Jack&Teague [& Katy] stories 1-5

by Amy Lane

  There was more after that. There was talk about a house for them, close to Green’s Hill but not on it, because this much family gave Teague the shivers. There was talk about a garden, because Teague never could sit still and he was tired of cleaning their small apartment. There was talk about cats.

  Jack had heard Teague’s quiet, half-terrified desire for a cat before when he’d been in the car. It wasn’t until the night before that he’d heard the story of a kitten snuck into Teague’s room shortly after he’d gotten his first job at the local diner when he was barely fourteen. Teague’s father had found the thing after a week, knocked Teague against the wall, and grabbed the kitten by the back legs and closed its head in the door.

  After Teague had cleaned up the mess, Sean Sullivan had beaten his son until Sean had passed out. Teague reckoned it had been about a half an hour after Teague himself had gone under, judging by the state of his body when he’d woken up.

  It was a horrible story, but it told Jack everything he needed to know about the man he loved.

  Teague had learned that love hurts, and then it hurts, and then it rips out your heart and gnaws on your thrashing corpse. He learned that the thing you loved needed to be protected but that it probably died anyway. He learned that the people you trusted to love you could rip your heart out when you needed them most. He learned that the things you wanted for yourself were wrong and were meant to shred what was left in your chest to teeny-tiny bits.

  The fact that somewhere in there he’d learned to love Jacky at all seemed to be a sort of miracle.

  When Teague was done talking, Jacky waited some more in the dark, until Teague’s breathing evened out and he was well and truly asleep.

  First he wiped his eyes on the corner of the pillow case because he was weeping like a stupid girl, and then he kissed Teague’s face, soft kisses, gentle kisses, a lover’s kisses, not just a bedmate’s. When Teague was moving—just enough to respond, but not quite enough to wake up—Jack kissed his way down.

  He kissed over Teague’s stubbled chin—the stubble was thicker since they’d gotten bit, but still blonde like Teague’s hair must have been as a child. He kissed down his tender neck, liking the little purr Teague made in his throat when he nipped, and then he moved on to the mostly smooth, lean chest that should have been broad but just didn’t have enough meat.

  Jack took his time—he learned Teague’s body in the moonlight. He learned the feeling of his ribs, defined under the knotty muscles, and the way Teague said “unnhh…” in a shivery way every time Jack played with a little pebbled nipple.

  He learned the place of every scar and filed the location away so he could put together every horrible thing his lover had endured later, and suffer with him.

  But mostly, he just learned to make Teague happy, to please him until, like Jack, he didn’t have the strength to say no.

  Teague came fully awake and made a protesting noise when Jack peeled his underwear down. “Jacky, n…”

  Because Jack swallowed his thick erection down to the back of his throat before Teague could say no.

  Teague almost came off the bed and his fingers knotted in Jack’s hair and Jack kept swallowing. He was inexpert at this—Teague had been his first male lover, and as of yet, Jack hadn’t been allowed to love him. But as he slid his lips over the ridge and played his tongue along the taut little harp string below it he figured he must have been doing something right because Teague was making inarticulate, surprised moans into the moonlit quiet around them. That (impressive) erection kept thrusting into the haven of Jack’s mouth and again and again and again… Jack’s mouth was stretched and getting tired, but he was damned if he’d stop before Teague was done.

  He snuck his hand to Teague’s balls and touched them tentatively, fondling the soft skin underneath the coarse brown hair and Teague gave a strangled “Jacky you’re killing me…”

  Memories of Teague’s chest, bruised from his own fingers, passed through Jack’s mind. Jack refused to hurt Teague—he would never make love to him that way—but he could, maybe, just a little bit more firmly…

  Teague cried hoarsely, convulsing around Jack’s head and spurting and spurting as Jack did his damnedest to swallow.

  It was bitter/salty/creamy, and he couldn’t swallow all of it. Some of it spilt down his chin and he wiped it on the back of his hand in the quiet that followed. Teague’s hands came down to his shoulders and he pulled Jack up even to him, but he couldn’t look his lover in the face.

