Camp H.O.W.L.

by Bru Baker

  He’d gotten to see something private today, and it only made him more certain what he felt for Tate really could become love. The moonmate bond brought them closer, but Tate’s amazing spirit and kind heart had sealed the deal. Adrian could see a future with him, and it had to be one where Tate could do what he loved. If that meant they stayed here at the camp, then Adrian would find a way to make it work.

  “What do you want to do tonight?” Tate asked as they let themselves into the cabin after dinner. “I could take you into Bloomington if you’re stir-crazy. Hit some bars or see a movie or something.”

  Tate stretched, and Adrian watched the play of muscles through his thin T-shirt. His mouth went dry.

  “I choose the or something,” he said, grinning deviously when Tate turned around and gave him a questioning look.

  “Oh,” Tate breathed, his gaze darkening.

  Adrian hummed in agreement and crowded into Tate’s space until he had him backed up against Tate’s closed bedroom door. He stopped just short of kissing him, letting his lips hover a millimeter away from Tate’s as their gazes locked. It was more intimate than anything Adrian had ever done. Standing with their breath mingling, Adrian felt like they were actually a part of each other. If the moonmate bond could make this innocent contact feel so intense, what would sex with Tate be like?

  He wasn’t going to wait any longer to find out. Adrian closed the tiny gap between them and kissed Tate, reveling in the way their lips fit together like they were made for each other. Tate responded eagerly, his hands fitting around Adrian’s waist and ushering him closer.

  Adrian shivered when Tate’s thumbs stroked up under his T-shirt, the skin-on-skin contact a delicious preview of what was to come. He paused, worried for a moment that the shiver might be the start of a shift, but it wasn’t. Just pure, unadulterated pleasure.

  When Tate pushed up Adrian’s shirt and slid his hand up his back and around to ghost along his side Adrian bucked against him, breaking the kiss with an undignified giggle.

  Adrian buried his face in the warm skin of Tate’s neck. “Sorry. Ticklish.”

  Tate resumed his exploration, his hand running up between Adrian’s shoulder blades. “I want to get to know all of your quirks,” he said, groaning when Adrian nuzzled in closer.

  “Well, I have a thing for necks,” Adrian said, nipping playfully at the thin skin. Tate shuddered, and a thrill shot through Adrian. His voice turned husky. “It looks like that’s something we share.”

  He hissed out a surprised laugh when Tate turned the handle of the door and they stumbled inside. Tate guided him over to the bed, walking backward so he didn’t have to disentangle them. He collapsed onto the bed, and Adrian scrambled to brace himself on his arms so he didn’t crush Tate as he fell on top of him.

  They bounced on the mattress, and the friction of his erection rubbing against Tate’s made Adrian whimper.

  “I have a thing for you and anything that makes you sound like that,” Tate murmured. He canted his hips up, drawing a low moan from Adrian this time.

  Adrian leaned down and kissed him, moving his hips against Tate’s. The tightness of his jeans was enough to keep him from embarrassing himself, so he just enjoyed the sensation of being so close and drawing gasps and shivers from Tate underneath him.

  “We are too old,” Tate began, pausing to kiss Adrian again, “to come in our pants.”

  “Then we’d better get the pants off,” Adrian said, working a hand between them to thumb at his button and zipper. The motion brought him into contact with Tate’s straining erection, and he lost focus, curving his hand around the bulge and sinking back down to kiss Tate.

  Tate drew in a breath. “I don’t like our chances if you keep that up.”

  He shifted Adrian off him and lifted his hips to tug at his pants. Adrian rolled off the side of the bed, stood, and shimmied out of his jeans. His boxers were already smeared with precome, and he peeled them off before climbing back onto the bed and straddling a now-naked Tate.

  Adrian hadn’t thought to take off his shirt, but before he could grab the hem, Tate’s hands were already there, lifting it over his head and tossing it onto the floor.

  When Adrian leaned forward, their cocks brushed, and it was electric. Abandoning his plan to take things slow, Adrian got a hand around both of them and started to stroke. Tate sat up, cradling Adrian’s head with one hand, and then rolled them so they were on their sides. It changed the angle of Adrian’s strokes and left both of them breathless.

