by DD Prince
“I live a few hours away. But I was born in a little town not far from here, as a matter of fact. My parents moved when I was about… three or four I think.”
I smile as I work on the fire and she furiously scrubs at the surface of the electric stove with a sudsy sponge. This makes my chest feel warm.
Her attention moves to the food we got today, and she begins stashing items in cupboards, moving the few items in those cupboards around first. She opens the refrigerator with a jar of something in her hand and gasps.
“The ice cream doesn’t belong in the fridge, Tyson. It belongs in the freezer!” She opens a lid and breathes relief. “It’s only partly melted. Phew.”
She opens the top door of the fridge and sticks that container in. She moves some other cartons and bags up there with it and some of the meat, too.
“The meat too?” I check, remembering that section of the refrigerator will turn the meat to blocks of ice meat.
“There’s too much meat in the fridge. It’ll spoil before you get a chance to eat it all.”
“And when I’m ready to eat it, I’ll break a tooth?” I ask.
She smiles. “You can take it out the morning of the day you plan to eat it and it’ll thaw by supper time.”
Oh. This makes sense. Meat only lasts so long before it no longer tastes good. I don’t know from experience, I’ve always eaten whatever I’ve hunted immediately, but my uncle explained that as a child during his first nighttime solo shift and hunt, he came upon rabbit and tasted it, figuring he didn’t have to hunt to eat after all, but it was old and filled with larvae and tasted bad, made him very sick. He nearly died. This was how it was determined he had problems with his sense of smell. He made use of my scenting abilities from an early age.
This recollection makes me feel strange, suddenly. I hadn’t thought about this lately, how much he relied on me for such things. Some tasks he’d have me complete for him. We had a rhythm to the way we did things. I led and he followed. I hunted or took down prey and we both feasted.
He made use of my senses many times while I grew. And then by the time I was a man, his major focus was coaxing me into finding my mate, though my biggest concern was always running, hunting, feasting. I particularly enjoyed hunting evasive animals that were good at dodging me. I thrived on challenges. And I always shared with him the fruits of my labor, often letting him eat first.
Memories sweep over me of me hunting a man and ripping his throat out before devouring a bunch of his flesh in a rage and I don’t recall why. What did the man do? Why did I do that?
The haze. The haze of anger. Uncle was there afterwards. There, leashing me, trying to calm me. I almost destroyed him too, but he injected something into my flank that made me sleep so that the haze would leave.
Bumps rise on the back of my neck and I feel a chill. An angry one as I start to remember some of the errands we had. Errands that filled the space under the garage floorboards with money.
I watch as she moves things around and puts away more things. I’m in the chair beside the wood stove and I like the view of watching her move around the kitchen, her short pants hugging the curves of her ass. My thoughts of my uncle fade away as she lifts her arms up and takes her hair up into her fist and winds the end around and tucks it so that it stays up in a ball on the back of her head. My eyes travel her torso to the swell of her tits.
She comes to me and for a moment I think she’s about to straddle me, but I’m disappointed when she instead bends and reaches into the bag of hers on the floor near me, lifting a black circle out and wrapping it around the ball of hair to hold it in place.
She moves back to the kitchen and uses a knife to slice open a plastic package of striped meat then places the strips in a pan before washing some more dishes. Smells fill the house. Nice smells. Food smells. The yellow soap in the kitchen. The fragrance of that meat has me salivating.
She cracks an egg over the rim of a dish and drops the insides in and then repeats it before stirring it furiously, putting the shell from the egg into a different dish. She moves to the fridge to fetch a paper container and pours white liquid into the bowl of stirred eggs. Milk. I remember milk. I smile as the kitchen smells and sizzling sounds coupled with the warmth of the wood stove and the sight of my mate makes me happy.
She begins running a knife through food of different colors and dumps small chunks all into a pan with a brown sandy-looking substance. A third pan goes onto the stove (I wasn’t aware I had three pans) and she drops a glob of something yellow into that pan as well as the pan with the food bits before dipping bread slices into the egg bowl and flips it before dropping it into one of the pans. If I weren’t so captivated I’d have her on the floor, thrusting inside her. My cock aches at the sight of my beautiful woman with her long bare legs moving around the kitchen, using it in a way it’s never been used.
She takes a fourth pan and puts more yellow stuff into it. All four stove burners are bright orange and now there are sweet and savory smells in the air. It makes me happy. I find myself purring softly as I watch her.
She cracks eggs into another bowl and stirs the contents and then drops the egg liquid into the fourth pan while flipping meat with a fork in one pan and then stirring the fruit pan and flipping a piece of bread over, then another.
My woman has kitchen skills. This makes me happy.
I look back to the fire and stoke it as I watch her alternately dance between the four burners and the soapy sink. She’s washing things and putting other things away in between tending the food.
She wipes her hands on a towel and looks at me.
“Can you wash the table and set it instead of just sitting there looking pretty?”
I tilt my head to the side as she says, “Here.” She holds out a soaped-up sponge.
I move to the simple table that was always here and begin to scrub it. The yellow sponge’s surface quickly blackens. She catches me staring at it and brings me a new soaped-up sponge, taking that one away.
