28. Unleashed
Unleashed
Present Day
Mash
When I woke up, he was there, just like he’d been for the past three weeks. But this time it was different. For one, we were both stark-bollock naked. And two, he didn’t immediately roll away upon waking.
Cian was lying on his back, his neck bent to the side and his cheek resting against the top of my head. In the night, I had somehow curled myself around his body like a baby koala. My arm and leg were draped over him, my knee millimetres from his balls. He had a semi. I had a full-on rager.
He groaned, stretched his spine into an arch, and his hand went straight to his dick.
“Hey,” I said, my voice whisper soft.
“Mash,” he replied groggily. “Morning.”
I pushed a gap between us, resting my head on the pillow, and Cian turned on his side to face me.
Every moment from yesterday came flooding back with exacting clarity. Fishing with Felix, the whole “Am I bi?” convo, running from Cian, the kiss, coming in my shorts, and the rest of the evening in the shower. I suppressed a moan.
“So, last night was fun,” I said. I brushed the hair from his face, because that was what I’d have done if I were waking up next to a random woman. But this time it felt agonisingly intimate.
“It was.” He had morning breath. It was kinda gross. Mine was definitely worse.
“Are we . . . gonna be okay? Like . . . you’re still my bestie, my BFF?”
“BFF?”
I laughed. “We’re good, though, yeah? This isn’t going to fuck everything up and make it weird?”
“Mash, there is nothing you could do that would fuck up our friendship. You could bury me alive and still be my number one BFF.” He snorted. “Besides, it was your dick in my mouth last night, not the other way around.”
I bit back my groan and rubbed a hand over my suddenly very needy cock. “Quick question.” The words came out breathy.
“Yes. The answer is yes.”
“You don’t even know what I was gonna ask.”
“You were going to ask if we could carry on fucking about and trying out new stuff.” He said it so matter-of-factly. “The answer is yes. Whatever you want. But not now. Tonight.”
I bit my lip, unable to contain my excitement, and I let my mind race with all the possibilities. There was so much for me to discover. So many firsts. Me, Mash Cassidy. I wondered if we’d get a chance to try them all before the end of the Harvest Fest celebrations.
After a moment, I spoke. “What’s the time?”
“Oh, we’re not doing anything right now. Your breath is horrible.”
“Does that really matter if my mouth is wrapped around your cock?”
Cian made a throaty grunting sound. “Touché,” he said eventually. “But still no. I’ll probably be needed at Clem’s soon. The menu tonight is burgers and chips, and I need to help prep the patties.”
“Ooh.” My mind was suddenly no longer on sex. Clem’s burgers were out of this world. So good they’d become a local Lykos celebratory in themselves. So good I once spent an entire month attempting to convince Clem to leave Sean and the kids and set up a burger joint in Remy.
I knew where we were eating tonight.
Cian looked at his wrist and then realised he’d taken off his watch last night.
“What time do you have to be there?” I asked.
“Eleven.”
I pushed up onto my elbows, located his watch on the nightstand, then leaned over him, making sure to squash my armpit right onto his face. I grabbed the watch, and the digits automatically lit up on the screen. “Nine fifteen.”
“Still got a while.” Cian relaxed. His shoulders untensed, though his nose was wrinkled. He ran a hand over his face. “Gonna need another shower now.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. A thought entered my mind. “Do you think for the rest of this Harvest Fest you could still pretend you don’t know about the alpha thing?”
Cian raised an eyebrow.
I took a deep breath in and let it all out slowly. “If you tell them you know, Nana is gonna start organising moving trucks and whatnot, and you won’t hear anything else for this whole holiday. I’d rather they nagged me in secret to confess, than nag you to accept the mate bite and move here.”
He said nothing, just chewed on his lip, his gaze flitting over my face. Eventually, he nodded. I guessed technically— technically —I didn’t need him to stay for the rest of the Harvest Fest celebrations. At some point I was going to have to make up an excuse that Cian had rejected my mate bond. I was planning on using the whole “uprooting his entire life to become the alpha’s mate” argument there. But these last six or so weeks felt like an unofficial countdown, and I didn’t want to give him up before I absolutely had to.
From the way he didn’t argue, didn’t suggest I came clean, I knew he was thinking the same.
This was our time, and I wasn’t about to let anything spoil that. Even my future.
“So, where are you going to live once you accept the call of the alpha?” he asked.
“Here,” I said. “I’ll be alpha—fuck, that sounds weird—so this’ll be my house. I could kick my nana out of the master bedroom, but I like this room. It’s big enough for my needs. The bathroom is a decent size, closet space is great, but I can always extend it or take over the girls’ old bedroom if my mate wants extra space for . . . whatever.”
