by Amy Lane
Teague sat up in bed, strangling on his breath, the sweat popping over his body, a scream trapped and struggling inside his chest. Instinctively his hand shot out to where Jacky had slept at his side for the last week, and Jack grunted even as Teague stroked his chest, making sure everything was where it should be.
The scar was new, where Katy had ripped at him with her jaws and her back claws, but Jacky, lean, long, and peaceful in his sleep as Teague had never been—Jacky was as he always had been. He had dark shaggy hair and thoughtful blue eyes, a narrow face, average nose and a square chin. He was also kind, quiet, smart, incredibly passive-aggressive, and, according to the tattoo on the inside of his thigh, he was Teague’s.
And now he was in Teague’s bed, and Teague could, while Jacky was asleep, gather his lover to his chest and tighten his arms around him, shuddering, fighting and losing to the urge to bury his nose in Jacky’s hair and breathe in his scent, reassuring himself that Jack was whole and well and not bleeding, dying, his heart consumed by Teague’s bewildered werewolf.
Jacky murmured and shifted in Teague’s arms, and Teague wiped his cheek in Jack’s hair, wishing he could get his shit together and stop sniveling like an asshole. They would be changing, both of them, changing into their wolves, becoming something new right after they had just become something new, and Jack would look to him to make it right. The whole reason he’d asked Katy for the bite so he could follow Jacky into this new world was to make it right.
Oh God…Goddess, if She was who he got to pray to now…oh, please, for Jacky’s sake, let him be able to make it right.
Jack Waking
Green’s place was the sort of place where you didn’t sit idle long. Whether it was sitting in the were’s common room, soaking up lore about your new life (Teague called them ‘werewolf lessons’) or simply helping the people around you to keep the place running, Teague always seemed to have something to do in the week since Jack was bit.
Something, anything to do, besides talk to Jack about what was in his heart.
“He’s looking at you again,” Katy said from Jack’s side. They were sitting at the weekly banquet—which they understood was a smaller version of the Thanksgiving that Grace had been running them ragged to plan all week. Teague was up at what Katy called the ‘Alpha’ table, where he’d been sitting in one way or another since the two of them had woken up in their semi-permanent guest room after Jack had recovered from his wounds.
A private smile flirted at Jack’s lean mouth, and he flipped his longish dark hair back from the part down the middle as he returned his lover’s smile.
Teague flushed, the red mottling his Irish-fair skin, making the freckles stand out on his razor cheekbones. Abruptly, Teague’s attention was very seriously on the short young woman at the head of the table. She was plain and freckled, with wide hips and shoulders, and a flat chest, and at first glance looked incongruous with her tall, anime-beautiful mates, Green and Bracken, but one look at the deference everybody at the leader’s table paid to the little college student and she suddenly assumed a glamour all her own.
Right now, that glamour made Teague laugh a little at something she said, and Jack would be jealous, but she smiled at Jack as she said it and waved gaily, and it was obvious that whatever it had been, she didn’t have any designs on Jack’s chosen mate.
He couldn’t say the same thing about the breath-takingly pretty woman sitting next to him.
“I like the way he looks at you,” Katy Garcia said lowly, her own dark hair floating around her face in a spangle of silver from something she’d put in it when she dressed for dinner. She had clear dusky skin, a heart-shaped face, flared hips, a tiny waist, and lush breasts. If it hadn’t been for her direct gaze and the wisdom in her brown eyes, he would have said the silver spangle was overkill.
“What do you like about it?” Jack asked, curious, and the smile she slanted up at him was speculative and sultry. Jack’s mouth went suddenly dry, and he realized that Teague wasn’t the only one who knew how to send hot looks. Katy saw him blush, and her eyes grew positively predatory.
“It’s the way I used to look at smack,” she murmured, “all hot, like it was everything I ever wanted, like it would make my heart beat and fill my stomach and caress my skin…except…”
“Except what?” Jacky asked, surprised that his voice didn’t squeak. Between Teague’s looks—oh, he gave them all day—across the common room, in their own shared bedroom as Jack was reading, across the table at breakfast… all day long those hungry, devouring looks—but between them and Katy’s playful, seductive voice…
Goddess, he had a hard-on that wouldn’t quit.