  “Why…”

  Jack put his fingers under Teague’s chin and forced the older man to meet his eyes. The terrible fragility in Teague’s expression made Jack want to punch something again.

  “Don’t ever be afraid to let me love you,” Jack said roughly. He would have said more, but Teague silenced him with a kiss.

  Jack, hungry for Teague’s kisses in a way that far exceeded his hunger for Teague’s skin, fell into the kiss like a ship into a whirlpool. He let Teague taste his own spend on his tongue, he let Teague drug him into silence, he let the kiss continue until they drowned in it. They fell asleep lips touching, breath mingling, practically in the middle of the kiss itself, because he’d seen his lover’s face as they’d made love and he’d tasted his lover’s spend on his own tongue and Jack knew it would be a long hard haul for the two of them—or the three of them—but that for now, he could trust the waiting would pay off.

  Teague Waiting

  Teague was pretty sure he’d deal with being a werewolf just fine. It was the waiting that was killing him.

  Jacky had been wounded about two weeks before Thanksgiving—their first week spent in Green’s Hill, waiting to change, they had been enlisted as kitchen help. Teague wasn’t sure how that had happened, but he was grateful for it. Since the two of them had been cautioned to only go out of the hill accompanied by somebody—anybody else whose body wasn’t going through a sort of hyped-out puberty—taking the orders of Grace, the resident den-mother-cum-vampire kept him busy and out of trouble.

  Teague needed to be busy. If he and Jack had been at home, he would have been cleaning the little apartment until it gleamed, taking runs down to the river bike trail, or working on his car. He didn’t sit still, didn’t meditate, didn’t vegetate—he did his best thinking when his wiry, vibrating body was moving.

  Jacky could sit still just fine, which was all well and good with Teague, because Green may have healed that awful wound across his stomach nice and pretty, but Teague still woke up in a cold sweat remembering when Jack’s perfect, pale skin had been ripped, spilling blood over Teague’s hands.

  So being busy was not a problem. The fact that being kept busy actually kept him from having time to sit down and talk to Jack was a serious bonus.

  “You can’t avoid that conversation forever, querido,” Katy said at his side as they were hopping into his red and white ’70 Mustang in the vast underground garage. He was distracted from Katy’s words for a moment when he saw a brother car—without the white trick paintjob of the fastback—nearby. He’d seen it before, but it was pretty easy to spot, since, with the exception of a battered, rusty brown Toyota P.O.S. and a big purple hearse, every other car in the garage was some sort of hybrid S.U.V.

  “Who else has a ‘Stang?” Teague asked happily.

  “That’s Max’s—he don’t even let Renny drive that car.” Mario, the Avian who was getting dropped off at the Camp Far West site, shook his head. He was a handsome guy—about Teague’s height but more powerfully built. Like Katy, he had the light brown complexion and black hair of Hispanic heritage, but unlike Katy, he didn’t live at the hill full time. When he saw they were running a shopping errand for Grace and asked to cop a ride, he’d explained, My people, they do the sex once, it’s for-fucking-ever. You stay under the hill too long without a break, brother, and you’re going to find yourself doing the sex, you feel me?

  Teague had flushed and nodded, and asked him to jump in the back. And then tried hard not to squirm under
the weight of the questions pressing him into the seat as he drove out of the garage and onto the drive.

  “It’s a nice ‘Stang,” he said lamely into the silence, and Mario, seemingly oblivious to the undercurrents nodded his head.

  “It’s Max’s baby—I think he’s had it since he was a kid, you know?”

  “Yeah—whose beater was that in the back?” Teague had been curious. There didn’t seem any reason to keep it.

  “That’s Lady Cory’s car,” Katy said next to him, “except Green, he don’t let her drive it. You got any more dumbshit questions to ask, Teague, or are you going to talk to me?”

  She tended to slant her eyes at him when she was irritated, Teague thought, charmed. When she was just talking, she looked him full on in the eyes.

  “You want to talk to me about talking to Jacky?” Teague asked, shaking his head. What in the fuck? Could these people not see that talking was not his strongpoint? “Why doesn’t Jacky just talk to me?”

