by Amy Lane
As it turned out, Katy was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
She was sitting on a marble bench, with a carved silhouette on it, and Teague was startled into identifying the likeness. “Adrian.”
Katy looked over her shoulder and smiled at him. “Yeah—rumor has it, if Cory’s out here, you can see his ghost. They talk and everything.”
“Does Green see him too?” Teague asked, concerned. Green and Adrian had been together for 150 years—it didn’t seem fair that Cory, no matter how…amazing, would see him and Green wouldn’t.
“Yeah,” Katy nodded with a soft smile. “Green too. I remember you, you know. When you worked at the diner. You used to give me pie.” She patted the empty space on the bench next to her, and gathered her legs and arms further under the quilt on her shoulders, the calm given to her by the vampire’s visit sitting very comfortably on her narrow shoulders. Her dark hair, layer cut around a pretty, dusky, valentine-shaped face, and brown eyes were just as he remembered them from when she was a pup, only now they were all grown up.
Teague found himself remembering her as a wolf as he sat down—he’d always been a sucker for blondes with dark roots. The pretty girl, clean, healthy, plump around the cheeks and smiling packed a helluva punch, and unlike Cory, who scared him silly, Katy was very warm and real, out here in the ethereal holiness of what Cory had called ‘the Goddess Grove’.
“I didn’t think you’d remember that,” he said, staring out into the gray night. There was a lime tree and a rose tree a little to his left, doing something that he’d been dreaming about for a year. “You were just a little kid.” His father had made a living doing odd jobs and odd cons, but Teague, tired of not knowing when their next meal would come from, had worked at the diner from the time he’d wandered in at fourteen and out and out begged for a job. Sean had drunk his paycheck and tip money, of course, but a least Teague got to eat.
“You think a little girl forgets kindness?” Asked Katy now, and he looked at her, caught by her smile. His pulse started doing a jackhammer tap-dance in his throat, then, because she wasn’t a little girl anymore and that woman’s smile, sweet and sexy and vulnerable—oooh, did that do a number on Teague’s libido. He breathed in hard, a slug-to-the-gut breath, and looked at that tree again, and thought about Jacky.
“I should have done more for you,” he said now, remembering how her mother would come in for coffee, because that’s all she could afford, and because at least the diner was warm, when their little apartment had no heat.
“You were a kid, Teague—and it’s not like you didn’t have your own problems.” She put her hand on his knee and he swallowed. Of course she knew. The whole fucking town knew, which is why—when he’d come to his senses and changed sides--he’d migrated anywhere but Angel’s Fucking Camp.
“I’m glad you found this place,” he said after a moment, covering her hand with his own. Her skin was warm and soft, and he wondered when just touching a woman and thinking about a man had become the nexus, the epicenter of his universe. “Green’s good—he’ll take care of you.”
“And you?” She asked softly. “Who takes care of you?”
Teague shrugged, swallowed, remembered Cory telling him that everything was going to be all right. “Jacky,” he said softly, and Katy frowned.
“I’m so sorry—I thought you guys were…” She trailed off and started to shiver, and Teague moved into her instinctively, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.
“You thought we were friends of…fuckhead dickwad…”
Katy laughed at his irreverence, and Teague smiled at her, a soft little armful of sweet werewolf.
“You grew up pretty, Katy—you’re a fine looking wolf, too.”
She grinned, her dark eyes dancing, then sobered. “Jacky—he’s going to be all right?”
Teague nodded, stroking her back again, loving her smell. She’d bathed—women used flower stuff when they bathed, and Teague liked it. Always had—sometimes, it was the only softness in his life.
“You love him?” She asked, tentatively. They both knew the world they grew up in, where a girl didn’t ask a grown man a question like that and expect to escape with a whole jaw.
“I like women,” he said softly, allowing himself to bury his nose in her coarse black hair like a dog, scenting home. “I like the way you smell, I like the way you sound—your voices. Damn. So damned soft. I like the way you feel…” he thought about plump breasts in his palm, chubby nipples under his tongue, and what an armful of Katy Garcia was doing to his body. His voice hoarsened. “The sounds you make when I’m inside you…I love women.”
