by DD Prince
A family. I wanted that as a child. I wanted it with a fierceness I took out on the environment around me. It washes over me, the memories. I remember wailing at the sky for the lost family I didn’t have, though I didn’t know what I was howling for until my uncle told me. He was in one of those dark moods where his words jumbled, and he smelled like whisky. He talked about loss, about having things taken away by evil. He looked me in the eyes and told me that evil took the things you wanted, that being alone was difficult, but better than seeing what others had that should be yours.
Alone isn’t better.
I wondered if I should be lone wolf or should be with a pack. He told me lone was better, that our former pack was too corrupt.
“Why don’t we find a pack that isn’t corrupt? What about other packs, Uncle?”
“There are no others for us.”
As I grew, I felt like it was a lie. I felt like it had to be.
If our pack was bad, why didn’t we seek out another? I craved companionship, wolves to run with that were my size. Boys to play with and talk to when I was in my man form. Uncle didn’t like talking unless he drank the whisky and then his words were always confusing.
I don’t know what age I began shifting but I know he used my wolf senses and my size to his advantage both when I was a small wolf and when I was a large one. I remember rules about when we could and could not show our nature and the grass we had to eat to hide our smell, and I fucking hated that grass. Then things changed and we were wolves more often than we were people and we continued to eat the stupid grass.
I remember being much smaller than him and then being much larger a few seasons later. I remember him being a man of few words except when he needed something done or when he’d have one of his dark times and then he would talk words that made no sense until my ears grew tired of hearing him. He hated my questions. He only liked me to do what he told me to do. He liked to remind me that he saved my life, that without him I’d have been killed like my father.
I’m still spilling into my Ivy and she’s crying into my shoulder as her body trembles with her pleasure. I groan mine into her soft hair. She goes limp on me as my knot releases and my pants are soaked with my essence.
“I can’t have any more sex right now, Ty. Please, please no more.” Her face is buried in my neck.
“Okay, sweet Ivy,” I whisper into her hair. I kiss her purple wrist and feel terrible. I’ve hurt her wrist, made her cry, taken her more times than she wanted. I won’t feel bad for stopping her from leaving me.
Doesn’t she understand that I do this because I have no choice? She’s not angry at me. She seems sad and that’s confusing. Some of the women I tried from the bar got angry when they knew I was finished, when their attempts to get me to take more from them failed. Ivy doesn’t get angry at me. She gets sad. And it hurts my chest and my stomach and now I want to go hunting and rip things apart, make them bleed. I’m angry. It makes my innards feel foul.
She’s gotten a little angry a few times, but her face isn’t ugly when she’s angry. In fact, when she gets angry, it makes me want to take her to the ground and mount her as much as I want to do it when she’s smiling or laughing.
I carry her toward the bed so I can lay her down, but then my left foot slides and my body goes airborne. All I can think of as I land hard on my back is of keeping her from being hurt, so I manage to hold her high up enough that she feels no impact. I hear her gasp as my body protests at the pain.
She’s on me. I’m on the floor.
“Are you okay?”
She’s moving off me and I’m wincing in pain. This was like the soap incident in the bathroom, but worse. I fell and I nearly allowed her to get hurt.
“Are you okay?” she asks again.
“Yeah,” I grunt and sit up and stretch my back.
“Oh, Ty.” She giggles. “You slipped on a banana peel.”
She lifts it from the floor and then she laughs. “I’m sorry for laughing, but it’s a classic slapstick comedy we’ve got going on here.” She’s laughing so hard, she’s rocking to and fro.
I’m still holding my back, feeling a little disappointed that she laughs.
She suddenly sobers and swallows. “You protected me as you fell.”
I did. I always will. “I’ll always protect you.”
She leans over and no longer laughing, she puts her hand to my face. Her eyes fill with moisture. “You’re so fucking sweet.” She has a big smile on her face.
