Fun With Wolves
Page 11
Her voice was ragged, shaking. “Oh no, not again. Not again, not again…”
Why was this happening now? How was it happening now? Megan had no memory of ever dreaming the same thing twice in her life. Why did she have to be dreaming this again? Could she just wake up? Please—just wake up?
She heard the stirring and rustling in the thicket again, which made her heartbeat turn to drumbeats in her ears. Fixing her wide-eyed gaze on the spot in the undergrowth from which the sound was coming, she watched the great black wolf stride into view again. She trembled all over. She wanted to run—but running had done her no good last time. Why would it do her any good now?
The black wolf stood up on his hind legs once again, and again he transformed from a massive canine to a lean and exquisite young man, presenting his perfect naked body and proud erection.
Tate held out his hand. “Megan, you can’t be afraid of me,” he said. “You know me. You remember how we were. Let’s be that way again.”
Still keeping her arms at her bosom and her legs together, Megan protested, “This isn’t real, none of this. How did I even get here? This isn’t happening. It’s not!”
“It is,” said Tate. “I’m here. I’ve come for you. Just come to me now. Let’s do everything, just like we used to. You remember…”
“No!” she cried. “Look at you! Look at you! You…you…” Her voice caught in her throat. She had never felt so vulnerable in all her life. It both angered and terrified her.
“What?” asked Tate. “What am I?”
“Exactly the way you were!” Megan blurted. “Just the way you were when we…”
“When we’d get into bed together and do everything, and I’d screw you all night long?”
“But you haven’t changed! It’s been twelve years, Tate, and you’re not any older! That’s not possible! How can you not have changed?”
“You used to say I was the sexiest thing you ever saw. You remember that. We’d never want to get out of bed. You’d tell me you wished we could just stay in bed. You said how happy I made you. We can be that way again.”
“It’s not real and it’s wrong!” Megan shouted, her fear starting to overtake every other feeling she had.
“You know better than that,” said Tate, glancing down at his throbbing member and then back up at her. “It’s never wrong, you know that.”
“But you’re my past! We’ve been over for so many years. You and me, that’s not our lives now. That’s over. It’s gone.”
“And your life now is…what? Those twins? Those brothers? That Pearce and Nash?”
Megan set her jaw, determined. “Yes! Pearce and Nash!”
Tate frowned and shook his head. “They’re only fucking you. I loved you. I still do.” He reached out to her again, beckoning her. “Come to me.”
Megan resolved to stand her ground, not to leave the spot where she stood. While her body stayed still, her voice shook. “How can you not have changed? It’s a dream. It must be a dream. A dream…”
In spite of everything, every ounce of will she put into her decision—she moved. Without even being aware that she was doing it at first, she took a step towards him. And another. At the back of her mind, she protested. The wordless protest melted into desire. She could not stop herself from wanting him, and she could not stop herself from going to him. Tate was making her feel as aroused as she was by Nash and Pearce combined. She was powerless.
At once, Tate had her on her back in the grass, and loomed over her and brought himself down to her, down, down…
…and she woke up in a sudden, frantic jolt, springing up on the bed between Nash and Pearce, her breaths coming so hard that it pained her to inhale and exhale. A cold sheen of perspiration covered her flesh, and she gathered up the covers around herself, shaking all over, gulping the air deeply and loudly.
Immediately the twins stirred awake. Sitting up on either side of her, they each put an arm around her, Nash around her shoulder, Pearce around the small of her back.
“You okay?” asked Nash, he and his brother both genuinely concerned.
“I’m…I’m fine,” Megan gasped and stammered. “I-I’m all right.”
“You sure?” asked Pearce.
“It was…just another dream,” she answered, her breaths beginning to slow down.
“Pretty bad one, huh?” said Nash.
Megan said nothing to that, only shook her head, relieved at the calming of her heart.
“There’s nothing here to have bad dreams about,” Pearce told her. “There’s just us.”
“Just us,” Nash repeated, with a kiss on her cheek.
“Would you guys do something? Please?” she asked.
“Name it,” said Pearce.
“Hold me, all right? Just…hold me.”
“Sure,” Nash said. “Lie back down now.”
Megan leaned back and rested her head on the pillows again. The twins lay back down with her and pulled the covers back over the three of them. She curled up against Pearce’s chest and Nash curled up against her back. She felt Nash’s stiffening piece at the cleft of her buttocks.
Pearce tenderly kissed her mouth while Nash kissed and licked her neck. They would be inside her again soon, she knew. She was grateful for it.
They were what she needed—real sex, not some phantasm of a man from her past in a dream. Pearce and Nash would chase the dreams away, perhaps never to return. She yielded herself to them, to the reality of them, to their mounting and thrusting, first Pearce, then Nash, the two who were everything she needed.
