by Leigh Evans
My own Were seemed to swell under my skin, making it feel tender and tight.
“You’re going to have to help me, if the bullet doesn’t change course. God, I’m so hot.” He grabbed the front of his shirt and gave it a good yank. The last of its buttons went rolling onto the floor, chittering like skittles on the ceramic. “Test the knife on your thumb. Is it sharp?”
“You’re asking me to use a knife on you?”
“As long as this is working its way through me, I won’t heal. Do you want me to be weak? In my uncle’s territory? Now?” His neck muscles moved as he swallowed. “I can’t protect you or myself. You wanted Lancelot, now be Guinevere.”
“I’ve seen Camelot. She ended up being stuck in a nunnery, while he swanned off to France.” I hooked my finger under the strand of hair stuck in his beard, and gently tugged it loose. “What would you have me do with a knife?”
He mustered a shaky grin. “First promise me that you’ll leave me with my balls.”
“You got it.”
“Good girl.” His lips were bloodless. “God, I’m thirsty.”
I filled a glass with water, and brought it to his lips. He gulped it down, tipping his head back and breathing through another spasm of pain. “Get me out of my jeans, and then we’ll talk about what I need you to do,” he said. “Hurry. Just split the seams with the blade.”
Something rippled under his skin, right near his cheekbone. Then, another ripple, over his brow. There was a sound, like the chatter of teeth, but Trowbridge’s were clenched. Oh God, his bones were moving. My Were was howling inside of me. Howling, like a dog shut up too long in its crate. “Son of a bitch,” he managed to get out.
“Trowbridge? What’s happening?”
“Fuck, I feel like I’m changing.”
“What do you mean, ‘feel like’?” My hand hovered in the space between us. “Don’t you know when you’re going to change?”
“I shouldn’t be able to. It’s too early in the lunar cycle. There’s not enough moon to make me … Oh son of a bitch.” His back arched. “The bullet’s moving again…” He gasped twice. Two sharp wrenching inhales in between backbreaking contractions. “Hurry up with the knife. You’re going to have to cut down to the bone.”
I ripped away what jean material I hadn’t cut away and poised the blade’s tip over his hip. I could see his skin stretching and thinning.
“Whatever you do, don’t be afraid,” he whispered. “Don’t be afraid in front of me, okay, Tink?”
“I’m never afraid of you.”
“Liar.”
“Mhhmmhh,” I said. My eyes were hurting, burning fiercely. He was in pain, my Trowbridge. Horrible pain. And the answer seemed to be right there. Yes, my fur-girl said. Guide him. “Trowbridge, change.”
“I can’t.” He rolled his head on the tile. “I won’t. Not now.” His ribs flexed and I watched the skin sink in between them as he took a deep breath.
I watched his leg muscle ripple. “You’d heal as a Were, wouldn’t you? Faster than as a man?”
He gave a rough nod.
“Then change,” I pleaded.
“I can’t. It’s not a choice. It’s not time.”
“Well, you better get yourself a new moon calendar because you’re changing. I can see it. Your bones are moving. I can hear them.” It was an ugly sound, but I didn’t want to tell him that. “If I cut you down to the bone with a fillet knife, it will be horrible and bloody and more than a little aggravating to your Were.” I paused, studying him. “Oooh, you should see what just happened to your jaw. Look, pain is triggering your change anyhow. Let it happen. Otherwise, I’m the girl with the bloody dagger facing a pissed-off wolf.”
“You talk too much.” At least that’s what I thought he said. His vowels were changing shape along with his jaw.
“Sometimes.” I reached out to brush back his hair, as if I had every right to do so. If I was going to die, fate should at least hand me that cookie crumb. While he was on the floor, writhing, he was mine. Just for a bit, before he turned all ugly and furry, and possibly throat-ripping-outish. “Trowbridge, change.”
“Can’t. Control. It.” He took a breath and then spat out, “Might hurt you.”
“Yeah, but I’m the one with the knife.” I put a shaky grin on my face, as I cut the rest of his jeans off. “Do it.”
“Throat.” The ripples were constant and ugly and made his words come out as mumbles. “If I attack. Push in deep. No—”
The room went blue.
