CHAPTER 12
January 2017
James, age 35
It was the most depressing Monday of the year and I was camping alone on the Northern edge of the Park, near Klamath beach. Samantha was still at my brother's pack, spending the holidays with her aunt and her family. She'd told me all about how she used to spend her summers with them but then completely detached herself from them after “you know, everything,” as she put it. Now she was making a conscious effort to reconnect with them and appreciate them, even if it meant that me and my wolf were the most miserable bastards in existence while she was gone. I even went as far as to get a small pot of sage for my office, but all it did was confuse us. The faint smell made it feel like she'd just left the room, like we’d just missed her, so it did quite the opposite of calming me down. It went without saying that I got exactly no work done.
I’d liked Samantha ever since she’d started working for me, but it was that infernal drive home after that damned sports bar evening that pushed my crush into full-blown-obsession territory. All I’d wanted to do was lick her fingertips and dive into her folds, chasing the faint scent of her mouthwatering arousal to its source. Of course, I did no such thing. Whenever we were in Crescent City after that, I'd leave my bed at all hours of the night and sneak to her bedroom door, straining my ears to detect even the faintest moan or slippery sound, desperate for a hit of that old high. However, Samantha's self-control seemed to mirror mine after that single time.
I had no idea what to do. I was a 35-year-old male who'd never been in a relationship – all I knew how to do was pick up a willing woman from a bar, and Samantha had made it clear that she wasn't interested in casual sex, and honestly, neither was I. I wanted more with her. No, I actually wanted more with her. So I googled things like “how to make someone fall in love with you” and “how to make a female fall in love in your 30s” and got a bunch of the same – shared hobbies, communication, attention, dialogue, eye contact, etc. So I’d made a conscious effort to plan my days with Samantha like they were dates. When we were assigned to overnight patrol and had to stay in one of the cabins, I'd bring fresh vegetables from the pack garden and we'd catch ourselves some rabbit (or elk if they needed culling) and we'd cook together while talking or listening to one of the playlists I'd made for the occasion. While driving to Crescent City, I'd propose car games that inevitably revolved around us answering questions about ourselves and our thoughts on things. I made her download Scrabble on her phone so we could play against each other during boring meetings. We’d even made jam in the pack kitchen with berries we'd collected on a hike. It had been a lot of work for only two measly jars of jam, but it was priceless to inhale Samantha's sweet scent mixed with warm sugar and berries, to stand so close to her that our arms kept brushing against each other, to watch her wipe her damp forehead after stirring the bubbling concoction, and finally, to witness the joy in her eyes when we managed to fill a jar for each of us. Every time I'd put it on my toast, I’d be transported into that late afternoon in the kitchen and I could almost see her how blue her tongue was from sneaking berries instead of cleaning them.
One night in October, we were sitting by the fire in one of the log cabins, enjoying a cup of tea after dinner and planning our trail for the next day, and I decided it was time to tell her about my mate. It had been a fear of mine, especially knowing Samantha's rigid self-imposed rules about widowed males.
“Are you never gonna ask?”
“Ask what?” she frowned slightly.
“About my mate.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, as if she had been scared of this talk too, and then said:
“I don't like to be asked so I don't ask others.”
“Well, can I tell you anyway?”
She shrugged, all fake casual, as if to say, “suit yourself”.
Now it was time for me to look away from Samantha like she'd done so many times when the subject came up for her. I focused on the flames, the oranges and blues, their seductive trance pulling me away from my pain.
“When I turned 18, I realized my mate was a female from my high school, her name was Lucy,” from the corner of my eye I saw Samantha leaning in to listen carefully.
“Lucy was only 16 - I don't know the rules in your old pack, but we weren't allowed to tell a wolf who was not of age that we were mated to them. I guess some years back a male took advantage of several underage females by lying to them about it, and my grandfather instituted this rule. It's a good rule, since there is no way for an underage wolf to verify the information until they shift. So Lucy, my mate, she was a very outgoing and popular high school student, she cheered and did all kinds of extracurriculars; she was kind of dating the human quarterback on the team and it was hard for me to watch but her family assured mine that they had the mate talk with her, and that she knew better than to mess around with humans too seriously. Besides, I figured I'd be leaving for college soon and in two years she'd join me there.”
“Well, I thought wrong. She and her friends, including the boyfriend, all got into a horrific car accident on prom night. No survivors. She hadn't shifted yet so she had no wolf healing and she probably died on impact. Or that's what I hope. I hadn't felt her die since we weren't marked or mated, but my father immediately knew since he was her Alpha, and he took me with him because of who she was to me.”
Samantha grabbed my hand and I held on for dear life.
“I will never forget seeing her like that. Lifeless, mangled, reeking of liquor and her boyfriend's semen. By now you've probably noticed I don't drink alcohol. The smell immediately takes me back to that scene.”
“I was sad and angry for the longest time. I also felt guilty. Guilty for hating her in that moment, guilty for not protecting her somehow, guilty for obeying the stupid rules and not making a move. I had waited for her, you know? And now she was dead, reeking of the fact that she hadn't waited for me, hadn't considered my existence at all – that's what it felt like to teenage me. Then I started sleeping around with unmated she-wolves and that made me feel even worse about myself afterward, disrespecting someone's mating bond like that. I knew first hand how it felt, so what was I trying to do? So I switched to women. I was lashing out. I was young and angry and hurt, because at 18 years old I knew that I'd never have the future I'd always envisioned with my mate and pups. So you see, Samantha, we have much more in common than you'd think,” I looked at her then and the sight of her pain broke my heart.