Outside, from the edge of the real forest, the great black wolf figure stood again at the edge of the forest and watched the house. Again, he looked at the candlelit bedroom window and ran his tongue across his jaws. You’re more mine all the time, the creature thought. With every passing moment you belong more to me.
_______________
The next day, the trolley bus once again let Megan, dressed simply and carrying her phone and wallet in a waist purse, off across the street from Moonlight Bay. She found Jules outside the front entrance, sweeping the sidewalk, a rather Norman Rockwell kind of sight for a place like this. The old man asked how she was enjoying her time with the Maguire boys, and Megan told him that nothing was any more amiss than some peculiar dreams she’d been having.
She gave him no more details than she gave to Pearce and Nash, but Jules mentioned to her that dreams always have a meaning; that they were the sleeping mind trying to send a message. He then mentioned that he had another business in town. Inside the small public library, he had a little used bookstore. It was no more than a corner of the library with a couple of bookshelves, but there were some interesting things there, including, he seemed to recall, a book on interpreting dreams.
“You might want to have a look at it,” he said, “assuming someone had not bought it. It was likely still to be there, as my sales of books were not as brisk as my sales of antiques.” Megan thanked him for the tip and followed his directions, walking the short way down Main Street to the library.
There she found the corner with a sofa, a table, a couple of comfortable chairs, and the two shelves of books for sale rather than loan. Being it was a library, the books were there just to read as much as to buy. Megan found the book about dream interpretation and settled down on the library sofa for a deliberate read, looking for specific information. She wanted to know what the book had to say regarding dreams about werewolves.
A dream about werewolves, the book stated, meant that something in one’s life was not what it appeared to be, and that it symbolized fear, repressed anger, and uncontrollable violence. Dreaming of sex with a werewolf meant that one was too inhibited and had animalistic desires in search of an outlet. It may mean that one needed to be more sexually adventurous.
Megan seriously pondered all these things in terms of her own waking life. Did they really apply to her? It did not seem very likely. She began to pick the interpretations apart, point by point.
Repressed anger—at whom or what? The only thing that might possibly make her angry was the experience of Andrew leaving her, and the divorce, and she was convinced she had turned the pages on that as much as she had turned the pages of this book. She was certain that she wasn’t on the “angry ex-wife” page anymore, especially now that she was sleeping with Pearce and Nash and learning a new meaning of satisfaction from them.
Uncontrollable violence was the least supportable idea of all. Even in her most furious moments about Andrew, she had never felt violent—or had she? Megan reflected on all the times she had wanted to rip out Sarah’s blonde hair by the black roots.
It was an understandable reaction to the circumstances, but she recognized it as one of the myriad things that a person thinks with no intention of ever doing them; a fantasy fueled by pain and loss and anger, which she had let herself experience and had gotten out the other side of it. She wasn’t about to go after Sarah with a knife or a gun or any such thing. Uncontrollable violence was out. Sarah had Andrew now, and may they have the best of luck with each other, the faithless husband and the aging, wealthy cougar.
Dream interpretation was of no help to Megan at all so far. Whatever was at the back of these dreams of hers, it was not in her past. So, what if it was in her present? What if her dreams of Tate were somehow really about Nash and Pearce? Was there some part of her that felt ashamed, guilty, wrong for having the kind of relationship she was having with them?
Was she somehow judging herself for the complete sexual abandon of surrendering to two perfect werewolves at the same time? Were her sleeping visits with the one great love of her past telling her that she was now doing something forbidden, that she ought not to have started?
It was a provincial, puritanical, and yes, very judgmental thing to think about herself, Megan realized. Why should she begrudge herself the boundless ecstasy that she was now having, lying with the Maguire twins? Why should she think, even unconsciously, that she was doing anything wrong? It was a human reaction to something inhumanly pleasurable, and she saw it as that self-limiting part of human “morality” that considered it a “sin” to enjoy anything, to be truly happy. Why did people do such things to themselves? Why did anyone find it an affront to morality simply to be happy?
Megan put the dream book back on the shelf. It was no good to her, after all. Better she should pass the time reading some of the other books that she saw, the ones about werewolf myths and lore—further signs of where she was, and in whose company she was. It struck her as a much more fitting thing to read in Rendall Glen.
_______________
As the day wore on, Megan’s visit to the town took her once again for a walk down the bike path along the side of the pond. She hoped this would not be an encore of yesterday, strolling down the path and then returning to the log house, falling into a nap, and having that dream. She wanted the rest of today to be about clearing her mind, and tonight to be about what had occupied her every night since she arrived.
She walked along, barely noticing the people who strolled or jogged or biked past her, thinking of nothing but the two brothers. One thing she would not mind repeating about yesterday was the after-work shower. That, she would welcome.
