by DD Prince
“One sec,” I say, seeing way too much water escape the confines of the tub because the shower curtain is hanging by just three rings now, and I squat to twist the steel plug in to block the drain. I flip the shower knob so that water begins filling the tub before the entire floor gets flooded.
“Here,” I say and nudge at his shoulders until he understands my gesture and sits down. I get behind him, legs on either side of his thighs and he shifts down a little as I begin lathering up his fabulous long, dark, curly hair. He leans back against my chest and makes a happy sound while caressing my legs. I soap up his shoulders and his chest with the excess shampoo on my hands. He grabs his cock and strokes it as I do this and holy moly… it’s the hottest thing I think I’ve ever witnessed.
I stare at the sexy, muscled, wet body in front of me, nestled between my thighs. Every water droplet is fascinating. The big soaker tub is a tight fit for the two of us, but he’s not complaining. His knees are cocked and he’s soapy everywhere. The way he pumps his dick, it looks so normal. I mean, huge, but normal, not like it could be the same thing he used inside me that transformed into a vibrating g-spot stimulator that was locked in place. I reach sideways as far as I can and am able to grab it. It feels normal.
Suddenly, I’m mortified at my actions. I can’t believe I just grabbed it. I let it go and stew in my indignity.
What’s wrong with me? I need a brain transplant. Or maybe I got one when I wasn’t looking, because after everything, I’m here giggling and giving banana-peeling tutorials, then washing the hair of the guy that hauled me to his wolf lair and has been dicking me half to death.
He twists sideways to look over his shoulder at me.
“Why is your face like that?” His eyes are so soft on me, so concerned.
“The way it moved inside me. It got bigger and… vibrated. Is that… is that normal?”
“It?” he asks.
“Your…” I gesture toward his cock, which is right there in all its thick, veined, glory.
“Ah. For me it feels like the most natural thing. Others? I have no idea. I know all wolf shifters knot their mates. Rinse the soap from my hair or I’m going to have to fuck you in this tub, Ivy Savage, and I intended to give you until after we eat dinner for that but then you grabbed my cock and I’ve decided that after we eat, I want to climax with my cock in your little hand.”
“Uh… oh.”
He smiles. “It’ll give your princess parts a break. My… parts don’t want a break.”
“You don’t know if others like you have the same thing happen? The pulsing action?”
“I don’t make it a habit to ask other men about their cocks. I only know what I was told. That I’d only be able to knot inside my mate. I’ve never knotted inside anyone else.”
“Oh. But…”
“I spent no significant time with any man but my uncle and he was the only shifter I ever met before this morning. My uncle told me things but was a man of few words, so I don’t think he told me all the things. And now I don’t know if all he told me was truth or not. My conversation with Riley Savage today has my mind jumbled. But you’re my focus. I’ll figure all the other stuff out later when you’re finally settled.”
“Finally settled?” I ask.
The tub is filled deep enough with water and shampoo bubbles now that his cock is now hiding under the water level.
“When you stop trying to leave me.”
I fight to swallow, but it doesn’t happen.
“My whole life I was told they’re the enemy. Part of me wants to hunt them and erase them from this world. Part of me wonders if my uncle told only lies. My mind is … considering a lot of events growing up.”
He goes quiet and I think he probably feels like the weight of the world is on his shoulders.
I put my hands to those massive shoulders and squeeze them. I feel his body relax a little.
“What things did he say to you today?” I dash bubbles that are about to slide down his forehead into his eyes back into his hairline.
“I don’t want to think on that or talk about it. I want to eat. And then fuck you.” Tyson stretches, wanting my mouth. I grant it. He kisses me sweetly and his voice drops an octave. “I need this shampoo out. You’re very sweet to protect my eyes. I’ve gotten it in there before and it isn’t nice.”
“It’s small in here with both of us. I’ll get out and you tip your head back under that running water before it gets too deep.”
“Stay,” he says and spins around so that he gets his head under water and his feet are tucked on either side of my hips. This gives me a direct view of everything going on between his legs briefly before the water and bubbles slosh over his body and cover him.
“Tyson… we need to talk about you fucking me,” My eyes fly to the ceiling. I realize it’s likely he can’t hear me as his head is under the running water. He finally rises to sitting and squeezes his hair of excess water. “We need to talk about you fucking me. About you not fucking me, I mean,” I feel my face go red. “I need to go home. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, you seem very… sweet, but…”
He lunges forward and water spills over the side. He puts his mouth to mine, cupping my jaw. My eyes drift shut as I let him steal the words from my mouth. He kisses sweetly at first, and then he’s kissing with tongue and making that vibrating purr sound again and my nipples are tingling. I’m clutching both sides of the tub and then he’s licking my throat.
“Please don’t try to fuck me again,” I plead. “I can’t.”
“Then don’t talk about having to go,” he threatens and backs away.
I have a full body shudder.
He climbs out of the tub and shakes his head rapidly from side to side.
Water is flying everywhere.
I squeal and squint.
Holy shit, he’s shaking the water off like a dog.
“Towels are a lot more effective, Ty,” I suggest, blinking, laughing.
