by J L Aarne
“It doesn’t have to be,” Owen said.
Sam took his hand away and clasped them both together again, staring down at the blue carpet. “Yes, it does.”
Owen didn’t say anything, then he walked away from Sam and started taking off the rest of his clothes on his way into the bathroom. Sam watched him, frowning and puzzled, before deciding to follow him.
Owen’s back was to him as he turned on the shower and adjusted the water. He was tense and Sam knew that deep down he was hurting. He had the phases of the moon tattooed in an arc across his shoulders and Sam put his hand between them where the full moon lay.
“What can I do?” he asked.
Owen shrugged and stepped into the shower. He held a hand out for Sam and pulled him in with him beneath the spray. Owen washed Sam’s hair then his body. Sam allowed it, let him move him as he wanted to clean away the sweat and come and stench of Caleb. When Owen turned him to face away from him, Sam braced his hands on the wall of the shower and spread his legs for Owen to wash him there, too.
The showerhead was directly above him so he didn’t feel right way when Owen pressed his lips to his back. Owen’s tongue flicked out and he licked between Sam’s shoulders. He kissed him there and Sam shivered to feel his breath on the back of his neck, the same place Caleb’s panting breath had been minutes before. Owen caught the lobe of his ear in his teeth and tugged, nibbled at it, his breath hot on the side of his neck. The water cascaded down Sam’s back and fell on Owen’s head, washing everything away the moment it touched him.
“May I?” Owen whispered in his ear.
Sam closed his eyes, let out his breath on a sigh and nodded. “Of course.”
Owen pressed a finger inside him and stroked. He added another and worked them in and out of his body while he nuzzled the side of Sam’s neck and licked his shoulder. Pleasure was slow to kindle within him again so quickly, but it began to build and Sam moaned. He turned his head seeking Owen’s mouth and he was there to kiss him. He swallowed Sam’s next moans and growled, pushing up against him.
When Owen removed his fingers, he took Sam’s hips in his hands and his shoulder in his teeth. He didn’t bite down hard, but he held him like that as he thrust inside him. Sam cried out and let his head fall back on his shoulders, the shower spray in his face and running down his throat. Owen growled around the muscle of Sam’s shoulder and began to move, fucking him hard and slow.
Mine, he said with his body. With every pounding thrust inside him, with every clench of his teeth in Sam’s flesh and every growl that hummed down his spine, he was saying it; Mine. You are mine. All of you. Everything. You belong to me. Me and no other.
It was as true now as it had always been, not that it mattered if they were the only two who knew it.
Sam wrapped his hand around his own cock and began to stroke it, to hurry his own orgasm along, but Owen reached down and slapped it away. He growled and took Sam’s hand, smacked it flat to the wall beneath his own. Took his other hand and laced their fingers together, not allowing him to touch himself.
Sam’s breath hitched with every thrust and he could feel pleasure building into a ball of fire in his belly, but it was a slow burn. Slow to grow because of his recent orgasm, but there all the same and it was a deep, clenching, trembling pleasure that he moved back against Owen to seek out. It wasn’t pretty; it was out of control like a wildfire, like a freeway collision, their bodies colliding in time to a rhythm they knew by heart.
Owen came with a harsh cry and slowed his thrusts, but then he picked back up and didn’t stop and Sam got one hand free and reached back for him, his nails dragging down Owen’s side. He was oversensitive from all of it, the sex on top of sex, the stimulation that was unending, the orgasm that kept building and building, winding tighter, growing hotter without releasing. Sam screamed and the sound of it broke and broke as Owen kept going. The water was cold on their skin and Sam just wanted it to end. It felt so good that it hurt and he couldn’t stand it. He ached all over, inside and out, and his skin felt two sizes too small. He could hear the high whimpering in his own voice when he screamed and he tried to bite it back.
