then he walked away, down the path and didn’t say a word. Part of her wished she could have done that more delicately but another part didn’t care. He needed to see that not everything revolved around him. And if this was one way to do that, so be it.

“He seems lovely as always,” Dr. Tekkin said with an irritated grate to his voice as they kept walking.

“He’s got a big ego; you could relate,” Alessia said and felt Dr. Tekkin’s glare at the back of her head, though she refused to turn and face him.

“It’s not an ego,” he said. “I need to protect himself in some way. Did you ever read Dune? I doubt it. It was my favorite book when I was a teenager, all about strange powers and distant worlds. There’s this line in there, ‘fear is the mind killer’ I never forgot that. It was life altering to read for someone like me so I never let it go when I got older.”

For someone like me. Alessia tried not to cringe. So maybe Dr. Tekkin had a little more license to walk around like a big man than Erik did. Though she wasn’t about to forgive him for everything just because he had a chip on his shoulder, she was willing to overlook some of his tendencies that were a little less desirable. It was a defense mechanism—the hard and spikey outer shell of a soft underbelly. Maybe she should stop having her defenses raised so high as well, stop trying to meet him at every turn when it came to verbal sparring and glaring.

Maybe she should try to enjoy this night as if it was a date. She wasn’t saying she needed to think about kissing him or if there would be another dinner after this, sometime in the future. But she could forget their past, forget the context of their relationship, forget everything she already knew about him and try to create a blank slate in front of her. This was a man who asked her to dinner. That seemed like as good a place to start as any.

#

The restaurant was decked out in all the colors and trappings of a Tex-Mex place hoping to cash in every year on Cinco de Mayo. Sugar skulls littered the walls, hanging in paper chains across the ceiling. Cartoon depictions of cacti and old Mexican towns hung on the walls. The music was some Mariachi Spotify station and the air around the bar positively smelled like stale, spilled tequila.

“Now we’re talking,” Dr. Tekkin said as they seated themselves at a cocktail table in the bar area.

“I’ll be right with you guys,” said some small, speedy waitress rushing drinks over to a table across the way.

“Total Americanization of a culture,” Dr. Tekkin said. “But if we know that and approach it thusly, there’s nothing wrong with having a little fun.”

“Are you ever not in professor mode?”

“My mother always said I was a born academic. Though she was always afraid…”

He trailed off, frowning into his menu.

“Afraid of what?” she asked, wondering if it was wise to continue.

“Back then, there were bans on shifters working with kids,” he said.

She remembered. Her second-grade teacher was a wolf shifter and ended up just not showing to class anymore; the substitute with the bad breath and the loud voice became our permanent teacher after that. The same thing happened to the fourth-grade teacher Mr. Edelman. It had been a nationwide ban on shifters working in medical and children-related fields. The ban was eventually lifted, and apologies were made, but prospective teachers still had to show shifter ID cards if they wanted a job and, more often than not, they didn’t end up getting it.

“Did you want to work with younger kids?” she asked. “I feel like anything below undergrad would make you want to tear your hair out.”

He smiled. “No, but the entire profession was in some upheaval. My dad was a professor and he almost lost his job when he had to declare my mother and me as shifters in his household on some form.”

She nodded, swallowing, and suddenly very interested in the list of appetizers on the menu. It was a tough subject, but one they couldn’t avoid. He was a shifter, a professor of shifter studies, and she was a grad student learning from him in a mentorship, in that capacity. Their entire professional and personal existence revolved around the topic. Maybe dinner wasn’t such a good idea when it came to trying to clear the air. Maybe a movie would have been better or an arcade or anything where the sole form of entertainment wasn’t their ability to talk to each other.

“They have three different types of guac,” she said, clearing my throat. “I say we get the trio.”

“Alessia, we can talk about this stuff.”

“About guac?”

He gave her a look and she gave him a weak smile in return. Her fingers tapped restlessly against the plastic menu and she sat it against the table. “About all this stuff. I wanted a chance to talk to you without school or our jobs, or anything else in the way. We’re friends, right? Or at least something like friends. And we should be able to talk to each other. I mean, even if we aren’t friends, we’re kind of bound by a weird circumstance, right? We’ve got this shared memory that no one else can really get in on.”

He rambled, she didn’t know that it was possible for him to ramble nervously but there he was, pattering away. She tried not to think of it as cute. She tried not to smile. But his own nervousness was a little too adorable not to admire. Yes, she could admit they were probably friends. She wasn’t sure she’d take a bullet for him just yet or let herself be conned into helping him move, but she could admit he was someone she could talk to about certain things, and wanted to talk about certain things.

