Chapter Eight
The dark one’s breathing at my back is deep and even. The gray one in front of me lets out a soft murmur in his sleep and tucks himself closer, his face pressed against the underside of my jaw. Their warmth is so complete that I can’t tell where my body ends and theirs begins.
The soreness comes through next, in waves. My thighs ache deep, the kind of ache that won’t leave for days. My hips. The hollow throb between my legs. Bruises are coming up on my hips and flanks where his hands held me. My lips feel raw from being bitten.
I’m still leaking. A slow wet trail of their come moves down my inner thigh into the grass, and there’s more of it inside me than my body can hold. Inexplicably, my mind goes to Marcus.
I was wrong.
My quiet, loving theory was that he’d built a cathedral around a misidentified bear. He didn’t. He built a life around something real, and he gave it to me because I’m the only person he thought could sit with it without breaking.
He needs to be told.
Not the details. Never the details. But he needs to see my face and know that the thing he watched for forty years was real, because he’s earned that. He’s earned the knowledge that his life wasn’t a mistake, that he wasn’t a man who spent his best years chasing a ghost.
I shift in place.
Both wolves wake immediately. The dark one lifts his head from behind me and chuffs a low inquiry. The gray one unfolds himself from my chest and watches my face.
“I have to go,” I whisper.
A low, unhappy note comes from the gray one. The dark one says nothing.
Sitting up is a struggle. Everything hurts in the best possible way. The dark one braces a hand on my back to help me, and the gray one slides up beside me with his hand at my ribs. Between the two of them, I get myself up to sit in the grass. Another flood of come spills out of me.
The gray one chuffs, pleased.
It takes me a minute to think past the sensation. Then my eyes find them both, one at a time, and I memorize their faces.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I say.
They watch me. The dark one offers a soft note I can’t quite read, but the gray one lets out a soft exhalation and presses his muzzle hard against the side of my head and holds it there.
“I’ll come back,” I say. The words are more for me than for them. “I don’t know when. I don’t know how often. But I’ll come back.”
The dark one’s chest rumbles.
I dress.
It takes time. My hands are unsteady. My clothes are scattered around the hollow, and some of them are damp with grass and with other things.
My thermal undershirt gets sacrificed to cleanup, and I mop up as much of our combined come as I can manage before pulling on my pants.
I can already feel that I’m going to leak through them.
When I’m dressed, I’m a ranger again. Not just a woman. I give myself one more minute, then I leave.
◆◆◆
The hike out takes the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening.
A steady pace. No thinking about what’s happened. Not yet. One foot in front of the other, eyes on the trail, landmarks logged. My feet know the way even when my mind is a soft gray blur. Every step is a reminder. The slick between my thighs. The hollow ache.
The fire road comes up just before full dark. My truck waits where I left it. For a long time, I sit in the quiet cab. My body has a scent on it now. Under the faint trace of sweat is them. What we did.
I drive.
I take the long miles back to my cabin with the windows cracked, the night air cold on my face.
I reach my cabin a little after nine and walk inside on legs still a little wobbly.
I strip right there in the mudroom, leave my clothes in a pile, head for the bathroom.
The hot shower drums on my shoulders for a long time.
I wash the scent and the mess away, and a part of me grieves as it goes down the drain.
Clean clothes. Flannel pants. A T-shirt. My hair is still wet when I sit on the edge of my bed in the dark. Around four in the morning, I move into my kitchen. The sky outside the window is still black. I drink my coffee standing at the counter while the eastern sky slowly lightens.
At five, I pull on a jacket and boots and get in the truck.