Eddie’s Prize

by Maddy Barone

  That hadn’t happened. She set the lamp on the dresser and smoothed the bedclothes into order, tucking the sheet and blankets neatly under the mattress and laying the quilt so its edges hung parallel to the floor. Lisa leaned against the dresser and looked at the bed. Was this the bed she’d be sleeping in for the next forty or fifty years? How many nights would she go to bed alone? She didn’t mind that Eddie would probably be gone sometimes for his veterinarian work. But if he was going to run off and leave her alone every time they had a fight, how would they ever work anything out?

  Lisa picked up the lamp and trudged to the outhouse. On the way back, she found a ragged scrap of fabric that looked like the same fabric Eddie’s shirt was made of, just off the path. With a frown, she picked the scrap up. It must be a rag Bree or her mother used for cleaning. She carried it to the house, where she laid it on the counter. Then she put on the thick flannel nightgown she’d never worn, folded the quilt and blankets down, and settled into bed.

  It felt strange to be wearing a nightgown, and the bed, which was half the size of her bed at home, seemed big and empty without Eddie. In the dark, with the smoky scent of the extinguished wick of the oil lamp burning her nose, she gave into the tears she’d been fighting for hours. Eddie was a jealous idiot of a Neanderthal, but she had already begun to care for him.

  She had cried herself to sleep many nights in the years since her father left her family when she was eleven, but seldom had she felt as lost and miserable as she did now.

  Chapter 12

  Eddie eased the back door of his new house open, glad the hinges didn’t squeak. Even from this distance he could hear Lisa’s slow, even breaths and didn’t want to wake her. The acuteness of his hearing would dull over the next few minutes, as would his sense of smell and his sharp night vision. They always did after he went back to being a man. He had run for hours on his hated four paws, reveling in his freedom and power even as his true self writhed with shame at his lack of self-control. Now, though he should be weary from running, his flesh throbbed with hot need only his wife could assuage. Before Lisa, he would have used his hand to satisfy himself. Now he had a beautiful wife who enjoyed passion.

  A shadow of his earlier hurt tried to thicken, but he pushed it away. It was different in the Times Before. He couldn’t understand how men and women could sleep together with no true commitment, but he had to find a way to accept it. This level of rage would ruin what he and Lisa could have together. It was all the fault of his damned beast.

  If Lisa knew of the beast inside him, would she repudiate him? He had lived with the secret since he was a boy, following his mother’s command to hide the monster from everyone. The only person who knew of the creature beside his mother was Bree. Beast. Creature. Monster. Animal. Eddie never knew what to call it, but he knew it was completely separate from him. Eddie was a man who loved animals and dedicated himself to healing them. He was not a beast or a monster, no matter that one took over his body when he lost control of it.

  Weary disgust battled with lust. He wanted Lisa, to feel her hot, wet flesh clenching around him, and to hear her moans when he moved inside her. But he couldn’t go to her with the sweat of his shame fouling his body.

  Naked, he ghosted into the dark house. He hadn’t seen his clothes or boots in the yard, so probably his mother or sister had taken them in. He hoped it wasn’t Lisa who found them. He had no idea how he would explain it. He stepped into the shower and let icy water trickle over him. Even the frigid water and the harshness of the lye soap couldn’t cool his libido. He scrubbed the washcloth roughly over his body, desperate to be clean when he joined his wife.

  Lisa still slept when he walked into their bedroom, curled on her side with the quilt pulled under her chin and her blonde head on the pillow. His vision was dulling but was not yet back to its human level. Gently, he eased the quilt down, revealing a prim flannel nightgown. How sweetly angelic she looked, with her slender body covered in flannel and her lovely face and pale hair almost glowing in the dark. A memory of her body scandalously revealed in the picture in the magazine flashed into his mind. Blood pounded in his cock knowing that same body was lying before him. A savage urge to claim her body and mark it so everyone would know she was his roared through him. It came from the beast inside him. He forced it back.

  Eddie lifted the quilt and slid in beside his wife. She didn’t move, even when he eased the nightgown up. It wasn’t until he took one of her nipples into his mouth that she woke with a muffled scream.

