Ethan made dinner. He set a plate of fried chicken, potato salad, and green beans in front of me with a glass of sweet tea. He’d plated it up like we were at a fancy restaurant, complete with a fancy carved tomato garnish and a sprig of rosemary tucked beside the chicken. At my praise and thanks, he offered a tight smile and took up the seat on the other side of my tiny kitchen table.
“When we were teenagers,” I said after the first few surprisingly good bites, “you couldn’t even handle boxed mac and cheese.”
His grin was real this time. Quick and bright before he hid it behind a sip of his tea. “It’s been a while. I learned to feed myself actual food and stopped living on takeout and boxed dinners sometime around freshman year of college.”
“I think I figured out I needed to eat actual grown up food sometime around my first year of med school. Unfortunately, at the same time, I also realized I didn’t have time to make anything other than instant noodles and whatever I could nuke in under five minutes.” I speared a chunk of potatoes and popped it in my mouth. “Remember that time your dad was out of town?”
“And we tried to play house with that fancy dinner and shit?” Ethan snorted. “Oh, God, I tried to make steaks. I remember the smell lingered for days. Mrs. Carroll from next door could still smell it when she came over that next weekend, and she didn’t even have the senses the rest of us did.”
It had been terrible. The steaks were burned on the outside but bloody inside. I’d forgotten to wash the spinach, so our salad was gritty and had one very scared little worm hiding under a chunk of tomato. Ethan had snagged some beers from his dad’s stash in the garage fridge, but I tapped out after a few sips, the bitter-sour taste making me gag. His dad had been off at some meeting. Looking back, I know it must have been clan-related, but at the time, I was told it was for work. Ethan’s brothers were gone for the night, off doing gods knew what. “I remember you wore that awful shirt. The shiny one? All… gray and shimmery?”
He blushed, looking down at his plate with intense focus. “I got it out of Tyler’s closet. I thought maybe I’d dress up a little.” The glance he shot my way was fraught with remembered heat, with the butterfly-laced excitement of two barely-men growing into their desires. “I remember thinking how good you looked. Um. I have to admit something. I burned the steaks because I kept staring at your ass while you made the salad.”
I managed not to choke on my drink, but just barely. “Oh my God, Ethan!”
“Oh, don’t act like you didn’t know! You were dancing around, shaking your hips. You kept looking at me to see if I was watching.”
“Never!” The serious expression lasted for less than ten seconds before I cracked, and then we were both laughing, pretending for a few minutes we weren’t scared to bits. That Tyler and Waltrip weren’t breaking into my aunt’s house. Like we weren’t waiting for everything to implode. Picking at the crunchy bits on the chicken, I glanced at the clock. “It’s been two hours.”
“It’s going to take at least five,” he murmured, back to snaffling down his food like he was afraid someone was going to steal it off his plate.
“What if Tyler can’t find it? I mean, I told him exactly where it was but—”
“He’ll find it,” Ethan said flatly. He stood abruptly, his chair skittering on the old linoleum. “Want more? I’m gonna…” Gesturing toward the stove top and the still-warm food, he shrugged. “Being nervous makes me hungry.”
He was kind of adorable when he blushed. I shook my head, picking at the chicken again. “I’m still working on this, thanks.” The kitchen was quiet for another few minutes while Ethan refilled his plate and I moved the food around on mine, fooling neither of us. “Do you think…”
What did I even want to know? Did he think this would end well? Did he think Tyler and Waltrip were going to make it? Did he think that, maybe, when this all settled out somehow, we could make another go of it now that we were adults, and our heads were mostly out of our asses?
“Not often.” He chuckled. “It scares the hamster off the wheel.”
“Huh? Oh.” I rolled my eyes, making a raspberry noise at him as he sat back down. He eyed me expectantly, but I kept my attention firmly on the remains of my potato salad. After a minute, Ethan tucked into his plate of chicken, and conversation slowly bubbled up again, meandering through mundane topics while skirting the edges of more dire ones. After we’d done all the damage we could to dinner, Ethan insisted on cleaning up, threatening to move me bodily from my own kitchen if I didn’t let him.