“Your mate?”
My stomach flipped. “Someday I’m gonna have to find a mate. I’ll need to produce a successor.”
“Oh,” he said. That was all he said.
“Leadership contests are something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. They’re awful. I’ve only seen a couple in my life, but they can get brutal. Wolves go feral. Even in packs like ours where everyone seems big-happy-family content. It’s unavoidable. Kinda like a shift at the full moon. You just—” I made an explosion gesture, bringing my fists together, then pulling them apart and making a crashing sound. “It can be a fight to the death. And I’m not prepared for anyone in my pack to go to the big farm in the sky because I neglected my responsibilities for too long.”
“Mash,” he said, his voice no louder than a whisper. He cupped my shoulder with his palm and stroked his thumb back and forth against my skin. Goosebumps erupted at the gentleness of his touch. I pretended not to notice.
An idea flitted through my mind. I tried to bat it away. But I knew if I did, I’d end up chasing it down like a tennis ball.
Be my fake mate forever. Stay here with me. Move in with me. I’ll install proper Wi-Fi so you can work remotely. Fuck what Dee-Dee said, we’ll find you a new, better job. There will be so many BJs. I love you. More than anyone I’ve ever known. I’ll always love you. I can’t bear to lose you.
But how could I ask him to give up everything—fucking everything—for me? To spend the rest of his life trapped on this reserve, in this tiny town, in this part of werewolf country? Away from his job, his other friends, his family, everything he loved, his life?
Cian was a city boy through and through. He lived for the culture, the theatre, the fancy eateries, the cheaper food wagons. He liked buying bread at three a.m. He liked the eight-minute journey on the U-Rail across town to his office. He liked that in the next block over from his apartment there was an entire street dubbed “The Coffee District.”
And we both loved the anonymity of living amongst millions of others, the diversity. Here, diversity meant some wolves had brown fur whilst others had silver. And every single person knew your name. There was no hook-up culture in Lykos. In this town, you fucked around, and everyone found out.
And he’d already rejected me once. Already told me, in no uncertain terms, I was holding him back.
I refused to be responsible for his imprisonment here.
“I don’t wanna talk about that right now, though. Don’t even want to think about it,” I said.
Cian nodded. “I’m here when you’re ready to. No rush.”
“Thank you.” My voice wobbled.
“Just gonna take a shower and wash the pit stink off my face.”
“I was about to suggest that. Your face fumes are making me nauseated.”
“You fucker,” he said, laughing. Then he pretended to yawn, stretching out his back and arms, leaning over me, and deliberately smothering my nose with his armpit.
I chose the most unfortunate time to suck in a breath. His pit hairs flooded my mouth, the slightly metallic, onion-pie stink-taste hit my tongue and nostrils. Gross, but also kinda hot.
“Joke’s on you, I’m into that shit,” I said after he pulled himself off me.
I waited for Ci to finish his shower, and then I jumped in after him. I sort of felt like I should give him a kiss as we swapped places, but something stopped me. It wasn’t a real relationship, and I didn’t know if our friendship extended to that kind of habitualness. Were we now fuck buddies? Maybe we only kissed if it was a prelude to one or both of us coming.
After my shower, in which I wanked to the mental image of Cian on his knees for me with my cock buried in his throat, I got dressed and went to the kitchen for breakfast. He was already there, sitting at the table with Mam and Nana. They were all laughing. Something was spread out over the tablecloth. Lots of paper squares . . . photographs.
Cool, cool, cool. They were looking at old photos of me.
Probably all the ones from that period of my life, aged six, when I wore as few clothes as I could get away with.
Cian looked up and grinned the biggest, cheesiest grin. “I saw your wiener.”
“Not the first time, though, is it?” I replied. “Morning, Nana, Mam.” I walked over to the cafetière and gave it a swirl. Nice, there was enough coffee left for me.
“Morning, sunshine,” Mam said. She smiled at a photo and handed it to Ci.
“Wow!” he said, then he thrust it at me. “You look cute with a moustache.”
“Huh?” I’ve never had a moustache. I took the photo and peered down, and for a brain-falteringly long moment, I only saw myself. Taken in this very kitchen, same wallpaper, same cupboard fronts, different blinds. Shaggy-blonde hair, lazy half smile, green eyes, bushy lip decor.
It was my dad. We really did look alike.
“I can see why you fell in love with this handsome chap,” I said, handing the photo back to Mam. She smiled. So did Nana. So did Cian. And in that second, I realised what was happening.