  Tate’s hand joined his, and they moved faster. The new position brought them close enough to kiss, and Adrian swallowed down sighs and moans greedily, his tongue licking into Tate’s mouth in search of more.

  Adrian tried to slow down when he felt his orgasm begin to build, but Tate sped up instead, and it didn’t take much more before Adrian was falling over the edge, lost in a pleasure more intense than anything he’d ever felt before. His mouth fell away from Tate’s and he rested his head on Tate’s shoulder, his body spasming as the waves of his orgasm worked through him. Tate brought up a hand and rested it over the back of Adrian’s neck, holding him close, Adrian’s cries muffled against his skin.

  After the last spasm, Adrian went boneless against Tate’s firm chest, letting Tate take all of his weight. Tate pressed a kiss to the top of his head and shifted him to the mattress so he could raise up on his knees, his hand still working over his own cock furiously. Adrian reached out and cupped his balls, massaging them as Tate started to come. Tate fell forward, but Adrian was ready for him, recovered enough to support him as Tate came all over his chest.

  Tate fell heavily back to the mattress when he was finished, his breathing ragged.

  “Jesus Christ,” he panted. “That was—”

  Adrian laughed. “That was apparently moonmate sex.”

  “Sign me up,” Tate said, still winded.

  “It’s definitely a perk. I think I could get used to being moonmates.”

  Tate groped around the mattress, grasping Adrian’s hand when he found it. “Me too.”

  Chapter Twenty

  One week later

  IT had been strange to sleep in a different bed from Adrian last night, but since they were bunked up with four other wolflings to ride out the full moon, that hadn’t seemed appropriate.

  Instead, Tate had spent the night in a narrow twin bed, catching snippets of sleep when he could while the wolflings played cards and horsed around all night. Adrian had joined in with them, and Tate had enjoyed watching him interact with the teens. He was a great mentor, and he’d be a fabulous addition to the staff if Anne Marie got her way and Adrian chose to stay.

  Not that Tate was going to let that happen. Adrian was meant for a lot more than a sleepy werewolf camp tucked away in southern Indiana. They’d agreed to take each day as it came, and Adrian was planning to extend his stay at Camp H.O.W.L. through the next moon, commuting to his company’s Indianapolis office once or twice a week to take care of any work he couldn’t do from Tate’s cabin.

  Adrian wasn’t the only one who’d been making plans, though. Ryan’s father had been so grateful over Tate’s role in his son’s breakthrough that he’d offered to throw a frankly ridiculous amount of money at Tate to get Tate to relocate to New York and continue to see Ryan as a patient.

  He and Adrian would need to talk it over, but not until he roused all the wolflings and got them back to their cabins.

  “C’mon, bud,” Tate said, nudging Ryan awake from his sprawl on the floor. “They’re serving breakfast in the main room, and then you can finish packing.”

  Ryan grinned up at him blearily. “I didn’t shift,” he said, his words slurred with exhaustion from a night spent fighting the effects of the moon.

  “You did good.” Tate offered Ryan a hand and pulled him to his feet. “Everyone did. You’re all going to get to go home today.”

  Arms wrapped around Tate from behind, and he relaxed into Adrian’s sleep-rich scent. “Not a
ll of us.”

  Ryan made a gagging noise. “You two are worse than my parents. It must be a moonmate thing. You’re all disgustingly adorable.”

  “Your parents are moonmates?” That was news to Tate.

  “Yup. Bonded and sickeningly in love,” Ryan said, sounding fond rather than annoyed. “I think that might be why things have changed so much. They have a pretty intense bond, and even though he’s the Alpha, Mom has a lot of say in Pack matters. After I talked to them last week about college and being a disappointment and everything, my brother said Mom lit into Dad like a stick of dynamite.”

  Tate had talked to both of them yesterday, and that was probably an accurate assessment.

  “Mom’s upset because she didn’t realize how I was feeling. I mean, how could she, though? I never said anything.”