He sighed and moved away from her a little. “I love women, but…I’d miss Jacky more.”
She sighed as his warmth left her, but she kept hold of his hand. “You know, Teague—you may be in one of the few places in the universe that won’t force you to make that choice.”
He grinned a little, and reached out and touched her cheek, rubbing it with his thumb. “I promised I wouldn’t leave him—and he’s going to be okay, right?”
Katy nodded, knowing where this was going—had known, really, since Teague had dropped to his knees and howled at the still body of his friend. That was the moment which brought her back into the house—any man who grieved like that, when his friend was in danger—he couldn’t be a bad person. Even a freaked out werewolf knew the truth there.
“Right,” she whispered, leaning into his touch.
“You feel like you owe us—you don’t, but…if you want to put paid to everything, could you do me a favor?” He looked at her hopefully, and she gazed back, her brown eyes locked with his murky green ones, the air between them static and waiting.
“Bite me?” He said hopefully, and she laughed a little, still savoring the touch of the nice boy who had given her pie when she’d been hungry, and smiles when the rest of the town had kicked her to the curb.
Before his heart could beat again, before he could change his mind and move out of her world, she turned into a wolf and bit his left hand hard enough to draw blood, to snag on the flesh, to make sure he was good and marked. He howled and jumped up and down, and she stood there, in the puddle of clothes she’d shed and looked at him pointedly until he took the hint and left.
It was way too early in their relationship for him to see her naked.
Green
Being Leader of Green’s Hill
Teague staggered into Green on the way to the room with the wolf quilt, exhausted and shocky from the sudden pain and the blood loss and the confounding, horrible, fucked up day.
Green took one look at him, weaving and blinking hard in front of the door and sighed, literally scooping Teague’s tough, spare body into his arms and opening the door with his hip.
“You had to go and do things the hard way, didn’t you, you stubborn Irishman,” Green tsked, but Teague saw Jacky, lying across the king-sized bed then, his shaggy head pillowed on his outstretched arm. He smiled such a beatific, lovely, peaceful smile that all of Green’s irritation dissipated.
“Yes, Teague, he’s going to be fine,” Green sighed, depositing him on the bed and going about untying his big steel-toed, waffle-soled boots.
“I couldn’t let him go somewhere without me, Green,” Teague explained like a child, and Green shook his head.
“Well of course you couldn’t—but we could have had a ceremony, and someone there to make sure you didn’t bleed half to death and then I could have done this.” He was tired—Jacky’s wounds had been severe. Not as severe as Teague’s had been, nearly two years before, but it had taken some doing to fix him up before Teague’s nervous exhaustion exploded through the whole damned hill. Oh yes, Green had felt that as his beloved had been holding down the conversation—she was getting good at letting him into her head when he needed to be.
But as tired as he might be, he wasn’t too tired to take Teague’s hand in his own and kiss it, watching as the wolf bite healed. Green didn’t take away the scar though—Te
ague didn’t know it, but in were-creature culture, that scar passing on the blessing of the Goddess was something to be worn with pride. Green imagined that Teague would have guessed anyway, because Teague’s gut level knowledge of what to respect was a formidable thing.
Green had left the scar on Teague’s chest for almost the same reason. Whether the stubborn, wounded old soul knew it or not, that scar was what connected him to Green’s Hill, at least in his battered, beaten great heart.
If anyone needed a place to call home, it was Teague Sullivan.
Teague pulled his wrist from Green’s tender hold and stroked the healed scars. “Thank you,” he murmured, but Green recaptured it, and looking Teague in the eyes, very deliberately reached out to his chest and rubbed a thumb over the bruised nipple that lay under Max’s old white T-shirt, starting a tingle that grabbed Teague’s groin in both hands.
