He Can't Reject Me: My Mate Doesn't Know I'm a Woman

Water

Storm pov

I stood in the doorway of that washroom for a full minute before I made myself go in.

It wasn't the room itself, not exactly. It was everything the room represented. A house with actual walls and a roof that didn't leak. A door that shut and stayed shut. Furniture nobody had stolen or fought over. I'd grown up sleeping in a tent held together with rope and spite, and standing in the entrance of Kagiso's house felt like walking into a story someone had made up to torment rogues who'd never get to live in one.

I didn't trust it. That was the honest truth. Nice things in the Hollow always came with a price tag nobody mentioned until it was too late to refuse paying it. My mother, Willow, used to warn me about that more than almost anything else. She'd grown up in a pack once, before all of this, before Vorath, before any of it. Havenbrook, she called it, though I had no idea if that was the same territory I was currently standing in or some other pack entirely on the other side of the map. She never said much more than the name. Just that she'd been happy there, once, before she fell in love with the wrong man and got cast out for it.

Vorath took her in after that. Made her his instead. And when he learned, eventually, that some part of her had never stopped loving the man she'd lost, he made her pay for that every single day since, in ways I'd spent my whole childhood learning not to ask questions about. My mother never told me it was love that got her hurt like that. She didn't have to. I'd worked it out myself, young enough that I still remember the exact moment the pieces clicked into place and I understood that loving the wrong person, in the wrong place, could cost you everything for the rest of your life.

Packs look kind on the outside. That's how they trap you.

She'd traded one cage for a worse one, and paid for a debt that was never actually hers to begin with. So no, I didn't walk into strange houses in unfamiliar packs and start trusting soft towels and warm floors. I stood in that doorway bracing myself instead, waiting for the catch.

Eventually exhaustion won out over suspicion, mostly because my legs had started informing me, quite firmly, that they were done negotiating.

The washroom itself made no sense to me. There was a large white basin against one wall, deep enough to sit in, with two metal handles above it that clearly did something, though I had no idea what. Rogue camps didn't have running water. We had streams. Buckets. A particularly resourceful hollowed log if you were desperate and it hadn't rained in a week. I'd bathed in freezing creek water more times than I could count, teeth chattering, always fast, always watching the tree line for anyone who might wander past.

I picked up the bar of soap sitting on the little shelf and brought it to my nose out of pure curiosity, and something in my chest actually ached at the smell of it. Clean. Sharp. Something like pine, something like rain, nothing at all like the harsh lye soap we made ourselves back home that stripped your skin raw if you weren't careful.

The towel folded on the shelf beside it was worse. Or better, I suppose, depending on how you looked at it. I ran my thumb over the fabric and nearly laughed out loud at how soft it was, absurdly, stupidly soft, like nothing I'd ever touched that wasn't stolen off some unlucky trader passing too close to our territory.

I turned my attention to the two metal handles and tried, with great confidence, to figure out how a person turned water on in a box built into the wall.

It did not go well.

I turned one handle and nothing happened. I turned the other and something groaned deep in the wall like the house itself was annoyed with me. I tried both at once and got a single, violent burst of ice cold water that hit me square in the chest and made me yelp loud enough that I clapped a hand over my own mouth in horror.

Footsteps, fast, right outside the door. "What happened. Are you hurt."

"I'm fine," I called back, mortified, dripping, glaring at the metal handles like they'd personally wronged me. "Everything is fine."

A pause. "You don't sound fine."

"I am extremely fine."

Another pause, longer this time, and when he spoke again his voice had shifted into something I didn't expect from a man who'd spent the last hour cursing at the sky about me. Careful. Almost, though I refused to actually believe it, amused. "Have you never used a shower before."

I stood there dripping, weighing my pride against the very real possibility of standing in a cold, half flooded washroom for the rest of the night out of stubbornness alone. Pride lost. It usually did, eventually, when the alternative was actually worse.

"No," I admitted, through the door, to the one person on earth I least wanted to admit anything to. "We didn't have this. Where I'm from."

I braced for the mockery. Some cutting remark about rogues living like animals, which, frankly, wasn't far from the truth. We'd bathed in streams. Relieved ourselves in whatever bushes were far enough from camp to spare everyone the smell. We slept on the ground more often than not and called it comfortable if it wasn't actively raining on us. I'd spent my whole life assuming that was simply what surviving looked like, right up until the exact moment I stood dripping in a stranger's washroom realizing how much of it hadn't been necessary at all, just what we'd had.

The mockery didn't come.

"Alright," he said instead, slow and patient in a way that caught me completely off guard given how loudly he'd been screaming at his own goddess less than an hour earlier. "The left handle is hot water. The right is cold. You turn them together until you find a temperature that doesn't try to kill you either direction. There's a lever on top, you pull it down, and the water comes out of the piece higher up instead of the tap below."

I found the lever. Pulled it. Water rained down from directly above me instead of the wall, and I actually gasped out loud at how strange it felt, warm water falling like rain that I could control, that I could stop, that nobody could see me standing in.

"Better?" His voice, still through the door, still careful.

"Yes," I said, and hated a little how much I meant it.

"Good." A pause. "There's more soap on the shelf for hair, if you want it. Different bottle. Smells better than the bar, probably."

I found the bottle. Smelled it. Something floral, something warm, absolutely nothing like anything that had ever touched my head before, and for one embarrassing, undignified moment standing under all that warm water with soap that smelled like an actual garden, I had to blink hard and remind myself that crying over shampoo was not a reasonable use of the very limited dignity I had left tonight.

Outside the door, I heard him settle into a chair, the wood creaking under his weight, and I heard him mutter something low, mostly to himself.

"Unbelievable," he said again, though quieter this time, and something in his tone had shifted since the last time he'd said it. Less fury behind it. More something else I didn't have a name for yet and wasn't in any hurry to go looking for.

I stood under that impossible, endless warm water for longer than I probably should have, and let myself, just for a few minutes, stop bracing for the catch.