by L. C. Davis
“An Egyptian cotton blanket and top-shelf champagne,” he clarified, patting the spot next to him. I took my shoes off and sat beside him. He pulled two glasses from the ice bucket and I cried out in alarm when he popped the cork and fizz went everywhere.
“Sorry,” he laughed. “I'm more of a beer kind of guy.”
“Champagne and sports cars are fun once in a while, but I definitely prefer beer and pickup trucks on a day-to-day basis,” I admitted, taking a glass from him.
He took his glass and draped an arm around me so I could lean against him while he rested against on the wall. He really was warm. Cuddling with him was the thing I had missed most while we weren't speaking. “That surprises me.”
“Why?”
“I don't know, guess I always thought that was part of Victor's charm,” he said. “You're into all these sophisticated things like opera and foreign politics.”
I laughed. “Sometimes I think you forget that I grew up in small town foster homes. Those things are fun from time to time, but I vastly prefer cuddling at home and reading a good book to 'sophisticated outings.'”
“I can definitely swing that,” he said. “As long as I don't have to read.”
“You could always take up needlepoint.”
He grimaced, then looked at his glass. “In the interest of being classy, I feel like we should do a toast.”
I giggled. “A toast? Okay, you go ahead.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, it's an important part of the courtship process,” I said, eying him mischievously over the rim of my glass. “Impress me with your words, Mr. Wolf.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Uh, let's see,” he grumbled, looking around. He finally turned his gaze upward and raised his glass to the waxing crescent rising above us. “A toast to the moon, then.”
“The moon?” I snickered. “What, are you turning into Foster?”
“Why not? The Great Lady hardly gets any credit these days unless she's full. That's a lot of pressure.”
“Very true,” I said, gazing up at the sky. The moon seemed to glow back in response. I lifted my glass and nodded fondly. “To the crescent moon, then. Highly underrated.”
“Hear, hear,” Sebastian said before raising his glass to his lips.
“Wait—wait,” I said, reaching out to stop him. “I feel like the toast isn't complete.”
He glanced quizzically at me. “No? Did I leave out the amen or something?”
I shook my head. “We should howl. It feels disrespectful not to, considering that we're two wolves at the highest point in the city.”
He laughed. “You're already drunk, maybe I should confiscate the champagne.”
I leaned away, protecting the glass from him. “No, seriously. Wolves are always howling at the full moon, now I feel bad.”
“You feel bad?” he asked, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “We're not even in our beastforms.”
“So? It's the heart that counts.”
“You're serious.”
“Yep.”
He groaned. “Okay, fine. One howl, but you have to go first.”
I cleared my throat and straightened my spine in preparation. I threw my head back and let out what was probably the most pitiful excuse for a howl the moon had ever heard. Sebastian's was much better, even though he was being silly.
My howl dissolved into laughter and his followed suit as we collapsed against each other. “You are so fucking drunk,” he choked out.
“Hey, I only had two glasses at the restaurant,” I said, taking a sip of the sweet, bubbly champagne. “It was strong.”
“It's wine, it's always strong,” he said. “And you had three glasses.”
I waved him off. “Splitting hairs,” I said, taking another sip as I nestled into his side, gazing up at the sky. “This really is beautiful.”
“I'm glad you like it,” he said, his arm wrapped tightly around me. “Are you cold?”
“It's impossible to be cold next to you.”
“Good,” he said. “You've warmed up a little since your wolf side came back.”
“Yeah. I sleep better, too,” I admitted. “A lot of my human instincts are coming back.”
“Well, wolves are basically human until we're not,” he said. “We're just a lot harder to kill.”
“Do you think Prentice is right?” I asked suddenly. “About me being impossible to kill without some ancient artifact, I mean.”
“Hard to say. I'm gonna make sure we never find out for sure.”
“What about aging, though? Sarah hasn't aged at all,” I mused. “What if I want to die one day because you and Victor are gone but I can't?”
“Hey,” he said, turning me to face him. “Neither of us is going anywhere for a long time. Look at your dad, does he look his age?”
I shook my head.
“We might not be immortal like vampires, but wolves handle the passage of time pretty well,” he said. “Besides, who knows how long anything is gonna last with all of this hunter apocalypse bullshit? There's enough to worry about right now.”
“You're right,” I conceded. “Like picking a mate so the pack will have an alpha if anything happens to Ulric.”
“It's likely he'd just retire,” said Sebastian. “But yeah, that among other things.”
I snuggled against his chest. We stayed there in silence for a long while and I forgot about how forbidden our presence on the rooftop was. In fact, I forgot about a lot of things in those moments. It was easy to forget my problems with Sebastian, although I couldn't escape the feeling that there was something I needed desperately to remember.
“I should get you home,” he said finally, helping me to my feet. “Don't want you to be exhausted when I hand you back over to Victor.”
“It's pretty late and we've both had a lot to drink,” I said.
“You mean you've had a lot to drink. I weigh almost three-hundred pounds and all I had was a glass of wine and a glass of champagne.”
“Well, it's still late,” I said. “You did rent out that suite downstairs. It'd be a shame if it went to waste.”