In the end, he didn’t change fully. He changed just enough to scare the shit out of me, and maybe it was that—the stink of my fear in that small bathroom—that made him pause halfway. Could he do that? Even for me? I don’t know. Maybe all the shifting of bones, the snapping and crackling, the stretching of skin and tendon … possibly all those horrifying body adjustments was enough.
Trowbridge stopped, hovered and held, halfway between man and wolf, and then with a terrible howl that belonged in neither the world of beast nor of man, he pulled himself back from the brink. My bullet, flattened and twisted, pushed through his flesh and fell into my waiting palm.
The rippling under his skin stopped. The noises reversed. Pops gave way to sound that made my stomach turn—somewhere between the noise an ocean makes and a slurp. There were a few more crackles, one long stretch of sea-slurp, and then he was Trowbridge again.
Wet with sweat. Stinking of pain. And strangely, mine.
Other women say “I do” when they’re wearing white and their groom is wearing a new haircut and tie. My man was wearing a torn-up shirt and his old wedding ring. He was lying on blood-smeared tiles in a bathroom that smelled vaguely of Pine-Sol and Obsession. But he was mine. My Were-bitch had always recognized him, even before I’d recognized her.
I might not be his One True Love, but he would always be mine.
Now I understood the terrible burn in my eyes at the sight of him. Why my flare reached for his. The reason my mother had given up her princess crown, her family, and her future. I saw the yin and yang of it all. The yearning and regret. The instinct battling the common sense. Mum had said that she knew when she found her love, and that one day I would too. She hadn’t told me I wouldn’t be able to keep him once I did. I felt my eyes burn, but it was different pain. Not across my eyeballs, but deep in my tear ducts. I’d seen Mum cry twice. The first time when she and Dad had a fight of epic proportions and the last time—the image of which I’ll never rid from my memory—a minute before she died. I knew what was coming. I waited, fists on my knees, breath caught behind my teeth. My tear ducts filled and stretched. The agony of passing my first real Tear made me suck in my belly and bow to it. I whined, high through the nose, as it fought its way out.
He reached out to my face, and knuckled away the thin stream of blood trickling from my eyes. “Stronghold?”
My nails dug into my palms. The Tear squeezed out and hung, pink-glazed on my lower lid, before it fell.
“Shit.” His eyes opened in surprise as its wetness bit through the almost healed skin on his knuckles. “It burns,” he said in a hushed voice. Bitter as acid, cold as ice, my Tear glittered and rolled off his hand, leaving behind a residue of splintered diamond chips that shimmered through the red glaze of his fresh blood. He wiped his hand on a towel, and watched me with a frown.
Another one rolled down to my chin and hung from it.
He caught it in his palm.
Pink water turned to brilliant white ice. It shone as bright as the brightest light, lit from the fire of love and pain, before turning hard. He let it roll in his palm. “Tink?”
In his palm lay a small pebble of perfect diamond, truly tear-shaped.
“What—”
“Fae Tears,” I whispered.
* * *
I needed to be clean and alone—for once I needed time to think—but I only got clean. Trowbridge had his shower first, and I refused to get into it, even when he smiled his most devilish smile, and coc
ked up his eyebrow. That wasn’t the only thing that had been all cocked up.
I tried not to look, and failed.
He left the shower curtain open. When my socks were wet from the growing puddle, I rolled another of Cordelia’s white towels into a footrest. His head pivoted with my movement, and for a second the air was perfumed by a scent I began to pinpoint as “me-predator.”
He didn’t say anything though, and went back to soaping his chest. I didn’t say anything either. Too much had gone on, all of it silently, before he’d gotten up and turned on the shower. We’d rested quietly on the floor, leg to leg, hip to hip, and had given ourselves a mental time-out as his body fully healed. I’d shifted my leg away from him and his had followed, searching for my warmth again. I’d concentrated on breathing, and studying Cordelia’s shiny soap dispenser between taking glances at him underneath my lashes. He hadn’t rolled his head in my direction. Not once. But there had been a faraway expression on his face as he’d rolled my second Fae Tear between his fingers, like it was one jewel too many on a long string of worry beads.