“Please,” he said softly, almost babbling. “Please, Owen, please. Please just… I can’t. I’m going fucking crazy. Please. It hurts. I can’t… I need to…”
Owen reached around him and turned off the water. He slowed down and Sam made a sound of frustration in his throat that made Owen laugh a little. “You can do it,” he whispered, putting his mouth close to Sam’s ear as he kept going. He’d softened only a bit after coming, but he was hard again. Something that made Sam despair. “I’ve seen you, remember?”
“I don’t want to think about that,” Sam hissed.
“Neither do I, but it happens.” Owen ran a hand down Sam’s spine and rested it just above the swell of his ass as he thrust. “I’ve seen you gangbanged by five or six guys at the gathering. I don’t want to think about it, but sometimes it just sneaks in there. I’ve watched Jordan throw you down over the end of the dining room table and fuck you in front of every alpha and beta from the Idaho border to Billings. You liked it that time, too. I’d need some kind of brain bleach to—”
“What do you want?” Sam asked. His voice was strained and it was hard to focus, but he turned his head and looked back at Owen. “You’re mad about what you saw out there, so you’re going to torture me now, for what? What do you get out of that? You’re not a sadist, my love.”
“You’re right,” Owen said.
He reached around Sam, grasped his cock in his hand and jerked him off. It only took a few seconds like that, a few quick strokes and Sam cried out and stood up from the wall, arching back against Owen as his orgasm slammed through him. It was like being punched.
Owen pulled out of him and let him go. Sam clung to him but without Owen to hold him up, his legs wobbled and he sank to his knees.
Owen left him like that, shaking and gasping on the floor, and stepped out of the shower. He wrapped a towel around his waist and walked out of the bathroom.
Sam remained like that for a few minutes, until he got his bearings and could stand. He wanted to be mad at Owen, but he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. It had been mean and not very much like him, but harmless enough. Sam was shaken and sore, but he would recover. Owen had a right to be angry. Hell, he had a right to be angry a whole lot more often than he seemed to be. He didn’t get mad at Sam very much, not even when he deserved it, and though Sam could have argued that he did not deserve it this time, he couldn’t really blame him either.
When he stepped out of the bathroom, Owen wasn’t there, so he held a towel around his waist and went to find him.
He found Owen in the living room on the sofa staring at the blank screen of his TV while he smoked a cigarette. He had pulled on pants and a shirt, but not them. His hand trembled a bit when he lifted it to take his cigarette from his mouth.
“Maybe we should talk,” Sam said.
Owen glanced his way. “I don’t think so,” he said. “They’ve probably all gone to bed now. You can go get your clothes in the living room.”
Sam didn’t understand what he was saying at first. Then it hit him. “You… You’re throwing me out?”
“I apologize for what just happened,” Owen said. “It was… cruel.”
“It was fine, Owen,” Sam said. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“Maybe, but I’m not fine.”
“So you want me to leave.”
Owen nodded.
“You want me to leave here naked to go scrounge around for my clothes in the living room where—” Sam cut himself off. Owen knew exactly what he was doing, Sam wasn’t going to beg him not to. He took the towel from around his waist and threw it in Owen’s face. “Fine. Have it your way.”
He stalked through the apartment, naked, still damp from the shower and shaking, yanked open the door and slammed it closed on his way out. “Asshole,” he growled.
Owen was right, everyone had go
ne to bed, but that didn’t make the snipe-hunt for his clothes any less humiliating. Owen had never thrown him out before. Not during a fight or after one. Not ever.
At first Sam was just angry about it, but as he calmed down and began to think about it, he started to worry. Something was different or it wouldn’t have happened. Something had changed or was changing in Owen and that scared Sam. He couldn’t lose Owen, but what if, like most everything, it wasn’t up to him?
5
Sam didn’t become the omega of his pack overnight, but his downfall could be traced back to one single event. A single moment. A single decision. A choice made between heartbeats which changed everything that came after.