He gave me a wary look. “I don't know if that's such a good idea.”
“Come on, I'm not that drunk,” I said, folding up the blanket. “Besides, I've never been in a presidential suite. Please? Victor doesn't ever come out of his office until late afternoon, he won't even know.”
“Yeah, alright,” he said hesitantly, leading me downstairs. “If you really want to.”
“I do,” I said, running down the stairs.
“Hey, easy,” he warned. “We don't wanna advertise where we were.”
I snatched the key from him and opened the door. The room blew my expectations out of the water. A huge canopy bed occupied the center of the room while a tinted glass wall overlooked the city. The handcrafted mahogany furniture was almost as nice as the furniture in the Lodge.
“This is amazing,” I said, falling onto the bed.
“Glad you like it,” he said, chuckling as he slipped off his shoes. “I'll take the floor.”
“Don't be silly,” I said, patting the other side of the bed. “There's plenty of room.”
He eyed me warily like I was a snake and he couldn't quite judge my striking distance. “Did Victor put you up to this?” he finally asked.
“What?” I frowned. “Of course not, why would he?”
“I know he's been obsessed with the idea of you giving us both a shot,” he said warily. “Telling you to seduce me so you can be sure of your feelings is exactly the kind of self-defeating bullshit he'd come up with, and you're just crazy enough to go along with it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Now that is the most paranoid thing I've ever heard. Besides,” I said, assuming a coy position on my side, “what makes you think I'm trying to seduce you?”
He didn't even bother to hide the fact that he was checking me out. “The pose, for starters. And your pheromones.”
“So, if you're worried about whether
I'm acting on free will, that should be a clue,” I purred, crawling towards the edge of the bed. I reached for his collar and started unbuttoning his shirt.
His hands closed around mine. “Remus, please.”
“What's wrong?” I asked impatiently.
“If you really do love me, you'll be honest with me.”
I looked up at him in confusion. “What are you talking about?”
“I'm not like the others,” he muttered, looking away. “Sex is emotional for me, whether it's with another wolf or not. I get attached. I bond. It's gonna be hard enough when you're mated to Victor, never mind if we rekindle our physical bond just for the hell of it—especially now that our wolves are in contact. If you're just doing this because Vic is being distant or because you want to tie up loose ends before things are official...”
“Will you stop assuming I'm going to choose Victor?” I asked, taking his face in my hands in an attempt to shake some sense into him. “This is what I meant by you being stubborn. I'm standing here in front of you telling you I love you, practically throwing myself at you, and Victor is the furthest thing from my mind. If you want to bring him into bed with us, fine, but it's not me.”
He sighed. “You're right. I'm sorry, I just needed to make sure it was really you talking. I can live with you not wanting me, but I can't live with you pretending to want me because of someone else.”
I smiled, draping my arms around his neck. “You're wrong about something, you know.”
“What's that?” he asked worriedly.
I leaned in and my lips hovered so close to his that I could feel the warmth of his skin and the coolness of his breath. “Victor is not the better man,” I whispered, pressing my lips against his.
Once first contact was made, his hands found my waist and he returned the kiss passionately. Without another moment's hesitation he put me on my back and managed to climb on top of me without breaking the kiss. I continued fumbling with his buttons until his shirt was off. My hands roamed the well-muscled planes of his chest, tugging impatiently at the thin white tank top that separated us.
“Easy,” he said with a husky laugh, peeling his shirt off. I took a moment to admire what he had just unveiled, from the ridge of muscle between his neck and shoulder blades to his strong chest and thick torso. My taunting wasn't without reason. He was bigger after all the time he'd spent on the road, but he was still the furthest thing from soft. He had traded in his eight-pack in for a sturdy, muscular torso far more suited to a man who earned his living with his hands than the underwear model look was.
My hands continued to explore all the way down to his cut, tracing the v with my fingertips until it disappeared into his waistband. I bit my lip and my gaze flickered up to find him watching me in amusement. “Enjoying yourself?” he asked smugly.
I nodded sheepishly, shrieking when he suddenly tossed me onto my back “My turn,” he growled, peeling my shirt off with little effort. He straddled me and his huge hands ran over my flesh with gentle urgency. He leaned in and when his teeth grazed my flesh I shuddered in need. My body was strangely responsive to his touch, as if it somehow knew what was in store.
Only when he had tasted every inch of my torso did he take my left hand and place a surprisingly gentle kiss on the spot where the mark was. I still couldn't see it but I could feel it now more than ever as the energy he had imprinted on my flesh surged within me. He kissed the vulnerable underside of my wrist and I flinched as his lips brushed over the ridge of a particularly long scar that stood out pale and ghastly against my tawny skin.
I managed to resist the urge to pull away, but I found myself unable to look at him and my body language must have shown the change in my mood. He dropped my hand and watched me with a concerned frown. “What's wrong?”
“Just still a little self-conscious about my scars, I guess,” I admitted, turning away to hide the blush creeping into my cheeks.
He said nothing for a long moment, his face impassive, before he climbed off me and laid on his side next to me. When I was convinced that I had ruined the mood, he pulled me against his chest and cradled me there.
