Лорел Гамильтон - Dead Ice

I nodded back. If I could remember names I used them with the nod, though honestly we had so many new guys coming in to use the gym that I didn’t know all the names anymore. Now that I knew that Micah and the other leaders were trying to recruit enough “soldiers” to replace all the werehyenas if we needed to, I understood why there were so many new faces. Most of the new guys must have liked a morning workout, because the amount of noise from inside the showers was a lot.

I stood just outside the door, steeling myself to go into the shared locker room where we could put our weapons and some people undressed. If we’d known we were going to have more female guards we might have built two locker rooms, but no one thought of it when the plans were laid out, or maybe lycanthropes just didn’t sweat nudity, even in the shower, so maybe it was just me feeling all squirmy awkward about it? Either way, I wished for a girls’ locker room as I hesitated at the open doorway; I wished really, really hard. But like all the female sportscasters who’d been told, sure you can have all the chances to interview the players that the male sportscasters have, but you still have to go into the shower and see the people you’re trying to interview possibly naked—there really is no such thing as equality, just different levels of inequality, and how hard are you willing to fight for it all? Fuck.

Did I yell out “girl in the locker room” the way they did in some of the professional sports locker rooms? I realized I would have been a lot more comfortable if someone inside there were a lover of mine, but knowing they were men I’d never seen nude, or had no “right” to see nude, made me more embarrassed. I’m not saying that made sense; I’m just saying that’s how I felt.

Someone walked around the open doorway so fast, they ran right into me and sent me stumbling backward. I barely kept my feet. It was one of the new female guards from L.A. She was a little taller than me, and built like a feminine square with shoulders broad enough to make most men very proud. Sheer greater mass had almost set me on my ass.

“Oh, I’m . . . so sorry.” She blushed scarlet even through the darkness of her skin, which was a nice solid brown, as if she’d tan incredibly dark given a chance.

“It’s okay,” I said.

She reached out to touch my arm as if to reassure herself I was okay, then dropped her hand as if she didn’t know what to do with it. “I didn’t see you. I mean, I wasn’t noticing. I mean . . .”

I laughed. “It’s okay, Pepita, right?”

She nodded. “Yes, I’m Pepita, but they call me Peppy.”

“Which do you prefer?” I asked.

She looked confused for a second, and then said, “Peppy, I am so not a little anything.” And she spread her hands wide to sort of take in the thickness of her body.

“Don’t apologize for not being little; you’ll be able to lift weights that I can’t even imagine lifting.”

She looked pleased and ran a finger through her short, black hair, tucking it behind one ear where it didn’t stay. Either she had only cut it short recently, or it was a very old habit from years of having much longer hair. Some habitual gestures stay on for years after the reason for them is long past.

She was still dressed in baggy gym shorts and an oversized men’s T-shirt, as if she wanted to hide her body even while she worked out, or maybe it was just comfortable and I was projecting.

“You just finish working out?” I asked.

She nodded, smiled. “Yes.”

“But you didn’t shower yet.”

The smile faded. “No,” and she looked down, not meeting my brown eyes with her own anymore.

“Too many men, and not enough privacy for you in there?”

Her eyes darted up to me and then she looked at the floor again. “I know we’re all shapeshifters and nudity is okay, but . . .”

“You’re still the only girl with a bunch of guys, most of whom are cute and very in shape, and you’re all expected to pretend you don’t notice each other.”

She looked at me. “Yeah, we didn’t do this kind of big group thing at home. Claudia told me that she did it and so could I.”

“Is she in there now?” I asked.

Pepita, I mean Peppy, shook her head.

“When did Claudia tell you that?”

“When she showed us around the gym area. We asked where the girls’ locker room was and she told us that we were going to be professional about this, just like we were about any other part of our job.”

“That sounds like Claudia,” I said.

“I know she’s right, but . . .” She looked at the ground again.

“Honestly, I don’t like coming down here when there are this many of the guys either.”

She looked up at me, hopeful and suspicious all at once. “Really, or are you just trying to make me feel less like a pussy?”

“I swear that this is a little too much testosterone in one place, at one time, even for me.”

She grinned suddenly and it made her look even younger than I knew she was, but it was also a good smile. She was suddenly pretty, and not just muscle that happened to be a girl.

“We’ll go in together; that way at least neither of us will be the only girl.”

The grin turned to relief. “Thank you, Señora Blake, thank you so much.”

“Anita, call me Anita.”

She nodded, smiling. “Okay, Anita, thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet, we still have to brave the locker room and run the gauntlet of naked guys to get to the covered shower stalls.”

She laughed then. “If you can do it, I can do it.”

“Then let’s do it,” I said.

We walked into the locker room together, and because Peppy needed me to be brave, it was easier to do it. Yay for easier.

THE ROOM WAS so full of men in various states of undress that we had to thread our way through them like a maze of naked guys. It might have been erotic, but they were also joking and doing that rough talk that passes for sweet nothings between guy friends. I kept my head down and studied the tile floor like we were going to be graded later.

“Fuck, Ricky, your dick is going to fall off if you keep using it that much.” I couldn’t tell who said it, but the Ricky in question was beside us as I pushed my way between them to one of the weapons lockers, because he answered.

“Hey, can I help it if the ladies can’t get enough of this?” and he gyrated his hips, making his junk swing. I did my very best to ignore it, but since it was damn near hitting my elbow, it was harder to ignore than it might have been.

I willed myself not to blush and opened the locker.

“Jesus, Ricky, stop shaking your junk at the new girls,” a third voice called out. I realized that with my head down, my hair plastered to my head from the drying goop, and me wearing the black on black that was damn near the guards’ uniform, they’d mistaken me for one of the new female guards from L.A. Perfect.

“Hey, she’s not complaining, are you, baby?” Ricky said, and he actually leaned his shoulder against the closed lockers, arms crossed, in that popular-jock kind of way. They start doing it in high school, or earlier, but I’d never had anyone do it while they were naked. Life is just full of new experiences.

I froze with the door open on the locker, and looked up. I had to look way up, because Ricky was over a foot taller than me. I finally met the handsome, arrogant face, his shoulder still leaning against the lockers, arms crossed over the muscular chest, so high school jock. His eyes were big and brown with thick eyelashes, and the nearly perfect arch of black eyebrows that women want but never seem to have naturally. His hair was a brown so dark that calling it light black seemed more accurate. He’d already blow-dried his hair back in feathering on the sides as if the 1980s had never died, but hey, maybe it was coming back in style.