The women had no doubt conspired together and concocted a plan: Project Let’s Convince Cian How Wholesome and Wonderful Family Life Is Here at Howling Pines and Make Sure He’ll Never Reject Mash’s Mate Bite.
Was I a bad person for secretly hoping it worked?
I bent down and placed my lips near Cian’s ear. “You like the moustache?”
“Yeah,” he replied.
“I’ll grow a tash for you, baby.” And because we had an audience we needed to convince of our relationship, and because I wanted to, I kissed his temple.
“This is a lovely one of us all,” Mam said. She and Nana shared a covert glance and a subtle nod.
Still bending over Cian, I accepted the photo and held it in such a way we could both look at it. There was my dad in the centre, roughly the age I was now. He had an arm around Mam and the other shielding his eyes from the sun. Next to them stood a preteen Clem wearing daisy-print overalls. A baby me rested on her hip. Beside us was Mika, about eight years old in a pink sundress, which left five-year-old Alba wrestling with Zach—four at most—on the grass in front of us. It had been taken in one of the clearings on the Howling Pines reserve. Nana wasn’t in the shot, which meant she’d snapped it.
“That you?” Ci asked, pointing to the baby.
“Yeah,” I said.
“So cute. You all look so happy. Well, maybe not these two.” He pointed to Alba and Zach.
I closed my eyes and tipped my forehead to his temple, breathing in the scent of him. Of us. Of the shampoo we shared, and the utter domestic bliss of the situation. The fresh coffee, the pastries, the toast.
Holy shit. Holy shit.
I had my eyes shut, but I still saw the picture. I was my father, kids all over the lawn, but instead of a random woman standing next to me, pulled close by my extended arm, it was Ci.
I had to get out of there. I was on the brink of crying—what the actual fuck—in front of everyone.
That’s what I wanted.
I haphazardly placed the photo into Ci’s hand, plonked my mug of half-drunk coffee on the countertop, and I ran out of the kitchen, into my room, then into my bathroom.
After a few moments of sitting on the closed lid of the toilet and trying to calm my manic heartbeat, I heard the bedroom door open and Cian’s footsteps—I’d recognise that gait anywhere—as he walked over to the bed and sat down, causing the springs to creak.
Even though I hadn’t done anything other than mope, I flushed the toilet. Then I splashed cold water on my face. I was not ready to address what any part of my little freak out meant. That was not a problem for today’s Mash. Today’s Mash was more concerned with what he might do to his best friend after he finished his shift in the B&B kitchen.
“You alright?” Ci asked as I joined him in the bedroom. “You ran off pretty sharpish.”
“Had to. I’m guessing Mam made the coffee? She always makes it like rocket fuel. Two sips and I was ready to defecate myself.”
Ci’s nostrils flared, and I realised he didn’t believe me. I should have actually taken a shit. At least there would have been some evidence to back up my statement. Instead, he stared at me, waiting for the truth. But to fuck was I giving him that?
“So, tonight I thought we’d eat at the B&B, and then maybe afterwards we could go to the lake . . . alone,” I said.
Cian’s cheeks turned pink. “Sounds good to me.”
“Um . . . so, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“I really want to kiss you.” Inwardly, I groaned. It had sounded a lot less lovesick teenager in my head. I cleared my throat. “I mean, will it harm our friendship if we just, like, casually kissed now and then, if it’s not . . . leading up to sex or . . . ? It’s basically a bro hug, but with our lips.”
He seemed to choke a little on his spit, then composed himself. “Do you think it’ll harm our friendship?”
Yes. Unequivocally, undeniably, without a modicum of doubt. Shatter it to smithereens. “No.”
“Okay, then. I mean, me neither. So yes . . . to casual kissing.” His blush spread up into his hairline. “You wanna kiss now?”
“I brushed my teeth,” I said in answer.
And without another word, Cian’s mouth was on mine. His tongue tracing mine. His fingers in my hair. We fell backwards onto the bed and we kissed until his alarm bleeped at ten forty-five.
“I can’t believe you set an alarm to go work for free at my sister’s bed and breakfast. She won’t care if you’re late.”
“You know I could never do that. Being late would make me severely ill.”
I bid him goodbye and went into the bathroom once again. I frothed up the shaving soap and applied it only to the lower half of my face.
My moustache wasn’t quite as impressive as my father’s, but I still had time to grow it.
“People keep looking over at us,” I whispered into Cian’s ear that night in The Full Moon’s restaurant.
In reality, I couldn’t tell whether they were because we had our backs to the rest of the patrons. If he asked, I would say I could feel them looking, but mostly it was an excuse to be so close to him. To keep my nose buried in his hair. To keep my fingertips tracing the contours of his nape. He’d had a haircut in town last week, and the hairs at the top of his neck were short and fuzzy and aggressively soft. I wouldn’t have been able to remove my fingers even if someone had held a gun to my face.