“Can I get you guys started on drinks?” the waitress asked, reappearing as if from nowhere.

Hell yes, please.

“Want to do a pitcher?” Dr. Tekkin asked. “I feel like we earned it.”

“Reading my mind.”

A few minutes later, a large pitcher of bright green margarita, a small dish of salt, and some wedges of lime appeared in front of them, and it took all Alessia’s energy not to dive in and just chug away. She allowed Dr. Tekkin to carefully pour the contents out for her, squeezing the lime and placing the salt. When he finally slid the margarita her way across the table, she took a massive sip, trying to hide just how much she chugged down.

“Am I that bad of company?” Dr. Tekkin asked, nodding to the glass.

“I’ve just had a very stressful week,” she sighed and then laughed. He shrugged and lifted his glass as if in a toast. He threw back a fair amount as well.

“So,” she asked, already feeling the tequila swirl through her system thanks to an empty stomach. “Do I qualify yet for your super-secret club and threshold to actually be considered a person who can talk about shifter politics?”

He took another sip and set his glass down. “There will always be a divide. A minority will always have final say over majority allies, no matter how dedicated. But… I’m willing to admit I might have been a little harsh on you.”

“Are you just saying that because you feel bad for kidnapping me?”

They smiled and they both took another deep drink from their glasses, enough that Dr. Tekkin reached over and filled them both up again. It probably wasn’t exactly healthy that alcohol running through their system made things easier but whatever crutch Alessia could take at this point, she would. Besides, he’d complimented her for the first time since she’d known him—or, at the very least, apologized for something.

There was, however, another downside to drinking. The more Dr. Tekkin drank, the cockier his face became. He had a perpetual smirk like he knew something no one else in the room did. He leaned back like he owned the entire table, head cocked to one side. She tried to hate it, tried to remember how frustrating his attitude had been for the longest time, but her vision and brain was getting fuzzy and all she could think was that he looked pretty cool in his Clash t shirt, ripped jeans, and sure face. It was hard not to be impressed by him, to believe his smirk. It infuriated her in an entirely different way, something closer to excitement. She wasn’t sure she could tell the difference anymore.

“No, the point is the Jedi were basically this awful cult organization that brainwashed kids.”

That was another thing… turns out he was a total nerd. He hid it well, under the muscles and the ripped clothes, but he was a total dork and his eyes lit up a little too much when he started talking about these things. The sure look went away in the face of babbling about space and old TV shows, all sorts of other things. She realized, by the time they finished the pitcher, that it made him a little too human. That’s what was scary about it all. He was a complete person hiding underneath those layers. It was frightening to think about, and incredibly tantalizing. Or maybe she was just drunk and had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

They ate through their shared plate of chips and guacamole and salsa, and their respective taco dinners. They laughed a little too loud sometimes and earned some glares from other people trying to enjoy whatever date or dinner they were on themselves. It was more fun than Alessia thought she’d have with him. And it was just him. It wasn’t even the shifter part of him, the politics that seemed to color his entire existence, talk of class. He laughed about being a nerd in high school, about his favorite band, his favorite TV shows, and food. She talked about her own complete ignorance of virtually everything he named.

By the time they were done, it had been hours and she hadn’t even noticed.

#

The mood changed, however, when he walked her home. The air around them changed; suddenly she remembered she was out to dinner with a man, a man who paid for her, and was now walking her home. She was out to dinner with a man that she didn’t want to admit she found fairly attractive. Alessia never liked that cliché, the line between love and hate, but there certainly was something to be said for the line between total irritation and sexual chemistry. In her sober mind, she never would have admitted that she could feel something like that for him, or that all her red-faced rants about him masked something else. But right now, she knew she was attracted to him. She knew she wanted to fill his arms and his chest. She knew she liked how he smelled and how much closer he walked next to her than earlier when they’d been walking to dinner.

When her apartment building came into view, she knew the night was almost over, the dream, the fantasy would be dead soon. She had to think of something to say, something to do. She didn’t want this to be the last time they were alone together. She didn’t want to go back to how things used to be, to their professional relationship. Alessia wanted to talk to him more about his Dungeon and Dragons tournaments and how ironic that was and she also wouldn’t mind testing to see just how soft his lips actually were.

“So, that wasn’t so bad,” he said when they got to the front door. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked on the balls of his feet, the universal symbol for awkward stalling. She could work with that.

