by Parker Foye
So intense, so good, and then came the gentle pinch of Jim’s teeth, and Teddy’s almost reflexive plea of “Harder.”
Reflexive though it may have been, he wouldn’t take it back.
He wanted what Jim could give him, and Jim gave it. His teeth seared into Teddy’s flesh, and he’d taken the command “harder” to heart, and pounded more forcefully into Teddy’s ass.
“Fuck.” Teddy felt as though his body was of two accords and was splintering. Half wanted to squirm away from the beating, and the other wanted him to push up onto his hands and knees and offer himself properly to the man who was giving him goose bumps.
Undecided, he lay still, except to squeeze Jim’s fingers too needily and to pant and curl his toes.
Jim pulled him up, breaking his teeth’s hold on Teddy’s shoulder as he did, and thrust once, twice and finally to completion with Teddy on his knees.
Just imagining what Jim’s face must have looked like, twisted with his pleasure, made his balls pull up tighter and belly cramp. “Oh God, can I—”
“Teddy,” Jim panted, sliding his hand beneath his belly and grabbing him tight. “Go.”
One shallow thrust, and then a longer one. Sweet torture. Teddy blinked sweat from his eyes and gritted his teeth as he leaned back against Jim and let go.
“Fuck,” he panted and closed his eyes because his head swam.
When Jim slid his hand down to Teddy’s sac, Teddy shook. He wasn’t cold or scared, but he shook. His body wouldn’t back down from the orgasm, although he’d already spent his load. The spasms rolled through him again and again, intensifying as Jim pulled himself from inside Teddy and licked where he’d bitten.
His belly was sticky with his come, and yet his balls still ached, his cock still wanted.
“It’s okay. You’re okay.” Jim kissed the side of his face and grabbed his chin to turn Teddy’s lips toward him.
Teddy opened his mouth wide for his forceful tongue and wanted to kiss him back, but Jim kept Teddy’s tongue on his side of the barrier. Kept him out of his mouth, but that didn’t matter. Teddy didn’t really want to think.
“Jim...”
“It’s all right.” He slid his hand down Teddy’s belly and tightly gripped his cock. He squeezed and stroked, up and down, the rough skin of his palm bringing Teddy to the brink again in seconds, and it felt good enough to stop his heart.
Did it?
He still couldn’t breathe.
“Lie down,” Jim whispered, but Teddy couldn’t get his legs to work. Jim had to pull them out from beneath him and roll him over onto a dry spot. Jim bent and kissed Teddy tenderly on the lips before backing off the bed. “I’ll be right back. Don’t go away. I’ll take care of you.”
For some reason, Teddy didn’t think Jim was only talking about cleaning up the mess.
Wishful thinking, maybe.
He smiled anyway as he closed his eyes and settled comfortably onto Jim’s big bed. There were certainly worse things to hope for.
Chapter Thirteen
The following morning, Jim put his back against his mother’s closed front door and muttered, “Fuck.”
“Shh,” his mother hissed from the porch steps.
“He can’t hear me.” The last time Jim had checked, Teddy was in the kitchen, dangling into the deep freezer sorting through bags of frozen vegetables Mom had put up from the summer harvest. He was like a kid in a candy store, but instead of SweeTarts, he was high on the idea of sweet corn.
“I wouldn’t have told you if I thought it’d be something that’d work out by itself in time,” his mother said. “Maybe the full moon’s got these idiots going stir-crazy, or maybe it’s hormones in general. Been getting worse since Hardy and Nate left. You don’t have enough dominant coyotes in the pack to keep these fools in check.”
“So what am I supposed to do? I mean, I came over here to snake your shower drain, and you’re telling me more assholes are whispering about staging a coup? And for what? Because they aren’t appreciative of the fact that I won’t add just anyone to the pack?”
She nodded. “I believe you’re doing the right thing. You’re doing what your father would have. He was vigilant about vetting outsider mates, but I guess they see this as a double-whammy. Not only are you telling them no—they can’t bring these women in—but you’re telling them you’re not going to mate with one of theirs.”