  Katy muttered something that sounded really vile in Spanish, and Mario sat up behind them and laughed. “Brother, whatever it is she wants, you’d better give it to her because she sounds pissed off!”

  “I don’t know what she wants,” Teague muttered. For a year and a half, it had been him and Jacky. On a really rare day, he might talk to a clerk in a store, and on a run, he might talk to three, maybe four other people, including Green. Sitting up at the leader’s table this last week had been like a self-test in making sure he could converse with his fellow humanoids. Finding himself locked in a car with two people who weren’t Jacky was suddenly turning into an endurance run and Teague was regretting saying ‘Yes’ to Grace’s request more and more with every passing meter. It wasn’t like his job tonight wasn’t going to be enough of a trial.

  “I want you to not leave Jacky looking like you ripped his heart out!” Katy protested, and Teague cut a curve really fast because he almost turned to look at her at a bad time. Since one side of this road was a sheer drop with a flimsy rail, he decided he’d better do more driving than talking for a moment. The road evened out and Teague risked a look at Katy, who was a little paler than she had been and gripping the sanity bar with white knuckles. Teague risked a look in the rearview and caught Mario’s shrug.

  “Don’t look at me, wolf-man—I take this drive with Lady Cory. You ever want to shit your shorts, she’s the one to make you do it.”

  “You guys go to school together, right?” Teague asked—it was a serious question: he had an agenda.

  “Yeah—but not this next semester. I’m taking the time off to help Green get the Aerie finished. He’s doing it up right, you know, and it’s hard with all of us in and out.” Mario shrugged, the gesture hiding sadness. “I don’t start aging until my next mate. I got time.”

  Teague’s eyebrows hit his hairline and he almost forgot where he was going with the question. “So Jacky, he could fit in the car this next semester, right?”

  Mario shrugged again, this time in bemusement. “Yeah—don’t see why not. But you gotta know those of us that go—we’re like her honor guard, you know?”

  And now Katy was curious. “She gots to have all those people with her? What, she gets an entourage or something?”

  Mario’s face and voice grew grim. “You two weren’t around last year. Yeah, she needs a fucking entourage, and if you’re really lucky, you get to think it’s for decoration. We don’t call her ‘Lady Cory’ cause she’s cute little white girl, mija—we call her that because she’s laid her life down more’n once for pretty much every fucking one of us.”

  “Okay okay okay already!” Katy held up her hands. “I gotchu—being her entourage is like the secret fucking service—I hear.”

  Teague was silent, and both of them looked at him. He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll hold off on that school thing if it’s dangerous. We got a run tonight—I’ll get to see how she rolls.”

  “What—you and Jack and Cory?” Katy asked suspiciously, and Teague was able to keep his eyes on the road.

  “Cory, Bracken, Nicky, Max, and a couple of the vampires,” he replied expressionlessly, and Katy blew out a low whistle. Mario did the math and held up his hands.

  “Okay—you two? I’m asleep. I’ve had a long fucking week—finals are kicking this old man’s ass—you two go about your business and have this big throwdown that’s brewing in the air like a storm and I’m going to close my eyes and snore like a sick horse, comprende?”

  “Does Jacky know?” Katy asked hopefully, and Teague’s shrug was not even close to a lie.

  “I was going to tell him,” Teague muttered.

  “When?” Katy asked sharply, and Teague would have thrown her a dirty look but they were crossing the Foresthill bridge so it was best to keep his eyes on the road.

  “Tonight before we left!” Teague shot back, and what Katy let loose a string of Spanish that had Teague growling.

  “You stop swearing at me in Mexican, Katy—this is none of your business!”

  “I don’t speak ‘Mexican’ you stupid pendejo, I speak Spanish!”

  They were at a stoplight now and Teague glared at her. “I took Spanish in high school and I know the difference between good Spanish and dirty-mean Nor-Cali-Mexican—whatever you just said, it wasn’t in the schoolbooks, it wasn’t nice, and it’s none of your goddamned business, so you just take it back!”

