Rough Sleepers

by Nem Rowan

  "You do, though." I grinned, which amused him because he laughed, only for the gruff sound to be cut off by my kiss. I tested the waters, to see how ready he was; at first it was just teasing kisses, but then it got deeper. I reached for his bare chest, clawing my fingertips through the dense hair that grew there and seeking the contact of a small, hidden nipple.

  He let out a deep grumbling moan when I opened my mouth, my tongue emerging to slip against his. I could taste his chewing tobacco; it was sweet and fragrant, not disgusting like I had expected. His heavy breathing and the musky scent of his arousal was making goosebumps prickle down my back, the rhythmic pulsing of his heart so close to me, forcing blood south. I turned and climbed atop him, folding forward to meet his wanton mouth as we sighed and whispered together, my weight trapping him against the bed, ensuring he focused only on me and not on escaping like he always seemed to want to do. His body was so hard, as though wrought from wire and rods, and under the pressure of my belly I felt his rigid organ so desperate for me, making itself known through the thick cotton of his underwear. He wanted me badly, but I would make him wait, just a little longer. I had to be sure he was worth it.

  Just as I felt his hips start to buck, I broke the kiss and urged him to look at me. His cheeks were glowing with passion. There was a weak, submissive twinkle in his eyes; he looked so adorable, so needy. Just the thought of him desiring me so was driving me mad, but I was wily and had learned to control myself over the years, no longer falling into the motions of lust with one-night-standers.

  "We should get some sleep. Maybe later, when I've decided whether you're worthy of my body, we can continue where we left off," I spoke, my words hushed as I continued to leave fleeting kisses on his lips.

  "W—what...?" he breathed, a wheezy tickle in his throat. He sat up on his elbows as I climbed off of him, and I saw how his pants had tented up when I lifted myself free.

  "Aww, don't worry sweetie. I'll take care of you later." I stroked my fingertip along his jaw before delicately poking the end of his nose. "I just want you to remember that Leona is the boss. She decides what you get and when you get it. Don't forget, she's your queen. Alright?"

  What at first had been disappointment on his face soon turned to further excitement. He blinked away the glitter in his eyes as I kissed him one more time.

  "Now what do you say? You say: Yes, Leona," I prompted, leaning my forehead against his.

  "Y—yes, Leona," he stammered. Ugh, how could he be so fucking cute!

  "Good boy. Now you're gonna lay down and go to sleep, all right? And in the morning, I'll think about what you can have from me next," I purred to him, loving the power I had over him, the way he was trembling with desire. He shuddered when I carefully brushed my fingers over the firm protrusion in his pants, but that was enough; he knew who was in control here.

  His heart continued to thump for a long time after we had pulled the duvet over ourselves, and he pressed close to me, his arms holding me as he buried his face in my hair. I stroked my hand up and down his thickly-scarred forearm, listening to his breath as he gradually calmed and began to relax into a protected, childlike sleep. I had him figured out pretty well, especially after what he had said about this other woman he had dedicated himself to. I had met a couple of men like him in my lifetime, men who did better with domineering women, men who liked to be told what to do, who began to verge onto the masochistic, submissive spectrum. One guy I had dated wanted me to tie him up in my wardrobe and beat him with a slipper whilst telling him what a bad grandson he had been.

  Well, sleeping with a man shut in my wardrobe proved rather difficult when I spent the whole night worrying he might dirty my expensive gowns, and eventually I began to feel a little insulted that he wanted to call me Grandma, so that relationship came to swift and silent end. Another guy wanted me to use him as a piece of furniture, which mostly involved him not speaking or even making a single sound, and that relationship ended because I might as well have been talking to a brick wall. I understood the kind of thing these guys were looking for, but I couldn't give it; I wasn't a dominatrix. I just liked to be respected and worshipped. I didn't need my partner licking the heels of my shoes or wearing a gimp mask.

  Maybe I was wrong, and Ceri liked those things. I'd find out sooner or later, along with everything else he was hiding from me. And that was another thing.

