Chapter 9
I hadn’t realized how much holding back from Kade about Jeremiah and Shadow had impacted our relationship. But after our kitchen-sex, we moved to the bedroom for something much more leisurely. Sometime later, as we lay snuggled under the covers, Kade’s muscular arms wrapped around me from behind as he kissed the tops of my shoulders, he said, “Aren’t couples supposed to go on some kind of baby-moon before the baby comes home?”
I tilted my head without looking at him. “I think that’s for couples who are both involved in the baby. Not one where half the couple is simply a supportive whatever.”
“I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
I could feel him smile against the skin on the nape of my neck. “Can I upgrade?”
“Depends on what you’re considering upgrading to,” I said. “We might have an opening at sort of supportive something or other. And there might still be room in the kind of helpful random guy—though there’s some discussion recently of downgrading that to one step below supportive something.”
He banged his forehead lightly against my back.
“I didn’t mean I didn’t want to be involved. I only meant that it had to be your decision.”
“Why?” I turned in his arms and put my hands up between us to rest on his chest, pushing back just enough so I could look him in the eye. “If we are together, and this is something I’m doing, you don’t have to be a part of it. I mean, you don’t have to… This is something I feel like I have to do. I want to be more than a caretaker or a counselor. I want to be something closer to a foster parent. If you don’t want to do that with me, that’s fine. I don’t expect you to. But…”
“But it means things are going to be different between us.” As usual he knew how to finish my sentences. That didn’t change the fact that I was only now beginning to figure out that Kade’s decision to stay out of fostering the lamia children had bothered me more than I had let on, or even realized myself.
I propped my head up on my hand, leaning over on one elbow and continued staring at him. “The thing is, relationships change. They are always in flux. If they’re not, if they’re too stagnant, then that becomes a problem. It also becomes a problem if they change so much that the people involved don’t want to continue it.”
“Is that your counselor voice?” Kade was smiling, but his usual golden-flecked eyes were turning dark.
“It’s the closest thing I have to the truth. I don’t know where we are on that continuum. I do know that, yes, me taking on these babies is going to change something between us. I hope it changes for the better. But I’m not willing to stand aside and not do it simply for fear of losing what we have.” I paused, gazing into his eyes and trying to read what I saw there. I couldn’t—but that didn’t change anything, either. “The one thing I cannot give up for the sake of us is me. And a huge part of who I am is a children’s counselor. I don’t have it in me to walk away from these children. I can’t.”
Kade reached out and brushed my hair away from my face. “And all of that is part of why I love you,” he said.
I froze in place. For all that we had clearly become a couple, we rarely said out loud that we loved each other. Not for lack of feeling it, I suspected, but because our lives had been so insanely unpredictable that it seemed almost as if saying the words would curse us somehow.
While I was framing my response, Kade continued, “I don’t want you to give up any part of who you are. And I only want you to change in the ways that you think make you more who you are. I am 100% behind you taking on an expanded role with these children. And I will be right there beside you, if you’ll have me. I simply want you to know—no matter how badly I said it before—that I want you to take the lead in how they are cared for. I want you to be the one who develops the relationship with them that you need. In that sense, I want to be supportive of what you and those children need. And I don’t know that either human or shifter language has a word for what I want to be to you.” By this point, tears had welled up in my eyes and it was all I could do to blink them back.
“So if I am your supportive whatever, I want you to know that it’s not in the sense of someone who is likely to take off at the first sign of trouble. I am in this with you, if you’ll have me.”
At that, the tears trembling on the ends of my lashes fell slipping down across my face and onto the sheets. Kade reach out and gently wiped one off the tip of my nose.
“And that,” I whispered huskily, “is why I love you.”
Kade grinned. “So does that mean I get to stick around?”
“I really hope you will.”
Until that moment, I hadn’t known that a man’s kiss could signal his total commitment.
Several hours later, I said sleepily, “My car is still out at the ranch. I’ll need to go get it so I can take Jeremiah and Shadow back to their car tomorrow.”
“I’ll go trade it out for my truck after I drop you off at work in the morning, if that’s okay. Then we can all go in your car.”
“Okay,” I agreed, and let myself quit thinking about it for a while.
It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up the next morning, though.
“Kade,” I said, shaking him awake. “Let’s leave early enough for me to go by the apartment and see what Jeremiah and Shadow have heard.”
He blinked at me several times before nodding. As he sat up and put his feet on the floor, I admired the strong, muscular lines of his back. I reached out and touched him, and he smiled over his shoulder at me before standing up to go make coffee for us. I had to admire the view as he walked away, too.