  “Shh. It’s me.”

  “Eddie? You’re cold!”

  He loved the feel of her hand clutching his hair. “I’ll warm up fast,” he muttered against the softness of her breast.

  “Wait! Eddie, we need to talk.”

  “Later,” he said, driven by the need of his cock to be inside her. He caressed her with his mouth and his hands, using everything she had taught him about pleasing her, until he felt her soften against him. Eddie stroked his hands up her legs until he came to the tiny, silky underpants from the Times Before. His night vision didn’t show him colors, but he knew what they looked like—a tiny triangle of sapphire blue covered by cream colored lace that barely hid her tender feminine parts. He hooked his fingers in the waistband to drag the underpants down Lisa’s long, slender legs. Her legs stiffened.

  She braced a hand against his chest. “Eddie!”

  “Shh,” he murmured. “Let’s not talk right now, okay? Open up for me.”

  “No.” She slapped his hand away from her hip. “We need to talk.”

  He nipped lightly at her nipple. The beast’s keen sense of smell had not yet faded, and the rich scent of his wife’s arousal drove him insane. “I need you. Take off the nightgown.”

  “Eddie, stop.”

  He couldn’t. He tore at the nightgown tangled beneath her armpits, trying to pull it off her, desperate to have her naked under him. The damned nightgown wouldn’t come. Was Lisa trying to tug it back down? He stilled, sniffing. The senses of the beast had never lasted this long after he changed. He wasn’t sure what he scented, but Lisa’s arousal was dimmed. Her breath was jerky, as it often was when he made love to her, but this was different. In the dark it sounded almost as if she were trying not to cry.

  “Lisa?”

  As soon as he stopped trying to remove the nightgown, she scooted to the far side of the bed. “I said no!”

  “No?” he echoed, confused.

  The monster’s excellent vision had faded now. He needed to see her face. He fumbled with the matches on the bedside table to light the lamp that sat there. In the flare of golden light he could see Lisa sitting up, back pressed against the headboard, clutching the neck of her nightgown tightly to her throat.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Are you going to rape me?”

  “Rape?” His breath exploded out of him. A punch to the gut couldn’t have shocked him more thoroughly. “Of course not! You’re my wife!”

  “Yes, your wife.” Her hand clutched the flannel so hard her knuckles turned white. “Not your sex slave. I said we needed to talk, and you ignored me as if what I want isn’t important.”

  Her words were defiant, but her lower lip trembled. The sight made his stomach lurch. Eddie identified her scent now. She was frightened. “I thought you wanted me.” It was a weak defense, and he knew it. No woman should ever have reason to be afraid of him, especially his wife. “I’m sorry. You should have said something.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Really? How many times did I say no?”

  Eddie couldn’t remember. Self-loathing crawled up his spine, dousing any lingering lust. “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He sat up, pulling the blanket over his lap to hide his wilting erection. “What did you want to talk about?”

  Lisa’s hands loosened their death grip on her nightgown. “I wanted to talk to you about what happened this afternoon.”

  Of course she did. When he saw the pictures and read the stories about her love life, t
he creature inside him went crazy. How could he possibly explain it to her? Sorry, Lisa, the evil monster under the bed is real, it hides inside me, and it’s insane?

  “Okay,” he said, bracing himself for whatever she wanted to throw at him.

  “You hurt me.” Her voice was low, her gaze fixed on her hands twisting in the blanket in her lap. “My feelings. And you scared me when you ran at me and Dane yelling you were going to kill him.” She raised her gaze to him, eyes steady. “Worst of all, you treated me like I was a misbehaving child. You left me at the library for hours, and when you came to collect me, you made it seem like an unpleasant chore. And you walked in front of me all the way home like I wasn’t good enough to walk next to you. I’m your wife. I deserve your respect.”

  Shame writhed with the beast inside. “I respect you.”

  “You don’t act like it.”

