by Amy Lane
“Bullshit!” Teague succeeded in jerking away, but Jack followed him, straddling his body with one easy motion and tussling off his shirt with anything but ease. Finally, Jack managed it, throwing the shirt across the room and grabbing Teague by the wrists before Teague could even think of bucking him off.
“I’ve seen your scars before!” Jack hissed, leaning forward. Their bare chests were touching and their faces were just inches apart. Jack began to swell and harden, and under his straddled thighs he felt Teague do the same.
Teague’s hands were pinned, and Jack knew that if he really wanted to he could break the pin but that he’d probably hurt Jack doing it. Jack was banking on the fact that hurting him was the last thing on Teague’s agenda. So Teague didn’t struggle as hard as he could have, but he did turn his face away, his lean, beautiful profile clean and shadowed in the dark, and Jack wondered if he would just lie there, inside himself, until Jack gave up.
Jack swore to himself that they’d fall asleep in this position first. “Teague?” he prompted gently, rubbing his nose against Teague’s cheek.
“But not when you were mine,” he muttered.
“What?”
“You didn’t see them when you were mine,” Teague repeated, irritated.
Jack gasped—but he didn’t let go.
“I showed them to Katy today,” Teague went on tonelessly, “because I was trying to make her go away, but it didn’t work.”
Jack closed his eyes and kissed the throbbing, fight/flight pulse in Teague’s temple. Of course he had, Jack thought sadly, of course he’d tried to drive her away. He’d tried the same thing with Jack.
“What if it worked with you? Now?” Teague asked now, his vision still fixed sightlessly at a point in the dark.
“Impossible,” Jack murmured. He could reach Teague’s collarbone from this position, so he bent down and kissed one of the fracture bumps, and then the other one, and then the other one, as tenderly as he possibly could.
“It better be,” Teague muttered. “You’re my reward, Jacky. You’re…you’re what I get for not turning out like my old man. You’re the reason my heart doesn’t freeze up and go cold. You…you can’t turn away from me now.”
Jack fought hard against his tight throat, his burning eyes. “Oh Jesus, Teague—I really am turning into a fucking woman,” he choked and a small corner of Teague’s mouth turned up in the dark, a ballsy reminder of Teague’s usual fuck-me grin.
Finally, he turned to meet Jack’s eyes. “You’ve always been one, Jacky—I’ve been telling you that since we’ve met.”
Jack let go of Teague’s arms but stayed straddling him, liking the friction of their groins rubbing together. He kissed Teague’s chest again, and his arms, and his ribs and his stomach, every bump, every break, every burn…he knew where they were, had looked at them since the two of them had started rooming together, had mapped them by feel the night before. His kisses were soft, tender, and kind—everything he knew Teague had never had in his life, Jack put into his touch.
By the time he’d worked his way down Teague’s stomach, Teague had knotted his hands in Jack’s hair and was moaning softly. Jack resisted for a moment, and found himself hauled up Teague’s body and then rolled over on his back, being kissed and kissed and kissed.
This time, after kissing, stretching, playing, when Teague fit himself inside, they were face to face, and Jack could read every joy, every vulnerability, every fine-line between pain and pleasure. He could kiss Teague, could whisper in his ear, see his scowl of concentration as he moved. Jack could trust that when his head tilted back and his spend coated his stomach, Teague would be there with him.
Teague’s climax was intense. Jack could tell by his thrusting, almost painful grunts, and the way Teague buried his face in Jack’s neck and wrapped his hands around Jack’s shoulders and held on for dear life. When it was over Teague made to pull out quickly as he always did, running for the washcloth, running to clean all of his tainted traces from Jack’s body, but this time Jack didn’t let him.
“Stay,” he whispered, loving Teague’s weight on him, his smell, the rough feeling of his stubbled cheek against Jack’s shoulder, and still shivering with the slackening stretch of their merged bodies.
“Stay…when you’re inside me, you’re not naked. Not anymore.”