The restaurant was busy. Always was on burger night, but burger night in the middle of Harvest Fest was another story. Cian and I had to sit at the tiny table in the corner that the staff took their breaks at. Thankfully, the table was tucked away enough that it felt intimate, even though we didn’t get a candle or a vase of fresh flowers like everyone else, but exposed enough for me to keep using the excuse to touch him. If anyone glanced in our direction, they’d see a happily in love couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.
Ci wasn’t falling for it. He was far too smart for that. But he was a good actor as well as being clever because he never once pushed me away or flinched. Instead, he’d hooked his fingers around my lower thigh, and traced slow circles on my bare flesh with his thumb.
After our burgers—I had two full-sized and Cian had three sliders—Felix wandered over to our table, little leatherbound folder in hand. He sometimes worked in the restaurant on super busy nights.
“I’m not paying. Family discount.”
I almost said, “Alpha’s don’t pay,” but I remembered Ci wasn’t supposed to know. A fresh stab of guilt hit my stomach. Well, not guilt exactly, but—
Holy shit, was it guilt?
Felix jabbed the bill at my chest. “Mum asked if you can just pay for the drinks. Also she said, ‘Who in the flaming heck has wine with burgers?’ ”
I laughed out loud because there was nothing more Cian than drinking an eighty-silver bottle of vino with reformed beef mince, baps, and chips.
“My little hipster snob,” I teased, flicking the top of his werewolf ears.
“Listen, I didn’t spend four hours slapping patties to drink fucking beer with my meal.” He slipped his wallet out of his jeans pocket and handed Felix a card.
I wanted to pay for his wine, but then I remembered I no longer had a job. As of this month, I had no income stream. I guessed that wouldn’t matter soon, though. I’d sell my apartment in Remy and put the equity towards my new life here, and I supposed I would sell my car too. There wasn’t any need for an open-top sports car in the middle of the fucking forest. Who was I showing off to here? Probably trade it in for a four-wheel pickup with a huge bed and a trailer so I could do rangery type things.
“Wow, it got boiling in here suddenly,” I said, pulling the neck of my T-shirt in a futile attempt to get air circulating.
It was hot for September, I supposed, and the restaurant was cramped, and I only put on the damn shirt because Clem had a “no nips at dinnertime unless you’re breastfeeding” rule. That was why I felt so suffocated.
“You okay?” Ci said, his brow furrowed.
I shook my head the tiniest amount, and without either of us saying anything, he knew what I was trying to communicate.
Cian pushed his chair back and got to his feet. Felix returned with his payment card and Ci seamlessly slipped him a tip. I couldn’t be sure of the value, but it looked like a twenty.
As soon as we were outside the restaurant, I stripped my shirt off.
“What’s wrong?” He was beside me in an instant, one hand on my shoulder, the other wrapped around my nape. I was only vaguely aware we were still in full view of The Full Moon’s windows and all the diners.
“It’s just . . . everything . . . all at once . . . and I can’t . . .” I tried to steady my breathing. Tried to exhale. Why couldn’t I exhale? Gods, was I having a panic attack?
“Okay, breathe. Copy me.” His hand was on my torso, right over my tattoo.
I copied Cian’s movements—chest rising and falling—as best as I could.
“It feels like a countdown to . . .” I began.
To pines instead of skyscrapers. To dirt roads instead of highways. Level crossings instead of underpasses. Tiny cafes open at the owners’ whims instead of reliability and consistency of chain brands. To daytimes felling trees and tracking deer instead of texting Ci about every single inconsequential moment of my life. Of evenings watching whatever Mam or Nana wanted to watch on the telly, instead of getting over-comfortable on Ci’s sofa. To the things I would have to give up: kicking my legs up onto the coffee table while I tugged his feet into my lap, nudging his fingertips with my forehead until he relented and sank them into my hair, breathing in the scent of him, just being near him.
“To the end of my world. To . . . to . . . the end of us,” I said.
Cian’s lip wobbled, and the next second he mashed his mouth against mine. The desperation was clear from his kiss. He felt the same.
This was the end of an era.
No more Bangers and Mash.
He held on to me as though the moment he let go, he’d lose me forever.
Eventually, our bodies’ overriding tenacity for survival kicked in and we had to break the kiss for air. Cian butted our foreheads together, our chests heaved against each other.
“Okay, I need to show you something. Come on.” He took my hand and began pulling me away from the restaurant and towards his parked car.