“But you still want to leave me. Wolves mate for life, Ivy. And I’ve mated you to me.”
Her face loses its joy and looks haunted as she stares at me for a long moment. Finally, I see a swallow work down her throat.
“But I’m not a wolf,” she says, and then she blinks rapidly, shaking off her emotions. “And I only just met you. I can’t know something like that instantly, especially when meeting them in the woods and they’re naked and breaking my car and then they steal me away to their remote cabin and refuse to let me go.”
My chest hurts at her words, at her expression.
She looks away and then gets to her feet, taking the peel out of the room. I follow her and see a dish of food waste in the kitchen. She deposits the banana peel there on top of broken eggshells.
“Now you know better than to throw banana peels on the floor. Do you have a compost pile outside?” she asks.
I frown. “A compost pile?”
“Where should we put this? If you have a place to put it and you turn it over once a week or so, eventually it’ll break down into nice soil for a vegetable garden.”
“Do you like to grow food?” I ask.
She nods. “I do. I always grow some herbs in my window and lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes on our little patio. We don’t have much of a yard, we have a tiny piece of a yard because there are two other apartments, but the stuff I grow is the best tasting stuff ever.”
“I’ll do this compost pile for you,” I say.
She gives me a sad smile, one that tells me it doesn’t matter if I do things for her because she won’t be here to enjoy them.
She’s wrong.
“I’m kind of tired. I think I’m going to go to bed.” She goes to her larger satchel and pulls out a white computer screen. I’ve seen devices like these in town before. She pulls a white cord from her bag and plugs it into the electricity outlet over the kitchen counter.
“Goodnight,” she says and then she goes to the bathroom with a small pink velvet bag she’s pulled from her larger bag.
Women I’d spent the night with would take bags into the bathroom to remove cosmetics. Brush their teeth. I lick my teeth and decide I’ll use her toothbrush after she sleeps. Mine is old. I stare at the closed door and listen to the water running, thinking on what I’ll do the rest of the evening while she sleeps.
I’ll refill the generators and chop more wood. Clean that table better and then … I can’t shift yet and run. When she’s more settled and safer, I’ll shift and go for a run. Hunt. I’ll mark the perimeter around the property so any animal will know to stay away. Will Riley Savage and his family heed that warning?
I don’t know if they will. And I don’t like not knowing. No. I can’t run. I can’t hunt. Not until I know they’re not a threat, even if that means eliminating them. Or moving Ivy far away. But, what if I lose my mind away from my territory?
Uncle’s mind wasn’t right. Maybe he was wrong about the territory issue.
Inside, I don’t feel like I want to eliminate them. I feel like I should find out more about them.
***
When she exits the bathroom, I lift her into my arms.
“Tyson.”
She’s protesting something but I’m simply carrying her to bed like I intended to earlier. I set her down and pull the covers over her body.
The room is warm. It’s not as cold outside tonight so with the door open the bedroom should be warm enough with a fire in the sitting room.
“Rest
, my only one.” I kiss her lips softly.
Her chin trembles and she stares at me briefly before turning over. When she does, she lifts her arm as if she hurt it before holding it to her chest with her right hand. Guilt sits in the middle of my chest like a stone. I can’t hurt her again. I need to be careful not to.
I want to hunt, I ache to run, I want to tear into flesh and feast, but I can’t. I glance at the painting over the mantle of me and the friends I wished I had when I was a boy. That sits in my chest, too. I think of Riley and those other shifters and that woman by the fence for a minute before I gather up from the chair the pile of clothes and towels as well as sheets she pulled off the bed at some stage. I put them in the machine in the garage and start it up, then wash that table she wanted me to clean until it no longer makes the water dirty when I squeeze the sponge, and then I chop wood until I grow tired.
When I climb into the bed, she’s asleep, but she curls into me and makes a cute sound. I take her mouth with mine and then I peel her clothing off. She doesn’t protest. She whimpers for me. She sleepily kisses me also. And then she whispers, “Ty”.