Teague’s shoulder’s shook, and a warm puff of air chuffed Jacky’s neck, and Jack wrapped his arms around his lover’s shoulders and hung on.
He planned to do that for as long as the gods would let him.
Cory
Laughing
Bracken pretty much hauled me through the hill and shoved me in the shower the instant we got home. I took the world’s quickest hot shower and then got waylaid by Green and Bracken and Nicky who all insisted that I dry my hair instead of just letting it hang damply while I sat outside.
“If you’re going up to the garden, it’s not particularly warm,” Green remarked tartly when I complained. I gritted my teeth and then winced—Teague was pretty damn strong for such a scrawny guy, and his elbow had caught me hard.
Green rolled his eyes. “What did you do to yourself, beloved?” he asked, and although his words were exasperated his touch on my jaw was heavenly. I couldn’t reply—my mouth was tingling and resetting—and Nicky tried to hold onto a chuckle and it only ended up snorking out of his throat. Bracken tried to suppress a guffaw by looking grim and I just shook my head at them. It was good that they weren’t treating me (too much) like a porcelain doll anymore, but it would have been swell if somebody had remembered to fish me out of the goddamned river before we practically bobbed to the delta.
But I found my mouth quirking in spite of myself, and I gave a grin, now that my jaw had reset. “I’ll tell you,” I murmured, surrounded by warm men in a steamy room and craving some time with Green alone, “but if he’s coming back to the garden, I’d really rather tell you both at the same time.” I found I was shining with a full grin, and I added, “I really want to see you two laugh.”
Green nodded his head, and our eyes locked for a moment, and that haunted, pointed, sad look that pinched his face when Adrian came left him and my heart did a little happy dance. Green was happy. I made Green happy.
I had a sudden thought and asked if Green could check on Teague’s silver-burn before we all went up, and Green agreed.
“Besides,” he said dryly, “it would be a shame to break them up once they start in on whatever they’ve been doing every night.”
I sighed. We’d talked about this—it hadn’t been hard to figure out that Teague had been using sex to push Jacky away and bind the poor guy to Teague’s chest both at the same time. Green was pretty good at playing “guess the damage” with the people at his hill, and when they started out as human, well, the damage could be considerable.
Teague’s heart, his battered, valiant heart, was particularly transparent to the both of us. He was so much like Adrian, it almost hurt to look at him.
What Green had told me as I’d lay sprawled in his arms the first night Teague and Jack had arrived at the hill, was that Teague reminded him of me, as well.
But not anymore, beloved.
The look on his face had been exquisite in its joy. No. Not anymore.
Apparently Jack and Teague had actually talked this night, because Green had nothing to report as he met us up in the garden, after he’d gone to heal our newest werewolf.
Nicky opted out of our little party—I knew he would. He tended to stay out of all things regarding Adrian, partly out of respect, and partly, I suspected, because the three of us became so single-minded about him that there was no room left for poor Nicky, period. I hoped Nicky was on the phone with Erik, a very nice guy who thought that Nicky was the end-all and be-all of his world. Nicky deserved to be someone’s first priority.
The Goddess grove was lovely. Unlike the river, where the trees had been naked, reaching bare branches towards a misty sky hoping for some warmth, these trees—the
oak, the lime, and the rose—were all covered and green. The magic that had made the grove kept working now, even as the trees grew, and the erotic possibilities sculpted into their living wood were still there—some even more, uhm, graphic than they had been since Green, Adrian, and I had created the grove a year and a half ago. (What can I say? I knew a lot more about sex now, and thanks to the little power surges that still washed out of me at certain times, the trees tended to get ‘redecorated’ a lot.)
Adrian’s marble memorial bench sat under a pool of ambient light, and although I knew it had started raining again—nasty, sleeting November rain up here in the higher foothills—Green kept that away from us for the night, and all that survived was a gentle mist, lit up by Green’s magic sky.
The three of us bundled onto the bench, the men on either side of me, their need to touch me so great that Bracken and Green actually interlaced their legs so I could sit on both of their laps. Green kissed my mouth and Bracken nuzzled my cheek, Green’s touch like hot satin, Bracken’s like electric velvet, the two of them as essential to my heart as blood and oxygen.
