“Fuck, you’re a gorgeous sight,” Lucas growled as he pumped his own cock. They’d lifted themselves to sit at the edge, steam rising off of their bodies as they watched me.
“I can’t wait to bury my cock in you Amelia,” Isaac purred, a dangerous glint in his eyes.
Hunter dragged his cock through my pussy again, and I arched back at him, turned on by them all watching me.
“So fucking good, Amy,” Hunter hissed out as he slowly sank into me. I could feel my pussy take every inch of his cock.
This time Hunter fucked me faster, taking his own pleasure from my body. Rather than being annoyed, it actually turned me on more. I wanted them all to fuck me like I was made just for them. That only I could give them what they really wanted, what they needed. What they loved.
Hunter grabbed a handful of my hair, pulling my head back hard enough I had to bow my back, thrusting my breasts out as he fucked me. Like this, my body was on even more display for the guys.
His thrusts grew deeper, his hips twisting against me as he got closer. My scalp tingled from where he pulled my hair, but the pain twisted into perverse pleasure than made my nipples ache they were so hard. With a hoarse shout, Hunter came inside me.
I let my eyes drift closed as he let go of my hair and he slid slowly out of me, my pussy aching with emptiness.
But I wasn’t empty for long. Suddenly another cock was there, and I peeked over my shoulder. Isaac was there, his hands sliding over my ass, his thumbs teasing my slit. I wiggled back against him in a silent plea.
He lined himself up and we both sighed as he glided in. He set a frantic pace, just like Hunter had, using me to chase his pleasure. Isaac pulled out and I yelped as he flipped me over, my shoulders resting on the edge of the spring, and my legs hooked over his arms. His cock filled me in a single sharp thrust before he returned to his pace.
My hands scrambled against the ground, trying to find a hold when they were both caught. Hunter had one hand and Lucas the other, bracing me while Isaac took me. Lucas shifted closer, and Hunter let of go me, only to press one hand against my back, the other teasing my nipples. Each pinch sent a jolt of pain and pleasure to my pussy.
Lucas tapped my cheek and I forced my eyes open. He guided my face until I was able to take his cock in my mouth, hard and full. I twisted my tongue along the underside, making the man’s blue eyes darken. I couldn’t move my head, but that didn’t seem to matter as Lucas carefully pulled out before thrusting back in. Each thrust he pushed a little further into my mouth, his cock slick with my saliva, until he touched the back of my throat.
I felt a cold tingle of magic before my throat relaxed, any threat of a gag reflex disappearing. My clever boy. He looked down at me, in question, and unable to answer, I pressed my mouth forward until I had his cock fully into my mouth.
Like that, being supported and touched by Hunter, Isaac and Lucas fucked me. Their moans filled the clearing, my own being caught by Lucas’s thrusts. Lucas watched me, his lips parted, a groan pulling itself from his chest. “So close, Amelia,” he said while he pulled back as if to save me from it. But I wanted to taste him, to come in my mouth as much as I wanted Isaac to come in my pussy. I grabbed his thigh, pressing my mouth back down on him, taking him deep into my throat. He hissed, but renewed his thrusts, his hands holding onto my head, until I finally felt his hot seed pump into me.
Swallowing him down, I tried to smile at him, but Hunter’s fingers once more found my clit and I came hard around Isaac’s cock, triggering his own release.
We were all a panting, sweaty mess, and I shoved Isaac and the others off of me before flopping up out of the hot spring and into the cold snow.
“Jesus, it’s cold,” I hissed as I settled down, ‘but fuck if it doesn’t feel good. I’m fucking hot.”
“Yeah, you are,” Lucas drawled like a prepubescent boy, but he laid down beside me, enjoying the cold.
Hunter and Isaac crowded around us and we shifted until my head was resting against Hunter’s chest, and Isaac and Lucas laid beside me. Silence drifted into the clearing as our breathing finally settled back to normal.
“I was wrong,” I murmured, breathing in the cool air, watching steam rise from our piled bodies in the snow.
“About?” Isaac wondered lazily.
