12. Chapter 12
Scent and Sensibility
Meredith
Well shit. Once we’d eaten dinner, the first solid meal I’d had in days, and the elves put my brothers up in a guest cottage in Santa’s compound, Dash and I headed back to a new room. We crept into the bed, and held each other. After a few hours, he began to snore.
I tossed and turned next to Dash who was soundly snoring.
The day’s events weighed heavily on my mind, so somewhere past midnight I got up, pulled on Dash’s borrowed shirt over my own clothes, and let myself out into a compound gone quiet and blue under a sky thick with stars, and a dome that glittered with constellations I didn’t recognize.
If anyone watched me, I didn’t notice. I needed to move, the way I needed to have my body do something while my mind was elsewhere. From the outside, it might have looked like I was running, but I wasn’t. Ever since I was a child, I’d lace up my boots and take a hike when I needed to clear my head.
After my brothers’ break-in, the elves tightened up security.
They stood, guarding the perimeter every few feet.
I walked the perimeter fence first, nodding my head at the first dozen elves, before cutting through the pines toward the workshop district.
I didn’t know where I was heading, I followed the signs on candy-cane striped poles.
My hands remained warm, stuffed in the flannel’s pockets, my breath fogging white in front of me, and somewhere in that walk I trailed a hand along every surface I passed from fence posts, to the rough bark of the pines where the reindeer hadn’t scratched and over the wooden rail of a bridge over a half-frozen creek.
At the time, I didn’t think much of it. It felt like something to do with my hands, same as Noelle’s tea.
It wasn’t until I caught myself pressing my palm flat against the door of the main hall, lingering there longer than made any sense, that some instinct under my skin roared to life. I’d left my scent everywhere I walked, marking a trail through half the compound, by instinct.
If you want him to find you, this is the way. If you want to remain alone, stop.
I did not stop.
By the time I reached the treeline at the compound’s edge, the cold seeped clean through my boots.
The trek sapped my energy. I didn’t know which way was back to Dash’s second room.
I kept touching things because I knew he’d come for me.
He always would. My hand trailed along low branches, my scent laid down thick behind me like a rope stretched taut between where I’d started and wherever I ended up.
My legs slowed. I didn’t know how long I’d walked. I sat on a snow-covered stump and waited for Dash.
I didn’t have to wait long.
Before I saw him, I heard him. His bellow cracked the quiet clean in half, and my pulse kicked hard in response. He caught my trail. Of course he caught the trail. I hadn’t been subtle about it once I realized what I was doing.
Dash, in his reindeer form, came through the trees at a dead run, massive and dark against the snow, breath steaming off him in great clouds.
I stood my ground even as every survival instinct I owned screamed to step back from several hundred pounds of animal bearing down on me at full speed.
He didn’t slow this time the way he had that first night.
He came in fast, and the ground shuddered under his last stride before he skidded to a stop close enough that his breath hit my face, hot and rough.
“Dash. I knew you’d find me.” My voice came out steadier than I expected, steadier than made sense given the situation.
He shifted before I finished saying his name; the change coming up through him fast and rough, none of the careful control from other times, bone and muscle tearing into human shape in a rush that left him breathing hard, bare-chested in the cold, eyes wild and fixed on me with an intensity that had nothing civilized left in it.
“You left.” His voice came out wrecked, more growl than words. “You left me. I woke up, and you were gone. I could smell you everywhere, all through the compound. And I didn’t know if you were leaving me or…”
“I wasn’t leaving.” I stepped into him before he could finish that thought, hands flat against his chest, feeling his heart slam under my palms. “I needed air. I needed to move because that’s what I do when I need to think.”
“You left me a trail.”
“I didn’t decide to mark a trail through half the North Pole, Dash, honest. It was an accident.”
“An accident?”
“I realized that I was touching things unconsciously. I’ve always liked tactile stimulation. I didn’t mean to scent-mark things.”
“I know.” His hands closed on my hips, not gentle this time.
He pulled me flush against him, like he needed the confirmation of my body pressed to his to believe I was actually there.
“I know it wasn’t a conscious choice. It still doesn’t change what it did to me, finding your scent laid out like that for anyone to find.
Every part of me went hunting the second I woke up and caught it. ”
“Dash…”
“I’ve spent all night furious,” he said, cutting me off, low and rough against my ear, “furious at Santa, furious at myself, furious at a bond I never asked for that’s costing you your whole family, and none of that fury went anywhere, Meredith.
I struggled with it until I caught your scent and every ounce of it turned into this instead. ”
“Into what?”
“You like tactile things, right?” He answered before his mouth crushed against mine without another word, hard and certain, with no hesitation in it.
I met his possessiveness with a hunger of my own that had been building right alongside his, all night, and all week.
If I were honest with myself, it built ever since the moment I first watched him bleed out on my porch and something in me had refused to look away.
There was nothing careful about this. His hands found the buttons of the flannel top and didn’t bother being patient with them.
I helped him just as fast, both of us shaking with cold and desire in equal measure.
The snow at our feet didn’t matter, nor did the biting cold.
He pulled my pants off one leg, and lifted me against a thick tree.
Dash pushed his engorged cock into me, and I lost myself in the sensation of being stuffed full, pressed against a tree with his mouth on my throat and my collarbone.
He pumped into me, claiming ground he’d already claimed twice tonight and still needed to claim again.
“Tell me you’re not leaving,” he said, against my skin, voice cracked wide open. “Tell me, Meredith, I need to hear you say it.”
“No, Dash. I’m not leaving.” My hands found his hair, and I held on for dear life with his powerful thrusts. “I walked out here half out of my mind trying to figure out how to say that to you, and instead my own body said it for me before I found the words.”
He nipped at my neck, making a sound against my throat that undid something low in my stomach.
He pushed me harder against the rough bark of the tree, the cold biting at my skin everywhere his mouth wasn’t.
It offered a welcome relief from the heat of his body.
My skin was on fire. “Look at me,” he commanded, and his eyes blazed gold.
This wasn’t fucking or gentle love making. No, this was us claiming each other, finally done pretending either of us had a choice that wouldn’t end up with the other in pain. This right here, was us choosing each other.
He lifted me higher against the tree, and I wrapped my legs around him, the leg of my pants slapping him on the back of his thighs and low on his ass as he plundered my body.
Snow fell around us in the dark, soft, like a blanket.
I called out his name, breaking the silence of the air again and again.
His name formed in white smoke on the wind, while his hand held me like letting go wasn’t a possibility his body understood anymore.
It was rough and it was desperate, and it was the most honest we’d ever been since the mess started.
Neither of us had fear or hesitation. We claimed each other, again and again.
“Say it again,” he said as he erupted inside me, his forehead pressed to mine, both our bodies shaking, spent, snow melting cold against overheated skin.
“I’m not leaving.” I said it steadier this time. “I choose this. I choose you.”
He held onto me a long time after that, out there in the cold and the dark with half the North Pole marked in my scent behind us, and for the first time since a bleeding stranger had collapsed on my porch, I understood that whatever this cost me down the line; I wasn’t running from it anymore.