Once the water had warmed he said, “You first.” But I’d just shaken my head wordlessly and he’d stepped in alone.
Still now, he wouldn’t go and leave me, not even after he’d showered and rinsed the conditioner out of his hair. He sat on the seat of the toilet, the towel wrapped around his narrow hips tenting at his groin, watching me as I stepped fully clothed into the humid shower.
There were questions coming, and worse, answers that had to be created out of half-lies and half-truths. I thought I needed time alone to figure stuff out, but maybe it was better this way. With him here, I couldn’t think of anything else but what I wanted and why I shouldn’t take it.
I pulled the curtain over, and adjusted the tap, and waited at the dry end of the tub for it to feel warm enough for my Fae skin’s comfort. I didn’t know what to do about Mum’s bride belt. There weren’t many places to hide it. After a bit of indecision, I took it off and hooked it over the shower rod, as far away from the wet as I could get. I’d trusted him so far with my life; I could probably trust him not to snatch my mum’s belt.
I hoped the steam cloaked me in invisibility as I unzipped my pants and dragged the sucking length of them down my legs. Water was running in two dirty streams from my bare feet. I pulled off Barry Manilow and threw him on the tub floor. Panties or bra next? Bra. I turned my back and took it off. I hooked my fingers on my panties, feeling the elastic stretch like my good intentions. My panties landed on top of Barry, and I spent a nanosecond thinking, How perverse was that? before I got under the spray.
My ride-alongs were deeply divided. Merry was stiff, even under the warm spray of the shower, and my Were-bitch was feeling like hot spice rubbed into my skin, but from the inside. I turned my back to Trowbridge, but there was no keeping him out anymore. He was in my head as surely as Lou’s thoughts, as surely as the Were-bitch who wiggled against my vertebrae. He was there, everywhere.
His eyes were obviously open, because his side of the curtain was lit by pulsing blue. My own eyes were reacting to his; the tiles around me were bright with my flare. But he’d changed even that, hadn’t he? My Fae light had flavored itself with Trowbridge blue. What had been green ice was now the color of the Caribbean. Inexplicable.
I want him. My body knew it. It was welcoming him already; breasts swelling, skin growing taut and sensitive, feminine core turning slick and heated.
I had always wanted him—the girl in me had burgeoned, hovered at the threshold of womanhood, just by inhaling his aroma and observing his body as it flexed and stretched. My uncharted desire had recognized him. Known him in a way that was not of mind but of instinct. Goddess, every time I spied upon him, I’d fancied that I’d developed a scent of my own—musky and heavy, as tantalizing as his.
I would always want him. My yearning for his body couldn’t be extinguished by self-will. He’d been the bare-chested hero of my dreams; the man with the simmering glower in every romance novel I’d ever read, the body I’d superimposed over any male substitute that had ever caused my vagina to twitch. Goddess knows how much I had tried to shed this longing. But it was part of me, as if somehow my settings had been permanently fused to his, the dials frozen in one position, so that no other creature could ever call to the sexual urges buried deep within me.
Thinking about how much I burned for him was like conjugating verbs, except figuring out French tenses wouldn’t hurt this much. I closed my eyes as I washed my hair. When I opened them I could see a spotlight of blue focused bust level on the plastic liner.
Merry was quiet. Too quiet and too dull, but for once, for one bloody minute of this last terrible day, I wasn’t going to think about her, or Lou, or the whole yawning hole of stupidity of a Were/Fae union. I had twigs to ferret out of my tangled hair. I had some serious scrubbing ahead.
“You about done?”
“Soon.” I picked up the soap to rewash every part that hadn’t been washed twice already.
“I’m hungry. We should raid Cordelia’s kitchen.”
“Do you think she has any chocolate?” I ran my fingers over my scalp, searching for any seeds I’d missed.
I heard him pull in some air through his teeth.
Suddenly the curtain was pulled back. Trowbridge stood scowling on the other side. He turned the water off, and yanked a towel off the rack with enough force to make it shudder. He sucked in another hard breath, and his towel fell to the floor, and then I drew in a deep breath of my own. The bride belt slithered off the rail and fell, landing in a heap of gold at his feet. He picked it up, and held it out to me. When I didn’t reach for it, he shook his hair to one side, and bent to fasten it around my waist. His fingers were trembling.