“These are nothing to be ashamed of,” he said, exposing my arm and its many jagged little imperfections to the light. I winced and tried not to look. I never looked directly at my arms if I could help it, or my neck for that matter. “You know what I think every time I see one of these scars?”
“That I'm a crazy, insecure freak who couldn't even manage to off himself the right way as a human?” I murmured, echoing my own thoughts.
He looked genuinely horrified. “How is it that you can be so compassionate and forgiving towards everyone else, no matter how little they deserve it, but so cruel to the person who matters most?”
I had no response that would satisfy him, so I settled for deflection. “Guess I'm just an enigma.”
He frowned, clearly not amused by my feeble attempt at self-deprecating humor. “Sorry, but I don't find that funny. If anyone else talked about you that way, I'd kill them.”
“I don't know what you want me to say, Sebastian,” I murmured. “When I look at myself in the mirror, that's what I see. Everyone tells me how much I've been through, like that means I accomplished something. I didn't. Every one of these scars is just proof that I lack even the most basic coping skills. Sure, Jeff put some of them there, but he was just feeding off the weakness that was there all along.”
He shook his head. “If that's how you really feel it explains a lot, but that's not what I see. I see every one of those scars as proof that you survived.”
“Survived what, myself?”
“Hey, I don't know a shrink from a psychic, but I know I'd rather face off against a thousand hunters than my own mind,” he said, stroking my carved up wrist with more tenderness than his rough hands seemed capable of. In all my life, I had never wished for my skin to be smooth and flawless more than I did in that moment. “If you were in enough pain to do this to yourself you were in enough pain to end it all, but you didn't. Every day you chose not to die was a choice to survive, and you're damn right that's something to be proud of.”
Sebastian's words were spoken gently but they soaked in painfully like salve in an open wound. I blinked away the moisture that threatened to betray my weakness. “I wish I could see myself the way you do,” I admitted. My lips played a game of tug-of-war between smiling and frowning. “All delusions aside.”
“That makes two of us,” he muttered. He reached out and gently moved my hair over one shoulder before he undid my choker and placed it on the nightstand. My hand instinctively moved to conceal my exposed flesh. As I feared, he gently guided it away and placed a soft kiss where it had been.
“You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen,” he whispered in my ear as he gathered me fully into his arms. “Every freckle, every scar, every inch of you is my idea of perfection. I wish you could see yourself the way I do, but until that day comes I'm just gonna have to love you enough for the both of us.”
I wrapped my arms around his neck, mesmerized by the sincerity of his words even if I wasn't worthy of them. His eyes were full of warmth and the kind of love you could drown in. Drawing him close, I leaned in to whisper, “Take me, Sebastian. I want to know what it's like to be yours, even if it's only for a night.”
His body tensed against mine. He wanted to, I could feel it, but something was holding him back. “Victor,” he said gruffly. Under normal circumstances that name was music to my ears, but it was the last one I wanted to hear coming from his lips just then. “I'm sorry, Remus. I thought I could, but I can't do to him what he did to me, as much as I want to.”
The comment struck me as strange, but the need to be intertwined with him was a powerful amnesiac and my confusion passed as quickly as it had come. “Forget about Victor,” I pleaded. “Forget the courtship, forget everything that's happened between us. In this moment, we're the only thing that exists, the only thing that matters. If we're not meant to be, it shouldn'
t be because we never tried. I can live with anything except that question lingering in the back of my mind.”
He stared at me for a long moment as if trying to read my thoughts. He gave up with a frustrated sigh. “I tried to be the better man, I really did,” he muttered, flipping me onto my back again. His entire demeanor switched as his hands made quick work of my zipper and he dropped my skin-tight leather jeans onto the floor.
The sudden shift was pleasantly startling. He freed himself from his jeans and left me no time to appreciate the sight of him as he pressed me into the bed, pinning my wrists against the overstuffed mattress. My legs wrapped instinctively around his hips as he positioned himself against my entrance. It was as if he didn't want to give himself the chance to change his mind.
As he kissed me, I felt what was left of my human mind giving way to pure instinct. It might not have been a full moon, but I was in a more desperate state of need than I could ever recall. Now that I had tasted his blood I wanted more, but there was another craving, too. It was overpowering even the bloodlust, but I couldn't put a name to it.
When the tip of Sebastian's length pressed against my entrance I realized that he was huge in terms of more than just stature. Even with his white-knuckled attempt at tenderness, the penetration was difficult to bear.
I whimpered involuntarily as the tension broke and he entered me. My body ached in resistance and his focus lifted a bit. When he looked at me, concern partially masked the pleasure glazing his eyes. “Did I hurt you?”
I shook my head feebly. “No, you're just...big.”
A hazy grin spread across his face as he pushed into me a little deeper. “Didn't think you'd have so much trouble. I'm almost inclined to think my brother's not taking care of you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, bewildered.
“As much as I'd like to take your uh, sensitivity as a compliment, Victor and I are twins so I know it's not a matter of size,” he remarked.
I rolled my eyes. “We're not sleeping together.”