Jim glanced over his shoulder through the storm door. Teddy was still a room away in the kitchen with his body dangling into the freezer.
“You want my advice?” she asked.
“I need some from somebody who doesn’t have ulterior motives, so yeah.”
“Tell him.”
Jim furrowed his brow. “What?”
“You need to tell him some things. He’s smart, Jimmy.”
“I know that.”
“When you were in the bathroom working on that drain, he was asking me about where you hang out. Real casual-like, you know? He knows that if you’re not at the auto parts store and you’re not at the community center, you’ve gotta be somewhere, and there aren’t that many places to be around here. He would have seen you around town somewhere or other. He thought the fact that he never had was unusual.”
Her gaze flitted to the door, and Jim didn’t have to look. He knew Teddy was on the other side.
He turned.
Teddy held up a bag with some unidentified green stuff inside. “Can I have these?”
Mom snorted. “Sure. No one else besides me will eat them.”
“Excellent.” He retreated to the kitchen.
Jim turned back to his mother. “Ma, he eats vegetables. I’m mated to a guy who eats fucking vegetables and reads food labels and shit to make sure what’s inside doesn’t have fake red stuff in it, and you want me to sit him down before the full moon and tell him he’s tangled up with a coyote.”
She blinked in that “Who even raised you?” way that some parents seemed to be so good at. “Did you have a better plan? Or had you convinced yourself that you didn’t need to tell him?”
He grimaced.
She poked his shoulder and sidled around him. “That’s my advice, but do what you want, Alpha.” She opened the door and called into the house, “There’s a cooler in the laundry room, Teddy. That’ll keep stuff from melting until you get it into a freezer.” Turning back to Jim, she narrowed her eyes and said low, “If you run him off, I swear, I’ll pluck you so hard in the forehead you’ll be wearing a knot until the next full moon.”
He rubbed his forehead at the idea, because he believed she would. He didn’t know if he was ready to do what she’d said, though. Teddy was his mate, but he was an outsider. He wasn’t going to accept that his lover was not only tangled up in a pack of wild animals, but that he was their leader.
Muttering a prayer for strength, Jim followed his mother into the house.
For a while, he watched her help Teddy stack layers of full plastic zipper bags into the cooler, smiling at their easy camaraderie. She was pleasant to most people, but he could tell that she actually liked Teddy.
Of course she does. They’re so damn much alike.
Coyote genetics aside.
Teddy pushed his hair behind his ears and looked down at his watch. “I’m going to have to leave soon and go into the city. I’ve been cutting it too close in my last few trips.”
“Where are you going?” Jim asked.
“I told you. I’ve got an audition.”
“Today?”
“First thing in the morning.” Smiling in his typically churlish way, Teddy cocked a brow as if he wasn’t quite sure if Jim was getting the hang of language. “I spend the night, remember?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t go,” Jim said.
“Why not?”
>
Jim tried to make his shrug look nonchalant. He didn’t know how convincing he was. Inside, he was a live electric wire that needed to be grounded, and the thing that was supposed to ground him was talking about auditions. “Full moon’s tonight. People act crazy, and there are more accidents and shit on the roads. I don’t want you on a bus with some addlebrained driver.”
“He can take my truck,” Ma said.
Jim glared at her before looking back to Teddy. “There’ll be other stuff, right? Is this really the one you want?”
“No, but it’s a stepping stone, you know? The job would look good on my résumé. Maybe it’d make getting the next thing easier.”
“I don’t want you to go. I’ll miss you.” Spoken in front of his mother, the words were pitiful, but honest. He’d never given his feelings away so freely since he was seventeen and had been rendered awestruck at the sight of Penny Olsen’s bounteous cleavage the night of junior prom.
