by Amy Lane
“What do you dream about, beloved?”
Teague hauled in another breath and Jack felt one final, convulsive shiver rock his scrawny, tree-root body.
“Letting you down,” he said after a moment, and Jack kissed his forehead. It was still clammy from the dream, and Teague made a rough sound in his throat before his shoulders came down in that self-protective cocoon that Jack recognized so well.
“Impossible,” Jack said fervently. In his head, he was thinking that his dream could wait. Teague had enough on his mind.
Teague
Personal Debt
When Teague Sullivan was fourteen years old, he made a miraculous discovery.
Girls wanted to touch him.
Boys probably wanted to touch him too, but he didn’t figure that out until Jacky, and it was beside the point. The point was, Teague was never touched unless he was getting beaten. When Michelle Campos, with glossy dark hair in rolled curls and vivacious brown eyes and the sexual confidence of a girl who knew she was wanted, pinned him behind the boy’s lockers after sixth period gym, murmured breathily into his mouth and put her hands on his shoulders, Teague was mesmerized. Not by Michelle, although she was pretty damned awesome, but by the feel of her palms on his flesh.
He opened his mouth to her kisses, and she tasted like soda and chocolate. He didn’t get a lot of sweet in his life, so he learned to love sweet, although he never ever asked for it. She pulled up his shirt and rubbed his bare skin with her whole hand, and he must have whimpered in complete surprise when she hit his nipples and his whole body tingled because she laughed into his mouth and kissed him harder.
Before he could protest (not that he would have) she had unbuttoned his jeans and was on her knees, in the dark of the locker-room, with his hard, aching cock in her mouth and her hands massaging his thighs. He couldn’t have said at that moment which one felt better. When his vision went dark and his body exploded and his eyes rolled back into his head, he might have said it was the mouth on his cock, but it was a near thing.
He didn’t know what to do then.
He stood there, stroking her hair as she laughed some more into the closeness of his thighs, and then they heard voices.
“Ooops!” she said, standing up and wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. She had a wicked smile, and he found himself answering it, feeling shy and dumb and inept. It didn’t matter. She gave him a quick kiss on the mouth, letting him taste himself, and then held her finger to her lips and disappeared through the back entrance to the boy’s locker room, leaving Teague to haul up his jeans and continue breathing, although that second one was somewhat of a stretch.
He’d felt vaguely ashamed of that moment.
Not of her mouth or her hands or anything she’d done—that had been wonderful. So wonderful in fact that sex became like soda or chocolate—that sweet thing he would never reach for but would take only when it dropped into his lap. (Which it did frequently, much to his constant surprise and puzzlement. He didn’t do anything! Why did women keep wanting to feel him up and blow him?)
No, he felt ashamed because of what he didn’t do. He hadn’t done anything to deserve that miracle of firing nerves and human touch. He’d just smiled at her a little in math and that had been all. But she’d kept smiling at him and he’d kept returning it, every day a little longer, and then… then on this day, she’d blessed him with human touch and orgasm, and he hadn’t paid his debt.
He never got a chance to pay that debt. Michele’s boldness had been an act of desperation and goodbye—her parents were moving her to an even smaller school in an even smaller town, because the assumption is that sex doesn’t happen in small schools in small towns. Anyone who’s ever been to one could tell you different, but parents are often afraid of sex, and there’s no reasoning with them.
So Teague learned his second lesson.
He learned that if you don’t see the person ever again, any mistakes you make, any fuck-ups or uncomfortable moments could be pretty much forgotten.
Teague lived to be fourteen because he learned quickly and acted on the knowledge. He learned to be a fucking awesome lover in the same way. He never wanted to feel that sense of shame and debt for not giving back. He also learned to only go home with girls who wouldn’t want to know his name in the morning.
Teague had been almost thirty when he woke up in Green’s bed after being healed of what should have been a mortal wound. He never said a word to Green—he never had to—about how Green’s touch was like food to a starving man and balm to a ravaged soul. Green knew. But when Teague found himself sharing a bed with Jacky and then Katy, being touched constantly, especially in sleep, became a sweet and terrible part of his life.