“I like washing dishes,” he lied.
“You’re doing that nose crinkle thing you do when you try to convince people you’re sincere about your love of diet soda or college ball.”
“Am not. Now go before I duct tape you to the recliner.” He held up one finger. “No. No sexy brow wiggles, racy comments, or suggestive looks. Go.”
“You didn’t say anything about salacious panting,” I teased, sticking my tongue out and panting like a dog as I headed for the living room. Ethan’s snort of laughter followed me into the dimly lit room. The TV showed the streaming screensaver, evidence of our attempt to watch a show to pass the time earlier. We’d given it up after neither one of us could stay focused for more than a few minutes, no matter how funny the comedian Ethan had chosen was. I flopped back on the sofa and grabbed for the remote to turn off the box, pausing mid-reach when I noticed my laptop was still open on the coffee table.
Still open, and flash drive still plugged in.
I felt like a kid sneaking out after Cleverly was asleep, jumping at every noise while I eased my laptop over and brought it out of sleep mode. It took seconds to open the drive and scroll past the things we’d already looked at. All that was left were some text-based files labeled with the initials B.D. and three numbers after them. Each file was a slightly different number, but all had the same initials. Christ, what if this is about one of the other kids? My initials were on some of those files about me. This must be one of the kids who survived, too. Or I hoped so. I hoped they’d survived and were out there somewhere, that thinking they had anxiety, or some sensory issues was the worst problem they faced in their daily life now, and they had no idea about what had been done to us.
Ethan was whistling some pop song I was planning on teasing him for knowing later, the sink running as he rinsed. Now or never. I opened the first text file only to be confronted with a wall of, well, text. It was gibberish, like someone had saved in the wrong format or something, but I scrolled down anyway. Six pages of the same mess on a file that showed it had seven pages. The last page was blank, which was a nice break from the nonsensical lines of blocky junk text but frustrating enough to make me growl like a dog.
Yikes. That’s new… I glanced toward the kitchen. Ethan was still whistling about how some boy broke his heart, and now he was going to party, party, party all night, night, night with the sink still running like I didn’t have to pay the water bill. Abruptly, the sink shut off and the whistling stopped. I fumbled the laptop and nearly dropped it when Ethan stuck his head around the corner of the kitchen door. “Hey, I was going to make some coffee. Do you…” He frowned and came out of the kitchen, crossing to me in just a few long strides. “Don’t torture yourself with that, Lan.”
“Bad choice of words there, Stone,” I said shakily. I moved to set the laptop back on the table, avoiding Ethan’s sharp glare. “It’s nothing, anyway. Just a junk file from the looks of things.”
“We’ll have Tyler run through it, just to be sure. It might be coded or something.” He looked at the screen, eyes widening and a soft gasp escaping. “Or hidden in plain sight.”
When I’d fumbled it, apparently, I’d hit a few keys. The page was highlighted, a neat and tidy list showing up in clear, plain language. “They saved in white text on a white background,” I huffed. “That’s elegantly simple and painfully irritating.”
Ethan dropped to sit next to me. “Those look like bank account numbers,” he said after a few seconds. “No names but look.” He tapped the screen where a column of numbers marched down one side of the list. “Decimals replaced by commas. They do that in a lot of European countries.”
“It’s a list of money they’re getting from Europe? Or are they sending it?”
Ethan shook his head. “We need to get Tyler on this. Fuck, I wish I had Lachlan’s number. I’d just go straight to him instead of dealing with my brother.” Ethan took the laptop back and opened one of the other text files. This was the same, a page that looked blank but showed a similar list of numbers if you highlighted it.
“I was worried it might be about one of the other kids,” I admitted softly. “I thought maybe if I could find their names, there’d be some way for me to track them down, and I could see if they were alright. If they… if they made it out in one piece.” A shudder racked my body. I felt impossibly young and terribly old at the same time. Ethan didn’t hesitate to wrap me in his arms, tugging me onto his lap and just letting me be there. His hands never strayed to more exciting areas. Instead, he tucked my head beneath his chin and drew his legs up to cradle me, making an Ethan-blanket around me.