He wasn’t ready for Teddy to be hours away when he’d barely had him. Coyotes tended to not separate from their mates for very long immediately following a connection, and Jim had bitten him. He’d imparted a bit of himself in Teddy, whether Teddy knew it or not, so he was always going to hurt a little when he was away.
“Okay. Probably best that I stay put. I can’t afford to skip my shift at the restaurant.” Teddy’s grin scrunched on one side of his face. “And I’m still pondering your job offer.”
Relief passed through Jim in a warm rush and he grinned, too, almost forgetting to keep his teeth tucked behind his lip. “I won’t even stalk you at work tonight. I’ll let you have your section all to yourself.”
Teddy rolled his eyes. “Whatever am I going to do without the entertainment from you leather-wearing clowns?”
“You’ll survive.”
“I always do. Even without the tips.”
“What are you up to, Jimmy?” Teddy muttered later that evening.
Pausing at the intersection of Main Street and Dell Road, Teddy glanced down at the GPS app on his phone. According to the little flashing light, the tracker chip in Jim’s motorcycle key fob said he was out near the fairgrounds. Teddy didn’t really want Jim’s money, but his toys were nice, and technology was a wonderful thing. In giving Teddy access to his safe and other locked-away parts of his house, Jim had also made Teddy privy to various passwords and security apps. Teddy suspected the tracker app he was using at the moment hadn’t been one of Jim’s intended offerings, but Teddy was an opportunist. Actors had to be, or they wouldn’t get paid. Same held true for pancake house waiters.
There was nothing happening at the farmer’s market. Nothing ever happened out there at night except for the occasional outdoor concert, and those had already ended for the year.
Teddy shifted into first gear and eased into the left lane to make a turn ahead.
He had never been the kind of man who’d fact-check a lover’s story, but the others hadn’t mattered. Jim mattered, and Teddy needed to know how he spent his time. Perhaps he’d been watching too much cable television about guys on bikes, but he didn’t want to believe that Jim was engaged in any illicit activities. After all, his mother was so nice. Hell, Teddy’s mother would like Jim’s mother, and that never happened. Teddy always picked wrong.
As willing as he was to try to build something meaningful with Jim, he needed answers, and he wasn’t going to wait until Jim’s so-called “right time” to find out what they were. Plus, he’d gotten lonely in that big house with Jim gone.
The farmer’s market parking lot was packed with motorcycles and other rugged sorts of vehicles. The lot was so packed that Teddy had to go to the end of the dead-end road make a U-turn. As he parked at the curb, he craned his neck toward the passenger’s side window. He couldn’t see anyone out there.
The market was basically a wooden pavilion built about twenty yards from a slow creek, beyond which was woods.
He’d always wondered why Ed O’Sullivan had built the market there instead of out near the fairgrounds or somewhere any smart capitalist would have erected such a venture.
Shrugging, Teddy killed the engine and pulled up the parking brake.
Jim had to be around somewhere. Teddy’s GPS had lied to him numerous times before, but he couldn’t possibly be too far off. There was nothing else around.
Teddy followed the blips on his phone, walking closer and closer to the rows of bikes, and shuddered at an eerie howl in the distance. Pausing, he rubbed down the standing hairs on the back of his neck and looked toward the woods. Was he in the territory of that coyote that had been skulking near Jim’s place? After seeing that one, he’d searched for news articles, hoping to get a hit on coyote spottings in and around Chesterton, but the newest article had been around fifteen years old. A coyote had been spotted running alongside a funeral procession.
He looked toward the truck, pondering retreat. The 4x400 relay gold medals he had tucked away in trunks in his parents’ attic were proof that he could run his ass off when he had to, but being one of the fastest young men in Iowa didn’t mean he could outrun a fucking coyote.
“Especially if it’s rabid,” he muttered.
The thing howled again.
“Ha. Okay.” Teddy took a deep breath and kept moving. It sounded far enough away that he could find the source of the blip and then run if he had to. He’d left the truck door unlocked so he could get in fast enough. “Keep moving. Find Jimmy.”