  What words could he offer to make her understand what he couldn’t entirely explain? “I overreacted. Horribly. I’m sorry.” He groped for honest words that would still conceal the ugly truth of his curse. “I was shocked when I learned what your life was like in the Times Before. I shouldn’t have been. I knew things were different then, and people slept together with no strings. Now that I know, I can be better prepared to handle the jealousy.” To control the beast, he added silently.

  The lamp guttered, the flame at the wick flickering before it died. The darkness gave him the courage to say, “Lisa, I never want to hurt you. I’m sorry I was such an idiot today. Can you forgive me?”

  He felt her shift on the bed, lying down. She was still on the far side of the bed, but Eddie thought she had relaxed. “I want this marriage to work. I’m willing to do whatever it takes to make it work,” she said. “Are you?”

  In the dark he stretched out his hand to touch her shoulder. “Yes. I’ll learn to control my jealousy.”

  “You have nothing to be jealous about. Those other men? Like I said before, they mean nothing to me.”

  Eddie tried to not think of the other men who had touched his wife. The animal inside him flexed his claws. Eddie jerked his hand away from her and froze. Never had he felt the beast so clearly. Cautiously, he let the memory of the magazine pictures float to the front of his mind. The beast responded with a barely vocal snarl, using Eddie’s vocal cords. Eddie pushed the memory away and gently touched his fingertips to Lisa’s cheek. The beast purred.

  The monster liked Lisa. Hell, it thought Lisa belonged to it. Eddie had to work at suppressing the purr when he stroked Lisa’s soft hair. The beast might be violently jealous, but it wouldn’t hurt Lisa.

  The relief bowed Eddie’s head. He let himself drop forward and buried his face in his wife’s neck, holding her so tightly he could feel her ribs compress.

  “Eddie,” she complained after a minute. “Ease up.”

  He flopped bonelessly to his side so they were face to face, although he couldn’t see her in the dark. “I love you, Lisa.” He touched a hand to her face, gliding his fingers over her cheek by feel. Wetness met his fingers. Tears? “Don’t cry, love.”

  He could hear the tears in her voice. “It hasn’t been easy adjusting to a completely new life in a world that doesn’t make any sense to me, married to a man I don’t even know.”

  And he hadn’t made it any easier for her. Damned beast. He brushed a light kiss over her hair. “I think you’ve been very brave. A lot of people in your shoes would have had hysterics.”

  He felt her shrug. “What good would that do? I can’t go back home, so I have to make the best of it here.”

  What had he done to help her settle in? A fresh wave of shame washed over him. “We can have a good life together. I’ll help you any way I can.”

  She was quiet, except for a tiny sniff. “There aren’t very many people that I really miss, but I miss the things I used to have back home. What do I have here? The only things I own are what you’ve given me.”

  The reason for her desire to work with Mrs. Martin dawned on him. He vowed to support her in her clothing design partnership. “You have me too.”

  “Thank you.” She brushed a kiss over his cheek and rolled to present him with her back.

  Both he and the creature that fought him for control belonged to her. Plainly, she wasn’t interested in sex tonight, but she let him spoon against her. He felt the creature very close to the surface, but it seemed content to cuddle with Lisa. Was it the first time they had ever been in accord? His sense of smell was still far sharper than it usually was. These changes made him wary. Was the creature evolving into something else? He would have to speak to his mom about it.

  He took comfort from Lisa’s steady heartbeat and soft, sleeping breaths. A thin ribbon of hope wrapped around his heart. They had gotten through their first fight. If he could manage to control the beast, their marriage would only grow stronger.

  Chapter 13

  Lisa’s arm muscles screamed in protest as she reached to flip a pair of freshly washed jeans over the clothesline in her mother-in-law’s backyard. Bree moved easily as she bent to retrieve another pair of jeans from the wash basket and straightened to pin it to the line. Lisa watched her with envy. She thought the exercises her personal trainer devised for her had toned her arm muscles and strengthened her core, but doing laundry was a full body workout.

  “I’m so glad you decided to start learning housekeeping chores right away,” Bree said brightly. “Was it Eddie’s idea?”