It happened on a Sunday early in December. It didn’t feel different from any other day. Sam got up early in the morning like he always did, leaving Owen asleep in their bed, and went out to sit on the hill slope outside the main house to watch the sunrise. He wore a long wool coat his mother had given him a few years earlier and carried a thermos of hot coffee and he sat in the dark as the sky turned from black to deep blue and the birds all around began to sing. It was a little chilly and the wind gusted every once in a while, so cold that it cut through his warm coat like a knife.
The sky had started to turn purple where it touched the mountain tops when the wind carried Owen’s scent to him. Owen sat down on the ground beside him and for a minute they didn’t say anything. Sam poured coffee into the cup top of the thermos and passed it to him, and Owen sipped it before he gave it back.
“You should have woke me up,” Owen said.
“You were sleeping, I didn’t want to bother you,” Sam said.
Owen nodded and they watched the sky change to a lighter blue, the clouds lighting up with the first touches of rose pink, lavender and salmon orange. The clouds that day were in a strange jittery checkerboard pattern across the sky and as they changed to such shining colors, the whole thing became a vast carpet unrolled above them, going on for miles.
“Every morning,” Owen said. He watched Sam’s profile in the growing light of the sunrise. “Every single morning, even when there’s eight feet of snow out here, you come out and watch this. Then every night, even in the summer when the sun doesn’t set until nearly midnight. I get it, it’s really pretty, but… every single time.”
“Every time is different,” Sam said with a shrug.
Owen turned his gaze up to the sky. “It looks kinda like water, don’t you think?”
“Kinda,” Sam said. “Like waves. It’s like the ocean, maybe.”
“I’ve never been to the ocean.”
“Neither have I. But it’s like… It’s so big. It’s so great. And it’s like, no matter who you are, you have to feel so fucking tiny looking up there at it, right? I bet even the president or the queen of England or whatever they’ve got now, I bet even they’d feel like nothing next to something like that.”
“If they ever bother to look at shit like that.” Owen smiled and lightly jostled Sam’s leg with his own. “So, what? You come out here every morning and watch the sunrise because it keeps you humble?”
“No, but it helps,” Sam said. He smiled, too and drank his coffee. “Mostly I just like to watch it. I think about things and everyone’s still asleep so it’s quiet. It’s nice.”
“Like what things?” Owen asked.
“I don’t know, things.”
Owen leaned over and tilted his head to look up at Sam. “Come on, tell me something you think about while watching the sunrise.”
Sam rolled his eyes. “All right. Like God.”
Owen snorted and sat back. “You don’t believe in God.”
“Well, no, but that’s not the point.”
The clouds were magenta and orange, gilded at the edges and turning silver as they thinned out. In a few moments, the sun would rise just a fraction more and the whole thing would change or be obliterated. A few moments after that, the sky would be blue and the clouds would be white and people would begin waking up, eating breakfast, planning their days, and going to work.
Sam and Owen were going into Hellgate to spend the day walking the streets and visiting the shops. Owen needed cigarettes, Sam wanted to look for something for his mother for winter solstice. The wolves didn’t celebrate Christmas, it was a human tradition and very few wolves were born human, so the custom wasn’t practiced among them, but they did celebrate the winter solstice every year at the winter gathering. Owen and Sam were also planning to declare themselves mates and exchange vows in December, but Sam already had his gift for Owen; it was a ring and he’d been carrying it in his pocket for months. He didn’t know if Owen had bought his ring yet, but he suspected that was at least part of the reason he’d talked Sam into going out with him later.
“What is the point then?” Owen prodded when Sam didn’t continue.
“For two million years or something like that, people have been trying to figure out why we’re here,” Sam said. The brightest of the colors had already faded from the sky, so he turned his head and looked at Owen instead. “Who created us? Why? And we’re no closer to knowing the answer than they were when they first asked the question. But people created gods to worship, said the gods they’d made had created them, gave them some mysterious, unknown purpose for doing this… and they all live up there.” He pointed to the sky overhead. “In the sky, on top of the tallest mountain, in heaven. And you know, that makes sense, right? I mean, if I was a god and I could live wherever I wanted, I’d live up there, too. I know, okay? I don’t believe in gods and I don’t really see the point in asking why we’re here because here we are, so what does it matter? But I get it. I get why we look up there and say that’s where God lives. That’s where we go when it’s all over.”