He laughs hard. “I forgot.” He fetches a towel from the rod and rubs his body, still laughing.
I twist the taps off and pull the plug.
“I never laughed before. I like it,” he says. “It’s fun. It feels good in here.” He points to his stomach. “and here.” He points to his chest and leaves.
My expression drops.
Never laughed before?
He comes back with another towel and reaches out to take my hand. As I stand, feeling bashful about the way his eyes devour my naked body, his muscles are bulging in his jaw and he’s examining my face, trying to read my expression, I think.
I try to take the towel as I step over the tub onto the sopping wet bathmat, but he doesn’t let go of it. Instead, he moves closer and dries me, staring into my eyes as he does.
I stand there while he gently dries me. He grabs my waist with one hand and lifts one foot in the other. “Hold on so you don’t fall.” I grab his shoulder and he dries even the bottoms of my feet. I’m watching him and thinking holy shit… Some girl some day is going to be very, very lucky to be your wife. And then it dawns.
I could be that girl.
I could be.
He wants me to be.
He thinks I am that girl.
I swallow down a lump in my throat. My chest feels strange.
He looks up. “What’s the matter? Is your wrist still hurting?” He looks at it. It’s a fairly ugly purple. Regret washes across his features again and it hits me in the chest as he kisses it.
“It’s okay,” I say, and he rises and begins drying my hair with the towel.
I’m biting my lip.
“What are you cooking for me?”
“Um, how about bacon and eggs? I’m starved and that won’t take long.” I reach for, then hang the wet bathmat over the side of the tub.
He shrugs. “Bacon and eggs. I’ll try it.”
“Try it? Haven’t you had it before?” I’m wondering if this is going to be as foreign to him as a banana.
�
�Well…” He looks like he’s sifting through his mind. “I’m not sure. I’ve done my eating as wolf except when I was very young and couldn’t shift yet and one other time when I was having a problem with shifting for several days. So, maybe. I don’t know.”
“You ate canned peaches as a wolf?” I ask, laughing as I wrap the towel around myself and head back to his bedroom. He follows. I reach for my bag, for a change of clothes. My iPad is there, too. I have no idea if my phone was in the car and he left it or if it’s outside the car somewhere. I chew my cheek thoughtfully and sift through for the cord.
“No, I ate canned peaches when I shifted. I shifted about a month each year until he died. I’d be man during the day and shift to wolf and run and hunt at night. After efforts to find a mate.”
He reaches into the armoire and pulls out a pair of trackpants and puts them on. He slicks his wet hair back with his fingers.
“My uncle bought this cabin for us when I was an infant and purchased some items to care for me until I was old enough to shift. I don’t know what I ate as an infant or a small child. My memories are hazy because it’s been so long since I was man. But, when I hit puberty I remember problems shifting for a time, so he provided some man-food to me. Canned fruit was something I ate a lot of. I didn’t grow tired of it.” He shrugs.
“You were only a man a month per year?” I ask.
“Yes, except when I was a small child.”
“And during those times…” His words about looking for a mate are rolling around in my head.
“I’d shift at night and hunt. Sleep and read during much of the day.”
“So, you mostly ate other animals?”
“Yes.”
I make a face. “Have you ever eaten a person?”
He considers my question a minute and flexes his jaw. “I remember once. Some of him. More than once, maybe, but once is vivid.”
I gag. He frowns.
“I disgust you?”
“You can’t help what you are any more than I can.” I shrug and slide my panties up my legs and try to get them on without dropping my towel. He watches with interest.
“You eat, what? Deer? Bunnies?”
“Yes.”
“You kill them and eat them?” My face heats.
“I don’t find dead ones and eat those. I’m not a buzzard shifter.”
“Bleck.”
“It’s natural, Ivy.”
“Let’s not talk about that stuff. Let’s just say you do ‘wolf’ things.”
“Okay,” he agrees.
“So you can read?” I ask.
“My uncle taught me, yes. He purchased textbooks and taught me from them until I could read well enough to take over and teach myself. He grew frustrated with the teaching and I was anxious for more learning, so I took over. I haven’t been a man for some time, Ivy. Some of the things I know are still coming back to me. Like the bananas. After you peeled it I remembered a book about a monkey who ate a lot of them and remember him opening the fruit to get the inside parts.” He gets a light in his eyes and then he’s gone.
He calls my name a few seconds later. I finish pulling a sweatshirt over my head and slide on a pair of loose short drawstring linen shorts I have in my bag.
I head out and see the door that was on the other end of the hall is open and a light is on. I step inside and this is a chilly room with a small bookshelf and a desk. There’s a twin mattress on the floor and everything in here is coated with dust. It smells like it hasn’t been opened up and cleaned in ages.
“This was my room, where I slept and did my studies as a child. The other room was his until I grew, and he gave it to me for bedding women and took this one.”
I lift my eyebrows and feel heat rise in my face. What’s that ugly feeling I have inside me?
“How many women have you brought here?” I ask, feeling my cheeks flame.
He ponders a moment. “Maybe six or eight, I think. Ten. Ten, yes.”
“You’ve had sex with ten women?”
