“Mara?”
“The star in question—the Equinox Star—is sacred to Solaris Pride. Claude is coming. Ezra asked if he could bring Aya if she’s up for it. I think Hazel and Dominic might join us if the weather holds.” His eyes soften. “I would be honored if Mara would walk me through what her pride teaches.”
“She’ll love that.” I’m already grinning. “I was on my way to find her anyway. I’ll tell her.”
“Good.” He inclines his head.
I smile and head out. I turn the corner into the main corridor, and it hits me. Not a thought this time, a wave, low and hot and pulling down into my pants. My step stutters. Mara bent at the waist, her dress riding up the backs of her thighs. Her looking up at me from the kitchen table this morning. My dick is hard.
I hunch forward and tug my shirt down over the front of me, which doesn’t help. Makes it worse, actually, because the friction is bad. A cluster of shifters passes me in the opposite direction and I catch the smirk from the wolf on the left before he’s past. They can smell me. Goddamn this school and its nose-in-everybody’s-business shifters.
I pick up my pace toward the stairs. Another wave hits, worse, and I grab the banister and lean into it. Mara on ourkitchen table. My face between her legs. Her tail curling around my—stop it, stop, you are at work.
I need to find her right now. There’s an urgency underneath this that isn’t just horniness, it’s pulling.
I reach the stairs. I’d been heading to the Conjuring Hall to talk to my mother about Seth. Another wave hits me on the landing and it’s so bad I sway. I’m not making it over there. I need a wall. I need anywhere that isn’t an open corridor full of shifters who can tell what’s happening under my shirt.
There’s a janitor’s closet behind the main stairs, tucked in the dead space behind the stairwell.
I walk as calmly as I can manage, turn the corner behind the stairs, find the door. I step inside and lean my forehead against it to breathe.
It smells like bleach and dust. There’s a mop in the corner and a bucket beside it, one bare bulb hanging on a chain, a shelf of cleaning supplies, and me, hunched against the cool wood, trying to get my dick to go down so I can walk across a school and have a conversation with my mother.
“Get it together,” I whisper. “Get ittogether.”
I close my eyes and start breathing. Which is when I start thinking about Mara again. The softness of her skin. How her purr kicks up a register when I slide into her. The way she goes absolutely liquid when my lips touch her claim mark.
My eyes snap open. This is worse. I’m doing the opposite of what I came in here to do.
I pace the closet, bucket scraping my foot, my hand dragging back over my head. Maybe I should just rub one out. Take the edge off and then I can walk up those stairs like a person?—
I stop pacing. The hair on my arms is lifting. Mara. She’s near, and my body moves, easing the door open an inch.
She’s in the hall, head tipped back, eyes half-closed, her tail moving in slow uncertain arcs behind her. She’s scenting for me.
“Aaron?” she says to nobody.
I don’t think. I yank the door open, wrap my hand around her wrist, and haul her inside. She yelps, startled. The door is already closing behind her, my shoulder against the wood, her back flat against it. I cage her with an arm on either side of her head and breathe hard.
“Aaron!” She hisses at me. Her tail is up and fluffed, her ears are back. She’s got one hand against my chest pushing at me. “What the heck, what are you doing in here?—“
“I don’t know.” I press my forehead to hers because I have to or I’m going to fall over. “I don’t know, baby. I’m losing my mind.”
She sighs, half-frustrated and half-worried, then her hand comes up from my chest and cups my face.
“I could feel you,” she says, her voice gone quiet. “Like you needed me. I was working on my lesson plans and I just stopped. I came looking for you.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and she strokes her thumb slow through my beard.
“Why are you in the janitor’s closet?”
“There’s one on every floor.” It comes out, and the second I hear myself I know how it sounds.
She pulls back enough to look at me, and her tail is coming down. Her brows are drawing together. “Aaron. That isnota reasonable thing to know off the top of your head?—“
I shift my weight and my hard dick brushes the front of her dress.
She freezes, and her mouth falls open.