A moment later, she’s marched to the bedroom and before I’ve blinked twice, she’s approaching the table with a sheet. She dries the surface with a towel and then passes the wet sponge and towel to me.
“Put those down over there, please? Food will be cold if we wait until that table is clean. Let’s just eat. You can finish de-grossifying it later.” She flips the sheet so that it unfolds and spreads it across the table, covering the rest of the dirt.
“Sit,” she tells me as she drops off two forks and two knives and then twirls to go back to the counter. I watch the light catch her hair and purr some more. She returns with two plates.
“We didn’t get anything to drink. I don’t want milk. Is the water from the tap any good?”
“Any… good?” I ask.
“Has the water been tested for safety?” she asks.
“It’s… water,” I answer.
She shakes her head. “Never mind. I’ll boil some just in case.” She gets up and lifts a pot from the counter where it sits drying with other dishes she’s washed and fills it before putting it on the stove. “I saw teabags here. And there’s no coffee machine, so we’ll have tea.”
My eyes follow my nose and I look at my plate.
There’s crispy strips of meat on one end, a pile of yellow fluffy substance, and two slices of bread covered in a brown sauce filled with colorful chunks.
I taste some. There’s banana and something that looks a bit like a seedling, but it’s white and familiar-scented, and there are berries like the ones I’ve eaten from the ground shrubbery as wolf sometimes. The sauce is sweet. The brown sand and fruit together sauce is the best food taste that has ever touched my tongue. I look up at her in astonishment.
She smiles. “Eat some with the French toast.”
I look down at my plate, lift the bread, and chomp down on it.
She giggles. “Use your cutlery and your manners, Tyson.”
She sits and takes her knife and fork and saws her French to
ast into several cubes like I did with the steak. I knew she’d need the little cubes with her small teeth. She forks up a piece and then dunks it into the fruit sauce and puts it in my mouth.
I chew. And she watches.
“Is that the best thing you’ve ever tasted or what?” The excitement in her eyes is contagious. I want to fuck her.
I need to fuck her.
I drop the toast onto the plate, suck the sweetness off my fingers and then I lunge for her, lift her up out of her chair and wrap her legs around my hips while putting her against the humming refrigerator. My mouth is on hers while she gasps in surprise.
“Almost,” I say. “You’re the best thing I’ve ever tasted.” I suck on my mark on her and she shivers.
“Ty-Ty-Tyson, we have to eat.”
“I like when you call me that.”
She moans as I lick her throat and then nibble my way up to her ear and suckle on the lobe, which has a tiny white shiny ear jewel in the center. It clicks against my teeth. I lick the ridge of her ear.
“Huh? Call you what?”
“When you call me Ty. When you say Ty, I know you’re pleased.”
“Let’s eat, Ty,” she whispers, her warm hand stroking the side of my neck.
I smile, carry her back to her chair, and set her down. Immediately, I reach for the crispy meat on my plate and put it in my mouth.
My mouth feels wonderful. I stare wide-eyed at her.
“Bacon,” she announces with big eyes. Happy eyes.
Before I’ve finished it, I’ve shoved another piece in my mouth. It’s delicious. There are only two pieces left on my plate. I want an entire plate of this crispy meat.
I taste the fluffy bits. They’re good. Not as good as the bacon, the fruit sauce, but as nice as the fried bread. I’ve eaten bread. Bread was something I ran out of quickly when Uncle left me during that time of uncontrollable shifting.
The bread was raw then, dry and bland, not savory and textured like this.
I catch her smiling when I look up. She’s barely made a dent in her food, but I’m nearly done. I guess I was ravenous. And it’s delicious.
“What sand tastes this good?”
She frowns. “Sand?”
“That sand.” I rise and move to the counter and see the label. Oh. Brown sugar. “Never mind. Brown sugar. I thought it was sand you were cooking with the colorful bits of food.”
She giggles as she lifts the pot from the stove and pours water into two brown cups that have been around since, always, but that I’ve never used. If I’ve been thirsty as man, I’ve turned the water on and stuck my mouth under it.
She adds something from a small jar shaped like a bear with a spout on his head and brings the cups to the table.
“The tea just needs to steep a bit.”
“What did you put in it?” I ask.
“Honey.”
I take another bite of the eggs. She pours milk into each cup on top of the steaming water.
“Why is the jar shaped like a bear? Shouldn’t it be shaped like a bee?”
She laughs.
I like that sound.
I smile. Uncle used to drink the water with those little sacks in it. Tea. He drank a lot of it. He often put whisky into it, too.
“Bears like honey. There’s a brand with a honeybee on the jar, too.”
She eats another forkful of the fluffy food and then her face changes.
“So, you live alone and that’s why you stayed in wolf form?”
“Yes. My uncle died a few years ago. It was just us two since I was a baby. He told me he rescued me when the pack we were in went mutinous and killed my parents.”
She gasps. “That’s so horrible!”
“Riley Savage came today and said he’s in my blood family and that my mother isn’t dead. That Cornelius lied and stole me. That he was responsible for my father’s death.”
