by Lauren Esker
She'd never had a boyfriend play with her like this before. It was nothing at all like doing it to herself.
A second finger joined the first, and then he laid his head on her thigh, tipped back a little so he could look up at her as he worked her. His lips were parted; he looked wildly aroused, but his fingers moved gently, slowly, bringing her up and up without haste, even when she lifted her hips and ground against his hand.
"Avery, I think I'm going to ..."
He didn't speak, just rolled his head forward and laid his open mouth over her, through the skirt. His thumb grazed her clit, his fingers pressed inside her, and she arched back and came with a sudden, blinding shock, a shuddering electric current across her spine.
She came down slowly, shivering with aftershocks. Avery still had his fingers in her; he nuzzled against her skirt. "You smell good," he murmured.
"I feel good." She propped herself up on her elbows again, looking down at him. His dark hair was tousled into a rough mop, half-hiding the bright sparkle of his eyes. "How about I make you feel good?"
"I do already." He withdrew his fingers from her, and rolled onto his good hip. His erection was a sharp tent against the front of his jeans. "That said ..."
"Hey!" she protested when he started to undo his pants, and pounced, hooking her fingers into the waistband of his jeans. "My turn."
Avery let go, giving over as she unzipped him. "Who am I to argue with a lady."
He hadn't bothered putting underwear on when he'd dressed again in the park. His cock, erect and uncut, filled her hand. Avery wasn't a large guy, but he was more than big enough.
She started to work his jeans over his hips, then stopped. The scar tissue was rough against his hand, and she hadn't realized it before, but his pelvis was misshapen on the right side, the bones jutting oddly beneath the skin. "I don't want to hurt you."
"You won't," he said gently, and shifted a little, drawing his left leg up under him to better balance his weight.
She had expected him to be self-conscious about it. There was no flinch, though, when she pulled his jeans down, revealing the extent of the scarring she'd glimpsed in the park. The scarred area reached from his ribs all the way down past his knee on that side, gnarling and knotting the hip and thigh. Even his knee was a mess, a snarled knot of scar tissue that didn't look capable of bending like a normal knee ought to.
"Is it okay to touch?" she asked.
Now there was a slight frisson of uncertainty in his tone. "Go ahead."
She stroked the rough ridges, bent and kissed them, trailed the side of her face across his scarred hip. "Tell me what I shouldn't do," she said, and planted a kiss on the trailing edge of a scar that pointed, like an angry arrow, at his genitals. "Is there anything that would hurt?"
"I don't have a lot of sensation in the skin. What hurts is mostly weight-bearing movements, or sideways torque, because things are kind of a jigsaw puzzle in there. The downside of fast shifter healing." He smiled lopsidedly. "My body's ability to heal itself sealed the torn-up arteries before I could bleed to death. But the bone didn't go together right—you can probably see that. And the doctors who were dealing with me didn't do any of what would've helped me heal myself, since they thought I was a human and didn't expect my shattered bones to knit together in hours instead of weeks."
"Is there anything they can do now?" she asked, resting her cheek lightly on his upper thigh, feeling the odd bumps of his pelvis beneath her temple.
"Willa Lafitte thinks it would be possible to go in and start cleaning stuff out, straighten the bone, that kind of thing. She's been trying to talk me into it. I don't really want to. God knows I've had enough messing with my body at this point, and surgery for us is even more invasive than for regular humans, since our bodies are constantly trying to heal in the middle of it, so they have to keep tearing—" He stopped, clenching his teeth. His penis had wilted against her hand, folding up like a flower. "Maybe this isn't the best time for this conversation."
"No, you're right. I'm sorry I brought it up." She kissed his cock and mouthed it lightly. "I just needed to know, I guess, what I can do without hurting you. And now I know."
With that, she drew him into her mouth. He was soft enough that she could fit nearly all of him—on the first stroke, at least, but as she circled her tongue around him, she could feel him lengthening and enlarging. When she finally pulled back, he was erect again, his cock rising from its nest of dark curls.