  “I hope you told her that,” Tate said, pride filling him. Ryan’s father wasn’t the only one who had come a long way. Ryan had thrown himself into therapy and camp activities, and it showed. He wasn’t the surly, disrespectful, unhappy kid he’d been. Things weren’t perfect, and Ryan still had a lot to work through, but he was blossoming into the man Tate had caught glimpses of over the last two months.

  “I did. I told her you’d say that was self-defeating talk and that we need to look ahead of us instead of behind us.”

  Adrian pressed a chaste kiss to Tate’s neck and pulled away.

  “Sounds like we might have a budding psychologist here,” he said, rubbing his knuckles over Ryan’s freshly buzzed head. He’d shaved off the floppy locks a few days ago, saying he’d always hated it but so had his father, so he’d kept it like that out of spite.

  Everyone else had already sprinted for breakfast, so Tate herded Adrian and Ryan out into the basement’s common area. Kenya and Diann had saved all three of them plates of eggs and sausage. Ryan grabbed his and continued on to a table full of wolflings. Tate and Adrian sat down, Adrian in front of the plate with a steaming cup of coffee next to it. Adrian grabbed it and murmured ridiculous things to it as he brought it up to his mouth to take the first sip.

  “Good morning, gentlemen,” Kenya said, her eyes bright. “I trust the moon treated you well?”

  “Everyone was able to hold off their shift. I’m a happy man,” Tate said, reaching over to take a piece of buttered toast off Adrian’s plate. He replaced it with his bagel before he’d fully processed what he was doing. Adrian hated buttered bread, so it had seemed like the natural thing to do.

  Adrian caught his eye and winked, making Tate flush. Ryan wasn’t wrong. They were sickeningly adorable.

  Diann leaned in. “Are you sticking with us for another month, Adrian?”

  Adrian’s mouth was full, so Tate answered for him. “He’s going to split time between being here and being up in Indy.”

  “Just until November?” Diann asked, giving Tate a pointed look.

  He’d already given Anne Marie his notice. Whether or not he took Ryan’s father up on his offer, Tate knew he and Adrian couldn’t stay at Camp H.O.W.L. He’d told Kenya and Diann last night too.

  “What’s happening in November?” Adrian asked after he’d swallowed.

  “That’s something we need to decide,” Tate said. He shot a dirty look at Diann, who shrugged, unrepentant. She and Kenya were used to being the ones to push Tate into uncomfortable territory when it came to communication and emotions, but he didn’t need as much help these days. “I figured we could go for a walk after the kids leave, maybe sort some things out.”

  None of the scenarios Tate had in mind involved the two of them splitting up. A month ago he wouldn’t have been able to fathom how he could choose to entangle his life with someone else’s, but a lot had changed in that month.

  Too much, really. Tate would have thrown a bag full of clinical terms at anyone who came to him with a story like his and Adrian’s, so it was hard for his mind to accept what his heart had embraced so—at the risk of sounding trite—whole-heartedly.

  Change was hard, and it wouldn’t happen overnight. But Adrian—God. That man was patience personified, and Tate got the feeling he’d wait forever if necessary.

  It wasn’t. Tate was finally able to say the word moonmate without grimacing, and it was all because Adrian had helped him see that what the two of them had together was nothing like the so-called moonmates his father took. He’d twisted the idea into something manipulative and wrong, just like he’d bastardized the idea of Pack with the way he treated everyone on the compound.

  Adrian studied Tate for a moment and then shrugged and picked up the bagel. “Sounds good to me.”

  The exhaustion of Tate’s sleepless night melted away as he looked at Adrian. Being trusted and loved like that was powerful. And he was going to do everything in his power to shower all of that back on Adrian too.

  He’d grown up thinking moonmates were a sham, a cycle of abuse and manipulation. But he’d had it wrong. Moonmates were a closed loop. That much was true. But it was a loop of love and support, not abuse.

  Tate wasn’t sure where they’d end up. There were a lot of long, messy discussions in their future. But whatever that future was, they’d face it together.

  Epilogue

  Six months later

  “THIS is the fourth box labeled ‘notebooks,’” Tate said, dumping the contents on the floor in what would be their living room once they were unpacked. “I think we might need to have an intervention.”