  I could feel the scars he had; they were an elephant sharing the room with us. I knew what scars like that meant, even though he had lied to me previously when I had asked him about them. I didn't expect him to be honest, of course not. They were evidence of past hurts, pain he had no control over, and the only way to bring himself back to reality was to harm himself. I had had friends in the past who had adopted the same survival tactic. Hurting themselves to take control of their own bodies. To remind themselves that they were still alive, still struggling through life's pains. I knew I could help Ceri, try to ease this and show him that life could be worth living again. I wouldn't give up on him and leave him on his own like his family seemed to have done.

  I didn't know anything about Ceri's family, but I knew there was pain there. I tried to imagine what his mother was like. His father. Whether he had any siblings. Where he had grown up, the places he had been, the people he had met. This mentor he had spoken of, but generally kept quiet about. I wanted to know Ceri, not just the version of Ceri he wanted me to see.

  These thoughts continued to circulate in my mind as bit by bit, I drifted off to sleep. But I wasn't asleep for long, as somewhere in the darkness there came a hysterical scream.

  Before I had even had a chance to open my eyes and come to, Ceri was clambering haphazardly from the bed, the covers caught around his foot getting dragged off of me and exposing me to the cool air. Grunting to myself, I sat up, turning my bleary eyes to the open bedroom door as he disappeared through it. Another horrified scream came from below and I scrambled to the edge, stumbling to my feet and pulling my pyjama bottoms up properly before rushing out onto the stairs after him. My bare feet padded hurriedly down the steps, and when I reached the cold floor of the middle landing, Mecky's bedroom door opened and she emerged. Her hair was tousled, and a blindfold was pushed up on her forehead, her eyes squinting out at me confusedly.

  "What is happening?" she cried as I thundered past.

  "I don't know, I don't know what the bleedin' heck is going on," I answered her briskly.

  I could hear scuffling downstairs and suddenly, Christine came hurtling up the stairs so fast that she was near enough clambering on her hands as she reached the landing. Tears were pouring from her wide-open eyes and she thumped into me so hard that she threw me into the wall, still shrieking when I grabbed hold of her hand. She tried to screech some unintelligible words to me as Mecky squeezed between us and headed down the steps, so I dragged Christine into the living room and pushed her to the sofa. She flailed against me even as I tried to get her to sit down, her narrow shoulders trembling under the fabric of her nightie.

  "What is it!" I shouted at her, but she was hysterical. All I received in reply was a jumble of high-pitched wailing.

  I could hear Ceri yelling so I left Christine where she was and ran to the source of the commotion. On the ground floor, the back door was ajar, and the snow-laden wind was blustering through, filling the stock room with a freezing fog that swirled and rolled round everyone's legs. Near the door, Mecky was wrestling with a stranger, and Ceri was on the ground clutching his head, blood running down his bare arm. My instinct was to run to him, but Mecky needed my help. When I reached the bottom step, I leapt into the air and slammed the intruder hard into the doorframe as Mecky struggled to pin his arms behind his back, but it seemed he was much stronger than she was because he kept managing to slip his wrists free of her grasp.

  Dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans and with a balaclava pulled over his head, I had no idea who this person was, but there was a scent lingering in the air than told me Wallace Reed h
ad been here. I reached for the balaclava, tearing the woollen garment from the stranger and discarding it to reveal the shaven head of a black youth. He snarled at me and I saw the wolf in him. A purple bruise was blooming around his eye socket, spreading out over the angular shape of his cheekbone, and his dark brown eyes glared with a terrifying ferocity I had never seen in one so young. As I fought to restrain him, I could feel our grip on him was slipping. Suddenly, he arched backward and headbutted Mecky in the face, blood spewing from her nose, the impact giving him a momentary gap to attack me. When he punched me in the head, I heard the sound of my own skull crack and I was sent sprawling across the floor.

  I lay there reeling for several seconds, the room spinning round in circles above me, until I felt Mecky dragging me across the ground, hauling me upright by my arm, her voice a shrill howling in my ear. I groaned when her loud voice opened up right by my ear.

  "Get up! Get up!" she demanded, spitting droplets of blood on my cheek.