“No, it wasn’t,” she said and, before she could stop herself, she leaned forward and placed a kiss on his stubble-covered cheek. The skin was warm even if his five o’clock shadow was rough and she pulled away to see him completely still. This was the moment, this was the test to see where things stood with them. She’d thrown out a line, all she needed was to see if he would take the bait or if he would head off running and that would be that.

He didn’t move. He just watched her with an intense gaze. She decided that was a good thing. She gave him plenty of chances to flee, to run off and never deal with her again. He wasn’t going anywhere; that was as good as anything else.

“Do you want coffee?”

They both knew she wasn’t offering him coffee, not really. But she would give the pretense anyway. She wasn’t expecting anything, she wouldn’t ask him for anything more than he was offering. So far, he’d bought her dinner and given her his time.

“I like coffee.”

It was a delicate game they played as she walked up the stairs, his steps behind her, watching her. It only occurred to her now the type of predator she was letting into her house, the person who followed her. She read plenty of literature on it and saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She knew the dangers of inviting in the evil. When that happened, it was her own damn fault if she ended up eaten. Of course, at the phrase “eaten,” she found herself picturing something else entirely. She really needed to get it the hell together.

She unlocked her door and stepped in.

“Unfortunately, you’ve been here before,” she said, turning to lock the door behind them and feeling the red creep up to her ears, staring at the base of her neck. She was never any good at preventing a blush.

“I’m glad I was there that night.”

“Erik wouldn’t have tried anything.”

“All the same.”

I went into the kitchen to make coffee. Though social tradition dictated that coffee never actually meant coffee at the end of a date—not that she was entirely sure what this was anymore—she would proceed as if she was actually getting him coffee. She imagined him following her into the kitchen, wrapping those tightly coiled arms around her waist and pulling until her back was one with his front. She imagined feeling the hint of a bulge where he hardened below, whispering into her ear about how beautiful she was and how much he’d wanted to rip her clothes off for a while now.

She shuddered at her own fantasy. He wasn’t behind her. In fact, he was several feet away from her, standing awkwardly at the threshold of the kitchen. She thought back to that vampire metaphor and how they constantly needed to be invited into homes and places. Perhaps it was the same with him. He looked up to see her looking at him.

“I don’t want—I don’t want you to think you owe me anything,” he said. “I wanted to clear the air with us. I wasn’t expecting anything else.”

He was entirely too sweet. The professor was gone; he was a man in front of her, at war with his own feelings and incredibly vulnerable. She had never felt more attracted to a person in her entire life. It was like when women saw a man who was good with kids for the first time and would drop everything, even the body-building Superman of a boyfriend because hormones and instinct attracted them to a man like that. Her instinct was to be attracted to this vulnerability.

She stepped towards him as it was obvious he would never make that move himself. If she wanted it, if she truly wanted him, she would have to move forward and get it herself. It was a clever way for the universe to test her. Did she really want this man? She could find out or she could let it go. She could free herself from the question or she could be brave enough to chase what it could mean.

So, she chased.

She was in front of him. He didn’t move. She placed a hand under his chin and lifted. His head moved without resistance, his eyes wide and scared as they looked into hers. She moved forward, placing her lips over his in a soft, chaste kiss. It was little more than a technical press of lips together. She just wanted to see what he’d do, if he would run. She pulled away to see his eyes had closed in the brief second they’d been connected and now they seemed to be stuck that way. In a look of blissful contentment, his lips still puckered slightly as if he hadn’t noticed she moved away.

That was all the information she needed. She moved back in. This time he was ready for her. They met a little more feverishly. Their lips tugged and pulled at each other, moving with the grace of an ocean wave pulling against the ocean floor, dragging along it, pulling at it, and then cresting down and washing over it. His hands came up to her head, his fingers splaying out in her hair like tendrils, landmines burying themselves in the vast expanse of her locks. Her hands stayed in their spot, softly pressing against his jaw and chin, holding him in place without urgency but with firmness.

Soon kissing wasn’t enough. She wasn’t sure who opened their mouth first, whose tongue made the first fearless journey across the border between them, but suddenly their tongues brushed each other and exploring opposite mouths. For all his harshness, his mouth was warm and soft. She dared to take his tongue in her mouth, sucking on it before biting down slightly and he let out a groan she felt throughout her entire body. It was a delicious sound and the vibrations across her skin were amazing. She wanted him to do that again; she wanted to hear that every day for the rest of her life, to feel it.

