The point was Aurora hadn’t had normal or gentle.
And I wasn’t the right person to give it to her, but I was going to fucking try my damnedest.
“Green light?” I asked when we parted.
“I need a moment.” She grabbed me when I immediately went to let her go and back away. She snuggled against my chest. “You did nothing wrong and I’m fine. I don’t feel—I’m fine.” She sounded confused, almost like to herself. “I think I want to savor the moment. I’m fine. I want to—I’m fine.”
I smiled into her thick, beautiful hair, understanding where her mind was. “Because it’s right. This is what it feels like when it’s with someone not using you and you trust won’t abuse you. I think that was the best thing you could have said to me so I stop freaking out I’m going to do damage to you.”
She was quiet for several moments, rubbing her hand against my chest as I did the same along her back. “We’re going to do damage to each other. As long as we don’t do it intentionally and work to not keep doing the same damage, I think we’ll be fine. That sounds healthy and how it should work.”
“Yeah, that sounds like how it should work,” I agreed, hoping I could really pull that off. I gave her another soft kiss and thenwent back to hugging her. “So what’s next? We talk to your daughters? You call your doc and set up an appointment for both of us? Both, right? Then I’ve got to handle work and take a week so we can… Have that week. Then my—”
“It’s a lot,” she said gently.
Yes, yes, it was, and I wanted to just skip ahead like a month and feel more stable, like I couldn’t fuck everything up.
But then I’d miss our first time together and I’d never had a first time I’d actually cared about. I wanted that and to not gloss over anything important. She was going to be my mate after all.
“I can’t believe we’re going to fucking mate,” I whispered. “It sounds so unreal. Like—seriously un-fucking-real. You were just the beauty who stopped the bullying a few months ago that I thought…”
“What?” She pushed away when I didn’t answer. “What was your first impression of me?”
“I thought maybe you were off your rocker,” I admitted with a shrug. I hurried on when she frowned. “You don’t talk like anyone I know, Aurora. And I know now how you mix up words sometimes, but you called me a servant and—it was a trip. I didn’t know you from a homeless person who thinks they’re Jesus.”
“I was with you until that last part,” she admitted.
I opened my mouth but then closed it, scrubbing my hand over my head. “I don’t actually know myself. I heard one of the docs talking about how someone smuggled in a human medical journal and there’s a mental condition where humans can think they’re god. And it happens more often to those who are homeless?”
She frowned. “Do they have a lot of homeless? We rarely have any with our different communities.”
“I heard it’s a real problem they ignore and blame on the people they’ve failed. But yeah, even the mob pack I was adoptedinto would hear of letting shifters in New York City sleep on the street. They’d always figure out something and get them back on their feet. It’s our duty as a community.”
“My selfish parents were the same. If a house burned down around us, they would live at the castle—no one was ever homeless. It reflected poorly on them for allowing it in the area they were in charge of.”
We both seemed to shrug it off and focus back on what we had to deal with.
“I will invite them all over for breakfast so they have to get to work or Theresa will take lunch to be here,” she told me. “That gives us tonight to handle some more details and plan for ourselves first. And then yes, you handle things with work tomorrow, we start scheduling your medical appointments—all of it. We need more answers for what they—”
“How fucking nuts I’ll go?” I grumbled, scrubbing my head again.
“Stop,” she said gently. “I don’t want you to lose all of your pretty red hair.”
I blinked at her for almost a full minute. No one had ever said my fire-red hair was pretty. Mostly fake looking or unsettling. Pompous when it became my mane or mangy when I was a cub and didn’t have a mane but a tuft. I knew that was because I grew up around wolves but… Never pretty.
This woman really was sent to heal so many of my hurts.
She reached up and fixed it, having already commented that she was glad I was growing it out. She probably didn’t know that they’d forced me to buzz cut it in prison, but I’d always kept it pretty short and professional before.
Though I’d always wanted to see what it would be like longer. It seemed too flashy for an attorney and a way to announce I was different from the pack, but now… Now we were starting over to be ourselves.
And that was all possible because of Aurora. So I kissed her. “Thank you for saving my life.”
She blinked at me in shock this time before smiling. “We’re going to save each other and ourselves, Creed. You pushing me to fight and value myself—you have no idea how I’ve needed that.”
I did. I really did.
We spent the next few hours plotting and even looking at places to buy to get some ideas. I really didn’t care as long as there was enough room for me to stretch my legs and have an office of my own.