Megan had not walked very far when she found herself slowing down. She did not understand why. She wanted to walk on, to continue on her way. The end of the path would take her back near the bus stop to catch the line to the road where Pearce and Nash’s house was. Pearce and Nash… She wanted to get back to Pearce and Nash…
But she slowed more, taking a longer and longer time between steps. She was walking now as if she were lost, unsure; as if she did not even know where she was. And everything around her looked strange. It reminded her of old foreign films she had seen, in which things were shot with Vaseline smeared on the lenses. The whole world seemed to have a halo. She no longer walked now, only wandered, slowly, more slowly, until she was hardly walking at all.
Something made her turn away from the path and look up the hillside, through the underbrush and into the forest looming beyond it. The forest: deep, green, cool… She wanted to go into the forest. Megan stepped off the path and into the tall grass. Heedless of going into a strange place, off the path, into the forest, she began to walk up the incline. She ignored the rustle of the tall grass through which she passed. She kept her eyes on the hillside above her, to the cool and dim places where fingers of sunlight passed through the deep green canopy. That was where she wanted to be: up there. Up there…
Megan climbed, undeterred by the unfamiliarity or roughness of where she was going. None of it mattered. She only wanted to keep going. Keep going, keep going—through the thicket, up the hill, into the forest. She had to get there. She needed to be there. Up and up she went, thinking of nothing else.
Soon she was up in the spaces between the trees. All was quiet and dim and cool, lit by those gossamer filaments of golden light through the treetops. It was only Megan there, and the trees, and the grass and the bushes. She stopped and stood still, breathing in the cool forest air. She felt at once completely calm and anxious—anticipating, waiting, expecting…
The black shape strode out of the bushes; again, that familiar shape of dark fur and long legs, upward pointed ears and gleaming eyes. Again, it took two legs, and again it changed, the black fur receding, the shape of the wild canine body changing, until it was now the naked Tate in the forest with Megan.
This time it was not a dream.
The fear that Megan had felt in the dream returned to her, but now it was a muffled thing, a smothered thing. It could not take hold of her completely. Something else already had her.
“I’m not asleep,” said Megan in a small, frightened voice.
“No, you’re not,” said Tate. “Not this time. This time you’re really here. And I’m really here. It’s the two of us. For real.”
“No…” she vainly protested.
“Yes,” Tate said. “I’m real. You don’t belong to them. You belong to me. Remember when I used to take you out into the forest? I’d be a wolf for you and we’d run together, and fall down together, and I’d do it to you in the grass? Let’s be that way again. We can have it all back, just like it was. Come to me.”
Megan was as powerless now as she had been in the dream. The feelings that Tate—impossible Tate, somehow still twenty-two years old—stirred in her were stronger than she was. He offered her his hand and she went to him. She could do nothing else.
He took her in his arms and kissed her, a kiss that made her feel as if she were weak and flying all at once; a kiss that commanded her unconditional surrender, to herself and to her own desires as much as to him. Hovering his face near hers at the end of the kiss, Tate exhaled a warm breath onto Megan, an intoxicating breath that made her delirious. She needed to lie down. She needed to lie with him.
Megan descended into the grass, first onto her knees, then onto her back. He stood over her, a naked tower of breathtaking young manhood, his member angling out proudly from between his thighs. Her drunken feeling grew deeper. In spite of her awe at Tate’s magnetic beauty, Megan closed her eyes. She could not keep them open. The feeling she had was too euphoric. With her eyes shut and fluttering and the image of Tate filling her mind, she could not see what happened next.
Tate shifted again, but not into a wolf. He rendered his flesh into something that was neither man nor beast. His limbs and torso, head, and muscles all melted away into a churning, swirling, roiling black vapor, like a storm cloud in miniature. The cloud hovered in the air above Megan’s prone form—and reached down to her with tendrils of mist like the funnels of dwarf tornadoes. The funnels of blackness raked their way up and down and over Megan’s body. And in the churning heart of the dark cloud, twin blazing lights appeared, pulsing and flickering in time to the strokes of its mis
ty tendrils on Megan’s form.
Had Megan been conscious, she might have described the appearance of the blackness above her as…hungry.
CHAPTER NINE
It was dinnertime and Nash actually caught himself thinking, She’s still not home.
They were in the living room. Pearce sat on the sofa—or on the edge of it, tapping on and cursing at his phone. Nash could tell his brother was thinking the same thing as he was. This was not Megan’s home, after all. But by his reckoning and by Pearce’s, this was where she belonged.
The question was, as Pearce growled again, as they had both wondered with growing alarm with the waning of the sun and the first darkening of the evening, “Where the hell is she?”
Nash frowned hard at their shared frustration. “She still doesn’t pick up. She still doesn’t call. Why would she not call?”