“The hot spring is nice,” I said, “but this is the best Christmas present ever.”
Lucas gave a quiet, rumbling assent. Even Hunter had to admit it. We lay there, spent, cooling in the snow, and he sighed contentedly as he trailed one hand back and forth along my shoulder. Lucas wrapped a hand around Hunter’s calf, his own leg thrown over mine, and Isaac picked up my hand and kissed the tips of my fingers. For a few seconds, I could imagine it was like this all the time. We were wild creatures, like a pack of wolves, and this was simply how we lived. No magic, no creatures from the Abyss, no responsibilities or dark destinies. Just comfort, and pleasure, and the seasons, and the open air around us.
Somehow off in the woods, just at the edge of hearing, something chimed.
Hunter shot up, searching the trees. “Did you hear that?”
“No,” Lucas said, frowning. “What?”
Hunter shuddered. “A jingle bell. We should… we should get back.”
I sighed as we mustered slowly and got dressed. I bet wild animals didn’t have to worry about Santa Clause. Oh, to be a wolf.
Hunter
Christmas came and went. On Christmas day, I called my family back home to check that they’d weathered the night. They had, which was always a relief when I couldn’t make it back. Of course, our community took Santa seriously, and made all the necessary precautions each year. I could tell Amelia still doubted our sincerity, but she just waved our attempts at explaining it away saying something about how she remembered the Rudolph song. I had no idea what that meant.
If Nathan noticed that the season had come and gone, I couldn’t tell. He seemed irritated that we’d taken time away from hunting down solutions, but it was short lived. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he muttered more than usual when he was reading, and he was drinking coffee at an alarming volume. All bad signs.
“You’re stressed,” I told him the day after Christmas, with only five more days to go before classes resumed. “You should take a break. Let us know what you’re looking for and we can mark pages for you. It’ll even save you time.”
“Rest,” Nathan snorted, and shook his head. “You think I could rest even if there was time for it? I’m fine, Hunter. I’ve asked Isaac to cook me up some energy.”
Isaac tried to hide behind the open journal in his hands. I glowered at him but turned my attention back to Nathan. “Just two hours. You won’t be able to think straight or—”
“It’s a bit stuffy in here,” he muttered. Nathan stood from the library table, closing the book over his notes. He tucked the tome under his arm. “And loud. If you’ll excuse me.”
He stalked off into the bookshelves, bound for the opposite end of the library as I dropped into my seat, confused and irritated. Well… not so much confused, really. I knew exactly what was going on in his head, more or less, I just didn’t understand how he couldn’t see the way exhaustion was affecting him. I narrowed my eyes at Isaac. “Seriously?”
He shrugged helplessly. “It’s Nathan. He’d have just done it himself. It’s perfectly safe in small doses for a little while. I wouldn’t make him enough to overdose on.”
“I know it won’t kill him,” I muttered. “But that doesn’t mean it will help his mental state at all. Already he’s dealing with a lot. It’s irresponsible.”
Amelia looked up from the book she’d been poring over, her finger pressed to the page. “I think I… where’s Nathan?”
The three of us raised eyebrows at her as one.
“Must be an interesting read,” Lucas mused. “He went to get some privacy. Apparently, we’re all a bit too loud for him. What did you find?”
She tapped the page again. “Somethi
ng troubling, but potentially useful. I’m not quite sure if I’m reading this right, but… I don’t know, I should take it to Nathan. Which way did he go?”
“That way,” I said, pointing toward the shelves. “Probably to another part of the library, but he could have gone as far as his room. Who knows? Hang on…”
I moved my fingers through the Whisper spell and pointed it at Nathan. “Amelia has something. Where are you?”
In a moment, Nathan’s irritated voice Whispered back. “Headed to the Headmistress’ office. She’s requisitioned a second-hand copy of this diary; I need the original… tell Amelia to meet me there.”
Amelia looked at me expectantly as I listened, until I heard the message. I relayed it to her. “He’s picky about his books,” I added. “And not remotely afraid to at least try and rake the school’s highest administrator over the coals. You should hurry and catch up with him before he makes an ass of himself.”
