Page 31 of True North
JT looked so sympathetic that Misha wanted to smother himself with a pillow. Did he really seem so pathetic? He pushed the covers aside and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He was going to get up.
“You want me to, uh. Bring you some coffee?” JT offered.
Misha must seemextremelypathetic. “No,” he said. “Thank you.” He straightened his shoulders and tried to look alert. “I am come down.”
“Okay,” JT said, his expression doubtful, but he left the room again.
Misha got dressed and brushed his teeth and scrubbed at his face with cold water cupped in his hands. “Get it together,” he told his reflection in the mirror, kind of amused by his own dramatics. At this rate, he’d be in an outright coma the day after the cookout.
He ate a huge breakfast and went back to bed after JT left to go into town, and woke up after an hour feeling much better. There: he had survived it. The shifters were nice. No one had asked him any uncomfortable questions. JT would be happy if he went to the cookout, and so he would go, and try to make small talk, and eat a hamburger or two.
He flopped onto his stomach on the bed. He was going to have to start thinking about his long-term plans soon. He didn’t want to overstay his welcome and force JT to kick him out. He needed a place to live, a car, a bank account, but he didn’t have any identification. He didn’t have a passport or a visa. Legally, in Canada, he was barely even a person.
Thinking about that made the heavy, viscous feeling come back. He shook off those dark thoughts. JT hadn’t asked him to leave yet. No need to brace for the worst.
He went out to walk in the forest in bear form. By the time he got back to the house, JT had returned and was fixing lunch in the kitchen, smelling so strongly of sweat that Misha paused in the doorway to let the scent coat the roof of his mouth. JT’s damp shirt clung to his back and his workout shorts clung to the curve of his ass. Misha’s eyes dropped and lingered.
“Hey,” JT said, turning to smile at him, and Misha hastily redirected his gaze to a more appropriate location. “You were out in the woods?”
Misha nodded. He was so distracted by JT’s sweat-drenched presence that he was glad to have the excuse of his poor English to explain away any verbal fumbling. “Yeah, I went to walking.”
“Nice,” JT said, his attention already redirected back to the cheese he was cutting into slices, so at least Misha wasn’t too obviously acting strange. “Want some?”
Misha did. They ate together at the table, naming objects in the kitchen as they usually did during meals, and they spent the afternoon busy with their usual pursuits of video games, TV, and snacks. Misha started one of the Russian-language mystery novels that had appeared on the bookshelves in the living room. He lay on the couch as JT watched baseball and felt the tension that had been knotting his shoulders for the past few days gradually release.
He felt safe here, he realized. On a bone-deep, instinctual level, his bear-self recognized JT’s house as a safe place to be and JT as a safe person to be with.
JT wasn’t safe at all, though. Or at least very few of Misha’s thoughts about him were safe. He kept telling himself he would get used to JT in time, or rather, become immune; that he wouldn’t keep feeling so taken aback by JT’s physical presence, the smell of his sleeping body at night as he breathed beside Misha in bed. He wasn’t adapting, though. He was still the same horny idiot he’d always been.
He heaved a sigh and re-read the same paragraph he’d already read at least three times. It wasn’t a bad book, and he liked mystery novels, but JT was sitting nearby, existing, and Misha was having a lot of trouble concentrating.
“Okay?” JT asked him.
“Yeah,” Misha said, and rededicated himself to the cause.
They ate dinner on the deck, as they did most evenings when the weather was good for it. JT had made a chicken dish with vegetables, which Misha found unobjectionable although inferior to Russian food in every way. An egret stalked around in the bulrushes north of JT’s dock. Waves lapped against the shore in a rhythmic, gentle wash. Misha turned sideways on the bench of the picnic table until the sun hit his back instead of the side of his face and basked in the warmth of it.
JT pushed his plate aside when he was finished eating. “You want to get in the hot tub? I’m thinking about having a beer and watching the sunset.”
Misha eyed him. He’d seen JT get in the hot tub a few times, but he’d never invited Misha to join him, and the last time Misha had gone in, he’d been in bear form and didn’t even know JT’s name. JT’s expression held no hint that he was poking fun at Misha, though. He seemed to earnestly want to hang out in the hot tub for a while.
So then the only issue was Misha’s libido.
He still cringed to think of how close he’d come to embarrassing himself the last time they went swimming in the lake. The hot tub would probably involve less aquatic wrestling but still wasn’t safe. Unless JT wore a wetsuit, Misha would likely pop a huge and unignorable boner. And what if JT decided to skinny-dip? Misha would die.
He swallowed his chicken. “Okay,” he said.
The sun set late in high summer and twilight lingered. Even after cleaning up after dinner, the sun was still hovering above the surface of the lake, and the sky glowed orange and yellow. There would be a glorious sunset tonight.
Misha uncovered the hot tub while JT went upstairs to change into his swim trunks, having once again rejected JT’s offer of a swimsuit. He hated the way trunks got wet and clung to him, clammily encasing his balls. He was willing to wear clothes most of the time, but he drew the line at wearing clothes while he was in the water.
The sharp scent of chlorine hit Misha’s nose as he lifted the cover up and over. The water steamed but didn’t bubble; there was a control panel on the side, but Misha didn’t know how to operate it. He stripped out of his shirt and shorts and climbed in, hissing through his teeth as he eased into the almost-too-hot water.
JT came through the kitchen doors and turned to close them. The muscles in his back shifted as he did, and Misha dragged his eyes away. Anywhere was better than looking at JT, who was entirely too half-naked and appealing. He didn’t have washboard abs or anything like that, but Misha preferred the slight softness around JT’s waist to a perfect, chiseled body. JT had the kind of easy, unselfconscious attractiveness that Misha liked in a man. Good shoulders, good arms.
Why had he agreed to this?
JT climbed into the tub and splashed a bit as he settled into the corner opposite Misha. “Nice, eh?” he asked. He spread his arms along the back edge of the tub, showing off the tanned stretch of his chest, and then leaned to one side to punch a button and turn on the jets. He had flat pink nipples that Misha knew he shouldn’t be noticing and definitely shouldn’t be thinking about tasting.