Abruptly, the sexual desire that had been teasing Teague all day—what, between Jacky, Katy, and the Lady of the house-- burgeoned into something so full under his chest that it stopped his breath.
“No more of that, hey?” Green asked softly, and Teague was caught helplessly in those kind emerald eyes.
“I don’t need it when I’m with a woman,” Teague muttered, and Green moved his hand and rubbed the other nipple.
“No, brother—it’s only when you reach for something for yourself that you think it needs to hurt,” and with that, Green turned him towards Jacky’s breathing body, naked and wrapped up in a quilt from Green’s own bed. Teague stretched a little, touched a naked, pale shoulder sticking out from under the quilt and stroked the skin with one finger, like a little girl touching a rabbit.
“He…” Teague’s shoulders began to shake, and he scooted across the bed to rest his head on the spare bones of Jacky’s hip, wiping his eyes on his hands. “He deserves better than me,” he said at last, rubbing his cheek against that quilt-swaddled, hard, lean body.
Green reached out and stroked Teague’s shoulder, wondering how many people thought Teague was a tough sonovabitch who didn’t give a flying pig’s shit about anyone or anything. “He deserves to be happy, Teague,” Green told him softly, “and you make him happy.”
Teague nodded, not breaking contact with the sleeping man in his bed. “Okay,” he murmured, as though accepting something that had been offered. “Okay.” He wiped his eyes then and sat up, trying to settle a tough look over lean, pretty features. When he spoke, his voice was firmed up, like a man’s, and Green pinched the bridge of his nose and fought the urge to kick him.
“Thank you for this, Green,” Teague managed, “I can’t thank you enough…” and as quickly as that, the trauma of the day took over, and Teague lost out to the pain and the fear and the terror that had been blasting down his blood vessels since he’d first seen Katy, terrified and angry, looking for an escape from that shithole.
Green wouldn’t let him weather the storm alone.
By the time the last sob shook his scrawny Irishman’s frame, Teague was sitting in Green’s lap like a child. Green kissed his temple then, and murmured things about what a good boy he was, to take such care of Jack Barnes like that, and how smart he had been to keep Jack alive. Teague hiccupped a little, and Green took off his jeans then, his touch as clinical as a doctor’s, in spite of Teague’s prettiness and the way his stubborn tough pride had always moved Green’s heart.
Green tucked him in, next to Jacky, and leaned over and kissed his cheek again.
“You’ve got your second chance, mate,” he murmured. “I tried to claim him for you, but you didn’t take my gift. You’ve made it clear you’ll follow him anywhere—but he doesn’t want you there unless you make him yours.”
“Mine,” Teague echoed, tightening his arms around Jack’s chest. Jack murmured in his sleep and Teague rubbed his cheek against his partner’s back. “I’ve never had anyone that’s mine.”
Green shook his head then and left them to sleep, laughing softly at the foolishness of humans. Of course Jacky was his—Jack had told Green repeatedly as their bodies had twined and heaved and mingled, that the dumb motherfucker was the only home he wanted.
Green found Cory in his bed when he returned, in spite of the fact that he usually cleaned up—both his sheets and his body—after healing somebody.
She was naked, and looking at him very determinedly.
He stripped his sweats and slid into sheets that smelled like sex between two men and felt her hands smoothing over him, reacquainting herself with him, marking him for her own, and he almost sighed with the healing she gave her healer, just by possessing him as her own.
“If we make love here,” she whispered, moving down to his swelling cock and licking experimentally, “will we feel them? Jacky and Teague?” She engulfed him then, and he gasped, throwing his head back as her lips traced his head through his foreskin, and then moved lower, taking him all the way to the base. It had taken her practice to do that, he thought vaguely. Practice made perfect, and she did it again, and all of his control left him and he groaned richly, arching his hips and letting her touch replenish everything he gave to the rest of the world.
“Will we?” She persisted throatily, her lips moving slickly against his head as she spoke, and he groaned again.
“Yes…” Because the smell of him and Jack was all around the two of them, and she throated him to his base again in reward for his answer.