Sweet because it was the thing he craved most of all and never wanted to admit to needing.
Terrible because he could not see how, in his entire history, he had ever come to deserve such kindness. How could he repay it? It was like that long ago blow-job—perfect, exquisite, and stolen from the pain that the world should be.
So that touch as he went to sleep haunted his dreams. Whether his lovers were being chased by a dragon with his father’s face or whether he was locked in his head, screaming in his skull as his traitorous body destroyed what he loved best, it was all about being touched and how if it didn’t hurt, Teague Sullivan didn’t deserve it.
Now that he’d had love for a couple of weeks and learned that it hurt sometimes worse than no love at all, he would have thought the dreams would ease up a little, but they didn’t. Life became a crapshoot. One day he was sitting with his family and ready to reach for them like he had a right to be happy, the next day he was howling his chest raw because he had no right to be happy, none at all. It was almost easier when he expected to be beaten all the time—at least then he’d known what was coming. It had sucked, but he hadn’t been touched then. He didn’t know the opposite of ‘suck’. He didn’t know that sometimes heaven might allow ‘rock’ as opposed to ‘suck’.
The dreams hurt. They ripped his mind like demons playing gleefully in the viscera of his broken heart.
That was what love should feel like, right? That was all he deserved?
He certainly didn’t deserve Jacky holding him, rocking him, kissing his forehead like a child, making him feel protected and safe. He definitely didn’t deserve the softness of Katy, pressed up against his back in sweetness, better than chocolate and soda and softer than cotton candy or puppy fur. He didn’t deserve them—he knew he didn’t. But they wouldn’t let him up, wouldn’t let him out of bed into the cold and the dark and the wet.
They wouldn’t let him go, and so he accepted them, he had to, because even when he didn’t deserve them he knew better than to hurt them when punishing himself. Any asshole knew that was a debt you could never repay, and Teague always paid his debts.
That didn’t make accepting Jacky’s comfort any easier, any less painful, but it did make it possible.
Love was a debt to repay. Teague may have to work his whole life to be even, but it would be worth it not to feel the shame of ingratitude at the end.
Since he wasn’t sleeping with Green or the Lady Cory, this went double for them. It went triple or quadruple—they asked for nothing. They didn’t hold him down and make him accept their love. They didn’t force him to acknowledge his feelings—because God knew that was more pain than it seemed worth most of the time. They didn’t look boldly at his scars and feel that pain twice—once for him and once for themselves. They just asked him to do a job, and expected him to be competent.
It was, by far, the most painless love Teague had ever experienced.
And although he couldn’t rank it first—he just couldn’t, some stubborn part of his soul had to make Jacky first and Katy a close second and nothing he could tell himself about duty first, comfort second could change that—he could rank it equal.
He’d die for his King and Queen, just as he’d die for Jacky and Katy. Goddess knew, dying for them might even
be easier than living for them, but he wasn’t planning on testing that out anytime soon.
He hated to admit it, but he was starting to enjoy the drug of comfort. He may even become addicted to it, like his father had been to liquor. But since he’d yet to beat anyone’s head in with a broken bottle or kill kittens just for sport, he thought maybe the addiction to his lovers’ skin might be his little secret.
He certainly wouldn’t let it get in the way of repaying his debts.
Which is why it hurt something vital in him to confess to Jack the nature of his dreams. He couldn’t repay that—he just couldn’t. He was in Jack’s debt, just to be able to say the words and lay them at Jack’s feet. It felt better, sharing that sort of burden, and he couldn’t take Jack’s anxieties in the same spirit. He’d always carried Jack’s burdens—it was the nature of their relationship.
He could tell Cory or Green—they were his leaders, they bore the weight of their people on their shoulders, and as one of their men, he laid his life on the line in return.