He’d managed to swap the shift to go to the audition, but had swapped it back and had promised to be at work at his usual time. He’d hoped to go in with his curiosity sated and not as angry as he’d been two nights prior and because of the same damn person.
The flashing on the screen stopped.
Teddy looked around him. He was standing between two rows of bikes, and to his right was a familiar black-and-chrome monstrosity he recognized as Jim’s.
Jim had left his jacket draped over the seat. Teddy picked it up on a hunch and saw Jim had left his key in the ignition.
“Shit. Where’d you go?”
Another howl had Teddy’s muscles coiled to launch him into a sprint the second his fight-or-flight instinct made up its mind.
The best Teddy could tell, the howl came from deep within the woods, but not far enough. He could hear voices at the same distance.
“What the hell are they doing in the woods?”
And why wouldn’t Jim tell me?
Still clutching Jim’s leather jacket against his chest, Teddy squeezed between the bikes, and then walked through the pavilion toward the creek. The voices—male voices—were louder, not just because Teddy was closer, but because the men were arguing.
Teddy couldn’t quite catch all the words, but he heard things like “alpha” and “mate” and “challenge.”
And there was growling, too. Rumbling, deep, sick-sounding growling that seemed to reverberate through the trees.
That old bite scar on his arm seemed to throb all of a sudden, pulsing with each pound of his heart. He rubbed the scar through his sweatshirt’s sleeve and tried to peel the sounds apart. Perhaps he wasn’t hearing growling at all. Someone could have been stupid enough to ride a motorcycle into the woods.
He chose not to believe that, but in spite of his trepidation, Teddy kept moving. If Jim was out there, he may not have known he was in danger. He’d taken a gun from the safe after showing Teddy the combination, but he may not have had the weapon on him. After all, he’d left his coat and his freaking keys on his bike for anyone to take. Teddy certainly didn’t want his new boyfriend getting chewed up by some sort of ravening beast. For that matter, he didn’t want him coming to blows with any of those greasy thugs in his entourage, either. He was pretty sure one of those voices he heard was Jim’s.
“What kind of mess do you have yourself caught up in?”
Teddy muttered, picking his way through the increasingly taller grass as he approached the creek. At the water, he swore, realizing he’d have to wade across. He rolled up his pants and stepped in before he could change his mind. Donning Jim’s jacket to free his hands, he scrambled up the bank without getting too muddy.
“Next thing I know, I’ll be going on hikes and competing in Ironman competitions.”
He scoffed at the thought.
As if.
He headed toward a narrow path into the woods—perhaps an unmarked hiking trail—and used his phone’s flashlight to assess the ground in front of him.
Ignoring the howls, he kept moving, realizing he was making himself a horror movie trope and not caring. He and Jim could laugh about it later, especially if the man wasn’t actually out there after all.
“After all this, you’d better be,” Teddy muttered.
Leaves rustled and twigs snapped on the ground behind him. He turned but saw nothing. Heard nothing more. He put his hand to his pounding heart and took a breath.
Squirrel? They were aggressive in Chesterton.
He still didn’t see anything.
He resumed his navigation of the path, ducking beneath low branches and furrowing his brow at the forest smell. It didn’t seem quite right. He’d been in forests before. He should have smelled moldering leaves and pinesap and moss and dampness, and he did, but there was something else, too.
“Is that the smell of the creek?” The creek went foul sometimes in summer, but it wasn’t summer, and the smell wasn’t quite right.
The smell was earthy. He’d smelled that before, two nights ago when Jim had leaned in close and handed him a hundred dollars in cash.
“Is this where he gets his scent?” Teddy picked his way farther up the path, still checking the forest floor for obstacles, still pulling in deep breaths to track that smell. “Where the hell is he?”
“I guess he didn’t turn ya.”
Teddy whipped around at the male voice behind him and shone his light all around until he found a man crouched beside a tree, pale eyes shining bright in the dark, and completely nude. “What the hell?”