by Amy Lane
“You like that.” Jack wasn’t asking—it seemed obvious because Teague couldn’t stop himself from arching into Jack’s strong, massaging pushes against his skin. “May I…” a thumb traced the furrowed line, and brushed on the scars Teague knew were there on the backs of his thighs and towards his opening.
Teague whimpered. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t want Jacky to know, to think about the pain, to worry about the shit that had happened to him when he’d been helpless. He didn’t want Jacky to think about him that way, period.
“They’re just scars,” he managed to say, glad his face was turned away. “I’ve got lots.”
“I know,” Jack murmured against the side of his bottom. “You’ve got lots. And they all hurt both of us. How about you let me touch these, and then they won’t be able to hurt us anymore, okay?”
I AM NOT WORTH ALL THIS PAIN.
He was almost biting his tongue in an effort not to say it. Instead, he pulled his arms underneath him in an effort to escape.
Jack literally threw his long body on top of him, pinning him to the mattress. Teague kept his shoulders tight, because they both knew he could throw Jack at any time. He’d proven that two nights ago—he was the meanest, most aggressive werewolf in the pack. They both knew it. And Jack was a beta—not anywhere near as strong as Teague, and certainly not as tough. He defeated Teague’s intentions with two words.
“You promised.”
They stayed there, in tableau for a couple of minutes, Teague’s breathing harsh in his own ears. Teague’s glance slid sideways to the red-numbered clock on the end-table, and he saw that they had a good, long time before he was going to have lunch with Cory and talk about the werewolves locked in the basement.
Eventually, that’s what decided him. He didn’t want to burden Cory and Green with anymore of his bullshit. Cory especially—she took too much on her narrow shoulders as it was. She wouldn’t talk about the werewolves in the basement until she knew if Teague was going to be okay. So he had to make himself okay, had to make it okay with Jacky, right here, in the privacy of their bedroom, before he left it.
Teague’s shoulders softened, pressed into the mattress, and Jack’s tackle became more of an embrace. “They’re just scars,” he repeated stubbornly, but they could both hear the catch in his voice, both feel the way his whole lower body clenched against the memory of a long ago bastard with a broken bottle.
“We both know that’s a lie,” Jack murmured, and Teague snarled into the pillow—a human sound, but still visceral and angry.
“Can’t we just leave my shit alone, Jacky? We’ve been doing this for a few weeks… can’t we just stick to that pattern? It was good, right? I didn’t let you down in the sex department?” Jack had sat up but he kept the flat of his hand between Teague’s shoulder blades to keep him pinned down. “We were all good,” Teague finished helplessly, and Jack’s other hand came up to ruffle reassuringly through his hair.
“The sex was great, Teague—never doubt it,” Jack said, scooting back until he was straddling the bottom of Teague’s thighs again. “It was just one sided. You gave, I took. That’s not fair, man—don’t you want to get a little back?”
I get it back when you let me touch you. “I don’t want to be a pain in the ass.”
Jack laughed breathily as he contorted impossibly forward and kissed the base of Teague’s spine. “You are—frequently. I like it.”
In spite of himself, the slowly burgeoning erection unfolding under his belly, and his discomfort with this situation, Teague found himself chuckling. “Didn’t we do enough of this yesterday?”
“Yesterday was about comfort. Today is about you letting me give you something.”
Jack’s tongue carefully traced a crooked path across Teague’s right cheek and descended into the tender skin of the cleft. His movements were so deliberate that he must have been chasing a scar across Teague’s skin. Teague gasped, all words gone, and held his breath. Jack used his palms to separate the halves of Teague’s bottom, and continued that torturous path, replacing pain and fear with love and joy.
Jack paused, right where… where…
Teague tensed his body again, hoping that would be the end of it, praying that it wouldn’t. “What are you doing, Jacky?”
Jack’s breath puffed against his secret skin when he spoke. “Giving you better memories.”
Teague almost came off the mattress when Jack’s tongue touched home.