  “No.” Lisa managed to suppress a wince as she hauled another pair of wet jeans out of the basket. She wondered if wet jeans always weighed ten pounds, or if it was a little specialty of the apocalypse? “No, I want to be a good wife. I need to learn this stuff.”

  Bree paused to re-tie the string at her nape holding her bouncing curls back. “So where’s Eddie?”

  “I told you. He said he wanted to check on some of his patients.” The memory of his good morning kiss and what followed was warm enough to almost loosen her aching muscles. “He said he’d be back before supper.”

  Bree’s face was hidden as she bent over the basket, but Lisa could hear a faint note of dissatisfaction in her voice. “It’s your honeymoon. He shouldn’t be leaving you alone so soon.”

  “I wanted to learn how to cook,” Lisa explained. Besides, in spite of the mind-blowing morning sex, there was a shadow of coolness in Eddie’s attitude. Lisa couldn’t pinpoint what made her feel the distance between them. The sex this morning had been vigorous and playful. Eddie made breakfast, served her the choicest tidbits, and helped wash the dishes. His kiss before he left was slow and tender. But Lisa felt the separation anyway.

  “Just your bad luck today was washday.” Bree let out a giggle. “You needed to do some washing anyway. When you came over this morning, I was glad to see you. Mom had something else to do today, and it’s always nice to have help. At least the weather is pretty warm. We won’t have too many more nice days like this. I hate the smell of wet clothes hung in the kitchen to dry, don’t you?”

  Lisa shuddered at the idea of lines of drying clothes strung up in the kitchen. “Why hasn’t anyone fixed the dryers so they work?”

  Over the clothesline, Bree’s pale blue eyes blinked. “The what?”

  Lisa sighed, reaching for a shirt. “Never mind.”

  Bree giggled as she plucked the sheets out of the laundry basket to hang. Lisa had stripped them from the bed she and Eddie shared and brought them, along with their dirty clothes, to the washtub Bree had set up in the backyard. The scent of them when she’d handed them over to her sister-in-law advertised what she and Eddie had done in them besides sleep. Bree giggled then too, making Lisa blush. She liked her young sister-in-law, she really did, but the girl’s giggle was going to drive her mad.

  “Well, that’s done.” Bree pinned the last corner of the sheet to the line and stood back to smile at Lisa. “It wasn’t so bad, was it? You thought it would take all day, but that was only three hours. Well, three and a half, but we took a break to eat lu
nch. It’s nice to have a friend to help out.”

  Not bad? Lisa’s idea of laundry was to pick it up from the dry cleaners. Here, it involved a huge kettle hung from a tripod over a fire while clothes were stirred in the simmering water with a wooden paddle. Just filling the kettle took a half hour. Lisa was positive it was the same kettle she and Carla had bathed in a few days ago. The water was wrung out of the clothes by feeding them between a pair of rollers turned by a manual crank. Lisa wasn’t sure if the stirring or the cranking made her shoulders so sore.

  “The clothes should dry before supper.” Bree eyeballed the sun. “Must be around three. Let’s go in, and you can help me get supper started.”

  It was only three o’clock? Stifling a groan, Lisa followed Bree into the house. Two hours later Lisa could proudly say she’d done her part to put supper together. She supposed she’d get used to cooking meats preserved in salt or by smoking. No refrigerators made it hard to keep food from spoiling.

  Tonight’s menu consisted of fried pork chops, milk gravy, baked potatoes, green beans, cornbread, and fried apple slices. Lisa had cut the chops into what Bree gravely pronounced to be relatively even slices and dredged them in flour to fry them in grease in an extra-large cast iron frying pan. While the pork fried, she cut apples into thin slices and rolled them in flour to be fried when the chops were done. Bree had buried the potatoes in the ashes in the stove to bake and put the beans on the stove to boil. Lisa looked from the sizzling oil in her frying pan to the soft width of Bree’s hips with a knowing eye. If she weren’t careful, her hips would look the same in a few months. But Bree didn’t notice, just showing Lisa how to make the gravy out of the drippings in the frying pan with flour and milk.