Once Upon a Wolf

by Rhys Ford

  His laptop woke up when he lifted the lid, and an open document was waiting for him. It was short, and for some reason, Gibson couldn’t see the screen past the blur in his eyes. He sat down hard, the chair groaning at the dead weight he’d deposited on the seat, but it held up. A hell of a lot better than Gibson was.

  He blinked to clear away the tears that were threatening to fall, focusing on the screen to see what his brother had left him. It was the emptiness in the cabin that scared him the most. There was such a finality to it, an echoing resonance he could feel humming on his back teeth. He didn’t need to see the words on the screen to tell him his brother was gone.

  But he needed to see where Ellis went so he could hunt him down and possibly skin him for that rug he’d always wanted in front of the fireplace.

  “Fitting,” Gibson muttered angrily. “Especially since it’s your fucking house.”

  His fingers were trembling when he pushed the lid back to minimize the play of sunlight across the screen. A part of him wished for that cup of coffee, but not as much as he longed to hear Zach driving up the road or Ellis stomping across the deck to get the snow off his feet before he came inside. Taking a deep breath, Gibson began to read.

  By the time you read this, I’ll be pretty far away. Going to make this short because it’s hard to type, but I love you and it’s time you let me go. You need to live, Gibson. You need to stop living for me and live for you. Live for Zach. I have the cell phone you got me, but I won’t be answering it for a couple of days. I took my old truck out of the barn. Thanks for keeping it going while I was trapped in my own head. There’s a few things I need to do, and someone I need to find. Keep the cabin. It’s more yours than mine, and I can always build another one. We do own a lot of land up there. I’m pretty sure I can find another space. Don’t come looking for me. I’ll call you when I get some place I can talk. I just don’t know where that place is yet. Don’t forget that I love you and that you really are a better man than I am—in all things—I also just saved this and hopefully haven’t fucked up anything, so if I have, I’m sorry, but you’re smart enough to figure stuff out if I have. I’ve got faith in you, baby brother. I’ve always had faith in you. You make me proud.

  As if he were conjured up out of Gibson’s deepest desires, Zach walked through the cabin’s front door. He stood framed on the threshold, sunlight pouring around him, and once again, Gibson sucked in his breath, remembering he’d been given an angel that day by the lake.

  “Ellis is gone.” Gibson stared at the screen in front of him, his world shaky beneath him. “I don’t know if I should be pissed off at him or…. Jesus, he can’t even write yet. Look at this! You can barely read it and he’s out there driving a car.”

  Zach held up his phone, crossing the room to join Gibson at the table. “I know. He texted me about fifteen minutes ago. He says he’s going to be okay—”

  “He hasn’t regained fine motor skills. He shouldn’t be….” He let his head drop back to rest on the chair’s high back. “I’m sorry. It’s not on you, and I shouldn’t lash out at you because Ellis has gone and done something stupid. I don’t know what he’s thinking. What the hell is going through his mind?”

  Zach closed the laptop’s lid, then slid it away from Gibson. Leaning against the table, he ran his fingers through Gibson’s hair, as if trying to smooth away the unruliness of his thoughts. “Well, according to what he told me, he thinks it’s time he takes back control of himself. Of his life.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Gibson snagged Zach’s wrist, grateful for the feel of the man’s skin beneath his fingers. “There’s a plan. We worked on it together and adjusted it when it looked like he was getting better quicker than we anticipated. He isn’t even close to a benchmark that we set for going out to town, much less driving off into the sunset to look for… something or someone.”

  “I know you’re not going to like to hear this, but no matter what we have planned,” Zach started, “it still is Ellis’s life. We can’t keep him here just because he hasn’t ticked off all of the boxes we want him to. He’s your brother, and if there is one thing the two of you share besides being able to change into a wolf, it’s that you’re both proud and stubborn.”