  Behind them Mario made a sound that didn’t sound like a snore at all, but they all pretended that it was.

  “Okay, okay,” Katy backed down. Her next look at Teague was direct and sad. “I just…I watched you, Teague. I watched you in our suckass town, when not a single mother-fucker would help you. I watched you leave, I watched you kneel at Jacky’s body when you thought I’d killed him… your whole life, you wanted somebody to love, Teague…”

  “Aw… gees…Katy…” Teague muttered, feeling naked. He hated being naked in front of people—it was worse when he cared for them, when what they thought of him mattered.

  “No—don’t ‘Aww gees’ me,” Kate snapped back. “Your whole life, you’ve been a naked bird looking for a tree, Teague Sullivan, and now that you’ve found one you’re going to peck it to death for… for I don’t even know what!”

  “You didn’t have it much better, Field Mouse,” Teague defended, using the name he’d called her when she was barely out of diapers and her mother, her poor, lost mother, would come into the diner where Teague worked for coffee.

  “Bullshit, Teague,” Katy responded after a few tense moments of driving in what amounted to a rural residential zone. Her little body bounced against the seatbelt as the navigated the un-lined streets on the gray November day. “I had my moms—she couldn’t always feed me, but she held me. She sang. I had you—you say you don’t remember, but I gots to tell you, I got four meals a week from that diner. You damned near kept me alive until I was old enough to steal. I asked mommy once, you know, why she didn’t eat when you offered? She told me that was your food, and it was all you got all day. She’d take it for me but not for herself. You were feeding me your food, you dumb mother fucker—we all knew your poppi was drinking your paycheck—and you’re feeding a lost little kid your fucking food…and…dammit…why? You’ve finally got someone to shelter you, and it’s not like I don’t want in on some of that, but why you trying to push him away? Why not tell him about this run?”

  Katy finished speaking. They were on a stretch of McCourtney Road now, long, windy, with a decent shoulder. Someone used to have cattle here, but the barbed wire was all rusty and broken. Teague looked at her, and she was looking down at her hands, and the silence in the car was so thick that Mario’s obviously wide-awake swallow seemed to slice right through it.

  So did Katy’s sniffle.

  Teague looked at her again and there was a quiet, clear tear, trembling down her cheek, just for him.

  “Fuck!!!!” Teague peeled into the road shoulder, hoping the fucking car didn’t sink into the fucking mud, and hit the brakes har
d enough for the posi-traction to wobble the back. With a slam of the door, Teague was out of the car, stomping over the downed wire, hauling ass through the long pale green grass the rains always brought, trying to get away from the fucking car, from the fucking conversation, from the goddamned little woman who reminded him who he had been once, who he was afraid of being now.

  He barely heard the door slam behind him as that woman marched out of the car after him.

  “So you not driving anymore, is that it?” she hollered and he stood with his back to her, trying to fight off the shakes.

  “Wouldja give me a minute, Field Mouse,” he asked, trying to be reasonable, trying to keep the shaking out of his voice. “I’d just like to pull my shit together a little here—is that so fucking wrong?”

  “Why you got to pull anything together, Teague? Why can’t you just say…”

  Teague whirled. “I can’t even say it to Jacky…to Jacky… what makes you think I’m just going to blurt it out to you?”

  Katy stood her ground, her pretty, full mouth pressed together and her dark brown eyes narrowed. “Because you got to say it to somebody—why not me? No one ever noticed me but you—no one ever know to ask me what your deal is.”

  “You’re beautiful, Katy—don’t tell me no one noticed that!” He smiled a little, and a faint hope pulsed through him that maybe they could flirt this moment away, and the fear howling through him wouldn’t have to be revealed, naked under the gray November sky.

  Katy screwed up her eyes against his words, and a brief, hard sob shook her before she set her mouth mutinously and glared at him through red-rimmed brown eyes. “I’ve been told that, Teague. Boys wanted my body and if they had smack I gave it to them. I lost my virginity to the bobula that gave me my first fix. I lay there on that filthy mattress and I closed my eyes and thought of someone, anyone, I’d rather have on top of me…you know whose face I saw?”