I felt safe. I was still scared to hell and back, and the knowledge I could be killed relatively soon wasn’t far from my conscious thoughts, but I felt safe. Ethan was what I’d been missing, or maybe what I’d been working toward. I thought maybe he might feel the same about me, but I couldn’t think of a way to ask that would keep me from shattering into dust if he pushed me away again like he had back when we were kids. “Landry,” he whispered.
“Uh oh. Landry, not Lan. I must be in trouble,” I murmured. He tipped his head back, but I refused to move, keeping my chin tucked and eyes firmly on his shoulder. Did he just read my mind? Does he know what I’m thinking? Or am I just that obvious, and he wants to nip this in the bud? We can go back to living close by and so far, pretending not to know the other is just an hour away.
“Not that kind of trouble,” he said, low voice sending shivery fingers down my neck. “Look at me.”
His fingers tightened as my heart picked up speed. That stupid scared bunny part of me was nervous but didn’t want to run. Not from Ethan. I tipped my face up and, before I could so much as breathe in, he was kissing me. Firm but not hard, he pressed his lips to mine. My microsecond of confusion made him tense, ready to pull away, but I was faster than either of us expected. Tangling my fingers in his thick hair, I held him in place, reveling in the feel of his beard rough on my cheeks, his tongue barely touching my lower lip. Opening for him, I felt his sigh rather than heard it. Maybe that was one thing to be thankful for, I thought, out of all this horrific mess. Whatever they’d done to me, however it had fucked up my senses, it made me able to feel this with Ethan in ways I’d never expected.
“Hey,” I said, breaking the kiss for just a moment, “so, um, with you guys—”
“Us guys?” he asked, smirking. “I’m gonna guess you mean weres.”
“Yeah, yeah. Weres. So, when you’re with someone, is there any sort of…” I paused, not able to think of how I wanted to phrase things. I settled for waving the fingers on my left hand. “You know, woo?”
“Wooing?”
“No, like… woooo?” I waggled my fingers again, throwing in raised brows for emphasis.
Ethan looked like he was either trying to be subtle about choking on his own tongue or trying not to laugh. “Are you asking if we mate for life or have some sort of mystical bond or fated mates?”
My face felt hot. Ah, yes, there it was… that hideous telltale red flush that always gave me away when I was especially awkward. I’d managed to avoid it for years, at least since the pantsing incident during my clinicals. Hello Shame Tomato, my old friend. I’d like if you’d fuck off again…
“No,” I drawled, sinking back against his chest, burying my face in his neck again.
“Liar,” he chided. “And no, we don’t. I mean,” he amended, raking his nails lightly up and down my inner arm. Hello, new erogenous zone. When did you get here? “We tend to stick with other weres or people from were clans even if they can’t shift.”
“That’s a thing? Is it a recessive gene or—”
“Easy there, Lan,” he chuckled. “We don’t know for sure, but the gene appears dominant. Once in a while, we have someone born without the ability to shift and completely lacking in any of our abilities. No one’s really studied it, but I do know of a few families where a were had kids with a non-shifting were, and their kids were able to change and everything as they got older.” He shrugged, the motion bumping my nose gently into his jaw. “Why?”
Ethan already knew why. I could tell. He was looking at me with a narrowed, satisfied gaze. I didn’t let him smirk long. Shifting to straddle his thighs, I kissed him again, then again. The low groan that rumbled up from my chest when Ethan’s hand slipped beneath my waistband surprised me, my startled jolt making him chuckle. I started to pull back, but Ethan was the fast one this time, pulling me hard against his chest and belly and moving us, my legs falling open to cradle his hips as he pressed me back onto the sofa. “We have a bit of time,” he murmured, nosing my jaw and placing a sharp nip to the skin beneath my ear. My melting sigh was all the permission he needed. “Can I?” he asked, fingers picking at the button on my jeans. I nodded, arching my hips up for him. He had my jeans open and unzipped in a heartbeat, tugging them down with my boxers and tucking the waistband behind my balls. “Fuck, Lan.” He groaned, looking up at me. “I want you in my mouth. Can I? Let me?”