She gave a dark laugh as she stood and marked the page with a loose sheet of paper. “Your confidence in me is inspiring, but probably poorly placed. I sincerely doubt I can prevent that. He does it just by walking into the room most days. All right. I’ll be back in a bit, then. Whisper me if you decide to head out. It’s easier to soak this awful stuff in with your three around.”
“Hey now,” Lucas said as she turned to leave. “Going so fast?”
She turned back around, a slight grin on her lips. “Hunter did say to hurry.”
“And you seemed to think it wouldn’t make a difference,” Isaac pointed out, and tapped his lips.
Amelia sauntered to him, smiling wider, and bent to kiss him, trailing her free hand down his cheek and neck. Lucas was next, from behind as he hung his head backward over the chair. Even after Christmas Eve, I almost didn’t expect her to come around to my side of the table. She did, though, sidling up with one leg between my knees as she tangled her fingers in my beard and pressed her lips to mine. It was a lingering sort of kiss that left the taste of her on my tongue and lips. When she pulled away, I had an urge to adjust myself, but resisted to keep from taking crap from Lucas and Isaac when she left.
We watched her leave, and I went back to my Abyssal bestiary—a book with no indication of real accuracy, but which was on the list Nathan had practically etched into our foreheads—and picked up where I’d left off.
“So,” Lucas mused when we heard the library door close, “change of heart, at last?”
I looked up at him, already irritated from where the conversation felt like it was heading. “I suppose you could call it that. Can we focus on the task at hand, though?”
“Well,” Isaac said slowly, “it’s not exactly all that simple, is it? I mean, obviously you’re not sleeping with anyone else. You’re… you know… you. But the thing is, we’ve had ‘the talk’ with Amelia already. You haven’t, I’m guessing.”
“’The Talk’,” I echoed back at him. “You mean about being exclusive? I know, Amelia told me. And… obviously, we haven’t.”
“Thing is,” Lucas put in, “it’s not really just Amelia to talk to, now is it?”
I sighed and sat back in the chair, hopeless about actually making more progress. Not that I was likely to pull anything from the book anyway. It was mostly gibberish about made-up abyssal animals. Shoggoths, and Mi-Gos, and ‘elder things’ whatever that was supposed to be. No references to hungering offspring of Az-Harad. “So I’ve got to have ‘the talk’ with you two as well? Do we really need to do that? Where would I find the time?”
“It’s the principal of the thing,” Isaac said. He turned the page in his journal before he set it down and put his pencil in it to mark the page. “Look, Hunter, the thing is… we’re not worried about us.”
“We’re not,” Lucas confirmed. I wanted to throw my pencil at the dolt. Amelia wouldn’t blame me.
“We just need to be sure that you’re not going to hurt Amelia,” Isaac said, finally getting to the point of it. “This come-and-go thing… Lucas and I have been through it. You can’t put her through it, too.”
That stung, and I didn’t hide it. Not now, after all this. “That was completely different,” I said quietly, my voice quavering with an old anger. “I was grieving, asshole. You can’t have expected me to maintain what we had in the middle of that.”
“We did,” Lucas countered. “And we grieved, too—together.”
“Well, Nathan’s back now,” I said as I picked the book up, trying to signal that the conversation was over with. “We can all just move on.”
“Until something else happens, you mean,” Isaac said quietly.
When I looked up to give him an exasperated scowl, his expression was soft. Compassionate. Warm. I felt like an ass. They were looking for an apology, I thought. And… maybe they were owed one. “I… shit. Look, we all handle that kind of thing differently, okay?” I shrugged, unable to really make the right excuse. Or any excuse. “I needed time on my own, to process, and then finding Nathan’s research… it just became the thing that held me together. And I shouldn’t have to remind you that because I did dive into it, we did manage to get him back.”
Lucas held up a finger. “Ah, that’s not accurate. Amelia managed to get him back. And only because she brought the three of us back together with a purpose.”
“I’m not sure I see the real difference,” I admitted.