When I run my tongue over that sweet spot between her legs, she pleads with me to not stop. It makes me happy. I carefully slide my cock into her, and I feel her stiffen and see the grimace on her face despite the dark. I know I’ve given her no time to recover, but then I purr for her and her body relaxes. She rocks into me. I knot and try to be as gentle as I can, moving just a little inside her, feeling her inside walls squeeze around me until I come and come and come. The more she whimpers the thicker the stream of fluids leaving me. Finally spent, I reach for the shirt I had worn and dab between her legs after pulling out, then she climbs on top of my body and tucks her head into the place between my chin and my shoulder. Her arm with the uninjured wrist wraps around my neck and she falls asleep with the other palm on my cheek.
I want this little beauty to sleep on top of me every night just like this until it’s time for me to turn to dust.
21
Ivy
Tyson fucked me when he came to the bed. It was late, I think; I felt like I’d been sleeping for hours, and I woke to hot hands roaming me, a skilled mouth nipping, licking, and kissing me all over. He fucked me gently, in multiple positions, including from a spooning position with his fingers on my clit and his mouth on that bitemark. It was slow, gentle, and so very good.
I fell asleep afterwards on top of him, which is sort of embarrassing, but he was very comfortable. Until I woke again, feeling gooey between my legs while it was still dark. I tried to get out of bed, and he grabbed me by the waist.
“You can’t leave, Ivy.”
“I just wanna clean between my legs. It’s all messy.”
“Stay here,” he ordered and got out of bed.
It sounded like he left the building and I was about to go looking for him when he was back and cleaning between my legs with a warm towel.
“How is this so warm?” I asked. “Is there a fire in the other room?”
“All the towels were dirty, so I washed and dried them. I did wipe between your thighs after I fucked you.”
“Well… there was a lot of --- you, I guess.” I shrugged. I saw the reflection of his eyes and the white of his teeth in the dark room as he smiled with pride or something, and I looked away, shyly. “Where’s there a washer and dryer?” I didn’t see a basement door. Maybe it was outside?
“The garage,” he said, kissing my nose. “I’m tired. Talk to me after I sleep.” He rolled half over me.
“Your leg is heavy on me,” I whispered.
“I need to hold you here, so you don’t leave me while I sleep,” he reasoned.
My throat clogged up at that.
“Just hold my hand,” I suggested.
He pulled his leg back and reached over my head, so I reached up and grabbed his hand and squeezed. He squeezed back. The warmth, the feel of it, it made me choke up. I tried to shake those emotions off.
I’ve been a bundle of nonsensical emotions since meeting this man.
And if I was honest, I kind of missed the weight of that leg. I said nothing about that, though.
“I notice you don’t try to convince me you won’t leave,” he whispered.
I shrugged.
His mouth touched the back of my head and his big, warm hand over my right palm, which was above my head on the pillow, squeezed again.
“You know how to do laundry and drive a car but not how to peel a banana. So odd.” I saw through the window that the sun was beginning to rise. I yawned.
He chuckled and put his free hand to my hip and gave it a squeeze. “My head was foggy. The fog is clearing. Mostly. I haven’t spent time in this form for years. Things are coming back. I suppose some things are just things I never forgot. Some things, like things in this house, I remembered. I never bought bananas before.”
“Oh.”
“If I’d gone many more seasons without shifting, I might never have come back to this form. Even to catch your scent.”
“Whoa.”
I thought on it. On how different his life is to mine. He’s here in the middle of nowhere and said other than hunting for a wife occasionally, he spent all his time with an uncle who he said was a man of few words.
He’s not very worldly. He’s quite savage in many ways, in fact, like his last name suggests. I wonder, idly, about the people who he talked about. Maybe he did belong with those people. The idea of leaving him alone, with nobody, in such a state of lonesomeness that he’d opt to live as a wolf all the time? It bothered me.