“Except he doesn’t want anything from you,” Katy finished wisely. “I wanted that smack—I needed what it had to give me. He doesn’t want anything from you, does he? He just wants to give and give and give until you have to stay with him, doesn’t he?” She shuddered a little, ecstasy by proxy. Until she came to Green’s, no one had wanted Katy. Now that she was clean—becoming a werewolf did that to you--it was clear that smack had been a pale substitute to the drug she’d really wanted.
Jack looked at her, wondering if that low sultry voice was his imagination, if she really wanted him as well as Teague. She’d made her attraction—her lifelong crush, actually—on Jack’s lover absolutely clear. But since she’d never been competitive with Jack, had never tried to vie for Teague’s affections, never tried to show Jack up or seduce Teague behind Jack’s back, Jack had no choice but to accept her friendliness—and her willingness to help them through their first transition—for what it appeared to be.
But that didn’t keep her from being brutally honest, either.
“So, Jacky,” she was saying now, since his attention seemed to be cleaved between her honest conversation and his own covert observations of the man he’d loved for over a year, “what’s it like to be looked at the way he’s looking at you?”
“What’s it like?” Suddenly Jack’s attention was all on Katy, the question vibrating through him like a cathedral bell. What was it like to have Teague turn those burning brown-green eyes on him, wanting him, yearning for him, begging him to be ready and willing, hands on the bed, ass in the air accepting his rough, desperate sex as the only love he could give?
It’s like a hand on my ass, a mouth on my cock, fingers on my nipples, a voice in my ear whispering sex, a come so hard it hurts…
And one of those shudders of sixth sense that he’d been having since he’d been bitten shook him hard, and he looked up to find Teague’s eyes fastened hotly, hungrily, not just on Jack but on the both of them, Jack and Katy, their heads bent together and almost touching, the breath of their conversation in the midst of the weekly banquet close enough to be a scent on the other’s skin.
Jack’s eyes connected with Teague’s, the current flowing between them so thick he wondered that anyone in between them didn’t get fried by the electricity.
“If you want to know what it’s like, Princess,” Jack murmured, “why don’t you look at him now, because he’s got us both in his sights.”
Katy gave a little ‘ohhhhh’ at his side, and then Green shook his butter colored hair and laughingly called Teague’s attention back to the head table she sighed again and then sagged into her chair as though that look alone had held her up.
“Hey, Princeso,” she murmured into the broken stillness between them, “you do me a favor, hey?”
Her accent—that of a child raised by a mother who spoke almost exclusively Spanish—was suddenly thick and even sexier. “What?” Jack asked, his eyes still on Teague’s face as he discussed ruling the fey world with his new best friend, Green.
She shifted a little in her seat, and his werewolf senses sharpened suddenly. He could have smelled the must flooding between her plump thighs from across the room. She gave him a slanted smile, as though very aware of what his new and improved senses would pick up on, and then cast her eyes in the same direction Jack’s were glued:
Teague.
“When he gets you back to your room and fucks you til you scream, you think of me when you come, eh querido?”
Jack’s hard-on throbbed in his pants and he made a sound like “Unnggghhhhh…” as he watched her stand up and walk away on obviously shaky knees.
When he looked back up at the table, Teague had disappeared. Jack excused himself shortly thereafter. He knew exactly where Teague’d gone.
Green’s hill was huge—it probably housed three times as many people in one form or another than the apartment complex that Teague and Jack called home down in Sacramento. Jack had gotten lost three times after he and Teague’d started rooming together on the corner of Howe and Hurley. Since he’d been bitten by Katy, he hadn’t gotten lost in the hill once. For one thing, he could smell his partner. He could trace Teague’s steps as he went up the stairs from the basement banquet room, down the colorfully tinted hallways and the muted watercolor carpet, around the hill a couple of times…Jack stopped.
Katy had stood here. He could smell her, and Teague. They’d stopped, they’d talked…there had been…
Arousal.
