2
Mara
By the time I’m cleaned up and redressed, my folder is tucked into my tote bag, and my thighs have stopped doing that stunned tremble, Aaron is pulling a long-sleeved shirt over his head in front of the mirror. I’ve lost a full minute of my life watching him do it. The line of his shoulders inside the fabric. The easy way he rolls his sleeves up to the elbow and smooths the front of the shirt down, catching my eye in the mirror and holding it, one eyebrow lifting.
“I don’t mind staying in bed,” he says. “First day really is a drag.”
I snatch my tote off the chair hard enough that the strap whips over my shoulder, and he laughs, holding his hands up in surrender.
“Hold on, baby, hold on. I’m messing with you.” He crosses to the chair by the window and slides into his shoes, grabs his own bag, slings it over his shoulder, and comes back to me and leans in for a kiss I don’t deny him. I smooch his lips once, grinning, and he smiles against my mouth and then heads straight for the coffee pot.
“I love this coffee station you built for me.” He’s pouring into a disposable cup, measuring his cream and sugar and the cinnamon he insists on, fixing the lid. “It’s a nice touch.”
Heat crawls up the back of my neck. I built it for him a couple weeks after we moved in. Set it up while he was in a meeting so he’d find it already finished. When he came home and stopped in the doorway, he looked at me like I’d hung the moon in our kitchen.
“Let me walk you to your classroom,” he says now, sliding the lid on his cup.
“No, Aaron.” I lift my tote onto my shoulder and level him a look.
“Please—“ he starts. The pout comes out, bottom lip pushed out, and my tail swings up and brushes firm against his cheek. I kiss his mouth anyway. He is ridiculous, and I lost this fight the moment he walked out of that bathroom.
He’s at the door before I’ve finished picking up my bag, holding it open, his free hand sliding into mine as I step past.
Outside the faculty suites the morning hits gold across the campus paths. The air smells like late-summer grass, and students are moving in loose clusters between the wings. A lioness in a cream sweater waves at me as she passes. A wolf shifter from the science faculty dips his head to Aaron, and he nods back without breaking stride.
I look up at him as we cross onto the main path. “Are we visiting the pack this weekend?” I ask him.
Aaron’s mouth pulls down into a pout around the rim of his cup. “Do we have to?” My ears tip back and he cringes slightly.
“The community lands is supposed to be temporary, Aaron. It’s been a year. I’d like to settle somewhere.”
“All right, all right, baby.” He sighs, but his eyes are smiling at me over the coffee. “Levi’s been itching to show us the floorplans for our cabin, anyway. He won’t break ground on the foundation until we approve them.”
He takes another sip, and his scent shifts, just enough, that faint under-note ofI’m not telling you somethinghe can’t quite school out of himself when I’m paying attention. My lion sits up inside me.
“How long has he been waiting?”
“Well—“ His eyes slide sideways, and his free hand flicks once at the air like he’s trying to wave the question into something smaller. “I mean, it hasn’t been, like,thatlong?—“
“How long,Aaron?”
He sighs long and theatrical, and his shoulders drop under the strap of his bag. “Six months.”
I snatch my hand out of his and start walking toward the Lion Shifter Wing without looking at him, my tail lashing once against the back of my calf. He catches up in a few long steps, coffee sloshing in the cup, his free hand held out like he wants to take mine back and knows he hasn’t earned it.
“Mara. Hold on—“ His hand brushes my elbow and I shake it off without slowing down.
“So you don’t want me to live with your pack,” I throw back over my shoulder, my tail lashing hard.
“That is not it at all, Mara.” His voice has dropped and gone serious.
“Six months,Aaron.”
I don’t answer him the rest of the walk. He stays at my shoulder and I let him, but my ears are flat and my tail is lashing. The students around us give us a wide berth. At the door of the Lion Shifter Wing I stop and turn on him. He stops too, lifts the cup halfway to his mouth, and thinks better of drinking in front of me right now.
“Do you want me to be honest with you?” he asks.
“Yes.”