Wouldn’t it be better, more gratifying to spend your life with others? And I supposed it would be freeing to be an animal with few worries, but would being a human be preferable? To have conversations. To have more choices about where to go, what to do, who to be? I didn’t know what it was like to be an animal, of course, so how could I know which was preferable?
I fell back under, into a blissfully cuddly sleep before the sun completely rose and I was warm, comfy, and snuggled by a man slash werewolf. As I slipped under, I did it thinking that something about this felt right, deep in my gut. My momma and her sister told me, my whole life, Ivy--- never ever ignore your gut. But I always veered toward not trusting my instinct. Why was that?
***
It’s morning. Bright and sunny. Birds are chirping and heat beats through the drapes, against my skin. I’m awake first. He’s still holding my right hand over our heads and his body spoons mine.
I slip my hand away and turn over to watch him.
He continues to sleep, so I carefully inch my way down to the bottom of the bed and off. It doesn’t rouse him.
Maybe I should go now. Get out of here and drive to town. Leave his truck there so it’s not like I’ve taken it too far. Call a tow truck. Get my car. Pay for the tow truck to bring his truck back, maybe. Get home.
The idea of the loneliness of this place without another person would drive me absolutely bonkers. How can he be alone like that? Isn’t it sad? Of course it is, for me, but he knows nothing else, except for companionship of one person, a person that died and someone that doesn’t sound like he was great company.
Should I encourage him to go meet that guy that says he’s family? If I do that, it doesn’t mean he’s not going to try to stop me from going again. But the way he stops me? Visions of yesterday assault my senses in a delicious way that makes my belly swoop.
It’s just gotta be because of how lonely he’s gonna be that I feel bad right now at the idea of leaving him alone.
Maybe he ought to try to live in society, where there’s the opportunity to meet people.
I understand, being supernatural that being away from prying eyes is probably better. I’m guessing it’s a rule that they don’t reveal themselves to the general population or something.
He’s on his side, lashes resting against his face, mouth full and pouty looking. The lines and angles of his face… he should be replicated in bronze and
put into a museum. Perfect Male Specimen.
His face is shadowed by a few days of not shaving, though not really because he wouldn’t have shaved for a lot longer than that if he’d been living as a wolf for years. A completely different form. An animal.
Reconciling it isn’t easy. I’ve always been pragmatic, amused by Aunt Nelle’s anecdotes and her eccentricities, but my feet remained firmly planted in healthy skepticism.
Here was fantasy as reality. This meant magic was real. Maybe aliens, too. Vampires? Ghosts? The skeptic part of me now ceased to exist because Ty is flesh, bone, and emotion. He’s excitement and wonder. He’s passionate and protective. He’s also nurturing and enjoys being amused.
He is a multifaceted person that I find myself fascinated by.
I now feel like anything is possible, like magic is real, just like my aunt told me.
I gaze at his massive frame, all those muscles, that sexy tanned skin. He’s the epitome of masculine. And yet he’s tender. He treats me with reverence, but with a caveat that I really like.
I’m a waif of a girl and this often instills protectiveness of me by men. As if I’m too easily breakable. With Ty, he touches me like he means it. No feather-light caresses when he’s in the throes of passion. When he touches me, I know it. He touches me like I’m his. And fuck, but I like it.
Holy moly am I ever using a lot of F-words these days. Sometimes they’re the only word with enough oomph to describe a situation, I guess.
He stirs and sniffs at the air like he smells something. And then he makes that purring sound as he rolls to his back. I round the bed and get back in with him, without thinking on it, just simply lifting the blanket and crawling in, plastering myself against his warmth. He pulls the blanket up over my shoulders and puts his hands on my ass. I smile against his chest and close my eyes, feeling the gentle vibration of the purrs coming from his chest.
“Good morning,” I say.
“Good morning,” he parrots and then his hands caress my backside. “I smell you.”
“What do I smell like?” I ask.