They pulled back after a moment, and I rested my head on Green’s shoulder and Bracken rested his head on mine.
“He’ll come back, right?” I asked anxiously, and that voice, that lovely boyish, cockney-sweet voice, murmured, “Of course, luv. You already know I’d die twice for you.”
There’s only one kind of laugh you can give to that, and you’d have to hear it to know it in your heart.
“Hello, beloved,” I murmured, gazing into those translucent blue eyes with my heart in my tight, fighting-tears smile. “I’m so very glad to see you this evening.”
Next to me, Bracken sat up a little and Green shifted, and Adrian sat his ghostly form down on the ground (I mean it’s not like the dew was going to soak into his pants!) and we settled in for a visit.
Adrian had been dead for over 150 years before he died twice in a mist of gentle rain. He’d been gone from the three of us for one year, four months and twenty-eight days since then, and given all of that death, you have to wonder at how it was that a vampire’s ghost laughed so hard that he got hiccups.
Green laughed along with him and the vibrations of that resonant laughter through his chest and against my ear was like some sort of magic-Motrin, easing away all the soreness that had ached at my heart since Teague had shown up in our living room, pining away for his beloved.
“Wankers!” Adrian gasped, amazed at Marcus and Phillip and the way they had let us drift a hundred meters down the American River while we tried to sputter our way to the rocky shore. “What were you doing, then, Fuckwit?” he asked Bracken, and Bracken looked sheepish.
“I believe he was screaming something like, ‘Get your asses up and get them out of there you bastard-asshole-fuckheads,’” I giggled, and Bracken scrubbed his hand over his eyes.
“I probably should have been fishing you out myself,” he confessed, and I looked at him sideways, surprised.
“We had two perfectly good sopping wet vampires who needed to earn their keep,” I responded. “I don’t know why you needed to get wet too!”
But Bracken and Adrian met eyes, and I could read between them. I had been in danger, and it had been Bracken’s fault.
“Enough,” I said thickly. “It wasn’t Brack’s fault…it was mine for being stupid—I’m pretty sure if I’d just yelled something, like say, ‘Silver poisoning is burning your face’, Teague would have gotten the hint.” I shook my head. “I get emotional about him and Jack, that’s all.”
Green rubbed my cheek and I leaned into it like a kitten. “I wonder why, beloved,” he said simply, and the moment threatened to lapse into melancholy again.
“So where are the two asshole fuckheads now?” asked Adrian innocently. I’m not sure what he planned to do to Marcus and Phillip, but I had visions of a ghost with a vampire’s sense of humor and laughingly told him it was okay—I’d given them clean-up.
Adrian’s expression, as ghostly as it was, was eloquent with disgust. “Blargh!” he said, and Bracken and I cracked up, and the visit was lovely after that.
As lovely as it could be when every moment of it broke our hearts, but that’s okay. Rather a broken heart than a heart numb from the loss—and I’m pretty sure Green and Bracken agreed with me, or they wouldn’t have been out there with me, comforting me with their warmth and their touch and laughing with Adrian as though he hadn’t been gone from us for one year, four months and, now, twenty-nine days.
I didn’t have school in the morning. It didn’t matter because I would have stayed up the whole night anyway, but you can’t freeze a moment like that like a butterfly in an ice cube, you just can’t. Eventually, somewhere in a distance I couldn’t hear, a rooster must have crowed, because Adrian’s ghost faded abruptly away and it was only the three of us, our smiles fading with him, missing him all over again.
But it was Thanksgiving—or it would be in a few days—and Green’s hill was about nothing if it wasn’t about being grateful for those people we loved.
It was with a sense of profound gratitude that I went back to Green’s bed with the two of them and settled in to sleep. Tomorrow we would wake up and make sleepy love—it was almost a given. It would be the sort of sex where it didn’t matter what went where or who kissed what, but every touch would be magical, every whisper perfect, every glide of sweet-slick-skin shivery with the promise of orgasm.
