Four hours and something later, I squeeze the latch on the cabin door. Once inside, I close it, giving the little extra push until it clicks. Then I sag heavily on the side of Thea’s bed.
She turns over, her fingers feeling the fine black wool of my tuxedo. I look over my shoulder.
She must have showered not long ago. Her hair is still damp, fusing together in sharp, black flames that lick against her naked skin. Silently, she pulls her legs from under the covers and kneels in front of me. She unties my laces and tosses my shoes (cap-toe Balmorals, high shine, not patent) to the side. Her hands slide up my calf until she touches skin, then she rolls down my socks (black, silk) and throws them to the side too. Leaning between my knees, she unbuttons my jacket (single-button, no vents, grosgrain facing, peaked collar). She pushes it from my shoulders. I shrug once, and it falls first to the bed, then slithers to the floor.
With a twist, her long, strong fingers open one button on my waistcoat (three-button, black). Then another. Then one more.
She feels around for the end of my tie (textured silk, semi-butterfly) and pulls. Inserting a finger in the loosened knot, she drags it down until the ends hang around the collar of my shirt (Royal Oxford, forward point). Without a second thought, I tilt my head back, my eyes closed, giving her free access to my neck. The cool air hits my skin as she works each shirt stud (mother-of-pearl) free. She disentangles the platinum chains from my cuffs, setting them on her table next to the studs. Then she pulls off my waistcoat, my shirt.
She unbuttons my pants (tapered, grosgrain ribbon).
“Up?” she says.
Holding on to the finial of her footboard, I lift my hips, allowing her to slide everything off to join the rest of my kit puddled on the floor.
Thea wedges between my legs, pushing them wider. She leans forward, inhaling my most secret scent, and, with each breath, leaves a whorled caress that makes me whimper. Her hands trace the outline of my shoulders and the sloping curves of my arms and my chest and continue down, taking my already heavy cock. My hand touches her hair, spreading it over her shoulders and my thighs until I feel her kiss, warm and fierce.
She kisses it, not lasciviously or like it’s a tool. She kisses it tenderly, like it is not an “it” at all. Like “it” is me.
I jerk when she takes me deep and long, exciting me with her mouth and gentling me with her hand along the tightening seam below, using a restrained rhythm that builds slowly until each new stroke makes me ache to come home inside this woman who has reminded me how to be untamed and immoderate. How to be real.
My hands slide and explore, reveling in each centimeter of her skin, the furrows of her ribs, the soft curve of her breasts with their taut tips. The slope to her belly and further until I twine one hand around her waist and cup her sex with the other and pull her up, feeling the pressure and dampness on my hand and the way her hips undulate against my palm in her need for more. No matter how tightly I hold my hand against her, her body twists against me, looking for more.
When I lift her up, her knees part on either side of my thighs and my thick crown pushes against her. She shudders, her head shaking fiercely as she puts her hands to my chest and pushes me away. “We need to stop,” she says, and straightening one leg, she reaches for her nightstand.
“You took me already, Thea.” I pull her back to me, kissing her lips and tasting the trace of salty muskiness there. She took me already.
“That’s because I believed you when you said you were very careful,” she says, pressing her forehead against mine. “No man with that many condoms and an apartment that OCD is going to play fast and loose with his body. But it doesn’t mean I can’t get pregnant.”
She starts to reach for her nightstand again, but I hold her one second longer. “Supposing it did. Supposing I told you that’s exactly what it meant. That I can’t get you pregnant. What then?”
That stops her.
She hesitates for a moment and then settles back on my lap, her legs wrapped around my hips, her arm crossed in front of her chest. “You’re…?”
“Sterile.” Which isn’t true, but it might as well be.
She looks me over carefully, as if she’s trying to gauge how the end of my bloodline makes me feel.
The answer is…elated. I can’t tell her how overwhelmingly grateful I am that she will never have to suffer through a lying-in—that I will never have to suffer through her lying-in—but she must see it in my eyes.
“And you’re okay with it?”
