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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ATHOS WATCHED HER come back off the field. He sat in the corner, in the shadows, staring at her like a pervy stalker guy, except for the fact that stalkers don’t usually get to actually fuck the women they’re stalking, and he had definitely fucked her. Twice.

Damn it, though.

Was this leftover swan bond shit? Was that it? Was he now doomed to be a bird about everything, and the minute he stuck his dick in a woman, he’d fall in love with her?

No, just fuck her out of your system, he told himself. Just go out there for the evening run tonight and fuck someone else.

The evening run was around seven o’clock tonight, not like Friday’s midnight run, so it would begin in the light and darkness would descend and then everyone would have the chance to be in bed early and check out in the morning.

Sure, there was a morning run on Sunday, but he wasn’t sticking around for that.

So, anyway, yeah, he could do that, couldn’t he?

Fuck someone else, and whatever weird devotion he was feeling starting to form towards her would go away.

It couldn’t work, anyway.

He didn’t like women like her, and she thought he was a completely different sort of man than he actually was.

He watched her, though, watched her coming back in with her clothes a little dirty and her hair mussed and her mouth all red and she looked just-fucked and prettier for it, or was that because he’d done the fucking?

She was gorgeous .

Wait, why was she stopping?

Shit, she’d seen him?

Was she coming over here?

He got to his feet, embarrassed but sort of excited, too. He liked being near her. He shoved his hands into his pockets. He traced a pattern on the floor with the toe of his shoe.

“You have lunch plans?” she said.

He slowly raised his gaze to hers. “You asking me on a date?”

“No,” she said. “After you said you didn’t have plans, I planned to say that was too bad, and then just walk off. Because, you know, I’m a stone cold bitch and all, right? That’s what you think of me?”

“No, that’s not what I think of you.” He thought he wanted to see her without her clothes again. He thought he wanted to put his mouth on her again, all over her. He thought… “Come to lunch with me.”

She laughed softly. “Now, you’re asking me out?”

“Yeah.”

She gestured. “Somebody kind of got me all dirty.”

“Did they. What a jackass.”

She giggled. “I need to get cleaned up.”

“Should you do that? I mean, should you wash away all that, um, sperm?”

She turned bright red, but she was still smiling. “Maybe not. I still need to change my clothes if I’m going to be seen in public.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let me help you change your clothes.”

She laughed again. “You’re…”

“I know,” he said. “Sorry about that. You did come over here, though.”

“Just meet me in the lobby,” she said. “Okay?”

“Okay, that also works,” he said. “But if you need help removing clothing, you know, ever, I’m just saying I’m here for you.”

She rolled her eyes and laughed and walked off. “Watch it. You’re on thin ice.”

He came after her.

She turned to look at him, batting her eyelashes. “Sir.”

Fuck. He was hard. He caught her by the hand and pulled her in against him.

She gasped up at him.

He kissed her.

She sighed. “Lobby,” she breathed. “Lunch. Later.”

He let go of her.

AFTER LUNCH, RORA and Stockton wandered around town. She wanted to go into a bookstore, and he trailed behind her and she waited for him to tease her about the books she was reading, but he was pulling them off the shelf and thumbing through them without comment.

She snatched the book he had out of his hands. “We’re friends now, Stockton, so you have to be supportive of my hobbies, the way good friends are.”

“This is your hobby?” He snatched the book back. “If I knew this sort of thing counted as a hobby, I wouldn’t have panicked because I thought I didn’t do anything with my life besides school and Maibell.” He opened the book up to a page in the middle, eyes scanning the words. “I didn’t think women liked this kind of stuff.”

“Are you serious?” she said, giggling.

“I mean, this is just a jackal gangbang on some little rabbitkin girl, huh?”

She snatched it back. “It is a romance . It’s called reverse harem.”

“Because, it’s—oh, got it, a harem is usually female.”

“Yes,” she said.

“How is it romantic? That scene seemed like porn.”

“Porn is pictures and videos,” she said. “If it’s written down, it’s erotica.”

“Oh,” he said. “Got it.”

“And it’s romance because they fall in love.”

“That didn’t seem loving,” he said.

“Well, by the end, it always is,” she said, sticking the book back on the shelf. “Sometimes, I have to admit, it’s sort of less hot by that point. It’s sort of hotter when they’re less nice to her.”

He gave her a look she might have termed horrified.

“I mean…” She considered. “It’s just really hot when they can’t control themselves, I guess, when they want her so bad they just lose it.”

