Two Fates

by Kari Gregg

  “Suicidal,” Jamie said, opting for the ugly truth. “Insane with grief. They forced me to eat, made sure I couldn’t hurt myself. They made me live when all I could do was howl with the agony of this one time not following my Ian.”

  “You were distraught and they took care of you when I couldn’t, when even the scent of me hundreds of yards away drove you into a mindless craze. No matter the mistakes the pack has made, I’ll always be grateful to them for that. They kept you alive.”

  Eventually, Jamie had learned gratitude for that too, but that lesson had demanded most of the past two years in the learning. “As bad as I was then...” He trailed off, swallowed to relieve the raw emotion tightening his throat. “Would you have left me?”

  “No.” For once, Kenneth didn’t pause to reflect before answering. “You were and are my mate.”

  Jamie gulped, trying and failing to tamp down his bitterness. “They expected me to leave him. Demanded it. And shunned us both when I refused.”

  Kenneth scrubbed a hand down his face. “You have to let that go.”

  Fury exploded inside Jamie. His fingers squeezed the bowl in his grip. “Fuck you, Kenneth.”

  “Do you think I wanted any of this? To finally find my mate, only to be presented with a man who can’t stand the sight of me? One who still aches and bleeds for another? Don’t tell me I don’t know what it’s like to long for a mate outside your reach. I know exactly what it’s like. I had two years to teach me how to let go of what I can’t change and learn how to live with what I could have."

  “You don’t know what it’s like.” Jamie pushed to his feet, towering over Kenneth who should have balked at the challenge to his dominance. Instead, Kenneth climbed off the ground too, brushing dirt and grit free from his clothes. Kenneth was only an inch or two taller. Standing face to face, Kenneth couldn’t loom. “You can’t know because I’m not dead,” Jamie said. “You had to only sneak through the woods to spy me through the green leaves to see me while my mate rotted in the cold hard ground. No matter how emotionally distant I’ve been, the pack was yours. Some might have challenged you as presumptive alpha, but you generally had their support. I had no one, only Ian’s memory to sustain me.” Releasing one edge of the bowl, Jamie chopped a furious hand through the air. “You think you’ve sacrificed to be with me? You’ve given up nothing.”

  “Arguing who has hurt more won’t help.” Kenneth’s shoulders slumped, a dispirited breath slipping from his lips. When he lifted his chin, though, his dark stare glinted with resolve. “Life is messy, Jamie. It’s brutal and it certainly isn’t fair. Not to you, not to me, not for any of us. We hurt and sometimes hurt each other, but we also make the best of what we’re given. If I can make the best of what’s building between us—” he said, waving a hand at Jamie, “—you can damn well meet me halfway.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Try harder.” Kenneth pivoted and marched away.

  When Jamie finally regained his composure, he returned to Kenneth’s den. He placed the bowl, carefully, on the desk at which Kenneth worked. Kenneth ignored him, tapping away at his laptop. Jamie couldn’t be sure, but a quilt he suspected was another mating gift rested on the desk next to Kenneth. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

  “This is difficult for you.”

  “It’s difficult for you too.”

  Kenneth snorted. “I didn’t lose a mate.”

  No, but you didn’t gain the mate you should have had to start with either. Jamie crossed his arms over his middle. “Maybe this would be easier if we tied.”

  That, at least, stopped the infernal tapping at the laptop keyboard. Kenneth slowly lifted his head and stared at Jamie long minutes that felt like glacial epochs in the tense quiet that followed. “Sex isn’t mating,” he eventually said.

  Jamie’s nerves jittered because, for he and Ian, it had been, but maybe that was wrong because they’d loved each other, bone deep, since forever. Ian had never been a stranger to him, not like Kenneth. “No,” he said, “but Dad is dying. Presumptive alpha or not, you can’t take his place unless we’ve tied.”

  Kenneth’s shoulders stiffened, but he shrugged the tension off. “Frank is a tough, cagy alpha. He’ll hang on. No matter how long it takes. He won’t risk the pack devolving into chaos. As bad as he wants to be with your mother, he’ll wait until we’ve mated and the pack line of ascendance is assured to his liking.”

  Jamie couldn’t look at Kenneth, glanced away from Kenneth’s startlingly direct gaze. “It might help too.” He shuffled his feet. “With things. Between us.”

