Chapter 6 Arik #2
Steam billowed up from the surface of the water, coating the window and the mirror, the flickering candlelight setting it gleaming as if the air was made out of tiny diamonds.
Matthew looked like something out of one of those moodily lit, porny period pieces, the kind where everyone fucked the king of England and then got their heads cut off: all broad shoulders and swarthy chest, hair a little longer than usual and hanging in a rakish wave over his forehead, the bulge in the front of his jeans pronounced enough that it could’ve been an Elizabethan codpiece rather than real.
He shoved the jeans over his hips along with his boxers. Mmm. Very real.
Usually I preferred to bathe alone. Werewolves might like living in large, noisy groups, but I’d always been more of a solitary creature. My baths were my quiet time, and Matthew respected that completely.
Tonight, though, it felt like the most natural thing in the world to scoot forward and make room for him behind me and around me, leaning back to savor the solidity and warmth of his muscled body.
His cock pressed equally solidly into my back, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to do anything about it.
Once he’d reached between us and readjusted a bit, he wrapped both arms around me and didn’t make any moves at all.
“You have a chance to talk to Calder tonight?” Matthew asked after a few quiet minutes.
My eyes had half closed; my own body had begun to respond to Matthew’s, but in a sleepy, non-urgent way. Now my eyes opened, and I stared at the condensation slowly forming rivulets on the tiled wall at the foot of the bath.
“He’s not exactly demonstrative, and he’d rather hide it when he’s upset,” Matthew went on.
“But this…I don’t know how this is going to hit him.
Ian and Jared and I had pretty stable childhoods.
Always someone around to protect us. This has to bring up some shitty memories for him.
A couple decades’ worth of shitty memories. ”
Right. Calder’s childhood, which hadn’t been much of one to start with, had been cut abruptly short when he took on parental responsibility for an abandoned bobcat toddler at the age of only twelve.
I’d been kind of a sickly kid, too, who’d needed more attention than most, which had only made it harder.
Any friend of Calder’s would have good reason to worry that tonight’s events would bring up a lot of topics he’d rather not dwell on.
But Matthew wasn’t worrying about Calder, per se. Did he really think I wouldn’t understand what his questions actually meant?
“I’m fine,” I said, answering the real one.
“I understand why you’d think I wouldn’t be.
But I don’t remember the part where I nearly died as a baby, or where I got abandoned or orphaned or whatever the hell happened to me.
All my nightmares come from the stuff that happened later on.
Nate was poking me about it, too, but I think maybe I convinced him I’m fine and to shut up about it. ”
“I’m taking that as a hint to shut up about it, too,” Matthew said dryly, but he kissed the side of my head and gave me a squeeze.
“You don’t have to talk to me. Obviously.
But maybe you should talk to Nate about it instead of blowing him off, huh?
His childhood fucking sucked. It’s not like he wouldn’t empathize. ”
“Nate doesn’t want to be my therapist,” I scoffed. Although…would he listen? If I wanted to talk about it?
“Not like a therapist. I mean, he’s your best friend. Of course he’d want to—”
I scrambled up and spun around so fast the water sloshed wildly over the sides of the tub, splooshing against the tiled wall and washing onto the floor.
The candle at the head of the tub hissed and spluttered as a few drops of water flew onto it, and Matthew let out an oof as my knee grazed his groin on its way to settle next to his hip.
“What the fuck? My what?”
“Ah.” Matthew cleared his throat, eyes wide as he took in my expression and hopefully realized he’d said something completely insane. “Um. Your best…friend? Do you not like that term, or something? Is closest friend better?”
“Neither one is better! Buggering fucking gods, Matthew, my best friend? Nate? You’re out of your mind!” I had my hands on his shoulders, and I gave him a shake on every other word for emphasis. “We work together, and we’re brothers-in-law, but we’re not…we’re not…”
Except that not only did we work together, and live close together as family by marriage, but we also ate lunch together.
And went into town together to run errands.
And when I had a fight with Matthew, I made a cup of coffee for Nate and a cup of tea for me, and I bummed a cigarette off of whoever was in the mechanic shop, and Nate and I shared it down at the end of the garden while we bitched about our mates, and…
“Oh no,” I gasped, and put my hands over my face. “Oh, fucking hell.”
“Wow,” Matthew said, and started to laugh, violently enough that it bounced me up and down on his lap and sloshed the water around even more.
I took one hand away from my eyes to smack him in the chest, and he caught it in one of his, kissed it, and kept laughing like a brain-damaged hyena.
“You really didn’t know? How could you not—Nate’s usually the oblivious one. Oh, shit, does he not know either?”
If he’d known but not clued me in, then I’d be using some particularly unpleasant magic to cause itching in hard-to-reach places.
Then again, how would I have reacted to Nate announcing that he’d decided I was his best friend?
The thought gave me a warm, glowing little ember of a feeling in a weird corner of my ribcage.
Fuck.
Left with no other option for escaping the conversation besides jumping out the window and running away, something I’d already tried once to get away from Matthew and come to regret, I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed the idiot laughter off those firm, perfect lips.
I’d meant to distract him, but it backfired, because by the time he finished exploring me with his tongue and nibbling my lower lip and sliding one hand under my ass to squeeze me and slip a finger between my cheeks and tease at my balls, I’d forgotten what I’d been intending to distract him from.
But I’d kept a slight handle on reality.
He released my mouth and moved down my neck, sucking marks into the curve of my throat, and I had the presence of mind to say, with great regret, “No knotting.” He hummed a sound against my Adam’s apple that sounded like disagreement and moved his fingers with intent.