“Oh, God… Jacky…”
It was warm, and it was wet, and it was invading, plunging into him, teasing, laving, and Teague was left, held in place only by the pleasure, the drug of touch, as Jack licked and penetrated and gave. Teague’s vision went black behind his clenched eyes and he gasped and moaned softly. Jack shifted off his thighs and between them, so Teague was lying spread-eagled and vulnerable beneath him as his fingers came into play.
It was… it was… oh God…it was sweet. But he wanted more. His hips started undulating, pressing against the mattress, and he let a whimper slip out, a begging sound. Jacky pulled away and whispered “Roll over,” gruffly, and God help him, Teague did.
Jack didn’t take up where he left off. He straddled Teague’s stomach instead and started kneading the muscles of Teague’s shoulders and his chest.
Teague’s cock was so hard it hurt.
He scowled up at Jack fiercely, unable to articulate his pain or his want or his need. Self-denial was too deeply ingrained in him to break the habit now.
Jack grinned in his face—he was panting slightly, and his own cock was hard on Teague’s belly, but he was smiling smugly. Teague was even more affronted—and more than seven-eight’s tempted to whip his body around and fuck that smile right off Jacky’s pretty face.
“You want something, Teague?”
Teague closed his eyes and counted to ten. “I’m fine, Jacky. No worries. Never…nnnngghhhhh…” because Jack’s fingertips had found his nipples and pinched, “better.”
Jack’s body came forward and his hips scooted backwards until they were groin to hard, aching groin. He hovered over Teague’s face, lips to lips for a moment. “Because it would be okay, you know, if you wanted something. I’d be happy to give you whatever you wanted…”
Teague wanted Jack to kiss him. He’d always thought kissing overrated until he’d first kissed Jack, and it had been passionate and intimate, the way kissing a stranger wasn’t. He’d kissed Katy too, and the sweetness had been a surprise, but that passion and that intimacy—he’d learned it all from Jack.
He didn’t have any words. Teague lifted his lips up to Jack and prayed that the boy would forget his game and just kiss him, without games or strings or caveats…
…and oh, God, his mouth was glorious. It was hard, and fierce, and wanting. Jack wanted Teague as much as Teague wanted Jack, and their tongues meshed and mated and their lips whispered… Teague groaned and lifted his hands, not in mastery but in need. He needed to wrap his arms around Jack’s shoulders and hold him—it was imperative.
Their bodies ground together as they kissed, just the friction of their cocks between their stomachs and the terrible, terrible want between them.
Jack tried to move—Teague knew it was to finish what he’d started, to take Teague’s erection into his sweet mouth and try and suck his brains out his dick. Teague didn’t let him.
“Stay,” he muttered between kisses. “Oh God… please stay…” Because he needed an anchor, someone to hold onto, so he didn’t disintegrate, fly into outer space, lose himself completely in the unbearable high of being touched. He needed Jacky—whether he came and… oh…oh… Christ… he was going to come…or not. Teague needed to hold Jack. It was more important than orgasm, more important than his pride, more important than breath.
He needed to hold Jacky. He just did.
His climax shattered through his synapses and exploded out his skin. He held onto Jack, clenching him so tight Jack could barely move, could barely breathe, even as Jack’
s own climax shot a scalding path across Teague’s belly. They clung together, breathing hard, while Teague’s arms convulsed around Jacky’s shoulders.
“Anything,” Jack panted. “I’ll do anything you need me to.”
They were touching, skin to skin, sex to sex. Jack had touched him, without reservation, without reciprocation.
It was a debt Teague could never repay.
Cory
Being the Royal Bank
I looked at the shiny silver knife in the werewolf’s shaking hands, and was completely baffled.
“You wrapped that in bubble-wrap and shoved it up your ass?” The sincere dedication to hatred in that act was really out of my league.
Behind me I heard Teague grunt. “So I smell, my Lady.” He sounded as baffled as I was. Bracken wasn’t confused in the least—he was cracking up.
Well good—Bracken was in good form today, which, considering how rocky things had been between us the day before was a good sign. I don’t like it when the people I care about put themselves in danger. I really don’t like it when they do that and I’m left out. It makes me all pouty and irritable, and Bracken gets the brunt of it. Especially when he’s the dumbshit who gets shot!
