“I should be presentable by the time I get over to my mother’s, so I’ll be fine.” Braun kissed my head before letting me walk ahead of him up the stairs. “Best view ever.”
Ugh.
“Stop that.” His laugh said he wasn’t even going to try to behave. “How do…how do people with children in the house do anything?”
With every sense being better than human how was privacy ever a thing?
“Every kid I know has been raised with a sound machine and their parents are all talking about which home purifier is the best.” Braun shrugged as I laughed that time. “It took me way too long as a teenager to understand why they were doing that.”
“That sounds like a good plan, though.” I’d have loved to have seen a young Braun finally connect the dots on something like that. “I’m guessing everyone pretends not to notice anything related to intimacy?”
Nodding, he shut the door and we headed for the stairs. “Yes, partly out of good manners and partly because we’re just closer to those kinds of instincts. It’s like shifting and removing your clothes. It’s something that happens but not something most people notice like humans would.”
That was going to be hard to get used to.
“That makes sense.” I could ignore bodies and not notice things. I could do that. “We’re getting an air purifier tomorrow, right?”
His laugh echoed through the house. “I got gifted one as a housewarming present when I first moved into the packhouse. It’s actually come in handy a few times when families needed to stay here. I use it so rarely I just stuck it under the bed.”
Thank goodness.
“Is there anything else I need to think about?” Besides smelling like sex because we’d basically been making love in the woods. “I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable.”
“They wouldn’t be.” Braun bent over and wiggled his ass at me as he pulled the little machine out from under the bed. “But you would be if Emeric or my mother did something like smirk at us for doing new couple things.”
Oh.
He might’ve had a point.
“I’m not used to this.” My private life had been fairly dry for a long time, so I hadn’t even run into the human equivalent of it, whatever that might’ve been. “I need you to point out stuff like this that should be obvious but I might not think of.”
“Of course.” Braun came over and gave me a quick kiss. “You go turn on the shower. I’m going to turn this on and go downstairs and grab you some sweats and a T-shirt for tomorrow. I know I’ve got some your size in the guest room. It’s stocked with all kinds of things.”
Yes, that would be good.
“I need to get some stuff from my place tomorrow.” Because it didn’t seem like I was going to be spending a lot of time there this week. “Clothes and some papers I have to grade as well.”
Nodding, he seemed to be trying not to smirk. I was pretty sure it was about the basically moving in part, so I ignored it. He was the reason we were mated and I was taking over his life, so I didn’t have to feel embarrassed about it. “And what about we grab a few things that might make your office here feel more comfortable?”
I was going to move in with him before we’d even had a single date.
“That sounds reasonable.” Under the circumstances. But as I headed toward the bathroom, random thoughts filled my head. “Are my students going to be able to smell you on my clothes? Like regular just being around you kind of scents?”
We weren’t going to do more than a fifties TV peck before I went to work, so I wouldn’t have to worry about anything else.
“It depends on what kind of shifter they are, but someone like a mage isn’t going to have the same sense of smell.” No, mages were just probably tripping me in class, but Braun was going to help me with that. “So you might get a few strangely worded questions about what you were doing over the weekend but they’re not going to be about intimate things. The kids are literally just going to be trying to figure out why you smell like an Alpha wolf.”
That probably made sense.
“Thank you for clarifying that.” He’d given me a lot to think about already, but as I turned on the water and started stripping, my brain kept coming up with new ones. I had a ridiculous list going by the time he came into the bathroom, but I didn’t let him getting naked distract me.
Too much.
“Is it possible for someone to give me…I’m not trying to sound rude or ignorant…some kind of charm or spell to keep my students from messing with me?” I was really tired of tripping over nothing but drawing attention to the prank would only make it worse.
Wow.
No.
