Half-Off Ragnarok
Page 66

I smiled, reaching out to smooth back a lock of her hair. “You smell like onion field.”
“You’re no bed of roses yourself,” she said, raising her eyebrows. “You proposing a way to fix the problem?”
“I think I am, yes,” I said, and told her.
Fitting two full-sized adults into Shelby’s shower was difficult, but not impossible, as long as we were willing to be very, very friendly with one another. After we finished with the all-important business of washing off the onion, we found being very, very friendly to be an easy task indeed.
Shelby pushed me up against the wall once the . . . friendliness . . . had scaled back a little, resting her elbows on my chest and smiling at me like a cat with a mouthful of canary. I put my hands on either side of her waist, lending just a little bit of extra stability.
“Hello, Mr. Price,” she practically purred. “My, that name suits you. Got any more lies you want to stop telling me?”
“Um . . . I probably was checking out your ass at the work Christmas party, but in my defense, you asked me to.”
“Mmm. So just the normal lies, then.” She leaned in and kissed me, her breasts a distracting pressure against my skin.
Almost as distracting as the water that was running down my face. I tried to surreptitiously shake some of it away.
Shelby pulled back, and snorted. “Little damp, are you?”
“That’s the point of the shower, isn’t it?” I reached around her, fumbling until my hand found the faucet. Shutting the water off, I continued, “But sometimes dry can be nice.”
“You sweet-talker, you,” said Shelby, delivering another kiss before she peeled herself away from me and opened the shower curtain. Her bathroom was small, and with her clothes, my clothes, and my weapons covering every available surface, it looked even more cluttered than the rest of the apartment.
Shelby stepped out of the bathroom long enough to grab two towels from the adjacent closet, dripping all the way. As she came back, she thrust one of the towels out toward me, and said, “You know, this is the first time you’ve let me see you undress.”
“I’m sure you can see why,” I said, with a nod toward the tidy array of knives, handguns, and other accoutrements that I had made atop her toilet tank.
“I would have looked at you a bit askance when you pulled the brass knuckles out, it’s true,” she said, beginning to rub the side of her head. She was still naked, and if the weight of her breasts had been distracting, the way they jiggled as she towel-dried her hair was downright enthralling.
Pulling my eyes away from her breasts, I wrapped my own towel around my waist and reached for my glasses. “I’m always armed. That’s been hard to explain sometimes. One of the girls I dated in college was convinced I belonged to a very strange branch of Mormonism, since I was perfectly happy to let her see me naked, and even happier to see her naked, but I never let her see me take my clothes off.”
“Discussion of ex-girlfriends, eh? I guess fighting a giant lizard really is the sort of thing that brings a couple closer together.”
Shelby’s tone was light, but that didn’t tell me much—Shelby’s tone was almost always light. She was the sort of girl who could sound laid-back and utterly pleasant as she was removing your spleen with a claw hammer. I put my glasses on as I turned to look at her.
She was still holding the towel, but she wasn’t making any effort to dry herself off. Instead, she was just looking at me, a complicated mixture of sadness and exhaustion in her face.
“Shelby?”
“I just . . .” She shook her head, slinging her towel around her shoulders. “No. It’s silly, and it’ll just spoil a pleasant evening.”
“Shelby.” I took an awkward half-step around the sink, reaching for her hand. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Everything. I just . . . oh, come out of the bathroom, will you? This is a terrible place to have any sort of conversation that isn’t about soap.” She turned, moving a little faster than was strictly necessary, her wet feet leaving a trail of dark spots on the plain brown carpet.
I raked wet hair out of my eyes as I followed her to the apartment’s lone bedroom. It was as small and hastily-furnished as everything else, with a queen-sized bed that was really just two mattresses stacked on top of each other and left in the middle of the floor. But she had plenty of pillows, and her linens always smelled like eucalyptus, thanks to the essential oils she added to the laundry every time she had to wash the sheets. (She said it made her feel more like she was home when she was trying to go to sleep. I couldn’t fault the sentiment; I didn’t add pine oil to everything, but I’d been known to buy scented Christmas candles for the sole purpose of pretending that I was back at home in Portland).
Shelby dropped her towel into the hamper next to her bedroom door as she walked to the bed. She smoothed the duvet with an almost fussy motion before she turned to face me and sat, folding her hands tightly together in her lap. Something about the solemnity of her pose made me feel like I was the one who was exposed, even though I had a towel around my waist, while she was completely nude.
“Alex, what are we doing?” she asked.
I froze. There were half a dozen possible answers to that question, ranging from flippant to overly serious, and I had no living clue which one was appropriate. After standing silent for what felt like way too long, I settled on the most honest answer of them all: “I don’t know.”
“And here I was hoping at least one of us did.” Shelby shook her head. “I thought we were having a bit of fun, you know? You were the American zoologist who didn’t know anything about anything—not even that he’d got Johrlac preying on him—and I was going to go home with a clear conscience when everything was done. At least you’d have gotten laid, and that’s payment enough, for most men. Only now you’re a Price. You’re part of the world I come from.”
Suddenly, I understood what she had been trying to tell me earlier in the car. “I was your vacation fling, and now I’m not, and you’re not sure how to deal with that,” I said.
Shelby bit her lip and nodded.
“Look, Shelby . . . if it helps at all, I didn’t expect things to go this way either. I’m not suddenly going to propose,” even though I sort of had, back when we were standing over the lindworm’s carcass, “and I’m not going to hate you forever and badmouth you to all the American cryptozoologists if we break up.”