Isaac grunted and leaned his elbows on the table. “Can you not? If you’d let us in to begin with—”
“I’m sorry, alright?” I snapped. I quieted my voice, sensing the distant eyes of Mara piercing through the bookshelves to burn into my forehead. “I didn’t know how to handle it. I’d never lost anyone like that before. Not someone that close. You two seemed to have one another, and I thought that was enough. And… and it made me feel… weak. To be so broken over him. And to hold that kind of anger about the two of you helping him do that to himself… I wasn’t in a good place, all right? And I wanted to be in that place by myself, to dig myself out of it on my own.”
Lucas nodded slowly as he listened, and Isaac’s eyebrows gradually pinched tight with sympathy.
Lucas wasn’t sympathetic. “Well, that’s just stupid, Hunter.”
I glared at him.
“What?” He asked, spreading his hands and sitting back in his chair. He waved a frustrated hand at me. “This whole… I don’t know, toxic mountain man ‘don’t let them see you cry’ thing is bullshit and you know it and you knew it, but you did it anyway. What don’t we know about one another? What haven’t we seen? What haven’t we shared, including losses and failures and injury? You say you haven’t lost anyone like that, and I know that’s true, but we were there when your Gran died, and you did cry, Hunter. And you grieved. You did it with us, and we were there, and you knew that you could trust us with your pain, but you pulled away not because you were hiding.”
Each word dug into me with the sharp stab that only came from the truth.
“No. You pulled away because being hurt makes you angry. And what happens when you get hurt again? What happens when Nathan never does come around, or he throws himself back into the Abyss, or he just feels like he’s done with us, with all of this? Because you know that’s in him, right? He thinks he better than you, and me, and Isaac, and Amelia—he thinks he’s better than everyone—”
“Lucas, come on,” Isaac said, and reached for him.
Lucas brushed his hand away. “No. No, I won’t ‘come on’. This isn’t about just you and me now, Isaac, it’s about her, too, and I don’t want Hunter to hurt her the way he hurt us. So? Hunter? Don’t you think it’s worth putting on the table?”
Lucas had gone red in the face, a little. Isaac wasn’t angry, but I could see old hurt in his eyes, too. Shit. He wasn’t wrong, was the thing. And I was speechless.
We sat in silence for a while, as Lucas gradually composed himself. I tried to imagine a day when Nathan just turned his back on me, on us, forever, and went his own way. I knew, as I felt a slight
sting, that only a few months ago that would have hurt to think about. I thought of Amelia, shouting at me that we’d keep one another together, that all of us, together, could be stronger. She’d been saying what Lucas was saying now. I supposed I could see how similar they were. Maybe that’s what drew me to her. She had Nathan’s relentless optimism, Isaac’s gentle compassion, even a bit of Nathan’s blithe natural talent—though none of his crushing ego. I wondered if they saw in her, something that they saw in me as well.
Seemed doubtful. At least at the moment.
I stood slowly. “I really am sorry,” I muttered, picking up the book.
Lucas rolled his eyes. “He says as he prepared to run off and sulk in private. Who are we to one another if we can’t get angry and live through it, Hunter? Maybe we can’t have what we used to. But we can have something like it, can’t we? At least trust, if nothing else?”
I looked to Isaac, wondering about his limited input on the matter. He sighed and stood up.
With some hesitation, he walked around Lucas’s chair and came to stand in front of me, half-obscuring my view of Lucas. Isaac looked up at me, his brow creased. And then he reached out and wrapped his arms around me, tucking his head against my shoulder.
My eyes closed on their own. A mix of memories came rushing to the front of my mind. Most of them good, maybe because of the context. A few of them… not so good. Sprinkled amid the times we all writhed together in the grass, on a bed, or in a sauna—or the myriad other places we’d gathered to relax over the year and a half we’d had—there were memories of lonely nights, right after Nathan vanished. Seeing Lucas and Isaac together on campus. Watching them grieve with each other at a distance and thinking, over and over, that I should go to them. Set my anger aside and just be sad with them. And then talking myself out of it.
Isaac’s embrace was as gentle as he was. He didn’t push, didn’t urge me for more, just… held me there, as if reminding me.
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 23