Page 51 of Tricks for Free

I didn’t want to get away. “So keep me alive,” I said, and kissed him hard.

He responded by grabbing my ass again, this time using the combined leverage of tail and palms to boost me up off the floor. I wrapped my legs around him, holding myself in place, and stayed there as we fell onto the bed, kissing each other hard all the while.

The kissing went on for quite some time, accompanied by a certain measure of groping as we got familiar with one another again—and in some cases, for the first time, since we didn’t need to worry about a Covenant strike team or Sam’s grandmother bursting in at any moment. Heavy petting with someone who essentially had four hands was a whole new experience for me. For most people, I would imagine.

Sam pulled away slightly, and asked, “Condom?”

I blinked at him, dazed and slightly out of synch with myself, before I replied, “In the bedside table. For emergencies.” Not that I’d been counting on anything like this happening, but the best way to wind up in a bad situation is to be unprepared for all eventualities.

“Cool,” he said, and kissed me again, and we toppled past the point of no return.

When I was a kid, on the rare occasions when Verity had treated me like a sister, instead of like some sort of weird stranger who lived in her house for some reason, we’d had a few slumber parties. Just her and me and my cousin Elsie, and later, when she’d started feeling secure enough in her ability not to read random minds to travel, my cousin Sarah. We’d all sit up all night eating popcorn and watching scary movies and talking about whatever seemed important—which was, quite frequently, sex.

I’ll never forget those nights, the four of us and the occasional mouse sitting in the dark living room, talking about things that were too adult for me, but which I’d wanted to hear anyway. I’d wanted to hear everything, to devour it all and make it a part of me. I’d never said much. There wasn’t really anything for me to contribute, and I hadn’t wanted to remind Verity of how young I was, or give her a good reason to send me away.

“Sex with therianthropes must be amazing,” Verity had sighed, sweet sixteen and dreaming constantly of being kissed, and I’d been thirteen, already inclined to hate her, but yearning for her approval all the same. It was a weird, toxic brew that I shared with younger siblings all over the world, and the only antidote was time.

Elsie, who had been the most experienced of the lot of us, having actually kissed a girl before the end of the school year, had looked at her blankly and asked, “Why?”

“Because the stamina they need to change forms without suffering from multiple organ failure has just got to translate to bed,” Verity had replied, attempting what might charitably be called a leer.

“You’re a pervert,” Elise had said, in a prim tone, and I had thrown my allegiance in with her on the spot.

Now, years and miles and a thousand bad decisions later, I lay curled against Sam in the cocoon of my sheets, the hot Florida air pressing down on us and covering our exposed skin in a sheen of sweat, and thought Verity had been onto something, in her usual blunt instrument manner. It wasn’t the stamina, or the potential for shapeshifting. It was that the therianthrope in question was Sam Taylor. I didn’t love him. He didn’t love me. But as his tail tightened around my waist, drawing me closer in his sleep, keeping me anchored, I realized two things:

If he didn’t leave soon, I was going to wind up loving him, whether I wanted to or not.

And I didn’t want him to go.

I pressed a kiss to the skin of his cheek, just above the furry line of his cheekbone, nestled my head against his shoulder, and closed my eyes. I was hot and sticky and needed a shower more than ever. Between the parade accident, the roller skating, and the remarkably acrobatic sex, I was sore in places that I hadn’t been consciously aware of before. There was no way I was going to fall asleep. No way.

What felt like seconds later, I opened my eyes again, and I was alone in the bed. Sunlight slanted under the edge of the curtain, filling my room with an eerie Twilight Zone glow. I sat bolt upright, the muscles in my back and thighs protesting, looking wildly around for any sign that Sam’s sudden appearance on the doorstep hadn’t been an oddly sexual wish fulfillment dream.

There wasn’t one. My clothes were strewn around the floor, but that happened regardless of whether I had company. Back at home, a messy room had been a solid defense mechanism. Once my siblings figured out that they couldn’t tell where I’d spilled the caltrops just by looking, they’d gotten a lot more careful about sneaking into my room to steal my shit. Here, it was a comforting reminder that this wasn’t forever: one day, I would shove all my secondhand Lowry tank tops and worn-out yoga pants into a bag and go back to the loving arms of my family, where I didn’t have to be frightened all the time. Better yet, I’d leave it all behind, and drop a match on it as I walked away.

I slid slowly out of the bed and grabbed my yoga pants off the floor, yanking them on before casting around for a shirt that didn’t smell like blood, sweat, or diesel fuel. It was harder than it should have been, but in short enough order I was dressed and creeping out into the hall, shoulders hunched, listening for signs of danger.

Instead, I heard laughter, and the distinctive pop of frying bacon. The smell of pancakes hit me a moment later. I straightened up. There’s only one person who would come into my apartment and start making breakfast—and as a hint, it’s not one of my roommates. Fern can’t cook to save her life. Megan can cook. It’s just that most of the things she produces are dangerous to the human esophagus.

I walked briskly down the hall to the small “dining nook” attached to the kitchen, separated by a Formica island that should have been remodeled sometime in the late seventies. Our battered secondhand kitchen table was occupied for a change, by Fern, sipping a mixed berry smoothie out of a reusable 7-11 cup . . . and Sam, who had a cup of coffee in his right hand and another held firmly in his tail, in case someone tried to take it away.

Mary was in the kitchen, flipping pancakes with the ease of a long-time diner cook. She turned at the sound of my footsteps—or maybe at the sound of my heartbeat, ghosts can be creepy sometimes—and flashed me a grin. She was dressed in her customary seventies hippie gear, peasant blouse and bell-bottomed jeans, and there were daisies braided in her hair.

“You left your phone in your gym bag,” she said. “Fairyland is closed today, and all workers who witnessed the accident—that would be you—have been given a shift off, with pay, probably so you won’t sue. And, um, someone named Colin texted you and said that under the circumstances, you didn’t need to come see him this morning. So you’re free. There’s bacon, and pancakes will be up in a moment.”

I stayed where I was, blinking, trying to tamp down the lingering remnants of panic and replace them with something verging on comprehension. It didn’t help that Sam wasn’t wearing a shirt. Combining a higher than human body temperature with our unreliable air-conditioning probably made that a bad idea. He offered me a sideways, almost hesitant smile.

“You were out cold,” he said. “I didn’t want to wake you. Especially not once Mary said you didn’t need to work.”

“I wouldn’t have let him wake you anyway,” said Mary. “You don’t sleep nearly enough. You need to work on that.”

“You’re dead,” I said. “You sleep forever. Where’s Megan?”

“She had to go to the hospital for her shift,” said Fern around a mouthful of bacon. The reason for her relative quiet was obvious when I looked at her plate: she was doing her best to show Sam that size didn’t matter when it came to putting away breakfast foods. “She said to tell you she doesn’t care if your boyfriend stays over, but if he drinks her cherimoya juice, she’ll let her hair bite him.”

“Sam, don’t drink Megan’s cherimoya juice,” I said, heading for the kitchen. The lure of pancakes was too great to resist any longer.

“What’s a cherimoya?” he asked.