But he’d already done that for Jack several times. He had no currency to repay the confidence. So he just blurted it out and trusted in what Jack and Katy had been trying to tell him for the past week or so—part of being lovers was taking another person’s pain. He wasn’t sure if he believed that—he wasn’t even sure if it worked—but he did know that when he closed his eyes, wrapped in Jack’s arms, he knew for a certainty that he wouldn’t be waking up with another dream, at least not on this night.
The next morning, Katy woke him with a sleepy kiss.
“Last two das were nice, pappi, but today I’ve gots to work.” She smelled spicy and exotic as she kissed him—something about the soap she’d brought to use in the shower, but he liked it. It was like cinnamon and bay leaves—both warm and sharp, just like her.
“You have a good day, Katy,” he mumbled, and she surprised him by keeping her face close and regarding him with warm brown eyes.
“Last time I told you to sleep in, Teague, you didn’t. You got all hurt and then went on a run and then you and Jacky, you almost got killed, and then we had to sit on you to make you sleep in. I know you’ve got to meet werewolves and be all functional today but… could you, just for me pappi, let me think of you tucked in here with Jacky for an hour? Don’t get into no fights, don’t get all hurt on your inside. Just sleep. Make love. Try a do-over, okay?”
Teague blinked. “Maybe I’m just not designed for sleeping in. You ever think about that, Katy?”
She shook her head and swore softly in Spanish. “I think you got some time to go before your heart’s all better, that’s what I think. I think you might kill us first while it’s mending. ‘Bye…”
“Katy…” He’d hurt her, and he didn’t know how, and she scowled at him and gave him a flipped wrist with an open palm. Talk to the palm, Teague, I’m done talking to you.
“Fine, dammit!” he snapped before she could slam the door. “I’m staying here in bed. Are you happy?”
She looked over her shoulder as she got to the door, and he couldn’t help but think that even the sulky thrust of her lower lip was charming. “You gonna get laid?” she asked, considering.
Teague risked a look at Jacky who squinted one eye at him and went back to feigning sleep to keep out of the argument.
“No,” he said punitively, and as Jack sat up in bed and protested, “NO?” Katy let out a musical laugh and slid gracefully out the door.
Teague grunted, a reluctant smile twitching his usually compressed mouth. “Serves you right,” he grumbled and then hauled the comforter over his shoulder and retreated to the corner of the bed where he usually slept.
Jack scooted next to him and grabbed him around the waist in spite of his startled squawk, and then Teague found himself hauled up back-to-front with his lover.
“What in the…”
“Humor me,” Jack murmured, and then he… fondled Teague, for lack of a better word.
“I thought we were supposed to be sleeping,” Teague muttered, but he wasn’t protesting very hard. God, Jack’s touch, Katy’s touch—it really had become his drug, hadn’t it?
Jack’s hand slid across Teague’s chest, rubbing deliberately against Teague’s sensitive nipples and down his stomach, and Teague arched into it, appreciating the pure touch of skin on skin.
“You go ahead and sleep all you want,” Jack murmured into the sensitive hollow of his ear, “just let me touch you while you sleep.”
Teague bit back on a half-strangled sound. It might have been “please” before he killed it.
“Please?” Jacky asked plaintively, and then Teague felt like a coward for not saying the word first.
“I really do need to run today,” he protested half-heartedly. “That’s not just bull…sh…eeeet…”
“Bullsheet?” Jack chuckled, but he had just wrapped his arm over Teague’s shoulders and framed Teague’s throat with his long-fingered hand. It was an intimate position, a vulnerable position—especially when the hand was large and it was attached to a tall, strong man. Teague’s vulnerability slammed into his chest, and it occurred to him that he literally gave Jack his safety, his life, just with that one gesture.
He wanted to run. It took all of his will to simply lie passive under Jack’s seductive touch.
Jack seemed to sense this—carefully, he stroked down from Teague’s throat and whispered, “Shhhhh… take it easy, big man,” into his ear.
Teague swallowed. “I wasn’t kid…”
“I know.” Sometimes these exchanges got heated, sharp—Teague’s driving need to run coming up against Jack’s possessive need to keep him in their bed. But not this time. Maybe it was the enforced intimacy of the day before, or maybe Jack just knew what he needed, but this time, Jack’s voice only grew gentler.
