11. Chapter 11
Give Me My Jollies
Dasher
Iwoke to Meredith’s mouth against my collarbone and her hand tracing slow circles low on my stomach. For the first time since I landed in this cold, wrong world, I woke up certain of where I was and glad of it.
“Morning,” she murmured, and I rolled her under me before she’d finished the word, catching her laugh against my mouth. I pressed her chest against the bed, and slid a hand under her thighs, hoisting her up.
“Let me take you this way,” I said, “you’re tight and I love watching your ass.”
She moaned into the pillow. “Dash.” She pushed back against me, taking me in.
I plundered her body with rhythm, making the bed creak and groan in time with my own grunts.
My hand had just slapped her on the ass, her pussy gripping me like a vice, and things had begun the climb toward the precipice.
Neither of us was in any hurry to stop when the door came off its hinges.
Our fucking did not cause it, and not metaphorically. The actual door crashed flat against the floor with a bang like the gunshot that pierced my flesh.
I slid out of Meredith in a swift motion, my cock bobbing in the air, angry it hadn’t found release in her sweet body. I pulled her behind me with half the room between us and the doorway before my mind caught up to what my body already knew.
Close.
Threat.
Loud.
Angry.
“Get your hands off my sister!”
The bigger brother filled the doorway, his chest heaving, a length of pipe in a meaty fist that he must have grabbed off some maintenance cart on his way through the compound.
Behind him stood the smaller one, his jaw still bruised from where I punched him not so long ago.
He held what looked like a tire iron with a grip that said he knew how to use it.
“Cole! Jake! Oh, my God. What the fuck?” Meredith scrambled for the blanket, dragging it up around herself, and I had no idea what to do with my nakedness except plant myself between her and two armed, furious men who clearly hadn’t forgotten the last time they’d seen me.
“You.” The smaller one, Jake, pointed the tire iron at my chest like it was a rifle sight. “You’re the psycho who broke into her house and grabbed her and turned into some kind of… of…”
“Moose,” Cole supplied, his voice barely containing his fury.
“We shot a moose that turned into a naked man that turned into a giant moose, elk thing and ran off with our sister on its back. I have spent days, almost a week telling myself I imagined it. Now I find you in bed with her at the North Pole… So you’re going to start explaining, right now, before I put this pipe through your skull. ”
“Cole! Stop!” Meredith stood up, blanket knotted around herself, putting her own body between the pipe and me now, which did nothing good for the low, steady growl building somewhere behind my ribs. “Nobody’s putting anything through anybody’s skull. Put it down.”
“Not until he explains why my little sister is naked in a bed with the thing that assaulted our family.”
“He didn’t assault…” Meredith paused and recalibrated. “Okay, fair. He did assault Jake, that part’s fair, but there’s context… there’s a lot of context, and none of it’s going to make sense if you two don’t put the weapons down and let someone talk.”
Nobody put anything down. I stood there, entirely bare, doing my level best to look like a predator, or at least a man, and not a cornered animal. I found the balance harder to strike than I expected, with two furious brothers eyeing me like I were something to be put down.
As if it couldn’t get worse, that was when Dasher arrived, filling what was left of the doorway with calm authority that made even Cole’s pipe waver an inch.
“Gentlemen,” he said, mild as anything, like he hadn’t walked into a standoff. “I’d suggest lowering those before someone gets hurt worse than they already are.”
“Who the hell are you?” Cole snapped.
“Older version of him.” Dasher nodded at me. “Same condition, more mileage. I understand the confusion, truly, but swinging that pipe will not make any of this easier to explain.”
It took another ten minutes of shouting, several more threats, and Meredith, blanket wrapped and all, wedging herself between her brothers and me twice before anyone lowered a weapon.
By the time the room settled into something like a conversation instead of a brawl, I threw a pair of pants on, while Meredith sat with her arms crossed tight over the blanket, her eyes on the floor.
“So let me get this straight,” Jake said, working his jaw as if it still ached. “Santa is not some guy in a red suit; he’s real. Reindeer shifters are real and you’re one of them. And Meredith’s what, exactly, in all this? Some kind of prize?”
“She’s his mate,” the older Dasher said before I could answer. Both Meredith’s brothers looked like he had slapped them.
“Excuse me?” Cole’s voice went dangerous and low. “Mate, like…?”
“Like it sounds.” The older Dasher didn’t flinch at their reaction. “It’s not something either of them chose, at least not at the start. It’s a bond.”