I had been unbelievably attracted to him ever since the first time I’d met him, and I think some part of me had been afraid that there was nothing more to it than some kind of weird shifter pheromones. Last night it reminded me of the other things I liked about him—his compassion, his desire to work with people as a healer. And always, the way he seemed to get me, to understand what I meant without any explanation at all.
I stretched, luxuriating in the knowledge that he really wanted to be with me.
It wasn’t just hot shifter sex.
Though I was glad that came with it, too.
When we got to my apartment a little over an hour later, Jeremiah and Shadow were already awake.
“Any word from the matriarch yet?” I asked.
“She wants to meet us at the hyena packs meeting room.” Jeremiah sounded deeply relieved.
“Apparently, it’s something like a community hall in a neighborhood,” Shadow said, her voice tinged with a hint of surprise, and maybe wonder. “I never knew that shifters lived so much like other people.”
I shrugged. “That’s probably not surprising, since you are being trained to kill them—you can’t be allowed to look at your enemy as if they are human. Not when you’re soldier,” I said.
“I suppose not. But why train our children to be Hunters at all?” Her white-blue eyes were troubled and she stared at me as if waiting for an actual answer.
“That may be something you spend the rest of your life figuring out,” I said. I probably shouldn’t have done this, but as far as I was aware, I was the only counselor who knew enough about shifters for her to even discuss these things with. So I forged ahead. “If you’d like, you can come in and see me when all this is over. We can talk about some of the things that I suspect you’ll be facing as you come to terms with your past life and your current surroundings.”
She swallowed visibly, but then nodded. “My people don’t believe in talking about our troubles,” she said.
“But you may be developing an entirely new set of beliefs, anyway,” I replied. “Seems like a good time to give therapy a try and see how you feel about it for yourself, as opposed to buying into what other people said. But it’s entirely up to you—just let me know if you ever want to make an appointment.”
Jeremiah was watching me carefully, his head tilted to one side, taking in to account everything I had said, and everything I hadn’t.
He might be a good Shield, but I suspected he would be a good counselor, as well.
He certainly had the observational skills for it.
It seemed to me, in fact, that pretty much the entire shifter community could use a whole raft of counselors—ones who understood their particular issues.
As far as I knew, those few shifters who saw therapists had to change their stories to fit human expectations. There was no way to truly get at the heart of the issues they had to deal with, given their need for secrecy.
Yet. Shifter counseling. I might be looking at my next career move.
With a grin, I waived the other two outside with me. The plan was to take the two of them back to Shadow’s car, and then presumably go our separate ways from there, though I would make sure they didn’t want me to follow them to the hyena clubhouse.
Kade had exited the truck, and was leaning casually against the door. “Hi, guys,” he said, and I grinned a little bit at his distinctly un-text and greeting.
“This is Dr. Kade Nevala,” I said. “Kade, this is Jeremiah Diphiri and Shadow Glass.”
“Nice to meet you,” Jeremiah said in his lyrical voice. Shadow simply nodded. Her hand kept clenching and unclenching at her side, and I wondered if she was feeling the lack of the giant acts on her back.
It had to be hard for her, going into an entire den of the very creatures she had spent her life training to kill.
Yep. Shifter counseling.
“So are we going now?” Kade asked. “Time to go get your car?”
“Yeah—I don’t think it’s going to be a problem. We’re heading up to the strip mall by the highway. Do you know where that is?”
“Yep,” Kade said. “That’s easy enough.”
I hesitated for a moment, trying to decide if I should offer the front seat from the passenger side to one of them, finally decided it would be too awkward. Anyway, they would probably want to sit together. I knew I would, if I were in their position.
Kade managed to keep some semblance of conversation stumbling along as we drove through the suburban towns that ringed Fort Worth. But I could tell both Jeremiah and Shadow were anxious about this meeting, no matter how positive they had wanted to seem.
“Just tell her what you told me,” I said. Jeremiah nodded, but Shadow stared out the window.
As we approached the parking lot where we had left Shadow’s car, I glanced around carefully. All the other cars occupants did the same, albeit in different ways. It was, however, easy to tell that we were a group of wary creatures. In humans, I would call that kind of hypervigilance a sign of stress, or possibly PTSD.
I thought of Gloria’s recent attempt to arrange for and intervention.
She definitely had a point, though she didn’t really have any sense of the extent of the issue.
At any rate, none of us saw anything.
I don’t know how we missed it.