  Kenneth barked out a laugh, a humorless sound. “Sharing another meal would help. Having a conversation that didn’t involve your dead mate, your parents, or this fucked up pack would help. Expecting me to have a magical dick capable of healing all the hurts and fixing every wrong? That doesn’t help.” He abruptly pushed back from his desk. He leaped out of the chair and marched, without looking at Jamie, to where a burlap sack hung in one corner, the scent of freshly killed deer wafting from it. Kenneth jerked the bag from a hook in the ceiling.

  Shaking, Jamie joined him at the table, where Kenneth dumped the bag’s contents of several choice cuts of venison. “I’m sorry I’m not the mate you wanted. That anybody would’ve wanted. You deserve better,” Jamie murmured while Kenneth began chopping the meat into bite-size chunks with a knife fetched from the rack overhead.

  “I think our lives would improve immeasurably if we stopped apologizing to each other. Don’t you?”

  Jamie hunched his shoulders, though he wasn’t sure the reprimand affected him more coming from his alpha or from his mate. “If that’s what you want.”

  “What I want,” Kenneth said, finally looking at Jamie directly, “is for you to grab the skewers from two drawers down, on the left, and start threading our supper onto them.” He jerked his chin at a shelf with a neat row of glass bottles lined up on it. “Seasonings are there.”

  While Kenneth cut the meat, Jamie prepared the kabobs. Though they worked silently, the familiar task settled Jamie’s nerves. He’d forgotten what this was like. After Ia—No, he wouldn’t bring that here, not now.

  No more apologies.

  He’d forgotten how soothing shared domestic chores could be. Meals had been a means of survival for him for years. Something he had to do. He’d learned which herbs to gather and dry as a boy, but hadn’t bothered with them for more than trade goods for a long, long time. Most dinners were rabbits threaded on spits roasted over an open campfire with, at best, a few hickory or mesquite chips thrown into the fire for flavor. Jamie hadn’t enjoyed food, or eating, in so long that when his stomach rumbled, Jamie initially didn’t recognize the sensation as a bonafide sign of hungry anticipation.

  Finished cutting the meat into chunks, Kenneth rinsed his hands in a basin of water and then fetched a metal grate from overhead to place over the den’s hearth. He bent, reaching into a box and tossed desiccated chips of wood into the fire and the scent of hickory tickled Jamie’s nose before Kenneth had even fitted the grilling surface over the snapping and crackling fire. “Do you like deer? Lucy and Everett brought it over earlier. I imagine you must like it, though I never saw you eat any until yesterday. You mostly lived off squirrel, rabbit, and fish from the creek.”

  Jamie swept his glance over the cooking area, finding a platter hanging on the wall, and after fetching it down, laid the heavily laden skewers upon it. “You kept that careful an eye on me?”

  When he turned to the fire, Kenneth kneeled at the hearth, stirring the embers up higher. He shot Jamie a small grin. “Yes.”

  Jamie’s stomach jittered, but he walked to the grate and laid the skewers in neat rows. “I’m an impatient hunter, always have been. I do better with snares or hunting with a partner. It’s not that I can’t take down a deer by myself. I can if I absolutely have to do it. Rabbit and squirrel are quicker, though. Easier.”

  Kenneth winked. “Not as tasty
, though.”

  The wink startled a laugh out of Jamie. “No, not as good.”

  Kenneth snatched his hand. “I didn’t mean you couldn’t talk about him.”

  Jamie smiled. “I know.” He squeezed Kenneth’s fingers in his grasp. “I’d rather not, though. If that’s okay?”

  Kenneth pushed to his feet, still connected by the tether of their joined hands. “We could start finding places to put your stuff while the deer cooks.”

  Jamie nodded, but didn’t let go of Kenneth’s hand either. “All right.”

  Bellies full, the flotsam and jetsam of Jamie’s life peppered through Kenneth’s—now Jamie’s—den, they lolled by the fire, barely touching. Kenneth’s bare toes skated up and down Jamie’s calf, below the hem of where Jamie’s threadbare pants leg had hiked up. Jamie wasn’t sure Kenneth realized he was touching him. After dinner, they’d lain by the fire, talking, their feet and legs sometimes nudging, other times twining. It was...disconcerting. And at the same time comforting.