  “That stubborn went a long way in keeping Ellis alive and safe from my fucked-up family.” He was spoiling for a fight, but there was no way Zach was going to give him one, nor did he deserve to be dragged into one. No, the person Gibson was angry at probably was at least a few hundred miles away in some unknown direction, so beating the shit out of his older brother wasn’t going to be on the day’s to-do list. “Ellis was there when our father and a couple of my uncles argued with me about putting him down. I’m worried about him going after them, but… we never talked about what happened that day…. I just told them all to fuck off, and I took him, warned them off of him. I don’t know if he’s holding a grudge or he just doesn’t give a shit.”

  “I’m going to guess he’s more focused on other things,” Zach murmured, closing his hand over Gibson’s. “Him leaving is personal. I don’t think it has anything to do with us or you personally. He told me he had things that he needed to do.”

  “Yeah, he said that to me too.” He itched to open the laptop again, to reread the words his brother left him, but Zach was right. Ellis leaving wasn’t about anything other than what he needed, no matter whether Gibson thought he was ready to go or not. “There’s someone he said he wanted to find as well. I could’ve helped him with that, he’s not exactly computer savvy. I just don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Zach leaned forward, then kissed the corner of Gibson’s mouth. “You’re going to do exactly what he told you to do… live your own life and love me.”

  IT WAS a week before Ellis reached out to Gibson, a stretch of seven days Zach spent at Gibson’s side. They worked to keep themselves busy, doing chores around the cabin and taking long hikes, avoiding the elephant in the room in the shape of a missing black wolf. Zach understood Gibson wouldn’t—couldn’t—move forward without at least something from his brother to let him know he was safe and, as much as it would hurt to hear, didn’t need Gibson to help him.

  Salvation came in the form of a text, a long ramble of words assuring Gibson he’d landed on his feet and everything was going fine. The attached picture showed what looked like a typical small town Main Street, gentrified storefronts interspersed with a couple of diners and an old-fashioned drugstore but nothing else.

  “He could at least have given me a state,” Gibson grumbled, showing Zach the text. “It’s like he doesn’t trust me.”

  “I wouldn’t trust you,” Zach replied, searching for a whisk in the collection of kitchen utensils the Keller boys shoved into a wide drawer. “He promised you he would tell you when he stopped moving. That’s as good as you’re going to get and all you can ask for.”

  “Asshole could at least take a photo of himself so I could see he was doing okay,” he muttered under his breath, scrolling through the message one more time. “Would it have killed him to do that?”

  “Look, he did what he said he was going to do. Now let it go and either help me find the whisk or beat those eggs for me.” Zach tapped at the cookbook lying open on the kitchen counter. “You’re the one who wanted to see if we could make quiche. So either pitch in or get out.”

  IT’D BEEN a risk to go on a walk while the quiche was cooking, but Gibson needed to burn off energy and Zach longed to stretch his legs. As cold as it was outside, it felt good to return to the trails and stomp through the snow banked up on either side of the winding path. There were signs of wildlife here and there, fox prints scattered over a pristine expanse of freshly fallen powder near the small pond Gibson showed him only a week before. Three cardinals fought a mighty skirmish with a handful of sparrows over the deck’s birdfeeder Zach refilled every morning, a couple of shivering pigeons pecking at the fallen seed on the ground below. The birds scattered when they approached the cabin, scolding
the couple from the relative safety of the nearby trees.

  Since the house didn’t smell like burned eggs and wasn’t filled with smoke, Zach figured the quiche had survived. The look on Gibson’s face when he checked the oven wasn’t reassuring, and neither was the heavy, protracted sigh he got when he asked how it looked.

  “It would help if we had turned the oven on the right temperature. I turned the oven on low-ish to preheat it while we were putting everything together, but I never turned it up. So it’s not quite cooked.” Gibson grinned when Zach repeated every swearword he’d ever learned. “Should we let it cook some more?”

  “I’ve a better idea,” Zach said, peering into the stove. “Put the damn thing into the refrigerator and I’ll make something quick. We’ve got more eggs.”

  “Pretty sure that’s how you get salmonella,” he replied, then looked back at what was in the oven. “Actually, I am going to guess that if we continued on any course of action with this particular quiche, we are definitely going to get salmonella. Trash? We still have lots of frozen pizza and instant noodles.”