“Is it?” He selected another book.

“What are you doing?” she said, taking that one from him.

“I think I might want to take up this hobby of yours,” he said. “If I want to buy one of these books, I can, can’t I?”

“You’re not really going to read it.”

“I totally am if it’s all like what I just read. Actually, where is that jackal book?”

She shook her head.

“Oh, whoa, they’re pirates?” He picked up a different book, paging through it.

“I do not usually read the reverse harem books, anyway,” she said. “So, that’s not my hobby.”

“No? Not into gangbangs?”

She snorted. “Actually, I do think that’s hot, but I just have a hard time suspending my disbelief for it. Like, sure , there’s four hot guys and they’re totally happy taking turns and none of them are jealous of each other, yeah, right .”

He put the book back on the shelf. “Okay, never mind.”

She laughed.

He laughed, too. “Maybe I’m not really the target audience.”

“You think?” she laughed.

“Yeah, but they don’t write books like that for men,” he said.

“Oh, sure, they do. Like, whatever, James Bond is that.”

“Um, James Bond books did not have that kind of graphic descriptive… action in them,” he said. “They were written in like 1950 or something.”

“Really? They’re that old?”

“Yup,” he said. “No, women are different about sex than men are.”

“I mean, maybe,” she said.

“Like, less ashamed of it,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

“This is like…” He gestured around. “This is just on a regular street, in a book store, and…”

She shrugged. “I guess I see what you’re saying.” She pointed. “Anyway, I’m trying to go over there, to the fantasy section.”

“Oh,” he said. “I like fantasy.”

“Well, this is fantasy romance,” she said.

“Uh huh,” he said. “So, you women have just taken over all the things, haven’t you? What are these books like? She’s got the sword, and he just watches her kill things and then is like, ‘Oh, baby, it makes me hot when you’re violent?’”

“You sure you don’t read this genre?” She picked up a book, the first book in a series that had been out for a while, but that she had been thinking about trying. “I’m thinking about buying this.”

“I’m buying it for you,” he said.

She looked up at him. “You don’t have to do that.”

“Yeah, as a friend thing,” he said. “Friends buy each other books, right?”

“I don’t think friends do that.”

“Sure, they do.”

“WHAT DO YOU even do?” Athos was saying, dunking one of his fries into ketchup. “Like, for a job?”

Tawny wasn’t sure why she’d approached him. She wasn’t sure if she wasn’t two seconds away from punching him in the nose, really. The sex had been hot. She had liked it when he took charge like that. She’d never been with a guy who would really and truly honestly do that. Calling him ‘sir’ had been incredibly sexy, but she was embarrassed to admit that. Thinking that just because they’d been good together naked meant they could have lunch together was probably stupid, though. “I own an event-planning business,” she said.

“Seriously.” He ate a fry, nodding at her. “I should have expected something like that.”

“You said you were a lawyer,” she said.

“Yup,” he said.

“What kind of lawyer?” she said. “You do a whole bunch of dramatic closing arguments?”

“Uh, no. I do mostly estate law and inheritance stuff,” he said. “Pretty much never on the inside of a courtroom. Very dry stuff, lots of paperwork, nothing even remotely dramatic.”

She smiled, not really having expected that answer from him.

He propped himself up on an elbow. “You shouldn’t get to know me, actually. I’ll disappoint you. I’m not how you think I am, not really.”

“You said something like that before,” she said.

“It’s true.” He picked up another fry. He surveyed it. “I never did anything in bed like what we just did.”

“We weren’t in bed.”

“Right,” he said. “So, uh, tell me about event planning.”

“Well, I don’t do a lot of the actual events,” she said. “I started out that way, planning the events themselves. I was working for a different event-planning company, and I realized what I wanted to do was to do what my boss did, which was to go out and schmooze and convince people to hire an event planner and then match the right event planner to the right person.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“Yeah, a lot of times, people hire someone who’s really talented but just isn’t right for the job. People have different styles, and it’s really easier to put together two people who mesh than it is to try to make the event planner mesh her style to the person who hired her. No one does their best creative work when they are self-censoring.”

“Makes sense,” he said, nodding. “So that’s what you do, then.”

“I recruit clients. I find them the right event planner. And then I stay with that process, checking in to make sure that everything is going smoothly throughout. The client pays me, and I pay the event planners, but I only keep a small percentage, like a finder’s fee. I’m good at what I do, though, so I do pretty well for myself.”