“Good,” she said when she came up, moving her lips around his purpling head, “because they were perfect, and Teague…he was so much like him…” her voice trailed off, and Green said the name for her.
“Adrian…”
“Oh yes,” Cory tasted him again and again and again, until his fist knotted in her hair and her mouth closed around his base, and he came, willingly giving over all of his power, all of his pain, to her willing mouth and her sweet, soft body, and her vast, sensual heart.
Jacky
Being Teague’s
Teague being next to Jacky when he woke up was like Christmas to a six year old—the good Christmas where you got the video game player you always wanted.
Jacky groaned and rolled over, wrapping his arms around that slight, sturdy frame, and grinned when Teague burrowed in like a kitten. For a moment he just breathed Teague in, leather from his jacket, sweat and…sadness. Jack pulled back and tried to read the strains on Teague’s face, even as he slept. For just this moment, when his lips weren’t pulled back and mocking, when the tension at his eyes wasn’t fierce, he was impossibly pretty. Jack could pretend that when he opened those murky green eyes, he would see the softness that made a glory of that masculine beauty.
Jack’s full-throttle woody was completely unexpected, and abruptly he remembered what he had been doing before he fell asleep.
He couldn’t touch Teague like this, he thought muzzily—his head hurt a little, but the rest of his soreness was pleasant so he wasn’t sure why that would be bothering him. He wiggled out from Teague’s death grip, and stumbled naked to the bathroom. It was pretty—everything here was pretty. The walls were stained azure and purple and olive and he liked that combo—better than sterile hotel white, anyway.
He opened the medicine cabinet and blinked. Hard.
“Whatcha lookin’ for, Princess,” Teague grumbled from the bed.
“Ibuprofin,” Jack replied, his tongue and teeth feeling alien—‘ibuprofin’ was a long-ass word. “They don’t have any. Just lots of…Jesus, who has seven different kinds of lubricant in their medicine cabinet?”
Teague’s chuckle was helpless and rusty. “This place would.” There was a groan and a creak of a mattress, and Jack heard Teague’s noises. If anything, his erection got worse, and if he’d realized that Teague was going to wake up he would have dragged the quilt around his hips with him.
“You don’t need ibuprofin anyway,” Teague’s voice got closer, and Jack reached out and grabbed a towel from the rack behind him, wrapping it around his hips and avoiding any look at Teague, ei
ther personally or in the full-sized mirror in front of him.
“What do I need?” Jack said this to his own reflection, and wondered why he didn’t look any different. After the things he’d done in bed with Green… ah…God, Green… and the erection wasn’t getting any better.
A hand holding a water bottle shimmied in between Jack’s ribs and the sink, and Teague’s whole body was practically plastered against Jack’s back as he filled it up.
The water bottle was suddenly in front of Jack’s nose, and he couldn’t help but meet Teague’s eyes in the mirror as he took what was offered.
“You’re dehydrated—Green fixed you up, but you need water to replace all your blood and…” a flush stained those razor cheekbones, and Jack saw the freckles that were usually hidden in Teague’s tanned skin. “Stuff,” Teague added lamely into the silence between them.
Jack took a swig of water, and even as the headache went away he felt too close. A year of yearning to be close enough to put his hand along Teague’s throat, to feel the texture of the skin on his collarbone, and now he couldn’t bear that Teague would touch him after last night.
“I’ve got to shower,” he said hoarsely, and to his surprise, Teague’s reflection shook it’s head.
“No,” Teague said gruffly, and Jack’s heart stopped beating in his stomach and started beating in his balls when Teague bent his head forward and dropped a kiss on the naked skin of Jack’s shoulder blade.
“Teague… what Green and I did…”
Teague’s hand appeared, tattooed on the wrist, and broad and tanned on the back, and the rough skin of his fingers started stroking Jack’s stomach at the line of the towel. Carefully he traced the scars there, still pink and fresh, and Jack grabbed his hand, because Teague was shaking so hard it was starting to tickle.