“Oh, God, yes.” A blowjob from Ethan had been the main event in so many of my dreams after I left for Baltimore. Feeling his hot mouth on me again after so many years was almost too much at once, my hips stuttering as pleasure shot through my veins. Ethan chuckled, damn him, the vibrations setting off more sparklers. He didn’t give me time to whine about it, though, setting to work like he’d been starving for me. “Oh, God, oh God,” I babbled, unable to stop myself from squirming. I usually had much better blowjob etiquette than that, but until Emily Post wrote a sternly worded column about it, I supposed I’d just have to accept the fact my bad manners were excusable if it meant Ethan would make that noise again. He took me nearly all the way to my root, his fingers stroking and tickling my sac as I gasped and made embarrassingly high-pitched noises. “Close,” I finally panted. “Fuck, Ethan, I’m so close, baby.”
He pulled away so fast it was a shock. Cool air hit my wet, hard cock in an unpleasant wave. I didn’t even get the first word of complaint out before he was leaning over me, kissing me with the taste of my precum on his tongue and lips. “Can we… I mean, if you think we shouldn’t yet—”
“Ethan, are you asking if I want you to put your cock in my ass?” I laughed, his awkward hesitancy wildly, weirdly endearing.
“No,” he admitted, ducking down to bite at the tendon in my neck, gently gnawing for a few seconds before he whispered against my throat, “I want you inside me this time.”
Oh. “Oh.” We’d never done it like that during our one summer together, though we’d talked about it in that jocular ‘I only mean it if you mean it otherwise just joking’ way teenage boys get around serious things. “Are you sure?”
He nodded. “I have to admit… it’s something I’ve thought about a lot since that summer.”
It was his turn to go all Shame Tomato.
“Oh, wow,” I breathed. “Um. Gimme just a sec. I thought I wasn’t so close now but hearing that? Fuck, I don’t have any blood left in any other part of my body.”
He laughed, sounding a bit relieved, before leaning up again to kiss the corner of my mouth. “Do you have supplies?”
I had to think a minute. “I think so. It’s been a long while, but I wasn’t exactly burning up the sheets before my last hookup.”
Ethan’s frown was deep and annoyed. “It’s irrational of me because, no offense, I wasn’t exactly keeping my own pants zipped up while we were apart, but I don’t want to hear about your hookups right now, even in passing.”
“I promise I’ll keep the juicy details to myself until the afterglow.” His scowl verged on the comical, though his eyes crinkled ever so slightly, telling me he was exaggerating his annoyance now just for my amusement. “My bedroom, top drawer in the nightstand.”
Ethan reluctantly pulled away, trotting down the short corridor to my room. A minute or so later, he was back, his own jeans unfastened and open to reveal his cock hard and pressed against his stomach by the waistband of his briefs. “Well, hello, there. Looks like you brought a friend.”
“I believe you’ve met,” he replied dryly. He dropped a condom onto the coffee table and shucked his jeans, looking me over from face to chest to groin and back again as he knelt over me. “Do you want to do it, or should I?”
I grabbed the condom and tore the packet open. “You do you; I’ll do me this time.”
Ethan nodded, wasting no time in reaching behind himself and starting to prepare. The sound of his lube-wet fingers slipping in and out of his tight passage made my cock throb. I was afraid to touch it, even to put on the condom, for fear of shooting immediately. Ethan groaned and leaned forward, bracing his free hand on the arm of the couch next to my head. He started to thrust back against his fingers, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I quickly rolled the condom over my painfully hard length then reached a hand around to find his probing fingers.
“Is this okay?” He nodded frantically, gasping high and needy when I slipped one finger in beside his two. Fuck. We moved together for several long, breathless moments before he slid his own fingers out and took my wrist to move mine away. “Now?” I asked.