She finally spoke and I could hear that she was trying really hard not to cry.
“I’m not happy that we have this shitty situation in common. You deserve so much better. I am so sorry that you had to go through that.”
“You do too, I hope you know that.”
“Yeah, I know. Doesn't make it any easier now, does it?” she asked quietly and I shook my head no. “That's why I can't eat potato chips,” she said and I just looked at her, confused. She smiled weakly and explained:
“After I'd met my mate, he was being so weird around me that I just had this gut feeling that something was terribly wrong. He claimed he had to go to Chicago the next day for a whole month to finish up with school and then he'd come back to our pack and we'd have our mating ceremony. I secretly followed him up there, ‘cause I had seen a woman's photo as his screensaver and the whole thing was just driving my wolf insane. While I was sitting in my car in front of his house during my amateur stakeout, trying to find out what was happening, I was eating potato chips. They used to be my favorite snack,” she sighed dreamily.
“That's when I saw him, my mate, kissing a heavily pregnant woman,” she shuddered. I could hear her heart racing. “All the chips came right back up, I vomited for what felt like 20 minutes. I could never look at them again,” here she stared crying in earnest and hugged herself while staring into the fire. I moved closer to her on the couch and pulled her into our first hug. I gently stroked her back while she cried. She fit into my arms so perfectly.
“Enough of that for tonight, hm?” I whispered after a while.
She looked up at my face, with her eyes unfocused, and I just stared at her lovely full mouth.
“We should probably -,” she said hoarsely.
“Yeah,” I whispered, but didn’t move.
She pressed her forehead into my chin and we remained like that for a few more minutes, then Samantha got up and headed towards her room.
“Good night, James.”
“Good night, Samantha.”
The next morning we walked the trails in comfortable silence for hours.
“I was thinking,” Samantha was the first to break it.
“As one tends to do,” I joked and she grinned at me. My heart swelled at the sight.
“My heat is coming up in two weeks and as you know, last year I went to my aunt's pack for it, and then worked over Christmas. This year I was thinking I should do the opposite, spend my heat here and go stay with them for the holidays. Do you think it would be doable?”
Hearing the word “heat” had actual heat crawling up my spine, as if a hand was caressing my back seductively. I needed to think about something else, anything, maybe Samantha's aunt, bear attacks, expense reports. I cleared my throat.
“I don't see why not. I'll be here over the holidays in any case so I can just do our usual rounds on my own.”
“Thank you so much!” she clasped her hands together and beamed at me. “I owe you one, whenever you need time off I'll cover your shifts, promise.”
I just smiled and shook my head, thinking how there was no way I was taking time off while she was here.
“I really need to do this, they basically saved my life and I've treated them so horribly while I stayed with them after, you know, everything. Next time we go to the City I'll get presents for everyone, I am so excited already! If you want to send your brother anything let me know, I'll be paying for extra luggage anyway,” she was already lost in her planning and my wolf was already whining at the prospect of her being away from us for two weeks.
???
The days leading up to Samantha's heat were pure delicious torture. Her aromatic warm sage smell was now mixed with something mouthwatering and ripe, something you want to sink your teeth into and have the juices running down your chin. I kept poking my canines with my teeth and scratching my palms with my claws. I hadn't masturbated this much since I was a teenager. Every time she’d drop off a document in my office, it was a struggle not to run to my private bathroom to indulge in all the fantasies I had of licking her, biting her, bending her over, filling her to the brim, marking her as mine, and imprinting my scent on her. I was painfully hard all the time. It was even worse when we were alone in the forest. There was nowhere to run. Luckily her heat was already clouding her mind enough that she didn’t pay attention to my struggles, since she was struggling herself. Even though I was jealous of her asshole mate, I hated him for leaving her to suffer through heat on her own for so many years.
I prepared the cabin for her, double checked all the locks. Samantha's smell would soon become irresistible to all the unmated males around her so she needed to lock herself in if she didn’t want any company. My wolf was angry with me, he wanted us to take care of her, relieve her pain, breed her; he already had saliva dripping down his fangs, he only spoke the language of want. I, on the other hand, would respect whatever she decided, as much as it saddened me that she would be alone and in pain. I left one of my sleeping shirts there, pushed by my wolf. We wanted to lay our claim to her, to leave our scent as a warning to others and as a comfort to Samantha. The whole three days that she was locked in the cabin, I couldn’t sleep. On the last night, I shifted into my wolf, ran to her, howled outside her door and peed around the cabin, marking it as off limits. After hearing her whimpers inside the cabin and catching a whiff of her scent which was at its peak, I ran back into my office and angrily smashed anything I could get my hands on.
When Samantha knocked on my door two days later, the office was still mostly a mess.
“What happened here?”
She looked well rested, unlike me.
“I left the windows open. With the rain and wind we had two nights ago, a lot of stuff was soaked or blown to the floor, I'm still trying to tidy up.”
She narrowed her eyes at me but didn't say anything.
I should probably hide the sage plant before she gets back. I looked at my watch. Only six more hours and then we'll have her back.