“No, more than that. Many more than that. That’s just the ones I brought here. I often brought them to the motel or would go to their home.” He tilts his head. “Does this anger you?”
“No!” I answer too quickly. “Why would it? You bring me here; you bring plenty of women here. Were they here against their will, too?” I’ve got my arms across my chest and I fight my brows from knitting together.
He looks amused.
The asshole.
“They weren’t my mate, Ivy. I didn’t know it until now that I should’ve known the minute I was in their presence.”
I say nothing but heat continues rising in my face.
He chuckles and then hands me a dusty yellow book. “I loved this little monkey,” he says. “For a long time, this was my only book. I read it over and over.”
I feel a smile tug my grimace away. “I loved him, too.”
“You read this?”
I nod. “I think my mom still has it and all my other books. Boxes upon boxes of them in the attic. She’s saving them for some day when I have a baby.”
Tyson smiles wide. “Then our baby will have two of these books. Or one for our sons and another for our girls. We’ll have many boys so if shifter boys don’t like to share, they’ll have to learn.”
My heart skips a beat.
His expression drops and I realize it’s mirroring my expression.
“Or maybe we’ll need more copies of this book. I wanted siblings and didn’t have any, but I would not have wanted to share my books.”
“I should… uh… cook,” I say and make my exit.
20
Tyson
Her cheeks burned with jealousy as she asked how many women I’d brought here and tried to guess the number I’d had sex with.
This is good news.
The nurturing nature of my little one, her carefully shampooing my hair, protecting my eyes from soap, wanting to cook for me, it’s further proof she’s a gift to me.
More and more from books and lessons as well as experiences are sliding back into place in my mind. Uncle struggled to teach me the basics of reading and comprehension and I’m sure I learned later than I would have, but after I had the basics down he was relieved and told me the books would do the rest.
They did.
I devoured books throughout my childhood and even after puberty I had a thirst for knowledge during the month each year that I was a man. I’d study until night fell and then I’d shift, run, and hunt until bone-weary and then I’d fall back into bed until the next day when I could devour a new book. Textbooks. Novels. Atlases. Encyclopedias. Each year he insisted I mount multiple females so I could seek out a mate. I read a lot in between those times, in between errands he had us run. He took me to a book shop sometimes and would ask the owner for books to teach a child all they’d learn in school.
A conversation from early manhood comes over me.
“What if she’s not at that bar, uncle? What if my destined only one is in the forbidden village? Or in another city, another country across the ocean?”
I’d been reading of foreign lands. I’d run out of the books we had and on a trip out of town for supplies as well as one of his errands, I found a different bookstore and there were thousands of books that had already been read by others so were inexpensive. I had two twenty-dollar bills in my pocket and purchased as many as I could carry.
“Shifters find their mate in their territory. It’s basic, Tyson. A shifter’s born territory is meant for them. They rarely stray far from it. If we weren’t to find our mates close, we wouldn’t stay in the same zone all our lives.”
But we left our zone often for his errands and came back soon after. He didn’t like being away from our property and would grow agitated easily whenever we had one of those errands.
And in one of his dark times he muttered about taking me, as an infant, to a place far away because I couldn’t eat the herb to disguise my scent, but said as soon as he could fee
d it to me, we came back. He needed to come back because if shifters left their territory it was bad for their minds. He didn’t explain that.
When I asked him about finding a mate for himself, he went sullen and told me,
“Not all stories have the happy ending, Tyson. Our pack decided to control my destiny instead of letting me be in charge. I showed them.”
Instead, he directed me to keep mounting women from the other village where the witch lived, telling me it was too dangerous to go to the forbidden village where they hated us, would kill us if we let them scent us. But yet I was drawn to the village.
“Is she there? Is that why I’m drawn?”
“Maybe,” he told me and one year, we moved along the fringe of it after taking extra efforts in masking our scent so we wouldn’t be discovered.
I wanted to mark the perimeter.
“I need to mark it here.”
I’d never felt the urge to mark a territory as mine. The urge was strong.
“You can’t do that, Tyson, we’ll be discovered. This was your birthright, that’s why you feel this, but you can’t take it. Things have changed.”
“Why? If it’s mine, I should take it.”
“Trust your uncle. There are things you don’t know.”
“Then tell me. I’m not a boy anymore. I’m a man now so fucking tell me.”
He went on to remind me of all he’d sacrificed to save me and told me ‘later, when it’s safe, I’ll tell you.’
I didn’t smell my mate there, so we left.
“Ivy,” I ask, “where do you come from?”
She’s pulling cooking things out of the kitchen cupboards and surveying them with distaste before setting them in the sink. Everything is dusty from not being used or cleaned in many years. Some items in the cupboards have been there as long as we’ve had the place. The house came partly furnished and outfitted with most of that kitchen gear. She finds an unopened package of sponges and a large yellow container that I recall contains soap, so she begins washing. I decide we need a fire. Her legs are bare and she’s wearing rubber footwear that consists of a v across her foot, plugging into the rubber sole between her first two toes. She must be chilled. Her hair is still wet, too. I pull a log out of the basket and shove it into the wood stove.