“Oh. Oh my God.”
I watch her use a spoon to squeeze the tea sacks against the side of each cup, before lifting them out and putting them on the side of her plate.
“Riley said I’m their top alpha, that I belong there,” I add.
Her mouth opens into an adorable o as she listens raptly to me.
“He could be lying. Uncle told me they’re liars.” I take another bite of egg bread.
“What does your instinct tell you?” she asks.
I stare.
“Listen to your instinct. It usually knows.”
A wolf’s instinct was all he had. It drove him to eat when hungry, to rest when weary. To protect himself from the elements, from enemies. As a wolf, I’d fought off a bear twice. I’d killed poisonous snakes three times, once to save the life of Cornelius who slept as an old wolf that would’ve perished several years before he did if not for that instinct I always lent to him. His wolf aged much faster than his man form did.
What if that instinct had failed me where he was concerned? What if all this time, he’d been the enemy?
What could he have gained from taking me from my family and living alone with me? Teaching me to be wolf, to be man? I couldn’t comprehend it.
Except… he regularly used my senses and some childhood memories were surfacing about things he gained from them on the errands we took. The money in the garage. The man he had me rip apart. How he couldn’t hunt well and continually found himself in peril where I’d get him out of it.
I didn’t want to think about it. Not now. I wanted to focus on her. On Ivy. My Ivy.
“Gonna help me with the dishes?” She stands. She’s only eaten half her food.
“You’re not done your food.”
“I’m done. Can’t eat another bite.” She puts her hand on her flat belly and inhales deep then blows out a long breath with force that makes her cheeks go fat for a moment.
“I’ll eat it,” I reach for her plate.
“Go for it,” she says and rises.
I watch her put away the dishes she’d already cleaned and then she begins to wash the pans. I finish everything but the tea and bring my empty plate to her as well as my knife and fork. She smiles and passes me a towel.
“Start dryin’.”
I dry the dishes carefully and put them away. When we’re done, she cleans all the countertops and scrubs the stovetop. She grabs our cups of milk and honey tea and takes them to the sitting area by the wood stove. She sets them down on the table and sits.
I lift the cup closest to me, take a sip as I sit, and I decide I like the sweet, warm drink.
She pulls her feet up to the seat and curls into a ball, resting her head on the arm of the sofa. I sit close, rubbing her hip with my free hand as we stare into the flames and I sip more of the drink. The warm feeling in my body comes from not just the fire and the tea but from something else. From happiness.
“You’re purring again,” she says with a smile.
“I’m happy,” I tell her and set the mug down so I can pull her to my lap and hold her close. “I’ve found you. I want to know everything about you.”
Her smile slides off her face and she looks conflicted. Little lines form over her nose as she seems to ponder a problem.
Me. I’m a problem to her.
“I have a job and responsibilities. My car is in a valley all squished and I have no way to pay for it if I’m here getting sexed to death by you. It’s like my mind keeps blocking my responsibilities and I just get lost… in this.” She gestures toward me. “My parents, my friends are gonna worry about me.”
I feel something ugly crawling through my veins at her words, at the distress in her voice. She’s still trying to figure out how to leave me. She says get lost in ‘this’ like it’s not something she should get lost in. Like being happy to be with me would be wrong.
She made me food. She washed my hair. She said my name with sweetness. She laughed for me. She’s making the kitchen clean. Even when she’s in my arms, warm and cuddled into me, at the same time she’s thinking about needing to go.
H
ow do I make her not want to leave me?
“What am I doing wrong, Ivy?” I can’t help but ask. My chest hurts. She climbs off my lap and puts her face in her hands, her nearly dry golden and blueberry locks falling over her face as she lets out a big breath.
“Maybe you think I won’t be a good mate, but I will. I’ll keep you safe, I’ll provide for you, and I’ll do whatever it takes to show you that your happiness is linked to me.”
“Tyson,” she says, her voice sad.
She doesn’t believe me. She’s not the same as me, so of course she doesn’t. She’s not wired the way I am. I just need to show her.
I grab her hips and pull her short pants down, snatching her underwear to yank them down too as I quickly haul her onto me.
Now she’s straddling me.
“Ty, don’t,” she orders, with her eyes all angry.
I growl at her. She’s called me Ty, like she does when I’m inside her. That’s where I need to be now. She rears back as if frightened.
I grab the back of her neck and use my other hand to free my cock from my soft pants without the button and zipper. This is much easier than fussing with the typical man jeans I wear.
I slam into her heat and she cries out. I’ve still got her by the back of the neck and her neck is so small that my thumb can graze my mark on her while I continue to hold her where I want her. I ram my hips up as I glare at her with anger and frustration. I only want to make her happy, make her know she’s mine, make her feel like no one and nothing is more right than this, than us.
She looks both horrified and aroused. I growl into her ear. “You’re mine. I’m yours. You’ll learn this. Forget everything but this. This is all that matters.”
She cries out as I feel my knot swell inside and I begin climaxing inside her.
I can’t wait until she goes into heat and I can fill her with my children, bind her to me in that way so she will know it’s real, that we’re a family.