Both of them had been aroused, but nothing beyond that. A conversation, Jack thought, trying to stomp on his jealousy. Just like he’d had with Katy, a simple conversation and Teague had been springing a boner and he’d said from the beginning that they both liked women, that their thing would be permanent, but it might not be exclusive and…
Jack was practically snarling to himself as he stomped the rest of the way to his room and flung the door open, letting it bang shut behind him.
Teague had his face pressed against the paneled wooden wall before the door had completely snicked in the lock.
Teague was shorter than Jack by several inches, but his chest was powerful—it would be really wide if the guy ever ate—and his muscles were wiry and ripped with working out and…and his force was just so powerful…even if he couldn’t hold Jack physically, the strength of his want was enough to keep Jack pressed against the wall.
Jack grunted and didn’t try to fight as Teague pressed his groin along Jack’s upper thigh, pinning his shoulders against the wall with the whole of his weight.
“Took you long enough, Princess…” Teague muttered in his ear.
“Long enough for Katy to turn you on,” Jack muttered back, and Teague let out a short bark of laughter before he unhooked Jack’s belt with shaking hands.
“Are you pissed about that? That I want her?”
Jack groaned as his body was exposed to the air, and Teague toed his shoes from his heels and slid rough hands around Jack’s ribs and slid the T-shirt and partially buttoned dress shirt over Jack’s head.
He pressed his body against Jack’s again, and Jack groaned again, his knees going weak. Teague was completely naked, bare, vulnerable, his generously sized erection oily with lubricant and sliding against Jack’s backside.
“Oh God…” Jack shuddered, and if he’d had any room at all, he would have lifted his ass in a blatant invitation to a sex act he’d been ignorant of a week ago.
Teague seized his arms and whirled him around to the king sized bed, bending Jack over and sliding a slick, hard hand over Jack’s own cock, around his bottom, cupping his balls and squeezing just enough to make Jack gibber into the coverlet.
“Jealous, Jacky?” Teague taunted as Jack whimpered into the mattress. His arms were pinned behind his back as Teague fondled him, penetrated him, readied him for what was coming even as the press of Teague’s chest along Jack’s back made Jack yearn to hold his lover, stroke his skin in turn, love him back.
“Uuahhhggghhhh…” Jack responded, bucking his backside up, hating that he didn’t have the strength in his heart to turn the tables, to force Teague back to the mattress, to make the man accept his touches, to make him take tenderness and sweetness and gentleness in their bed.
Teague grunted again, and plied his fingers as Jacky groaned, searching for words, finding none in the rampant violation of Jack’s senses by his desire.
“You can be as jealous as you want, Jacky,” Teague muttered against Jack’s back. Jack grunted again and Teague breached Jacky’s body, stretching a little…ah gods, the fine edge of pain…the fullness…
“Auuuugghhhhh…” They both cried as Teague slid into Jack’s backside, flush against his body, the two of them joined, slamming into each other, grunting, whimpering, urging each other on.
Teague bit Jacky’s shoulder, hard, and Jack cried out again even as Teague wrapped his hand around Jack’s cock and stroked, rough, hard, perfect. Jack’s shudder, his shout of climax set Teague off, and blackness washed Jack’s vision as he went limp against the coverlet, panting and sweating from the exertion and the high of Teague’s body in his.
“I’m not jealous,” Jack denied, still panting, “I’ll never be jealous, as long as it’s my bed you’re in at the end.”
Teague chuckled against his flesh, still quivering in after effects of orgasm, and soon—much too soon—pulled sloppily out. He smacked Jack’s bottom playfully on the way to the bathroom for a washcloth to clean them both up.
Jack—who was still, admittedly, recovering a little from the wound that had made him a werewolf in the first place-- had just enough energy to crawl up and put his head on the pillow, pulling the covers down and around his long, naked body. Teague came to bed and cleaned his backside and his frontside off with a warm washcloth, using efficient, impersonal movements, like a grade school teacher wiping paint off a kid’s hands.