But that was the morning . For the last breath of the night we simply lay in bed, touching hands, rubbing stomachs or arms or cheeks, and were thankful.
Reaching
By Amy Lane
The Third Jack & Teague (& Katy) Adventure
A Green’s Haven Story
Jack
Reaching
Jack yawned from the chair at the foot of the bed and stood and stretched. “I’m going to shower,” he said pointedly, and looked to where Teague was sprawled out on the bed.
Katy was next to him, sitting with one foot under her bottom, working on some sort of embroidery thing, making polite conversation. She’d been telling them about the weres running on the night of the full moon. They had about two weeks before running under the night sky happened, unless something weird happened to trigger the change.
“We don’t have to turn with the moon, you know,” she was saying now, “but it hurts. It feels like you got to take a gigantic dump and someone sewed your cheeks shut, you know what I means?”
Teague laughed a little, the sides of his mouth turning in and up, and his eyes arching upwards. Katy had carried the bulk of the conversation—she always did when she was there—but Teague had simply lay there, tired from a long day running errands for Grace, the Hill’s den mother, and enjoyed Katy’s company.
Jack had been counting on it.
Two nights ago, Katy sank to her knees in front of the Goddess and everyone, and took Jack into her mouth. Teague watched and approved, and made noises about the three of them, binding together into a family.
And then stepped back and didn’t make a goddamned move.
The tension alone was driving Jack insane.
Granted, Teague had relaxed a little between the two of them—they still had sex (a wondrous thing, whenever Teague touched him with passion and tenderness—Jack was still stunned and proud when their bodies slicked up against each other in the privacy of their room) but it wasn’t here let me fuck you so we don’t have to talk sort of sex.
And when Teague was out and about during the day, doing ‘Alpha shit’ as Jack called it, Katy and Jack got together, talked, laughed, touched…
But all in all, they were still waiting for Teague.
Jack stood at the entrance to the bathroom and looked at Katy, who rolled her eyes at him and shrugged. Three days in her company already, breathing the smell of her body through his newly heightened senses, hearing the throatiness of her laughter in every sweet note of her voice, and he could read that expression.
I’l
l try to be naked and sweating, mijo, but I’ll probably just be gone.
Jack decided to make that shower quick.
The water sluiced over him, and he thought of the two of them together, Teague’s body lean, shredded with muscle and not nearly enough fat, his pale Irish skin almost as scarred as his strong heart. Katy would be smoother, silken, her dusky skin brown and perfect. Katy had round cheeks, round shoulders, round breasts…she was soft, her skin sweet… the memory of her mouth on his cock made him hard and he turned the water off abruptly because he wanted to see them, watch them, catch them.
This was so much easier than he thought it would be.
He could share Teague, if it was with Katy—but only if it was with Katy, because Katy wanted Jack too.
As quickly as possible he dried off his shaggy dark hair and his lanky body, and brushed his teeth, and then moved quietly to the doorway, his towel around his hips to see if he’d missed anything.
He’d missed Katy—she was gone, and he was two seconds away from breaking the quiet and just, finally, asking Teague when they were going to see this thing through, when he realized what Teague, who was still stretched out on the bed, was actually doing.
He was smelling her.
He’d rolled over from his side and his face was buried in the place she had just sat, and he was scenting the sheets with the enthusiasm of a cat rubbing its face on catnip. His lips were pulled back from his teeth like the wolves they would become and he was tasting the spicy, sweet, plump tang of her skin and her body.
Jack opened up his senses—another new thing to learn about becoming a werewolf—and tried to smell her like Teague was doing. At first all he could smell was Teague, the sharp, bold scent of his lover overpowering even the smell of shampoo and soap and the taste of toothpaste on his tongue. But there was a musk in the air, a bold, male print of desire, and underneath it…
Jack could smell Katy’s arousal almost as plainly as he could smell Teague’s, and his cock went almost immediately hard.