  “We are not eating frozen pizza or ramen. It was supposed to be we cooked dinner at least five times a week, something that didn’t come out of the freezer or in a takeout box.” Zach rolled up his sleeves and nudged Gibson out of the way. “Stand back. I’m going to try to do something Ruth made for me once. Pray to God it comes out right.”

  DINNER WAS something Ruth called Chicken in a Basket and a bottle of red wine. The wine was from Napa, and the basket dish was basically an egg fried in a hole made in a slice of buttered bread. The edges were a little crispier than Zach intended, but for the most part the yolk was still runny enough for the cut-out piece to be dipped into, and the thick-sliced smoked bacon he’d found in the back of the freezer went a long way in forgiving the odd piece of shell they both found in their eggs.

  “I like how everything tastes like the bacon,” Gibson commented. “Even the bread tastes like bacon.”

  “That’s because I fried the egg thingies in the same pan after the bacon was finished.” Zach set his plate down on the coffee table, a little alarmed at the grease congealed around its rim. “Next time, I should probably drain some of the oil out. But every meal is kinda like a lesson learned.”

  “Like Ellis trying to microwave an egg?”

  “I caught him before he did it, didn’t I?” Zach pointed out, refilling Gibson’s wineglass, then his own. “I’d already thrown out one microwave for doing just that. I would’ve hated seeing another one die the same way. You can’t ever get the stink out.”

  Gibson pulled Zach close, and he rested his head on Gibson’s shoulder, staring at the fireplace crackling a few feet away. They turned off all the lights, filling their bellies and making up wild stories about what Ellis could be up to, sipping the potent wine, and Gibson chortling hard enough he forgot to breathe when Zach wondered aloud if Ellis was stomping grapes in a barrel at a Napa winery.

  “I’m glad you’re here with me,” Gibson murmured through a kiss he placed on Zach’s lips. “I know I’ve been pain in the ass this past week, so thank you.”

  “I could think of a lot of ways you can thank me.” He set his glass down on the table behind the sectional. The wine was stronger than what he was used to—in fairness, he normally stuck to beer, with the occasional gin and tonic, but it had been gathering dust, and when he brought out the bacon, Gibson suggested a fine red would go well with the pork.

  Neither one of them knew anything about wine, or even if the bottle could be considered a fine red, but the little bit of silliness kept their mood light.

  “I could be the one that cooks for a week,” Gibson suggested. “Or if you don’t want to play Russian roulette with your stomach, I could do your laundry.”

  “See, that’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

  He wasn’t sure if Gibson understood what he wanted. On the way down the trail, Zach had fallen behind a few feet and watched Gibson’s body flow as he walked. They’d been talking about stupid things, like the best toy they’d ever found in a box of cereal, when Zach was struck with a teeth-aching need to have Gibson make love to him. There was something about the day, maybe it was the promise of a full moon that night if the clouds would cooperate, but his want for his slightly sarcastic, usually rumpled, sexy romance writer left him breathless and needing more than a simple kiss.

  “We’re not talking about food anymore, are we?” Gibson’s half-full glass joined Zach’s on the table. “You’re talking about me possibly taking off my clothes and doing those unspeakable things I’ve always wanted to do to you, right?”

  “Well, or I could take them off of you. I just think maybe we should stop playing house.” He let out a short yelp when Gibson pushed him down onto the couch. “Or should that be stop playing cabin, and find out what each other likes.”

  Zach’s elbow got caught on his sweatshirt, and Gibson nearly kneed him trying to get his pants down. One of their plates landed on the floor, either hit by Gibson’s foot or possibly Zach’s underwear when it flew off of Gibson’s finger as he twirled it around. There was a brief scramble toward the fireplace, as it appeared one of the couch’s throw pillows was headed straight for the flames when thrown off to make room, but a quick lunge and slap-away worthy of an all-star soccer player prevented its unfortunate demise. Breathless with laughter and left with nothing else to discard, their mirth eased away, leaving room for their desire to grow.