Teague also seemed to be in good fighting trim—and this heartened me to no end. We’d heard him—hell, the whole hill had heard him—have a class six emotional hurricane two nights before. I didn’t blame him—I’d been in the process of a similar storm myself—but Teague…well shit. Teague was so damned repressed, so honestly sure that he didn’t deserve anything, much less honest emotions—man, the fact he’d walked out into the living room, fresh from a shower after his run, looking like he could take on a biker bar and then some, was a testament to the guy’s resilience, that was for damned sure.
A good thing we were all hunky-dory, because this negotiating thing wasn’t going so well.
“Shut up, cunt, and let me the fuck out of here.” The guy was a mixed bag of genetics, with straight black hair and cinnamon colored skin and light gray eyes—he was also about seven buckets of terrified, pissed-off crazy.
I looked around the bare steel room, and at the four other werewolves in it. They were at the opposite end of the room from Macshitsyerpants and looking at the guy like he smelled really, really bad.
Well, his hands were coated in feces—and they were wolves in their other lives. He didn’t smell that great to me either.
I squinted at the guy. “I’ve got to say, I’m at a loss. What in the fuck was your plan?”
Because really, this was a lose/lose situation for the guy. After we’d taken him and his buddies out two nights ago, we’d brought them here. We were pissed—I mean seriously pissed. The fuckers had set up a ‘peace treaty’ meeting and then tried to ambush us. We should have taken them out before the ambush even had a chance to take effect, but Teague had brought Jacky, and shit had gone down and… well, we were as pissed at ourselves for walking into the trap as we were for these assholes for springing it.
Since we’d killed fifteen out of twenty of them, we figured we’d let these five sit in lock-up until we didn’t feel like annihilating them on general principle.
And it wasn’t like lock-up was that bad—it had a bathroom (one of those little portajohns, but still, it wasn’t like they hadn’t seen each other’s junk before, right?) and food and water—we’d even given them a big warm soapy bucket for a sponge bath and some clean clothes. We put cots in, and gave them blankets—hell, someone had even brought in a box of (untouched) paperbacks. I mean, we wanted negotiators, not hostages, right? And we’d thought it might be going well, until Bracken, Teague and I had walked into the vampire vault (so called because that’s where we put our brand new or out-of-control vampires) and this guy had reached into his soiled shorts and pulled out what had proven to be a knife.
I looked at him again. “Do you have any idea how many people are outside who would be willing to kill you if you lay one finger on us? Besides the fact that the three of us did some serious damage to you’re entire pack two nights ago as it is?”
“I don’t give a fuck!” the guy screamed—spit flew out of his mouth, and with that and the smell, I was really glad I was across the room from him. “Just let me the fuck out of here, and I won’t fucking kill you!”
“Or maybe,” I said with a grimace, “you put that thing down and we won’t kill you?”
I was charging as we talked. Of course I was—I had a shield at the ready, because I was standing between Bozo Macshitsyerpants and my beloved and my friend. I’m not stupid—just mortal. The plan was that nobody else got to shed a drop of blood because these guys were brain-damaged assholes with no sense of family, honor, or organization.
He’d shoved a silver knife up his ass?
I looked at the guy in complete disbelief, shaking my head and wishing I was the type of power-mad psycho-bitch who could just fry all these fuckers where they sat and get rid of this little problem.
“I just want the fuck out of here!” the guy sobbed, and I sighed. He was so pathetic.
“Okay, Junior,” I said, trying to take the irritation out of my voice. “I’ll make you a deal. You put away the pig-sticker, and we’ll take you outside for a bit while we work this out—does that work for…”
The dumbshit rushed me—knife out, arms flailing, shouting spittle and drool, the whole nine yards. He didn’t even use his werewolf speed, and I was in the process of throwing a shield up between that knife and me and the guys when Teague did something supremely stupid.
He threw himself in front of me.
And took the silver knife right in the middle of his ribs.
