Rocco licked my legs almost constantly while I ate, but I didn’t mind. The wolf was a sweetie, and if I was his instant-wife, he probably liked the way I smelled. I sure liked the way Rocco smelled, so it wasn’t hard to believe that I’d smell just as good to him.
Hopefully.
I cringed at the thought, though.
How weird would it be if a guy wanted to sniff me?
I mean, I’d like it. Hell, I’d love it. But I wouldn’t know how to react, you know? Like, should I cringe away? Or kiss him?
The one time I’d kissed a guy had been in high school, before my parents got all crazy, and it had been so awkward I hated even thinking about it.
But the thought still made me sort of excited.
To have a guy want me… that would be different. In a good way.
But I mean, I couldn’t get too caught up in that idea. There was still a good chance that he might not want me at all. He hadn’t looked at me like I smelled good to him; hell, he’d hardly looked at me at all. So he might not want to be anything more than friends, and that was fine. Just having a built-in best friend sounded like a damned miracle to me.
Whatever happened, Rocco and I seemed to be pretty much trapped together. So that was good; I liked the thought of that. He was just as stuck with me as I was stuck with him, so we would have no choice but to figure shit out. Even if we were just house-mates, I could get used to that. I would have my own room, I assumed, and that would be plenty of space for me.
I devoured the entire plate of food, tossing the thick disposable plate in the trash and then setting the fork and knife off to the side of the overflowing sink.
Turning toward the house, I surveyed the room. There was shit… everywhere.
Yep.
Everywhere.
“Alright.” I blew a puff of hair out of my eyes. Since I bleached my hair to get it to the platinum blonde I loved, there was always a bit of breakage. I didn’t mind that, though, because I loved all the choppy strands that framed my face. “Where to start…” I trailed off, nibbling on my lip.
“If I start with the kitchen, I’ll have to look at the awful living room through the entire time,” I said, processing out loud. I talked to myself a lot; always had, probably always would. It kept me sane. “So, living room it is.”
I’d worry about the upstairs after I had the downstairs dealt with.
Stepping back into the living room, I started sorting the clothes. It was easy to tell the cleans from the dirties, thanks to Rocco’s yummy smell, so I made quick work of the clothing mountain. There was actually only one load’s worth of dirty clothes in the mass of fabric, which reassured me slightly as far as my new roommate’s cleanliness went.
I started the one load, reluctantly leaving out a few t-shirts and a sweatshirt that smelled like Rocco. Doing that made me feel kind of creepy, but he’d turned into a wolf that was hunting me, so I was pretty sure the two things balanced out.
Mostly.
The clean clothes, I folded up and left in piles on the couch. As I folded, I revealed the fabric beneath. It was a nice dark gray that I really liked, and the throw pillows were all in other shades of gray. Ultimately, it was a lot more manly than I preferred, but I didn’t mind the colors. With a couple of black-striped or polka-dotted pillows, it would’ve actually been cute.
When Rocco was a human again and we figured out whether or not we were going to live together, I would change shit up. Until then, I’d deal with the manliness.
After I folded all the clothes, I decided to leave the toiletries and boxed furniture until I cleaned the rest of the townhouse. Furniture-building and organization would just have to wait a bit.
“To the kitchen,” I announced to the wolf, who had followed me absolutely everywhere I went. His fur brushed my legs with every damn step I took, and it was actually pretty nice. Maybe I’d been lonelier than I realized.
Fine, I had realized I was lonely. There just hadn’t been anything to do about it, so I’d tried to ignore it.
But… it was nice not to be lonely anymore.
Really nice.