“I bet you do,” he said.

“Are you a good lawyer?”

He ran his forefinger over the tip of one of his antlers. “I’m adequate.”

She had expected him to be the kind of guy who was extremely confident, who portrayed himself as very effective at everything. She had not expected this. It wasn’t exactly humility, admittedly, but it was something less than the kind of arrogance she’d expected. “Just adequate?”

He shrugged. “I do what I can, but I’m not in a position in the firm where I’m the guy calling the shots, really. Other people are doing that.”

“Do you want to be the guy calling the shots?”

“Not really,” he said. “I like to have a certain amount of freedom, I guess, but I don’t necessarily need to be in charge. I just don’t appreciate being micromanaged. What about you? I guess you like calling the shots?”

She considered. “I guess I don’t mind it when other people are in charge of me as long as they’re competent. But when they aren’t, it annoys me, because I know I’d be doing a better job.”

“How often are the people in charge competent, though?”

She ducked down her head, laughing. “Okay, okay, you’re not wrong. I hold people to high standards. But it’s not because I want to be, like, in charge of things or calling the shots. I just want things done right.”

“I can respect that,” he said. “I get what you’re saying.”

“Really?” She smiled at him. “I get the feeling that if we hadn’t done whatever we did out there, you wouldn’t be so understanding of me and my positions.”

He shook his head. “I said it before, though, you were the one who was aggressively insulting.”

“You said that thing about being incompetent!”

“I mean…” He looked up at the ceiling, smirking. “That was a dick thing to say, maybe, but I was just dishing it back out at you.”

“You’ve said other things,” she said. “That thing about gatekeeping?”

“Well, that’s just true,” he said. “Or at least, it should be. Whenever male attention gets to the point where it’s overriding female choice, things are out of balance. Women are the ones who have to invest more in their offspring, and they should get to choose who invades their body and tries to use it to make the next generation.”

She set down her fork. What to even say to that? Women invested more in their offspring? Seriously? He wouldn’t even consider that men could invest in their offspring?

“What?” he said. “This is basic science, okay? You take any creature, whether it’s a sentient one or not, any creature that engages in sexual reproduction, and the female has to work harder than the male to make the baby. It’s her body that grows it. It’s just obvious that she has more at stake than the male. Maybe it’s a little different with birds, but you have a lot of paternal investment there, and you also have more pair bonding and—”

“You’re making this weird,” she said. “I’m not a gatekeeper.”

“Instinctively, you want the best for your offspring, you want to mate with a man who will create the strongest offspring.”

“You’re feeling really good about yourself right now and you’re trying to—”

“No, no, I’m not saying I’m your best choice or something. No, you wanted me to be a way so I pretended to be that way to get laid. This is also science.”

“You have an odd idea of what science is.” She picked her fork back up and speared a penne noodle, because she had ordered a whole big mess of pasta because she was actually pretty hungry after whatever they’d even done out there. “You’re not talking about science, you’re talking about the way people make decisions, and you’re acting like they can’t, like some force is controlling them.”

“I think it kind of is,” he said with a shrug.

She chewed and swallowed the penne. “No, you’re just using that an excuse for being a dick.”

“Okay,” he said, laughing softly. “Don’t hold back there.”

“I never do,” she said firmly.

He regarded her. “Got it,” he said softly.

“What’s that look?” she said.

He ate another fry. “I don’t mean to make excuses for myself, but maybe you’re right. Maybe it could come across as if I’m not holding people to accountability. I don’t mean it that way, though. I mean to be descriptive. This is the way things are . You might wish they were a different way, but when you start seeing the world the way it actually is, it’s… accurate.”

She snorted. “And the accuracy seems to always fall in ways that mean that women have to work harder than men.”

“No, just women do ,” he said.

She let out a disbelieving noise in the back of her throat. “I cannot believe I even let you touch me.”

“Well, me either,” he said. “But that’s the way it always is, that’s what women don’t get about men. We always feel like, ‘Fuck, there is no way on earth that a woman will ever let me touch her, look at me.’ And then, it happens, and it’s like a fucking miracle, and then—”

“Men are not always like that.” She pointed at him with her fork. “Sir.”

He laughed, looking her over, his expression downright affectionate. “Yeah, okay, but that’s pretend, and we both know it. That’s a fun little game, and women like that game so much because it’s never like that in your life, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, nobody’s taking care of you, are they? It’s always you, all on your own, out there against the world. And, sure, you like to fantasize about some authoritative masculine figure who’s going to waltz in and take charge and take care of everything. Just take something off your damned shoulders, right? And then, there’s actual men. Like me.”