  Like their first dinner together, finding the right subjects to talk about was hard, with the conversation stopping and starting as one awkward hurdle and the next were met and navigated around, but they’d ultimately found their groove again. They could speak of what Jamie did, his role in the pack as trainer for the whelps, his favorite spots in to hunt, fish, and be with nature. That was okay. Ian had been brash and frenetic. He didn’t often like to sit and absorb the spirit of the woods surrounding them. Plenty of special places didn’t have cherished memories of Ian woven inside them. Jamie already knew that, though, and he suspected Kenneth did too.

  What he truly enjoyed was hearing about Kenneth’s life before he came to Burnt Fork. Where he’d grown up, his family, the places he’d been, things Jamie didn’t and couldn’t know. Maybe things the rest of the pack didn’t know. Kenneth would be a steady leader, a calm voice of reason and a learned, more well-rounded influence on the pack. Jamie had no doubt of that and considering the tumult and trouble that had preceded Kenneth’s arrival, those qualities were a definite bonus. For such a grounded, quiet man, he’d barreled down a path of atypical daring and adventure to reach the lands he now called home, though.

  Kenneth wrapped up a story in which he narrowly averted catastrophe while traveling through another pack’s territory, making Jamie laugh because he understood how much that was not like Kenneth or what he would’ve enjoyed. “Why did you put yourself through that?”

  “I had to leave home.” The corner of his mouth curved. “I had to find you.”

  Jamie’s breath hitched. “When did you know you’d have to leave?”

  “Since I was a boy. Our pack seer was gifted too. He said—”

  “He?” Jamie blinked in bewilderment.

  “Yes. He. I told you men could be seers. Your pack doesn’t encourage boys in that way, but males can inherit the gift as well as females. I was born with a dash of the Sight myself.” Kenneth’s grin widened. “More than one seer can serve a pack too. When I’m alpha, there are a great many things we can change and make better.”

  “Your seer? What did h-he say?”

  “About us?” Kenneth jerked a shoulder. “Not much. He told me I would cross the country to find the mate fate intended for me and that you’d be handsome.” Kenneth’s bare foot caressed Jamie’s calf. “He was right.”

  Jamie wriggled closer. Because he couldn’t stand not to, but also because if he pressed to the barrel of Kenneth’s chest, maybe he wouldn’t have to look into piercing eyes that seemed to see too much. “You’ve been many places, experienced many things.”

  “Yes,” Kenneth said on a suspicious murmur as he lifted his arm so that Jamie could push closer. “More than most. We shifters tend to be homebodies sticking to the packs we are born within.”

  “In all your travels...”

  “Spit it out, Jamie.”

  “Did you ever see anyone like me?”

  “You mean a shifter with two destinies? More than one true mate?”

  Jamie couldn’t speak around the knot in his throat. He nodded instead.

  “No, I never met any shifter like you. I heard about one once. In Oklahoma. A female. She’d fallen in love and mated to a shifter in her home pack. He was killed in a farm accident shortly after their daughter was born. She survived his loss for the sake of their child and after she’d raised the girl, the woman scented a second mate, another true mate, during a visit from a neighboring pack.”

  “She mated again?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were happy?”

  “She had more time to heal from her mate’s loss, but reportedly, they were content.” Kenneth turned on his side, arms draped over Jamie’s shoulder. Kenneth tilted Jamie’s chin up, forcing Jamie to meet his gaze. “You are rare. Few of us survive the death of our mates and those who manage to go on generally live on alone like your father, or in relationships that are pale shadows of what mating could and should be. You aren’t the only one, though, Jamie. There have been others. You can be happy again.”

  Happy? Jamie had forgotten what that meant, how it felt. In the years since Ian had passed, he’d learned to endure and endurance had transitioned into an empty sort of satisfaction. He trained the pack’s whelps in pack lore and shifter craft. He had purpose, a reason for getting up every morning. He cared for the kids, genuinely cared for them. Eventually, he could look at the woods surrounding the den he’d shared with Ian without misery flooding him and aching for what could never be. He hadn’t missed happiness, though. When Ian died, part of Jamie had died with him. The loss of his mate had shattered him. Time had healed the jagged pieces, mending him back together, crudely and inexpertly. Parts of him were forever gone, as lost to Jamie as his dead mate.

