Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

Sam looked surprised for a moment. Then he grinned. “Not if you don’t,” he said.

We stripped quickly, both of us, and there was nothing erotic or enticing about it: we were two people getting naked as fast as we could. Sam got out of his jeans while I was still untying my shoes, and “helped” by unfastening my bra with his tail, looking innocent all the while. I was laughing too hard to say anything about it, and kept laughing as I stepped out of my shoes and yoga pants. Then I straightened, laughter stilling, and looked at him. He looked back.

It was strange seeing him without a canvas sky behind him, without the sounds of the midway jangling quietly in the distance. He was a beautiful man. He always had been, although it had taken me a while to see it. When we’d first met, I’d been the stranger in his family’s carnival, the threat to his way of life, and he’d reacted accordingly. I knew now that he was just a protective person. He’d been taking care of his own. Somehow, somewhere along the line, I had joined that list, and I was so grateful, and so afraid of everything that could imply.

He stepped closer, raising one hand to rest his fingertips against my cheek. The heat coming off his skin made me shiver, but in a good way.

“We don’t have to do this,” he said. “I didn’t come here because I wanted to get laid.”

“I know,” I said, and kissed him again, and conversation was over for a while.

The first time—the only time—we’d been together like this, we’d been standing at the edge of the end of the world, and we had gone in knowing we might not get another shot: that we were attempting to put paid to everything our relationship was and might have been in a single hour. There hadn’t been time to slow down or to explore. There hadn’t been time to admire. We had that time now, with morning miles away and both of us carnival-trained into silence, which meant my overprotective roommates wouldn’t come charging in to save me.

For the first time in a long time, there was nothing I felt like I needed to be saved from. I was exactly where I wanted to be.

Sam looked me up and down, appreciation and eagerness in his eyes, and I didn’t move, giving him the opportunity to change his mind. After a moment, he paused, and frowned.

“Annie? You okay?” A faint blush spread across the visible part of his cheeks. “Is it the furry thing? I can . . . y’know, stop . . .”

“You’d be dead if you were human,” I said, and stepped toward him, closing the last little gap between us. There was a fine sheen of fur on his chest, where a human man would have had wiry hair, and it tickled pleasantly, making me press myself even closer. I reached up and traced the whisper-thin outline of the scar on his forehead. It was barely visible. Sadly for me, I knew exactly where to look. “Pow, right in the head, and you’d be dead. No more Sam. No more asshole monkey throwing me around the flying trapeze. The furry thing didn’t bother me before you got shot. Now? I wouldn’t care if you never stopped again. All I want you to do is stay alive.”

“I could say the same thing to you,” he whispered, tail snaking around my waist and pulling tight. There was no way for me to get away without hurting him.

I didn’t want to get away. “So keep me alive,” I said, and kissed him hard.

He responded by grabbing my ass again, this time using the combined leverage of tail and palms to boost me up off the floor. I wrapped my legs around him, holding myself in place, and stayed there as we fell onto the bed, kissing each other hard all the while.

The kissing went on for quite some time, accompanied by a certain measure of groping as we got familiar with one another again—and in some cases, for the first time, since we didn’t need to worry about a Covenant strike team or Sam’s grandmother bursting in at any moment. Heavy petting with someone who essentially had four hands was a whole new experience for me. For most people, I would imagine.

Sam pulled away slightly, and asked, “Condom?”

I blinked at him, dazed and slightly out of synch with myself, before I replied, “In the bedside table. For emergencies.” Not that I’d been counting on anything like this happening, but the best way to wind up in a bad situation is to be unprepared for all eventualities.

“Cool,” he said, and kissed me again, and we toppled past the point of no return.



* * *





When I was a kid, on the rare occasions when Verity had treated me like a sister, instead of like some sort of weird stranger who lived in her house for some reason, we’d had a few slumber parties. Just her and me and my cousin Elsie, and later, when she’d started feeling secure enough in her ability not to read random minds to travel, my cousin Sarah. We’d all sit up all night eating popcorn and watching scary movies and talking about whatever seemed important—which was, quite frequently, sex.

I’ll never forget those nights, the four of us and the occasional mouse sitting in the dark living room, talking about things that were too adult for me, but which I’d wanted to hear anyway. I’d wanted to hear everything, to devour it all and make it a part of me. I’d never said much. There wasn’t really anything for me to contribute, and I hadn’t wanted to remind Verity of how young I was, or give her a good reason to send me away.

“Sex with therianthropes must be amazing,” Verity had sighed, sweet sixteen and dreaming constantly of being kissed, and I’d been thirteen, already inclined to hate her, but yearning for her approval all the same. It was a weird, toxic brew that I shared with younger siblings all over the world, and the only antidote was time.

Elsie, who had been the most experienced of the lot of us, having actually kissed a girl before the end of the school year, had looked at her blankly and asked, “Why?”

“Because the stamina they need to change forms without suffering from multiple organ failure has just got to translate to bed,” Verity had replied, attempting what might charitably be called a leer.

“You’re a pervert,” Elise had said, in a prim tone, and I had thrown my allegiance in with her on the spot.

Now, years and miles and a thousand bad decisions later, I lay curled against Sam in the cocoon of my sheets, the hot Florida air pressing down on us and covering our exposed skin in a sheen of sweat, and thought Verity had been onto something, in her usual blunt instrument manner. It wasn’t the stamina, or the potential for shapeshifting. It was that the therianthrope in question was Sam Taylor. I didn’t love him. He didn’t love me. But as his tail tightened around my waist, drawing me closer in his sleep, keeping me anchored, I realized two things:

If he didn’t leave soon, I was going to wind up loving him, whether I wanted to or not.

And I didn’t want him to go.

I pressed a kiss to the skin of his cheek, just above the furry line of his cheekbone, nestled my head against his shoulder, and closed my eyes. I was hot and sticky and needed a shower more than ever. Between the parade accident, the roller skating, and the remarkably acrobatic sex, I was sore in places that I hadn’t been consciously aware of before. There was no way I was going to fall asleep. No way.