  If I had been a cartoon character, I would have had a small flock of canaries flying around my head; the only other thing that had struck me that hard had been the train I had thrown myself in front of some time ago, and I was stunned at how powerfully the stranger had been able to hit me. Gradually, the fogginess cleared and clumsily, Mecky pulled me to my feet. She tried to jostle me, urgently encouraging me to snap out of it as she leaned me against the wall.

  "Come! They are escaping!" she shouted, and then she bolted through the door in her pyjamas.

  I didn't have a chance to form any coherent thought; I simply followed. The ground was freezing under my bare feet and the snow was so dense that it was hard to see more than a few metres ahead. There were no cars on the road. Mecky charged ahead of me on her flowing, fleeting feet, following the footprints of the intruder along the main road towards the roundabout, the road that led into town. I could make out two figures fleeing in the distance with their balaclavas in their hands, their dark shapes blurry, vanishing into the icy torrents that separated us. My lungs were on fire and my head was killing me.

  Just as we reached the roundabout, a bus turned the corner and blocked us from crossing, and by the time it had passed, the escapees had made it into a taxi and were pulling away from the pavement. Mecky crossed the road in chase, but I stopped, leaning against the lamppost that illuminated the crossing, my breath wheezing from my open mouth. We had already lost them; there was no point in going any further. She soon realised this, retreating back to me like a greyhound that had just lost the race, her cheeks were bright red from the cold. She gasped something quite loudly as she stopped beside me, and I knew it was probably a Polish swear word I hadn't learned yet.

  "You are seeing him! Wallace Reed!" she sniffed, wiping snowflakes from her eyelashes.

  "Yeah, I seen him. And you know who that was, don't ya? Darnel Williams." I agreed as I took her by the hand and gestured back the way we had come with a nod of my head. "Come on, let's get back to the house. We're both bleeding."

  *~*~*

  Ceri had managed to drag himself into a sitting position on the steps by the time we reached the back door, and as Mecky shut and locked it behind us, I bent to pull his hand away from his head. His eyebrow had split, and blood was staining his face and hand, a shiner already turning his eye black as the flesh there swelled, making it almost impossible for him to see between his puffed-up eyelids. He whimpered when I took his palm off it, allowing me to get a closer look. He seemed embarrassed, perhaps a little foolish that he had attempted to tackle two werewolves on his own, a mortal with half the strength of one of us, and yet he had done it to protect Christine. Without a word though, he lifted his other hand and jingled a bunch of keys at me, his pained expression gaining a sneaky grin.

  "Look what I swiped out of someone's pocket." He smiled at us, and Mecky accepted the keys from him, turning them over in her palm and examining them closely.

  "Let's get you upstairs, your face is in a right bloody state." I sighed, grabbing him under his arm and helping him to his feet.

  In the living room, Christine's head cautiously appeared from behind the sofa, her eyes staring at us as we entered through the door. She looked absolutely terrified; it was only when she knew it was safe that she inched out from behind the furniture and curled up in the armchair, clutching a cushion to herself and physically trembling. Mecky washed her face in the kitchen sink; the damage that had been done was already starting to heal, and pretty soon it would be as if she had never been injured in the first place. The same went for my bump, for which I was thankful.

  Ceri, on the other hand, would take much longer to heal from this. Mecky fetched some first aid supplies from under the sink and she sat on the sofa beside him, wiping the blood from his wound with some cotton wool balls as he grunted and cussed under his breath. Christine watched all of this silently; I thought she seemed guilty somehow, as though she blamed herself for us getting hurt. She looked away, stared at the floor when Mecky pinched Ceri's split eyebrow closed and stuck some butterfly stitches over the wound to hold it shut, before taping a square of cotton gauze over the top to keep it clean and tidy. I looked at the bunch of keys, smelled Wallace Reed's scent on them.

  "Now, are you gonna tell us how those two got in yere?" Ceri questioned as Mecky picked up the leftover packaging from the first aid kit and put them in the waste paper bin in the corner of the room. The question was directed at Christine, but she wouldn't look at us.

  When she didn't speak, Ceri continued.