Owen frowned and looked up at the sky, now almost entirely blue, and sighed. “You think about all that watching the sunrise?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” Sam said. “Sometimes I think about you still in bed all warm and naked and me sitting out here in a snowbank freezing my nuts off.”
Owen laughed and tipped to the side to bump shoulders with Sam. “It’s pretty cold out here now. You want to go get naked and jump back in bed?”
Sam laughed, too and stood up. He put a hand down to pull Owen up after him and they walked back to the house.
They were both nineteen and had been living there in their own quarters together instead of in their parents’ houses with their siblings since they were fifteen. Their union would not come as a surprise to anyone when they made it official, it had been expected for a long time. They had started showing signs of their connection with one another at a young age, and their elders had watched it grow the same way they had watched the young boys and girls play fight and establish themselves almost from the time they could crawl.
Sam was three months younger than Owen, but Owen had always deferred to him. So had they all. Sam would one day lead them, and Owen would be at his side when he did. This was something that was known.
They went back to their room and crawled back into bed, and they had sex while most of the house went on sleeping. Sam covered Owen’s mouth when he started to moan and cry out a little too loudly and Owen dragged his blunt nails down Sam’s back. They rested a little while and listened to the house waking up beyond their door. Then sweaty and sated, but wide-awake themselves, they got into the shower and washed it all away.
Sam’s mother, Maira, was in the kitchen that morning. She had chased the omega bitch, Caroline, out of the kitchen and was whisking batter for waffles in a large bowl when Sam and Owen climbed up on stools at the counter.
“What’s the occasion?” Sam asked.
He loved his mother’s waffles, but living in the big house as he did, he didn’t get to have them very often.
“No occasion,” Maira said. “I just got up this morning and decided I wanted to make waffles. Your father’s gone with Desmond until Tuesday or Wednesday, so I’d only be making them for myself and your sisters.”
Sam had three sisters, Maiven, his twin, who had moved out of their parent’s home two years before and had her own room at the big house, and the little twin girls, Jocelyn and Lyra, who were only eleven. Jocelyn and Lyra were picky eaters and they ate like birds anyway. Their mother was always scolding them about not eating their food and being too skinny.
“I, for one, am not complaining, Mrs. Bowman,” Owen said. “I love waffles.”
Sam leaned over and whispered in his ear, “Ass kisser.”
Owen swatted him away. “She’s like my future mother-in-law. It’s only good sense, but I do love waffles. Her waffles especially. I think Caroline tried to make waffles once, but they were hard and rubbery, you remember?”
Sam shrugged. He didn’t remember, but he didn’t like Caroline, so he wouldn’t have noticed it even if they had been the best waffles he’d ever tasted.
Maira made them breakfast and she made breakfast for whoever else came to get it while she was still there. She stayed long enough to feed Maiven when she came in from exercising her horse, Sparrow. Maiven sat with Sam while she ate and he drank more coffee and they didn’t talk, but it was comfortable, companionable silence. Maiven was a few minutes older than Sam, but they were alike in a lot of ways and they had always been very close. Often they sat together without speaking for hours, they had even done it as children, each playing with some toy or coloring book, not fighting, not really playing together, but staying near.
“You smell like horse,” Owen said, leaning over to peer down the counter at her.
Maiven cocked an eyebrow at him and lifted a glass of orange juice to her mouth to drink. Her bright hazel eyes sparked with mischief. “You smell like sex.”
Owen stared. Then his eyes narrowed.
Because of how close Sam was with his sister, Owen was around her quite a bit. They were friends, but this had also resulted in a strange sort of rivalry between them.