  “I’ve never been very good at this,” Zach confessed. “I mean, I get the mechanics of it but have never really—”

  “You made dinner,” Gibson said, crawling over Zach’s body to straddle his hips. “How about if you let me take care of this? Don’t worry. I am going to make you feel so good.”

  There had been promises about what Gibson would do to him with his fingers, and they were not overblown boasts. Gibson had been prepared for whenever they got around to an evening of wine and love, so maybe the suggestion of the bottle with the eggs hadn’t been so much chance as it was seduction. The lube left a sweet perfume in the air, the slightest hint of strawberries and cream, but the heat Zach felt along the bottom of his cock surprised him more than anything.

  Well, except for the sensual ripple of pleasure left by Gibson’s tongue when it swept over the soft head of Zach’s dick.

  “That’s what I want to do to you,” he gasped. “You don’t have any… idea of how much I want to… find out how you taste.”

  “Maybe….” Gibson took another lick, then raked his teeth over the sensitive slit in Zach’s skin. “We can do that the next time.”

  “So long as the next time—oh God,” Zach ground out, caught in the maelstrom of pleasure wrapping around him, “is as soon as I catch my breath.”

  The flames burning in the cabin’s fireplace seemed to have found Zach’s skin, or at least their heat did. The tingle began in his belly, then stretched out over every inch of him, a growing galaxy of pleasure points as bright as stars. His hands couldn’t seem to find satisfaction in caressing only a few inches of Gibson’s body at a single time. He craved to be closer, to somehow plunge himself through Gibson’s flesh and live for even a brief sliver of time as one.

  When Gibson swallowed him down into his throat, Zach lost his mind, enveloped by the unexpected velvety warmth. That simmering sensation continued farther, down his taint, then into the dips of his ass, laving at the entrance he needed Gibson to fill. There were desires his body seemed to instinctively know, hungers he couldn’t identify until Gibson’s fingers and then his mouth ghosted over his skin, teasing at the spots until Zach’s yearning grew too much to take.

  He dug his fingers through Gibson’s dark hair, fighting not to yank too hard when he pulled his lover up. Gibson’s stormy pupils held bits of sunset gold around the edges, bleeding in from the ebony ring surrounding the gray, and Zach’s breath caught in his throat, trapped by the intensity in Gibson’s eyes.

  “The wolf—your wolf….
” There was always a wildness to Gibson’s spirit, a thread of something primitive and exciting roiling beneath who he was. Still, it was a surprise to see that presence surface, and Zach stared into the unplumbed depths of the man he’d fallen in love with. “Your eyes. I can see him in you.”

  “There is no him. Only me.” Gibson captured Zach’s mouth with his. There was something darker than the wine on his tongue, something headier and more intoxicating than anything Zach had ever tasted. When Gibson finally let up, he murmured, “I am as much wolf as I’m human, but with you, that part of me is drawn out. So close to the surface, because all of my passions, all of my instincts, are carried by that blood. This isn’t the first time you’ve drawn together the separate parts of my soul, of my heart. I’m just surprised that this is the first time you’ve seen how much you complete me.”

  The uncertainty in Zach’s belly wasn’t fear. No, it was… anticipation mingled with wonder. His lover’s touch at his entrance begged Zach to lift his legs, part his knees, and let Gibson fulfill the promise he made only a few minutes before.

  “That’s it, babe,” Gibson purred at him, delving into his depths with a gentle touch. “Let me find the wolf you have hidden inside of you.”

  Zach wanted to say something funny, maybe a quick rejoinder of how the only wolf ever to be found inside of him would be Gibson, but when his lover pressed into him, Zach could no longer stitch two thoughts together, much less tease. If there was magic in the world, even just a little bit, it lay in Gibson’s touch. The man found every thread of rapture woven into Zach, and when he slid his oiled fingers from Zach’s body, he almost wept from the loss.

  “Hold on to me.” Gibson’s baritone played with Zach’s senses, rolling over him in redolent waves. “I want to feel your fingers digging into me, your mouth on me. I want you to leave as much of a mark on me as I intend to leave on you.”