He clumsily patted me dry with the towel before he picked me up. Not the pretty way. The efficient way, because he was not only a man in motion, he was a man on a mission. He grabbed my midsection and the back of my legs and hauled me out of there like I was a three-year-old ready for my nap.
Trowbridge fumbled for the door with one hand, and then we were out of the bathroom, and making good time down the hall. To where, I couldn’t tell. I was too busy cataloguing things, like how it felt to be skin on skin (the underside of my arm against the top of his shoulder) or to smell him so clean and so near (goddamn aphrodisiac, they should bottle it) or how tiny he made me feel (a freakin’ princess in his arms, no less).
The apartment was dark. I got a fleeting impression of light off stainless steel as we booked it past the kitchen. Trowbridge was comfortable in the apartment. He knew enough to veer sharply left when we hit the living room to avoid the side table, and he knew where the sofa bed was. He hesitated before lowering me to it.
Music played in the apartment behind Cordelia’s closed bedroom door. A man’s voice, bluesy and sad, singing about his Little Valentine.
“I want you,” he said in a harsh whisper.
“I know.”
“I’m going to have you.” His voice was firm, but his smile was tentative.
“I know.”
“Tell me you’re not a virgin.”
“Oh Fae Stars.” I raked my fingers through his hair, and pulled it backward until his head was tipped back. His lips curved. “Do you always talk this much?”
He laughed, and I did too, even though I was in midair, and the towel was parting from my body. There was a brief moment where I was naked and needing, right before his body met mine.
Skin to skin. I know they write poems about it, but they really should write more. Long stanzas about the sweet friction of woman-skin sliding against man-skin, words woven into blushing praise about the steely slopes of strong man’s muscles, perhaps a few short ditties about the sweet roughness of callused fingers against a breast.
He touched me. With gentle fingers on my jaw, and the backs of his knuckles on my cheek, stroking, feeling, imprinting me forever. My inner Were was rejoicing. Yes! There would be no man but this man. And n
o moment but this one.
He kissed me. Soft lips for such a hard man. Soft and quizzical, testing and urging, pleading for me to follow. He sucked in my lower lip, and I fell. Crumbled and fell.
Kiss me forever. Just kiss me forever.
His hand drifted down, and left a trail, hot and his, along my collarbone, along my throat. His lips followed; each kiss repeated by the soft echo of his hair. I was liquid heat, and unthinking, until he did the unthinkable. He opened his mouth and said something dumb.
“I can’t do this with that thing around your neck.” He gestured to Merry. I sat up and covered my swollen breasts with my hands.
“Thanks for bringing up the issue of our total incompatibility,” I said, feeling my lip turn mulish. “I can’t say much for your timing, but I guess it’s better late than never. You’re right; we shouldn’t do this. You’re a Were, and I’m a Fae, and we shouldn’t even contemplate having sex. What was I thinking?” I reached for the folded blanket on the bottom of the sofa bed, deaf to my inner Were’s whine of distress.
“Stop.” He caught me by my shoulders and held me there. He put his teeth to the part of my neck that was connected to my shoulder. The traitorous bitch in my belly shivered with delight.
“Do not mark me,” I said.
“Never crossed my mind.” He kept nibbling and sucking on my flesh, right there. Right where some part of me had been standing waiting, tapping its toes and scowling at its watch.
I’ll count to forty and stop him then.
He had Merry’s chain in his hand in five. He eased her over my head by seven. He put her on the side table by nine. And then his tongue moved over the spot he’d been tenderizing, and my toes curled. Toes do that if the right man is sitting behind you, with his legs wrapped around you and his hard cock pressed against the cheeks of your butt.
He slowed time down with Trowbridge kisses, and Trowbridge fingers. He stroked and sucked, and licked and turned my leg this way, and moved my hip that way, until I was weak and oblivious to anything else, not reason, not my soft belly, nothing else but the need to reach for him and lick him too.