“Bonds can be broken,” Jake said.
“Not these,” the older Dasher said. “It’s rare and permanent.”
“Permanent.” Cole turned the word over. His face shifted, sharpening and contorting in fury. “How permanent?”
Nobody answered fast enough for my liking. I stayed silent because I didn’t know the answer.
“How permanent?” Cole said again, louder, and it was Meredith who finally spoke without looking at any of us.
“I stop aging,” she said. “Once the bond fully takes hold. Noelle, Dasher’s wife, partner, mate, whatever, told me.
I look however I look the day it settles, and then I stay that way.
For as long as he’s alive.” She glanced at me then, and something in her eyes made my stomach drop clean through the floor. “Which is a very long time.”
The room went dead silent.
I heard her words for the first time. Neither Dasher nor Santa nor any of the mother-fucking elves had bothered to sit me down and explain what the bond actually cost the person on the other end of it.
“You knew this,” I said, turning on Dasher, my voice gone low in a way that scraped my throat raw. “You knew, and you let me… You let us…”
“No. Noelle told her,” Dasher said, measuring his words. “I assumed Santa told you, as he once told me. I should have confirmed it, I’ll own that mistake.”
“That’s the fucking mistake you’re going to own, you selfish bastard?
You own that one? What the fuck about the rest of the mistakes?
” I bellowed. “She’s going to watch her brothers grow old and die while she stays the same.
She’s going to bury her own family while I stand there next to her looking like this, and nobody thought that was worth mentioning to me before I ever laid a hand on her? ”
“Dash,” Meredith reached for me, and I let her, because the pain at the thought of her future anguish cracked open in my chest. “I knew.”
“You knew?”
She nodded. “And I still did it.” She looked at her brothers. “One more question.”
“What?” Jake asked. “Can’t get much worse than walking in and seeing my sister fucking.”
I growled. “Don’t…”
Meredith put her hand up. “Not now. You said you were looking for me for a week.”
“We have been,” Jake said.
“I’ve been here two days.”
“Mer, it’s been almost a week.” Cole rubbed his hands together. “We’ve been frantic.”
“It’s been two days,” I said.
From the hallway, in his trademark red pants, flannel shirt and suspenders, Santa cleared his throat.
“Holy shit,” Cole breathed.
“Son of a bitch,” Jake said.
“I am neither, but I would like to answer Meredith’s question,” Santa said.
“Please,” she said.
“Time moves differently here.”
“You bastard,” I said, standing up. I felt my reindeer shimmering below the surface.
“Young Dash, if you’ll let me explain,” Santa began.
“No. You’ve had plenty of chances. You took my whole life without asking.
My fields, my sky, every ordinary thing I had, and I made my peace with that, because you told me it was the run.
You told me it was my duty. You told me it was bigger than you or me, or all of us put together.
” My hands had curled into fists without my permission.
“And now I find out you let her walk into losing her whole family too, without a word of warning, because it was easier than watching me hesitate.”
“I didn’t withhold it to hurt either of you.”
“I don’t care why.” I was in his space before I could stop myself. Meredith’s hand closed around my arm, and I heard Cole’s voice shouting behind me. Jake called my name, and Dasher grabbed my waist.
None of it slowed the swing.
My fist caught Santa clean across the jaw, and he went down hard against the wall, more shock on his face than pain. From somewhere behind me, Jake laughed, short and startled. “He hits like a truck,” he said. “Hurts like a son of a bitch for a few days.”
“Give me my jollies back,” I said, looming over Santa, breathing hard.
I said it half as a joke, and half the truest words I ever spoke.
I wanted my life back, with my own say in any of it.
I wanted some scrap of choice in a story that had been predestined for me before I ever got a vote.
“You took everything else. The least you could’ve done was let me choose what it cost me and Meredith. ”
Santa sat there against the wall, working his jaw, and didn’t so much as raise a hand to hit me back.
“You’re right,” he said, his voice calm. “You deserved to know. Both of you deserved to know, and I let assumption stand in for honesty, and that's on me, not on either of you.”
I stood there, my fist throbbing, though I’d never admit it. Meredith’s hand was still locked around my arm, and her brothers watched from the doorway with faces caught somewhere between horror and reluctant respect. All the anger drained out of me leaving nothing behind but the cold, hard truth.
Meredith was going to lose everyone. And nobody, including me, had thought to warn either of us before it was too late to walk it back.