She kept at her work, not noticing that her hips had started moving on their own, bumping at his. Her own groans slowly joined his and soon she felt her hands sliding from his jaw, down his chest and going lower and lower. She didn’t really have an endgame in mind. She just knew she wanted to touch him because that would bring the sounds out of him that she needed, and she still had that fantasy brewing about him and a bulge in his pants.

But then his hand grabbed her wrist and lightly brushed her hand away. He parted their lips but didn’t release his grip on the back of her head or his hand on her own.

“I want that, trust me,” he practically gasped out and she tried not to shudder. “But there’s—things complicating it.”

“You turn me on.”

She smirked. “I’m not sure I see the problem.”

He smiled sheepishly. “I’m going to sound like an idiot or something, or like a twelve-year-old boy. But there’s some stuff that happens when I get… excited.”

“I’m familiar with the male anatomy.”

“No. I mean as—me. A shifter. How far into the theory have you delved when it comes to sex?”

She felt herself heating up again. Oh. This was territory she wasn’t sure she’d be able to come back from if he insisted on talking about it further. She swallowed like it was the most difficult thing she’d ever done in her life.

“Not too much,” she said. “I almost took a sexual therapy course in undergrad but…”

She’d honestly been terrified to take the class and avoided it like the plague.

“Well,” he cleared his throat. “A lot of people view the shifter form, the real form, hiding underneath all of this, as the true manifestation of a lot of things about that person. Ultimate happiness, ultimate anger, and ultimate… sexual drive.”

Her mouth dropped open before she could stop it.

“Do you mean that—when you, with a woman, you—you transform?”

“God, no.” His eyes were wide and he gripped her shoulders tightly. “It’s nothing like that. I just get—things can be a little aggressive. Emotionally, maybe even physiologically, the dragon will come out in moments like that. I just want you to be sure before we go there.”

Minus the shifter anatomy part of this, he did have a point. She didn’t necessarily like the idea of sleeping with a guy after the first date. No matter how hot he was or how fun it turned out to be.

“Right,” she said. “Well, I think that’s smart.”

“I can still stay,” he said. “And we can—continue. I just don’t want to go too far.”

“I don’t think I’d be able to stop myself from not going that far.”

She felt like an idiot for saying it. Now she sounded like the horny teenage boy. She couldn’t exactly stop herself, however. She wanted him. She didn’t realize just how much until he was in her arms and in her space, and she had him so close and right there. She felt like she might explode and blushed at the thought of relieving herself after he left. She wondered if he would go off and do the same.

“Well, I asked you up for coffee,” she said. “We can do that.”

“Coffee sounds good right now.”

So, she did just that. She made them coffee and they went on talking like they hadn’t just made out in her kitchen and almost fucked against the wall. They talked politics and weather and what little she knew about sports. It was nice and easy all over again, just like things had been at dinner. She was relieved she hadn’t complicated this night by going too far before they were ready.

Were they a ‘they’ already?

They hadn’t discussed that part. The conversation was light and casual, and not at all about what they’d almost done. She felt like he might be actively avoiding it. But she pushed her paranoia aside and reminded herself that he was still here, he was still talking to her, laughing at her jokes and drinking her coffee. He’d had so many chances to run so far this night and hadn’t.

But what did she want with him? If anyone found out, they would have a lot to answer for. She’d likely be removed from his class, if not the program. He might lose his job. It wasn’t illegal, it’s not like they were in high school. But it was unethical. They’d been out in public together though, people easily could see them at the restaurant together, laughing, drinking. People could see them on the way there too. They’d gone across campus and he hadn’t seemed to bat an eyelash at the possibility of there being consequences for that.

But Erik had seen them. Would he assume something? He already was assuming something, based on the look on his face and how miserable he got when they left. Would he be that vindictive? She thought so. She’d need to take care of that, find a way to prevent him from trying to get Dr. Tekkin fired. For now, she kept that worry to herself as she saw him out the door. He gave her a long kiss on the cheek as he left, promising to talk more later in the week. She watched him leave and tried to ignore the girlish butterflies in her stomach.

She went back into her apartment and checked her messages. She had a few from Trish asking if everything was okay, if she needed help, and then eventually joking, said she assumed she must be dead or banging him into the next century. Alessia rolled her eyes. Well, both of those were wrong but one was closer to the truth than the other.

She smiled as she went back into her apartment, putting on music as she moved through the kitchen to clean things up. She could still feel his hands in her hair, his mouth against hers. She could still smell him, still feel that heat. She wanted to do it all over again, and do it right, and go as far as he would let her.