Teague screamed and fell to my feet and I screamed and used my shield to slam Macshitsyerpants back against the steel wall with enough force to make his head crush in a little bit. I wasn’t sure if he was dead yet, so I kept him mashed there like a gurgling bug and sank to my knees in front of Teague, glaring at Bracken to stand back so the guy wouldn’t bleed out.
GREEN!!!!
He was coming.
“Jesus, you dumb Irish motherfucker, what in the hell did you think you were doing?” I fished in the pocket of my jeans for the bottle of herbal salt-wash that counteracted silver in were creatures and iron in the sidhe. Our lives were risky enough that I never went anywhere without it.
“Protecting… my… queen…”
Christ, spare me from heroes. With a yank I cleared the knife from under his ribs, grimacing as the blood welled up from it. The knife wasn’t that long—five inches maybe—and on a werewolf this sort of wound was normally cake. A few minutes panting, some beer, some salty meat, and he’d be good to go.
But it was long enough to drive the silver deep into Teague’s body, and that was bad—that made the wound worse than it would be on a human. Teague was starting to froth blood at the mouth and turn gray, like a guy with a really fatal infection, and wherever Green was, it was time for me to pony up and do some first goddamned aid.
“I was throwing a shield up,” I muttered, taking the bottle and squirting about half of it on the wound itself.
He hissed, “I’d forgotten you could do that, lady.”
“Well goddammit, remember—I can protect you. It’s my job to protect you!” I parted the wound to see how deep it went. It was already turning a dark gray, like Teague’s skin. Shit. I knew what I’d have to do.
“I… beg…to…differ…”
“Fuck.” I would not argue about this right now. I swore again, and then without wincing or cringing or any of the girly shit that I really really really wanted to do because I was so not a healer, I shoved the little plastic bottle as far into his flesh as I could before the icky, squishy give stopped. Then I took it in both hands and squeezed as much of the salt-wash as I could into the wound.
Teague gasped again and made a ‘manly-pain’ sound. GREEN! I called in my head with all the shock and terror I was not voicing, and he was suddenly next to me, holding his hands to his ears.
“Holy blue fuck!” he muttered. “Even in my head that’s worse than a grieving baonsidhe—now move!”
I did, looking helplessly at my red-dripping hands, while Green moved in to bend down and kiss Teague on the lips. Sex was the hallmark of his healing: the kiss would be as necessary to Green as a bandage would be to a human doctor.
“Cory?” Nicky said—he’d apparently arrived on Green’s heels. “That guy on the wall-- are you going to kill him or is he going to be art?”
I looked at the guy—his skull was reshaping itself, so apparently I didn’t kill him straight off. “He’s too ugly to be art,” I snarled, and I was a werewolf’s whisker away from squashing the guy flat. Macshitsyerpants yelped, and there was a sudden, rank smell of urine as five frightened werewolves voided their bladders.
“Lady, please don’t.”
The voice was soft but sound—Teague had apparently broken away from Green’s best healing kiss to stop me from killing Dumbfuck Macshitsyerpants, and I was damned if I knew why.
“Any particular reason?” I asked, skeptical.
Teague sat up and nodded respectfully to Green, who, in turn, gave Teague a hand up. His skin was already flushing, and his wound had knit up while Green was touching him, but his dark blue T-shirt was split wide down the middle and blood—both red and the infected gray—saturated both the T-shirt and the gray-green flannel shirt over it.
“It’s my job,” he said tersely. “Tomorrow, fair fight. These guys,” a nod at the other werewolves, “can see whose dick is bigger.”
‘These guys’ were crouching in a puddle of their own piss, making puppy-whimpering noises. I think if someone had asked them at that moment, they would have told me that my alpha was five feet, nine inches of pure dick, with a topper of dark-blonde hair.
“Awesome,” I muttered, looking at my hands and chasing down nausea. I’d had blood on my hands before—but it was usually someone I’d killed or fought with. And it hadn’t been turning gray. “We’ll have a gladiator death match, complete with audience and-are-you-fucking- shitting-me, asshole?”