“Yeah, I have to agree.” My mind meandered, thinking back on all the topping I’d been missing out on when I’d been constricted to the role of bottom in my marriage. “Probably one of the best since coming out, if I’m being honest.”
I felt a jab in my core. Had I just revealed too much? Was talking about my past a massive faux pas in the realm of casual situationships? I mentally wiped my face. Not even one hour after establishing this awesome friends with benefits thing with Wrex and I was already overthinking it to the point where I was giving myself phantom pains. I’d had one night stands and messed around with people in a less than structured way before, so I wasn’t sure why it was affecting me so much this time around. Maybe because it was so soon after getting divorced? Whatever it was, I told every fiber in my body that it needed to chill the fuck out.
Unbothered by my inner dialogue of detriment, Wrex scoffed and said, “You can remember that far back?”
“Are you calling me old?”
His laughter came in sputtering gulps, shaking his head as he propped his head up with his hand, staring into my eyes as we faced each other. I let a hand roam over his side, lightly teasing his skin with my fingertips. “As an Orb, I have no room to call anyone old.”
“How old are you?” I blurted before I could stop myself. “Not that it matters to me or anything, but—”
“It’s a fair question,” He waved it off. “I’m thirty-nine. I’ll be forty in the fall.”
My brows knitted into question marks. “Is that…relatively young for a petrylle?”
“Not really,” He stated simply, shaking his head. “Petrylle have a shorter lifespan than most Orbs. We probably have the closest lifespan to humans out of all the Orbs, living roughly about a hundred and twenty years on average.”
“That’s…surprising,” I said candidly. “I just assumed that all Orbs had as lengthy of lives as sangamar. Exo told me he’d once heard about a sangamar living past nine hundred once.”
“Ahh, yes. The sangamar and lycanthe live the longest. That’s why there’s so many of them,” Wrex chuckled, his hand coming to his sides to thread itself against mine where it still rubbed him. But a look of panic skid over his face and he relaxed it down by his side. “But living that long sounds exhausting to me.”
A part of me agreed. While the thought of living forever, or near forever, sounded great in theory, the art of putting it in reality sounded horrible. Always feeling so much pain, but also always feeling so much pleasure. I supposed it would be both a blessing and a curse to weather immortality.
“That’s why I like enjoying what I have in front of me,” I cleared my throat, finally ending my hands’ reign over his side. I flopped my arm down lazily, not wanting him to think that I couldn’t stop touching him even though it was wholeheartedly true. “Something that’s become really important to me in the last couple years.”
“Is that…” Wrex sighed, looking at me with anxious eyes. “Is that why your marriage ended?”
“Essentially, yes.” I admitted. “Matty and I were having problems long before we separated. We just kept telling each other what the other needed to hear to keep going, even though we never really rectified the issues we kept bringing up. It was all cyclical. Finally it was the only constant between us and I just needed it to end, for both of our sakes.”
Definitely shouldn’t be talking about these sorts of things with my fuck buddy, but he’d asked, so that made it okay, right?
“Have you had many relationships in the past?” Wrex said, curiosity spreading throughout the sparkling blue eyes I was becoming slowly obsessed with.
In a casual way, of course.
“I’d had one long relationship shortly after college before Matty.” Edgar certainly left a lot to be desired, but he’d been at least up front about what he was feeling, which was more than I could say for me and Matty. “But I’ve never really…I don’t know. I guess my divorce has made me guarded now. From thinking that there’s a such thing as endgame with someone else. It all feels destined to end sometimes.”
“I get it,” Wrex scoffed. “I’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than a year, so you’ve got me beat.”
“All Orbs?”
Wrex smiled. “I told you, I dabble in interspecies relations from time to time.” I chuckled, but he nodded as if he wanted to keep explaining, so I waited until he started speaking again. “I dated a stellymn for several months, dated a virces for a little less, and then the occasional petrylle. My longest relationship was with a petrylle, Orgun. We even lived together for a bit.” Wrex rolled his eyes. “I moved out two months after we moved in. But then I started hooking up with humans. Most of them reacted….pretty horribly to the slits on my back, so no danger of having them stick around.”
Hearing the subtle crack in his voice wracked my chest. So that’s why he’d had such a visceral reaction to exposing his back to me the first time we’d had sex. Wrex being self-conscious about where his wings came out of his body made sense, of course, but it also made me angry for him. Who the hell would make someone feel insecure about something they had no control over? Pride should be the only thing Wrex should feel about his wings, and I felt compelled to be the one to do so. Who the hell wouldn’t think someone having wings wasn’t the coolest things ever?
Shelving the idea to explore at a later date, he interjected with another train of thought that derailed me from bringing up my honest opinion about his wings.
“What about you? Am I your first Orb?”
“You are,” I rolled over on my back, feeling a cramp coming on from being on my side too long. Luckily for me, Wrex came with me, laying his head on my chest, feeling his hand resting on my lower stomach. My belly burned with something I needed to ignore, and I draped an arm around his back, minding the slits so he wouldn’t turn self-conscious on me. “Though the thoughts have….crossed my mind in the past. But nothing that I’d ever acted on.”
“Until me.” He beamed, feeling his lips curve from where they rested against my skin.
“Until you,” That burn came back, biting at my stomach as I did my best to push it down. “Not sure how my parents would have reacted if I’d brought an Orb home instead of Matty all those years ago.”
“Do you have a big family?”
“Not too big,” I said. “I have two really young sisters, though.” I was beyond the point of keeping details about myself safeguarded. It felt so easy to talk to Wrex, I’d probably give him the keys to the Capitol if he’d ask me nicely. Or tempted me with his salacious body. I’d be putty in his hands in seconds. “Barbara and Edith. They’re thirteen and eleven. My parents had me out of the house for a few years and just when I was about to graduate from college, they got pregnant with Barbara.”