I squirmed on them, the head of my cock rubbing over his wet stomach and sending tremors all the way through mine.
“Seriously,” I gasped. “They might need me if Jessica or one of the kids takes a turn. Getting unknotted in a hurry to go do more healing isn’t going to work for me.
I won’t enjoy it if I’m worried about it the whole time. ”
“No worries, then,” he murmured, sliding down and pressing kisses across my chest and down my stomach. “Kneel up and brace on the tub.”
“I have excellent balance, I won’t need to brace myse—oh!” I toppled forward and barely caught myself on the edge of the tub as Matthew wrapped his lips around the head of my cock and sucked, hard, lashing at the tip with his tongue.
Matthew grinned up at me wickedly around his mouthful, eyes gleaming alpha gold under his dark lashes, and then pulled me in, letting me sink all the way into his throat.
I’d spent fifteen years thinking alphas never sucked cock, and then I’d met Matthew.
The first time he’d touched me, when he still hated me and I still feared him, he’d ruined me for any other man.
Hell, he’d ruined me for any other man the first time he’d smiled at me, I just hadn’t known it.
Nate the oblivious one? Maybe. But he had some stiff competition.
Getting stiffer, because Matthew kept sucking me like his life depended on it, the rough stubble on his chin scraping the sensitive skin of my balls, and a fingertip now sliding inside me, providing enough pressure to give me something to ride while I fucked his alpha mouth.
If he hadn’t been holding on to me while I lost it, turned inside out, and came so hard I saw stars, I’d have slid down into the water and drowned. Everything went all sideways and slippery and hazy.
“Get the water warmed up so you don’t freeze,” Matthew said softly, pulling me against his chest, and I sent a pulse of magic through the tub.
I cracked my eyes open, watching fresh steam rise in lazy curls.
He had one arm around me, my body straddling his again and my head on his shoulder, with most of me submerged in the hot water.
Heaven.
Something nudged under my thighs. Right. He had his other hand under there, and he’d started stroking himself off, the thick head of his cock poking between my cheeks.
“Just the tip,” he said, voice gone all rough—maybe from swallowing my cock and every drop of my come, and maybe from his own arousal. “I want to come inside you. If I can’t knot you, I still want you to feel me.”
Well, since he’d asked so nicely and given me the blowjob of the century first, fine.
I spread my legs a little wider and tilted my pelvis, giving him a better angle for entry. It wouldn’t have worked for fucking me, but he shifted around and got himself wedged against my hole.
He clamped his other hand down on my hip, held me in place, and thrust up.
I couldn’t help my shudder and moan as his cockhead pried me open and popped inside. It didn’t hurt, but it felt…uncomfortable, in a way Matthew’s body joining with mine usually didn’t.
That discomfort, perversely, nearly got me hard again, narrowing my consciousness down to every nerve ending in that sensitive, needy part of me.
Nate wouldn’t need my help in the next half hour, right?
Matthew could knot me. I could slide down his cock and have him all the way inside me, pulsing in my core…
Matthew growled, bit down on my neck over the mating bite, and spurted into me, bucking up and making half of the remaining bath water splash over the sides.
We both collapsed. My body slid off of his cock, and it pressed between my legs. I wriggled and squeezed him, and he groaned and held me close.
“Damn it, I still need to go out to my office,” he said after a minute. “I really can’t leave it until tomorrow.”
“I’ll clean up the floor.” Sometimes my own generosity astounded me, but that blowjob…he’d earned it. “You go and come back as soon as you can. I can’t promise to stay awake until you do. I’ll get the bed warm, though.”
“It’s a deal.” He kissed the side of my head. “You have some leaves in your hair still. I’ll go and let you have the bath to yourself. Want me to run some more water?”
It took him a minute and a lot more splashing to extricate himself, and a lot of laughter on both our parts, but finally he’d gotten a towel, started the hot tap again, and left me to it.
Down the hall, I knew Nate would be faithfully keeping a coffee-fueled vigil over Jessica and her children as they slept. The kids wouldn’t remember this any more than I remembered Calder finding me behind a dumpster.
I could picture it, though, because I’d heard about it so many times—he’d tried to read me baby books, or tell me folk tales of brave cats saving the day, but I’d always wanted that particular story.
Where I’d come from. How he’d saved me. How he’d made me safe.
He’d been so painfully young, in retrospect, but at the time he’d looked like the biggest, strongest, most competent person on planet Earth, sitting there on the edge of the bed holding my hand while I went to sleep.
Would those kids grow up with a personal mythology that included The Night They’d Crashed in the Woods?
Would their mom tell them about me, the bobcat with the long blond hair and the tattoos who’d saved her life?
Or about Nate, letting them get to adulthood with a mental picture of a kind, loving guy with dark curly hair who’d held them and warmed them up while I took care of her?
I hoped so. That’d mean they’d grown up safe, taking comfort from knowing that when things had been the worst, someone had helped and protected them.
Matthew had been safe as a kid, by his own admission, so he didn’t understand: Calder finding me, starving and cold and abandoned, wasn’t the stuff of nightmares for me. It was the story I told myself in Calder’s voice when I woke from a nightmare.
If I ended up on the other side of that equation, part of their comforting bedtime story, a hazy anti-boogeyman keeping the dark at bay in their sleepy imaginations, it’d be the best thing I’d ever achieved in my life. Fine? I was better than fine.
Even if that obnoxious, skinny-jeans-clad warlock who’d once knocked me out with a fucking water bottle had somehow become my best friend. Gods help me.
Despite my exhaustion, I was smiling as I dunked my head under to rinse my hair.