  No, he didn’t miss happiness. He couldn’t even remember that anymore. He longed to feel whole again, though. Craved it like nothing else and with Kenneth’s fingers on his skin and his scent perfuming the air Jamie breathed, he yearned for all those missing pieces that had once completed him, perhaps more than he should. “Kiss me?” he asked and before the words left his lips, his heart stopped. How could he ask such a thing?

  But confusion whirled inside him because...how could he not? Was it wrong to want to feel alive again? To feel something? Anything?

  Kenneth stared at him, as steady and solid as the enormous jagged rocks that made up the borderlands with Bitter Creek, high towering spears of stone where cougars hid and where Ian had died. Kenneth was as steady as the mountains. Immutable. Maybe more unmovable than even the stone. Time would not weather him. Tragedy would not move him from his purpose. There was comfort in that, a constancy that called to Jamie even as it unsettled him.

  Kenneth didn’t rush. As little as Jamie knew of his mate, he had certainly learned that. Kenneth never rushed. He stared at Jamie, as though he could read every single thought and emotion as it flitted across Jamie’s face, and no matter what he saw, or what he read in Jamie’s features, he did not turn away. Slowly, eventually, he lowered his mouth to Jamie’s. He hadn’t realized his lips had parted and wasn’t sure when he’d started panting. He’d been aware of neither until Kenneth’s soft mouth pressed to his. He would’ve jerked in surprise had Kenneth’s wide palm not slid into Jamie’s hair, cradling his head in his hand and holding him fast. Still, Jamie’s fingers curled against the shirt covering Kenneth’s chest and his heartbeat skipped.

  Kenneth’s lips were warm. Of course, he was hot. All shifters were. The feral spirit of the wolf inside burned like a thousand suns, but this was different. Not the inferno of lust and wanton possession that Ian had stirred, nor the unpredictably shifting wildfires of the whelps when they wrestled and fought. This was gentler, a slower building firestorm, one Jamie could sense coming, but could not and did not wish to escape. Not anymore. As light as the kiss Kenneth gave him was, the play of lush lips and skilled tongue was no less consuming. Jamie was no less willing to be consumed.

  That Jamie had parted his m
outh for Kenneth’s no longer surprised Jamie. The frustration fiercely clawing him that the man would not take up Jamie’s offer shocked him to his core. Jamie, not Kenneth, darted his tongue out to test and taste, sipping the wild tang of deer and the whiskey they’d washed their supper down with from the dark, damp recesses of his mate’s mouth. He liked it. A lot. Loved the moist heat and the slick rubbing together of their tongues, their lips, the clack of their teeth. Their kiss was beautiful, exquisite.

  If Kenneth’s touch had ripened him, his kiss roused him to shrieking awareness and desperate anticipation. Without even trying. Kenneth hadn’t pulled Jamie to him, shoved him to the floor. His mate hadn’t beckoned Jamie. It was he, Jamie, who had done the asking, who had moved closer before the fire, who had asked for this kiss. In seducing, Jamie had been seduced himself. He couldn’t be sorry for that. Hadn’t Kenneth said there should be no more apologies between them?

  Still, he fought sharp regret when Kenneth lifted his mouth away. Jamie didn’t want it to end. He lifted up to chase those teasing lips and was met only with a puff of breath from Kenneth’s husky chuckle. “We are both of us too old to be driven by the lusts of our ripening. We’ve time, Jamie. Plenty of time,” the frustrating bastard said then yielded to temptation too by taking Jamie’s mouth again, this kiss fast, hard, more possessive, and lighting up all the fires in Jamie he had forgotten had ever existed. “Time for sleep, my mate. Up you get,” Kenneth said, pushing a shaky Jamie to his feet, then nudging him toward the den’s sole bed.

  “Sleep,” Jamie said flatly.

  Kenneth laughed. “Yes, sleep. Do you believe sleep isn’t as much a part of mating as tying?”

  “No, it’s not. It’s really not,” Jamie argued, stripping off his plain cotton shirt.

  Kenneth, too, yanked his own shirt up and over his head, letting it fall from the tips of his fingers to the bare wooden floor. “It is once you realize these arms will never be empty in that bed again. Or, for that matter, will be yours. Climb in. I’ll get the light.”