“Me? Absolutely. But the reason I told you has nothing to do with me and nothing to do with whether we use a condom tonight. It’s about the next night and the next and a whole lifetime of days and nights. It’s about a future with you. I need to be with you, but there are things I can’t give you. Not just children. I have…obligations, so while you would always have my heart and soul, you wouldn’t always have my bod… I mean, nobody else would have my body, because it doesn’t even work with anyone else anymore, but I couldn’t live here—”
“You’re rambling,” she says, putting her fingers to my lips. “I was seeing a guy before—”
“Doug?”
She frowns a little, trying, I suppose, to figure out how I know.
“He tried to warn me off. After Liebling died. Told me I wouldn’t be able to domesticate you.”
She offers a half smile and reaches behind her for a blanket. Of course she’s cold. She’s human. They get cold. I help her pull it over her back. I’ll have to get used to this.
“I’m not sure he was clear on what ‘domesticating’ meant. For him, it meant getting a television, a ‘real’ refrigerator, a sofa, and a couple of children. He always said it in the same sentence as though children and refrigerator and television and sofa were all part of a set. Like patio furniture.”
She pushes my hair back from my forehead. “He didn’t understand that I didn’t need any of it. I like children when they come on field trips. They ask strange questions with no answers and questions so simple that I’ve never thought to ask. But I’ve never wanted to have a child. Like I could own another human being.”
I pull her hand to my lips and kiss her palm. I don’t want to have her either. I don’t want to mold her or domesticate her or change her, because she is my compass, and if she lost her way, I would be lost too.
Then she kisses my palm and presses our hands together. Our bodies together. Our mouths together.
She isn’t saying no.
Then she moves her hips in gentle waves over my erection, making me jerk uncontrollably.
She isn’t saying no.
I hold tight to her calves, keeping them spread wide. She lowers herself on me, slowly surrounding me with every soft, tough, liquid part of her until we are fully joined. I push her hips down, reveling in the fierce grip of her body and the teasing rhythm that mirrors the tiny pulsing of her finger that first day I met her, but now it is playing out on my cracking cock that can’t help twitching inside her. Carefully, so that I will not lose this connection, I turn her over, and only then, when she is splayed in front of me, do I pull myself most of the way out. Her hands push down on my lower back, right where my spine is going soft and spongy, and I slam home.
Home. Again and again and again, until it is impossible to be any deeper. And having tightened so far, there’s nothing left for it but to release everything I have into her body.
In the end, she falls asleep in my arms, swollen and saturated with me.
And I am home.
As the fire dies down, cool air is sucked into the chimney, bringing with it the faintest whiff of creosote. I hold Thea tighter. At the end of this moon, I will do whatever needs to be done to make sure the 9th is secure. When I leave, Celia will be Alpha, and I will be just another low-ranked Offlander.
Hearing the change in Thea’s breath, I whisper her name. She turns to me, her hand finding my chest in the cold dark.
“I’m taking some time off. Going home.”
“Nnng?” she says sleepily. “Not ‘the apartment’?” She gives the words a special emphasis, because of course she has noticed that I never call that stasis chamber close to work home.
“No. My real home. It’s time for me to make it right.”
Her hand slides along my sternum up to my collarbone.
“How long will you be gone?”
“I’m not sure. A week? A month? God, I hope not that long.”
She pokes her head over the blankets, looking toward the dying fire. Then she pulls the throw from the foot of the bed and crouches in front of the stove.
“Where is it?” The door creaks as she opens it. “Home, I mean?”
I watch her feed the fire, swift and sure. Watch the slight movements of the bones of her spine that seem so delicate under the gold skin brushed with tiny upright hairs, that paltry excuse for fur. Every detail of her reminds me that things Offland are fragile and break easily. It makes me ache to shield her.
“Not so far away. A little south of Canada. I wish I could take you there, let you see you how special it is. Let them see how special you are, but my people… They’re very wary. They really don’t trust strangers.”
The sheets are cold again when she crawls in.
“Sort of like the Amish?”
I rub her back and shoulders and pull her close to the furnace of my body.
No, Thea Villalobos, Goddess of the City of Wolves, not Amish.
Werewolves.
“Yeah, just like that.”