"Okay, that was pretty effective," he admitted.
"Natural talent." She knelt with a knee on either side of his left leg, and worked her panties over her hips. The skirt was still on, and removing it seemed like too much bother. "Don't tell my sister I had sex in her skirt."
"I could suggest a way you can buy my silence."
Nicole grinned. "There's something else we're going to need, but it's in my purse, and that's out in the living room."
"Check the nightstand," he said, and then, "You carry condoms in your purse on a first date?"
"I believe in being prepared," she retorted primly, reaching over to open a drawer in the nightstand. "You too, I see."
"It's more like hope springs eternal," he admitted. "Check the expiration date. They don't see a lot of use."
The condoms were this side of expired—barely. Kneeling over Avery, she tore open the package with her teeth. She didn't have a lot of practice putting condoms on guys. Bending over, she licked up and down the shaft and across the head to be sure he was nice and lubricated, then rolled it carefully up the length of him. "Feel good?"
"Feels great."
Guiding him with her hand, she settled herself over him. She was still wet and open from her first orgasm, and he slid in without resistance, filling her comfortably. Avery gave a soft gasp.
"How's that?"
"Oh, good Lord, you have no idea."
Making love on top, she discovered, gave her the ability to precisely control her movements and angle. She shifted her hips until she found exactly the right angle to press with every stroke against—was that her g-spot? Whether or not it was, every time he thrust up against her, heat pooled in her belly, a warm glow growing and deepening, stroke by stroke, until it seemed to her as if she should be able to see the light spilling out of her, crackling off the tips of her hair, flooding down her fingertips, pooling behind her tongue.
"Nicole ..." he breathed, teeth clenched, back arching. His strokes were growing more frantic, the heat building inside her more intense. Every nerve ending was hyper-charged, every sensation more intense.
"Go," she gasped. She could tell his climax was going to push her over the edge of her own.
He thrust upward and heat burst in her, through her. Avery gave a strangled cry. She rode him through the shuddering waves of their shared climax. At last she collapsed onto him, curling around him, still tangled up in him.
He kissed the damp skin of her neck.
"And here you said you were out of practice," she mumbled into his hair.
"A good partner makes anything seem easy."
"Mmmm. Excellent answer." She peeled off him and kicked off the skirt, dropping it over the side of the bed, followed by the carefully rolled-up used condom. "Erin is never going to let me borrow her clothes again."
"I thought we weren't telling her."
"I think she might figure it out."
Avery rolled onto his left side and put an arm out. It took Nicole a minute to figure out what he wanted; then a pleasant rush of warmth went through her. It had been a very long time since she'd spooned with anybody.
She curled on her side. Avery sat up long enough to pull the covers over them, then arranged himself into a long line of warmth at her back. His breath stirred her hair.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt this calm and content. Something was nagging at her, though. Eventually she figured out what it was.
"The kids," she whispered.
"Shit. You're right. Hang on."
&nbs
p; Avery got out of bed. Nicole sat up. The lights of the city came in through the open blinds like moonlight, giving her a pleasant view of his narrow back and ass and thighs, the scars like shadows that shifted with his twisting gait.
She got up and followed him.
In the living room, she found him bending over the puppies in their heap on the couch. He already had two in his arms and was clearly trying to figure out how many more he could carry. Nicole smiled and picked up the other two, one at a time. They were so deeply asleep they barely stirred.
She and Avery carried them back to the bedroom and laid them on the rumpled sheet. Then Nicole climbed back into bed, curling protectively around them, and Avery spooned her from behind.
Co-sleeping was something her office was ambivalent about. Although many parents did it, especially poor ones who couldn't afford a crib for a newborn, there was always the danger that a child might be smothered in its parents' bed. But these were not terribly young children, she reassured herself, and besides, young animals slept with their pack or herd or flock in the natural world; it was what they all did. Only humans felt the need to separate their infants and put them in their own bed in a different room.