“Please!” He moved up a bit, one foot on the floor and the other braced on the cushion by my hip. I held my prick steady for him as he slid slowly down. When the head of my cock breached that first ring of muscle, he went still, head thrown back and chest heaving. “Christ, it’s been too long since I’ve done this with another person,” he breathed, half-laughing. “Toys aren’t the same.”
My cock gave a very interested twitch. Ethan groaned again, a strangled, breathy sound, as he took me the rest of the way into his tight passage. My fingers clasped his hips so tightly, I was sure there’d be bruises the next day, but Ethan didn’t seem to care. He slid his hands down my shoulders to rest on my chest, his head dropping forward as he slowly began to move. Seeing Ethan above me, not as a teenage fantasy dragged through the years but a living, breathing, amazing man, was more than I’d ever hoped for. He rocked his hips, moving up and down just a little, tipping his head curiously when he caught my intense stare.
“I just can’t really believe it,” I murmured. “Goddamn, you feel so good,” I moaned. “I can’t believe you’re… we’re…” He ground down on me then, slow and filthy. My train of thought derailed, all souls lost, but I knew I’d be able to resurrect it later. After Ethan was done riding me like that, his body tight around me, moving tortuously slow. My balls ached with the need to cum, every stress and fear and inadequacy I’d felt over the past several days reduced to nothing but an annoying fly’s buzz when compared with the rush of warm, heady love (why lie, that’s what it was) and pleasure pounding through me as Ethan rode. His cock bobbed purple-headed and leaking against my stomach. He didn’t stop me when I wrapped my fingers around it and started to stroke in time with his thrusts. Ethan’s sharp breath was the only warning I had before his release spilled hot over my fingers. I wasn’t long behind—the way he clenched around me, his body trembling, sent me over the edge in seconds. I cried out nonsense words, Ethan’s name, and desperate sounds I’d have been mortified to make any other time. It felt like it would never end even while being over far too soon.
Ethan slumped forward, his head on my chest this time, both of us drenched in rapidly cooling sweat. “I have to be honest,” he murmured, breath stirring my sparse chest hair, “I hadn’t planned on doing this for a while.”
“In general, or with me specifically?” His hair tangled around my fingers as I stroked it, making snarls and whorls that stuck out all over when he lifted his head to look me in the eye.
“Both,” he admitted. “I’ve, um, been thinking about after this is over. I mean,” he said. “I mean after we’ve figured out how to stop this mess with the rogue wolf and—”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about it, too. I spent a long time thinking I hated you, Ethan.”
“I spent a long time hating myself.”
“I’m tired of it.”
“Me, too.”
We stayed in our uncomfortable tangle, quietly listening to the outside sounds as the night grew darker. Finally, I couldn’t stand the feeling of the gross condom and itchy sweat anymore. “I need to shower. You want to try to squeeze in with me?”
Ethan’s groan was far less sexual than the ones he’d just been making a few moments before, but it was definitely frustrated. “I want to so bad, but I’d feel safer if I waited until you were done before I got in so at least one of us can keep an ear and eye out for Tyler and Waltrip.”
“Ugh, fine, make sense, be all responsible and shit,” I teased, scooting to my feet and heading for my bedroom. I didn’t have to look to know he was staring at my ass, so I made sure to put a little English on my wiggle before I disappeared into my room.
We stayed up far past midnight, though we didn’t fuck again. We watched Netflix, made an attempt at checkers, avoided my laptop and the evening news. Finally, I made myself go to bed. Ethan decided to stay up a bit longer ‘just in case.’ I knew he would be trying to get hold of Tyler or Waltrip as soon as I had my bedroom door closed.
I’d swear I’d barely slept a minute, but I woke up to bright sunlight streaming through my window and the strong smell of coffee teasing my senses. “God bless you, Ethan Stone,” I muttered.
“Sorry, babe. Wrong werewolf.”
“Fuck!” I popped up like a jack-in-the-box, clutching sheets around me. “Tyler! What the hell? Where’s Ethan?”
“Eating my fucking bacon if I don’t get back to the kitchen,” he said. “Here. Coffee. Drink. Get dressed then get your cute little ass in the kitchen. We’ve got some news.”