Tilting his head to gaze at me, Wrex threw me a curved smile.“That must be interesting, being so much older than your siblings.”
I shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. My mom and dad really missed the hustle and bustle of a full house, I guess. And with two almost teen girls, I’m sure they have their hands full right about now.” I finished with a chuckle.
“Do you see them often?” He asked.
“Not as often as I’d like, since ORBIT got started. And since the divorce proceedings. Actually, I should probably plan something soon.” Not wanting to dwell on my sidetracked brain, I offered him a chance to speak by saying, “What about you? How are you with your family?”
“Typical petrylle family,” Wrex sighed, but he nodded with a smile. “Closer than close, closer than I’dlikesometimes. I’m in the middle, sort of. There’s Wrage, of course. He’s the oldest. Then me, then my sister Wrachel and ending with the baby of the family, Wraven.”
“Those are some unusually human names.”
“I know,” Wrex rolled his eyes. “My mother has always been obsessed with human sounding names. But her family has a tradition of naming their children with the letter W. So while we all have human sounding names, they all start with W like hers. Her name is Wisteria.”
“That’s really sweet.” And really different. I was so used to the unique names that Orbs had, especially with the board, that hearing how attached some of them had gotten to the human nomenclature made us feel even more similar than I already perceived.
Hearing more about Wrex’s life and family only made me want to know more. I decided that I was going to stop getting so caught up on whether or not our conversations, or interactions, were casual enough. I just wanted those moments, whatever they turned out to be. I was going to treat our situation for what it was: a situation that two consenting adults had agreedto. Why was it such a bad thing to let this thing breathe?
So that’s what I was going to do. Bask in this new development and take it at face value. That’s all I wanted, anyway. All Wrex wanted. After repeating this in my head, I realized how stupid I’d been trying to dwell on whether or not certain things would make it serious or not. This was the best situation ever. I could enjoy my ease back into my single life while still having mind-blowing, body-numbing sex.
No way was I going to get in the way of that, mentally or physically.
Thinking back to Wrex’s earlier statement, I decided I wanted to test something and see if he’d be up for it. I sat up in bed, causing him to awkwardly shift off of my chest and take me in with arched eyebrows.
“I was wondering…only if you’d be up for it, of course but…I was wondering if you’d let me see your wings.”
Judging by the wide eyes and overall demeanor of his reaction, I’d caught him off guard with my request. I could tell that he still harbored a lot of insecurity around the issue of his wings, but that’s exactly what I was trying to alleviate by asking to see them. Maybe if he felt comfortable enough to show them to me, it would rewire his brain into thinking they weren’t anything other than an extension of him.
“I don’t know.” Wrex told me truthfully, his head dipping. “I already feel self-conscious enough by how much I’ve been calling you daddy in bed.”
I reached out and soothed a hand over his arm, trailing down his heated skin. “Hey, you can call me daddy in bed all you want to. I didn’t even know I…liked it as much, but hopefully I’ve shown you that I’m more than fine with that happening in the future.”
“You have,” he said back. “I guess you would have told me if you weren’t into it.”
“Which is why I’d love to see your wings. I would have told you if I’d had an issue with them, but I don’t. They’re a part of you. The rest of you is beautiful, so of course I’d want to see more beautiful parts of you.”
If I hadn’t previously sworn to myself to let this situationship with Wrex happen, I probably would think that I had just said something way too intimate to a fuck buddy. But I was done editing myself. I’d spent years feeling like I had to do that and I was absolutely done feeling like I had no choice but to wave the reaction and words I wanted to deliver. Plus, seeing the way it made Wrex’s face melt into the cutest smile certainly made me feel like I’d said the right thing.
“Alright,” He beamed, but he tilted his head toward the living room. “But I should probably do it in there. They’re…pretty big.”
Excitement splintered lightning heat throughout my body at his remark, so I jumped off the bed like an eager puppy. The laugh that succeeded my gallant eagerness would play on a loop in my head. Wrex’s laugh was if sunshine had vocal cords. It just made everything in the world brighter. Everything just felt right when Wrex laughed.
Soon, we were both in the living room away from the furniture so that nothing got knocked over. There was plenty of room for Wrex to stretch out his wings in the walkway between the living room and the kitchen that proceeded my bedroom. As long as his wings didn’t somehow jut up and ruin my eleven foot ceiling, we’d be golden.
“Are you sure you want to see them? They’re pretty big and look like bat wings and—”
“Will youpleasequit stalling?” I giggled, placing a hand on his right pec and splaying my fingers across his grey skin. “I want to see them and they’re not going to scare me.”
As if he was trying to prove how prepared I was, I felt his body go ridged and then there was a suddenwhooshreleased in the air. Wrex winced like the action of calling forth his wings caused him a searing pain that was inescapable. I wanted to soothe him, but the fascination took hold of me as two wings cracked and snapped into their full width behind Wrex’s back.
He was right, they looked a lot like bat wings, with pointed ends that looked dangerously sharp. The lights from over the kitchen turned the thin and translucent skin of his wings a distorted warm grey that probably would have looked different if I was looking at them in the natural light of the daytime. They were about five feet in length a piece, sticking out perfectly from his body. They had a fragile beauty about them, making me wonder how in the fuck they were supposed to support a powerhouse like Wrex enough to enable him to fly.
I stepped forward, wanting to feel the tenderness of the translucent skin but stopped as I glanced at Wrex for approval. “Can I?”
“Yes,” the hoarse whimper that came out of him made me suddenly aware that we were both still very naked, mainly because my eyes honed in on the way his dick stirred to life again.
Before I lost the nerve and before Wrex took back his invitation, I slowly and softly let my fingers trace the illuminated veins living inside the thin skin. When my fingers brushed the length of the dark veins there, Wrex’s entire body rolled in pleasure, a moan falling out of his mouth. I hadn’t expected that reaction, my eyes going back to the now hard as steel dick hanging between his legs, begging for me to tend to it.
“What…does it feel like?”