  Eliza trailed in behind him with a box marked kitchen. “It’s probably porn. Adrian is old-school. Your boy likes magazines instead of the internet,” she said over her shoulder as she passed through. “He used to mix them in with his drawing notebooks in his desk because he didn’t realize we could smell them.”

  Tate gave the box a wary sniff, but didn’t pick up anything other than the scent of cardboard and the sharp smell of permanent marker.

  Adrian’s brother Thomas snickered, poking his head around the armoire he was assembling in the corner. “Did he? Damn. I just figured he was really into whatever he was drawing,” he said. “Should have known no one likes buildings that much.”

  “You’re all hilarious,” Adrian yelled from the bedroom. “Shut up and get back to work. The truck is due back by seven or I’ll have to pay for another day.”

  “Mom’s paying for it anyway,” Thomas muttered, but he picked up his screwdriver and went back to work. Even though they were separated by an entire country, he didn’t seem to want to piss off his Alpha.

  Tate didn’t blame him. Even without any of the Pack ties that forced obedience, he’d been hesitant to defy her himself when they’d met. Tate’s refusal to join her Pack had caused a rift in their normally close family, but once she—and the rest of the Pack—had understood why, they’d been accommodating and accepting.

  Tate wasn’t built to be part of a Pack. He’d had his Pack loyalty beaten into him as a child, and he’d never put himself in that position again. Even for an Alpha as fair and nurturing as Adrian’s mom.

  And now he’d found a job where his Packless status was a boon. He’d been reluctant to take Alpha Connoll up on his offer to come to New York because he’d assumed he’d have to join the Pack, but the Alpha had been surprisingly understanding. He’d even helped Tate set up a private practice in the city, something that would never be possible without the local Alpha’s permission. Sometimes he missed Camp H.O.W.L. like a physical ache, but Kenya had been right. It had been long past time for Tate to move on. It hadn’t been easy. Change was scary, especially to a confirmed hermit like Tate. But it had been a good move—he’d only been here a few months and he already had a great base of clients. It felt good to know he was really making a difference when he went in to work every day. And now that Adrian was here, everything was perfect.

  “Mom isn’t paying for anything, asshole,” Adrian said, smacking his brother on the back of the head as he walked by. “The company is.”

  “Same difference,” Eliza called from the kitchen.
>
  “Hardly,” Adrian scoffed. He bent down to press a kiss to the side of Tate’s neck, distracting Tate from his job of filling the bookcases Thomas had assembled earlier. Tate breathed in the scent of him, warmth blossoming in his chest. “I’m the one in charge of the New York office, which technically means I am paying.”

  “Semantics.” Eliza breezed back out of the kitchen. “I’m going to go pick up some food. The truck’s mostly empty.”

  Alpha Connoll had sent over a group of wolflings, Ryan included, to help them unload. They’d made pretty quick work of all the furniture that had been crammed into the truck Thomas and Eliza had driven cross-country for their brother.

  “Lazy,” Adrian teased.

  Eliza shook her head. “Alpha,” she said, pointing to her chest.

  “That’s just another way of saying bossy.” Adrian ducked when Eliza winged a throw pillow from the couch at him. It hit Tate instead, and he grabbed it before Adrian could throw it back. This wasn’t his first rodeo with the Rothschild siblings, and he wanted to at least get the apartment set up before they wrecked it.

  “Besides, you’re not the Alpha yet. You’re just jealous because I got a big promotion and you’re still working under Mom.”

  Alpha Rothschild had been reluctant to let her son leave Portland, but when Adrian had made it clear he was following his moonmate across the country with or without her permission, she’d cleared the way for him to manage the New York office of Rothschild Architects. Being separated from his moonmate had been hard, but Tate had been busy setting up his practice and getting to know the local Pack. Adrian would be inducted as a member at the next full moon, and after spending the last few months with them, Tate could understand why joining a Pack was important to Adrian. His bond to Adrian was enough for him, but he didn’t begrudge Adrian the comfort of having a Pack. He was just relieved Alpha Connoll wasn’t offended that he didn’t want to join himself.