She was speechless. How could this man be so damned insightful and yet such an offensive idiot at the same time?

“And the thing is, men, we like the fantasy, too. It’s appealing to both of us.”

“It doesn’t have to be a fantasy,” she said witheringly.

He snickered. “Yeah? You want that to be reality, me ordering you around?”

“No.” She stabbed penne with her fork furiously. “That’s not what I meant. I meant that men could step the fuck up, you know?”

“Okay, agreed,” he said. “But no matter how much we step up, it never feels like enough, because I think, deep down, all men understand the fact that we don’t fucking matter, not the way women matter.”

She stuffed all the penne in her mouth and chewed, just glaring at him.

“Look, nature makes the male version of every species disposable,” he said. “Think of how many species in which the male is, you know, literally eaten by the female after mating.”

She swallowed the penne. “What are you even talking about?”

“This is our contribution, right? Protein to feed the offspring. That’s all we mean—”

“That is insane, and you know it.”

“And amongst our species… what the fuck do bucks matter, right? They just show up and fuck you and then disappear and leave you to do everything on your own.”

She furrowed her brow. “But if you think that, why aren’t you changing anything?”

“Who says I’m not?”

“You’re obviously not. You’re here. You’re participating in this rite, which just perpetrates the whole system—”

“It’s deeper than my choices,” he said. “Nature does not give a shit about men. We’re the ones with the testosterone, which is useful precisely because it makes us do stupid, reckless shit, which we—at least some of the time—do in the service of the herd, in the service of protecting everyone. It made better sense for nature to make bucks not invest in our particular offspring, because then we didn’t know, so we’d protect every single doe, every single fawn, in case it was ours. You see what I mean. We’d die for all of you, and that’s what nature wants us to do, that’s what we evolved to do, to just throw ourselves into the mouths of predators or hungry octopus women or—”

“Sun. And. Moon,” she interrupted. “You’re on this weird martyr kick, some noble sacrifice bullshit—”

“That’s the thing. I’m not,” he said, chuckling. He picked up his sandwich and took a bite. He chewed, looking thoughtful. He swallowed. “I’m really not. I think the noble sacrifice business is the consolation prize. Women get the babies and the family and the community, and we get what? Noble sacrifice? No thanks. I’d much rather be like fucking wolves and just be there, raising my own fucking kids.”

She stiffened.

“But, see, nature makes you, Tawny, attracted to the kind of man you’d never let near your damned kids, because men just only matter in one way, and that’s the tragedy of you and me, and being deerkin, and every-fucking-thing.”

“So, you’re admitting that you’re the kind of guy I shouldn’t let near my children?” She shook her head at him.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I tried to pretend like I was that kind of guy. But men like to pretend in that way. We like to pretend we matter.”

“Right,” she said sarcastically, “I forgot that men don’t matter.”

“We don’t,” he said. “We know it. You know it. Deep down—”

“I am not listening to this anymore,” she said, laughing.

He eyed her. “You want me to shut up, then?”

“I…” She shrugged. “You did say you took direction well, if I remember correctly.”

“You want me to leave?” He threw his napkin on his sandwich and took out his wallet. He tossed money down on the table.

“So, you’re just going?” she said.

“You want me to, right?”

“And you do whatever I want?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Including pretending I matter, that you could need me for anything. I’d be happy to provide evidence to further that little fantasy, you know? Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it, sure. Anything I could do that you could need. It’s what men do for women, after all. We like to pretend you need us.”

She tilted her head to one side. “You say you’d do anything I want, but you have neither shut up nor left.”

He nodded. “Good point.” He got up.

“Are you leaving because you can’t shut up?”

“You want me to stay?”

“I don’t even think I like you, you know,” she said. “But you said you liked me.”

“I do,” he said.

“Sit down,” she said, rolling her eyes.

He hesitated. He sat down.

“Let’s talk about something else,” she said.

“Like what?” he said.

“You really want to be there with your kids, like a wolfkin is with his pack?”

“Well, to be honest, I’ve never let myself want that. I always thought it was off the table.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it’s on the table,” she said.

“Right,” he said. A long pause. He eyed her. His voice was scratchy. “Yeah, I want it.”

She bit down on her bottom lip. “Well, that’s one thing I like about you, anyway.”