“Here, beloved,” he whispered, and Teague blushed under the endearment at the same time he blushed under Jack’s hands. “Here, I’ll make you a deal.”
“Yeah?” Teague hated the note of pleading in his voice, but his insides were still raw. The day before he’d had an emotional pain dump of epic proportions, a 9.9 on the Richter scale of internal cataclysms—he couldn’t have another argument right now. He wouldn’t do it. He needed something easy… God help him, he needed to give in. But he was stubborn. He would negotiate. He wouldn’t go too far into the debt of touching… he couldn’t. That was his code. It had kept him sane for thirty soulless years. Yes, whispered his traitorous body, but those years were before Jacky. He told the voice to shut up—Jack was offering him a way out.
“Yeah,” Jack muttered, nibbling on his ear again. Teague’s hips started to arch and wiggle and he tried to make himself stop that. It was impossible to stay out of personal debt when your body was taking touch on credit.
“What’s the deal?” He tried to turn then, thinking he would pin Jacky down, ravish him, take his long, drooling cock into his mouth and make him crazy. Jacky would touch him then, unreservedly, and Teague could earn the touches that way. But Jack kept his arms around Teague’s chest and tightened the embrace, not letting him move unless he jerked his body out of Jack’s control—and that would lead to a fight, to a conflict, and Teague… oh Goddess… he was still bleeding from thinking Jacky was dead, from having his lovers tend to him like a fraught, weepy child.
“The deal,” Jack murmured, biting the nape of his neck gently and then laving it with his tongue, “is that once—just once—you stay here and let me make love to you. No running away, no fighting to be on top, to be in charge. Stay here, let me touch you. Touch back if you want to, but don’t take over.”
Teague’s supreme discomfort with the idea came out with the whine in his throat. “I’m… I’ve got to… Jacky, I’m not good with that…”
Well, it was obvious he wasn’t good with it—his body was straining against itself, and Jack’s hands started rubbing his shoulders in more insistent circles. “Just let me, Teague.” Jacky pushed on Teague’s shoulder insistently, an
d Teague found himself rolling over onto his stomach. “Let me—I promise, you let me take care of you, and I’ll let you go running. No strings attached, no drama—you’ll just put on your shoes and go.”
Jack sat up then and straddled Teague’s thighs while his hands worked big-palmed magic on the twisted, knotted steel bars at Teague’s shoulders.
“Damn, Teague—you just woke up—how can you be this tight?” Jack wriggled, and Teague could feel the long muscles of his inner thighs against the corded muscle of Teague’s flank. Jack’s cock was semi-hard and nestled between Teague’s legs near the crease of his buttocks, and Teague kept wanting to clench his ass cheeks to keep it there or bring it closer, which surprised the hell out of him in general.
He grunted a non-committal sort of reply to Jack’s question and forced himself not to move, not to respond, to just lay there and accept the wonder of Jack’s touch as it was bestowed on him.
“So,” Jack asked, leaning forward so his lips would touch Teague’s spine between his shoulders, “do we have a deal?”
“I’m not good at this,” Teague temporized, because he wasn’t sure he could. To lay down and just accept touch? To not give anything in return? To exercise complete trust in another human being—even Jacky—not to hurt him when he had relinquished control?
“Not good at accepting love?” Jack asked, still bent over Teague’s back. “I never would have guessed.” He rained some more kisses along Teague’s back and then shifted, so that he was no longer straddling Teague’s thighs—the better to knead the muscles in his lower back and buttocks, really.
Teague made a sound of loss for Jack’s cock, no longer wedged near his bottom, and tried to think of something to say to the sarcastic truth Jack had just given him.
“You’ll just let me go?” he ended up whining, and wondered when he’d turned into a six- year-old girl.
“After we shower,” Jack affirmed, and Teague, mesmerized by the absolute wonder of Jack’s hands, moving from his lower back to his scrawny, muscular ass, couldn’t do more than grunt and agree.