Jack pressed his face into his pillow, ignoring the brusqueness, ignoring the cold feeling left in his groin from the faceless sex. He’d tried, this last week, to get Teague to let him kiss, let him hold, let him caress—but Teague had insisted, Jack’s pleasure first. Teague would go on his knees and lick pretty much everything Jack had below the waist, but Jack wasn’t allowed to so much as touch Teague’s face in affection.
Don’t worry about me, Jacky. You okay?
No, Jack had wanted to snarl. I’m not okay when you won’t let me in. But Jack didn’t say it. Jack didn’t force confrontations. Jack didn’t question the good fortune that finally brought Teague Sullivan to his bed. He had waited more than a year for a sign, any sign, that his dreamy-eyed love hadn’t been misplaced, that Teague would love him someday in the same, hungry, consuming way that Jack loved him. And Jack was good at taking orders, good at letting Teague lead. Questioning the way Teague was leading seemed wrong somehow, as though he wasn’t grateful for the way Teague looked at him, bumped his hand when they were in public, spoke low to his ear when it was something private, slid into his flesh when it was the two of them alone.
Besides, Jack thought with his first surge of contentment since he’d walked into their room—the best part was coming.
Teague slept in his tighty-whiteys—always—and after he pulled those on and climbed up into the big-assed bed next to Jack, he let Jack turn sleepily—had to make his movements slow and dreamy or it didn’t work—and pull Teague in against his narrow chest. Jack forced his arms to relax, forced his face to stay slack with exhaustion, forced his body to not just engulf his smaller, compact lover and convulse an embrace around him, holding him tightly enough to absorb Teague into his skin.
It worked. Teague rubbed his cheek a little on the small patch of fur on Jack’s bare chest, and Jack made his breathing even out, smooth, grow shallow, because he knew what would come when Teague thought he was asleep.
The words would come.
The first time Teague had done this, Jack had been wounded in the back of the car and Teague had been speeding through two counties to get him to Green’s healing touch. Jack thought it was his imagination, hallucination inspired by blood loss, until the second time Teague had buggered him senseless and spoken into the still night, thinking Jack was too far under to hear. Teague had spoken to him every night since—but only when he thought Jack was asleep.
Thanks, Jacky.
Always, always it st
arted with ‘thank you’—Jack was never sure whether to weep or kick something. If they’d been home he would have already thrown his fist through the wall.
I wish I had words for you, brother. I wish I was the kind of guy who could say sweet things, make your heart swell with words.
A fluttery sensation in the dark that Jack couldn’t help lean his cheek into.
I wish I was the kind of guy who could touch your face. I keep trying. I look at you and my heart is in my eyes and I think you need to hear the words and we’re alone and all I can do is fuck you until you pass out. It’s what I’ve got. It’s sad and it’s sorry, but it’s all I’ve got. My whole life, I’ve wanted someone to care about and now I’ve got you and I just want to make it worth it for you, that’s all. I just don’t want you to ever hate me for dragging you into this life, for getting you wounded, for loving you. And tonight, you and Katy were looking at each other, and suddenly I wanted you both. I don’t know how to feel about that, Jacky. We made it pretty clear that we liked women too—we didn’t want to give them up, but we didn’t want to give each other up either.
You, Teague, Jack thought wryly. It had been Teague who didn’t want to give women up—but now that Jacky had gotten close enough to Katy to breathe her perfume he could let that one slide.
And I want to protect her. It must be the wolf coming out—can you feel the wolf yet, Jacky? He’s sliding under my skin and he wants to protect you. He wants to protect you and protect Katy—hell, he even wants to protect the other wolves in our little pack—but mostly it’s you and Katy.
Jack had met the other wolves in their pack. Five young men, picked-on kids, recovering prostitutes and drug addicts who had taken the Green’s Hill way out of their old lives. Hell, Jack wanted to protect them too—obviously someone needed to.
But I just keep hoping the wolf is stronger than I am, braver. I’ve been nothing, Jacky. I can’t stand that you’d look at me and see that I was nothing. When I’m inside you, at least you think I’m something. I need you to think I’m something. Maybe the wolf, he’ll be worth the way you look at me, worth the way Katy is looking at me. Maybe the wolf, he’ll be something.