She must have fallen asleep. It was cool air at her back that woke her, the awareness of absence where there had been a warm and living presence.
She lay still in the bed, and then heard the soft rustles of Avery moving around in the apartment. Wolf-shaped, she realized, at the faint click of toenails on linoleum. He prowled the whole apartment, and she expected him to come back to bed, but he didn't. Instead things quieted down again. The only sounds were the puppies' little snorts and sighs, and the distant noises of traffic outside on the street.
Nicole sat up. "Avery?" she called softly.
There was a thump from not too far away. In the bedroom, she thought. No—in the bedroom closet. Then Avery's voice said, "Sorry. I thought you were asleep."
"I was." She yawned and rubbed her eyes.
She didn't hear him leave the closet, but the bed dipped under his weight, and he put an arm around her. "I didn't mean to wake you up," he said, kissing her ear.
"Come on back to bed."
Avery brushed his face against the side of hers, and ran a hand lightly over her bare breast. "I can't sleep up here. I tried, hoped I could, but ..." Pause. Soft breathing. "I'll stay 'til you fall asleep."
"Don't be silly. Where are you going to be? The closet?"
Silence was his answer. Then he said, "I don't think we'll both fit as humans. There just isn't enough room."
"I'm a shifter too, remember? Unless you don't want me there."
"I do," he said quietly, and slid off the bed, shifting as he went. Rather than going straight to the closet, though, he padded around the bed, a dark ghost in the dim light. He picked up one of the puppies in his jaws. Rather than carrying it by the scruff like a mother cat, he held it around the shoulders, his wolf jaws stretched wide to accommodate its fat body.
The puppy stirred and made a disgruntled squeak, windmilling at the air with its paws. Avery ignored its protests and carried it to the closet.
Nicole followed with two more. When she went back for the last, she found that Avery had already been there and taken it. Small rustles and squeaks came from the closet as Avery got himself and the puppies settled. Nicole hesitated, then padded across the floor naked, and shifted at the closet's half-open door, collapsing into her koala body.
She hadn't been a koala in awhile, and usually only in Erin's indoor eucalyptus grove. The world was subtly different, sounds not quite the same, some smells more intense and others less. Her claws snagged on the carpet as she followed Avery into the darkness of his den. Instinct told her to climb, and find a tree to sleep in.
Instinct, in this case, could go hang.
It was too dark in the closet to see, so she found them by feel, Avery curled up with the puppies nestled in the circle of his body. Feeling slightly awkward, Nicole crawled in with them. The puppies squeaked sleepily as she nestled down among them, finding her place among the other furry bodies.
Koalas in the wild were not cuddly creatures, regardless of appearance; they were actually about as asocial as mammals got. Koala shifters, on the other hand ... Nicole was used to sleeping alone in her bed at Erin's place, but the feeling of other bodies against hers, their soft breathing all around her, settled her in a way she wasn't sure she'd felt since she was a child, snuggling with her koala-shifted dad and siblings in the heat of the backyard.
And if there was one thing she knew, right down to her bones, it was that she didn't have be afraid of anything—not Uncanny Valley werewolves, not people who might leave a box of shifter children out on the street in the rain—while Avery was there.
Chapter Eight
Avery woke up hurting. Usually sleeping in his wolf form was less taxing on his body than falling asleep as a human, but he'd been wrapped unmoving around the puppies and Nicole for hours, on top of all the exertion in the park last night.
It was the puppies that woke him. They were squirming, restless and hungry. Dawn had not yet broken outside, and when he peeled himself painfully away from them and limped wolf-shaped out of the closet, he saw that the clock on the bedside table read a little after five a.m.
He stayed wolf-shaped until he could get to the bathroom and take half a Vicodin. Dr. Lafitte had given him tacit permission. She didn't want him to re-habituate himself to the narcotics, now that they had, at his behest, somewhat uncomfortably gotten him un-habituated, but she'd also told him she would much rather have him medicated and not in pain, than trying to suffer through it on over-the-counter painkillers out of pure machismo.