  "Did you let them in yere?" he asked. His tone was growly, and he was starting to get an angry glare in his eyes. "You did, didn't you. Opened the door for the pair of 'em. Christine! Answer me!"

  "Hey, don't shout at her," I warned him, knowing if I didn't step in quickly this situation could turn into a slanging match.

  "Christine, you're keeping secrets from us." He ignored me, or he only seemed to, because when he spoke again his tone had softened somewhat.

  "Chrissy, come on. Look at what's happened; we're all beat up. They could have killed Ceri. Did you let them in, sweetheart?" I decided I would try pleading with her. "You don't want us to get hurt, do you, Chrissy? We're your friends; we wanna help ya."

  Mecky perched herself beside me, choosing to keep quiet for now. She eyed me warily, apparently thinking the same as we did.

  "I didn't—I...I didn't mean for this to happen..." she stuttered, her face starting to screw up as she held back her tears.

  I got up and went to the armchair so that I could sit on the arm beside her, placing my hand on her back and gently rubbing her shoulder blade through her nightie.

  "Chrissy, come on now. Did you let them in?" I urged, keeping my voice calm and soothing.

  Swallowing deep, she nodded meekly. I glanced over at Mecky and Ceri, both of whom were quiet, although Ceri seemed to be fighting to keep himself under control.

  "Why?" I inquired, and I was relieved when she finally looked up at me. "Was that Darnel? You know, Darnel Williams?"

  She mouthed the words 'I don't know', but her eyes told me she knew all right. I opened my mouth to speak again but she suddenly burst into tears.

  "I'm sorry I didn't tell you before!" she cried, making noisy, wet hiccups. "I'm sorry! I didn't want you to hurt Darnel! I love him! And—and when you said, you said you would kill all of the werewolves, I thought that meant Darnel, too! I don't want Darnel to get hurt! I love him!"

  Her words trailed off into an eruption of uncontrollable sobbing. Mecky nodded, and I was surprised that Ceri only looked down at the ground between his feet.

  "Hey, it's all right. Come here, let Auntie Leon give you a hug." I took hold of her hand, but she needed little persuasion as she jumped up and near enough threw herself into my embrace. She was crying so hard that her stomach was contracting, making her retch into my shoulder, and for several minutes we just hugged tightly. She kept saying sorry over and over again, until finally her tears subsided, and I let her sink down into th
e armchair, liquid still bubbling from her bloodshot eyes.

  "D-Darnel is my boyfriend," she mumbled hopelessly. "He ch-changed me into a werewolf... N-not Wallace...P-please don't hurt him. I love him so m-much."

  A tense silence filled the room and it seemed none of us knew what to say. I sighed, feeling at the bump in my skull that was already beginning to flatten out again.

  "They know where we are, now. They know where we live, the layout of the building. They could break in now any time they fancy. We should leave yere, find somewhere safe to hide," Ceri muttered, and we all turned our heads to look at him.

  "No! No, I won't!" Mecky exclaimed, her face twisting into a grimace of horror. "This is my house I am living here! No, I won't leave!"

  "So what can we do! Barricade ourselves in!" he shouted back despairingly.

  "Stop it! Don't start arguing!" I raised my voice, getting to my feet so that I could intercept. "The last thing we need is to have all of us fighting with each other like a bunch of bloody school kids!"

  "This wouldn't have happened if she had told us the fucking truth!" Ceri snapped.

  "Leave her alone, she's just a kid who thinks her boyfriend is gonna get killed by us, of course she's gonna lie if she thinks it'll protect him, so having you yell at her isn't gonna make things any better, is it!" I snapped back.

  Silence, again. Mecky looked as if she was about to cry and Ceri was chewing at his lip. I sighed once more and wiped at my forehead, rubbing at my eyes with finger and thumb as I turned and sat down on the sofa between the two of them.

  "Look, I don't think they'll come back. They know two werewolves live here. Three if you count Christine. We outnumber them. Leaving is just gonna put us somewhere we can't defend ourselves. Like, where would we go? A hotel? At least if we stay here, we know the building well enough to defend it," I reasoned after a moment of frustrated contemplation. "Anyway, they're the ones what should be running from us; they should be afraid, not us."