By the time he came back, the closet light was on. He'd actually forgotten there was a light in the closet, a bare bulb with a dangling pull-string, which he never used. But Nicole had found it and now she was sitting up, yawning, in their rumpled nest. She'd pulled down one of his shirts from its hanger and wrapped it around her shoulders in a halfhearted attempt at modesty, but it was unbuttoned over her breasts and she was sitting crosslegged and naked, playing tug-of-war with one of the puppies.
She looked up when he came in and smiled at him through a curtain of tousled and wavy dark brown hair. She was so gorgeous in that instant that she took his breath away.
"I wasn't planning on staying the night," she said ruefully. "I have no clean clothes. I don't even have a toothbrush."
"I can't help with clothes, at least not any that would fit you properly, but I might be able to provide a toothbrush. If I don't have an unused one in a drawer, there's a drugstore down the street." He teetered on the verge of offering her the use of his, but pulled back from it: She's not a werewolf, most people have more sense of personal space, don't scare her off!
"Well, if I shake the wrinkles out, I can wear the same clothes to work. A blouse and skirt is pretty basic."
"Even a sex skirt?" he asked, grinning teasingly.
"Hush. Maybe I'll run by Erin and Tim's, and pick up something clean. You don't mind if I use your shower, I hope?"
"Nope. Actually, if you want to feed these guys and hit the shower, I'll go pick up a toothbrush for you and some breakfast for us."
Avery showed her where the puppy food was, then threw some clothes on and grabbed his cane. He was out the door before she could catch on that he had an ulterior motive beyond bringing breakfast back to the den and his—
Mate, whispered a deeply buried instinctual part of him.
—girlfriend, Avery corrected himself firmly. Or maybe even girlfriend was pushing it. She was beautiful and kind and smart, and he loved being around her, but for all he knew, after she left this morning, she'd never call him again.
That thought sent a sharp flash of pain through him, that no prescription painkillers were strong enough to blunt. He forced his mind away from that, to his real reason for being out in the gray liminal space between night and dawn.
The hints of "werewolf" that h
e'd caught last night were still bothering him. For wolf shifters, the awareness of others of their kind went beyond mere physical senses. It was akin, as he'd told Nicole, to shifters' ability to recognize their own kind, no matter what shape they were in. Werewolves had an extra level of that. They knew when other werewolves were around. And they craved it. The absence of it had been an itch under his skin for many years, something he'd gradually learned to live with, just like he'd learned to live with the pain of bones shattered and badly knit back together. The presence of the puppies salved a wound that had scabbed over, but never truly healed. He still hadn't found a way to cope with, or even think about, the fact that he was going to have to give them back, although he knew it was the right thing to do—their parents would be missing them just as much as he'd craved his pack through all those long packless years, despite knowing he wasn't with them for valid reasons.
He still didn't know if what he'd felt last night was truly that. It felt something like wolf, but not quite. And it smelled rank and unclean, like a wolf that was sick. Or a dog. The difference was subtle and, just from the smell and leaving aside the feeling, it could have been either one, or even a human that had been spending a lot of time around their dog. The park was always full of different human and dog and garbage smells. Picking out a fresh one, let alone identifying it as something unusual, wouldn't have struck him as anything odd if it hadn't come along with that elusive sense of werewolf kinship.
The little red-blond puppy had felt it too. She'd wanted to go to the strange werewolf, too young to understand that it wasn't part of her pack.
Or maybe recognizing a missing member of her pack.
He emerged into the clammy chill of the tail end of the night. Rather than turning toward the corner drugstore and other businesses along its street, he turned the other way, toward the park. Hunched into his coat, he strode as swiftly as he was able.
The park waited for him in an eerie shroud of mist. The mist was a comfort; it would give him extra cover. Avery picked the first dark shadow he came to, dropped his coat on the wet grass and shed the rest of his clothes on top of it. His collar was still in his coat pocket, shoved there the previous night and never put back in its usual spot. He fastened it around his neck.