Chapter 13 - Bryce #2
“Shit, you’re so tight.” His voice was a broken snarl.
Braced over me, his body was poised to take and take, and I only ever wanted to give and give.
His hips snapped, fucking me so hard I swore I moved along the cave floor.
I was tumbling, free-falling into pleasure, and something told me I would be caught.
I gazed up at him, my body and thoughts reeling at his sheer presence. The alpha. My alpha.
The claim rang through me, tightening my core.
I curled my fingers around his, trying to lift my hips to get more. “Faster,” I gasped. “I’m—I’m close.”
“Come with me.” Mason’s teeth were bared, and I yanked him down, the kiss immediately messy.
“Fuck,” I whimpered. “Mason—oh, God, I can’t, I can’t—”
My impending orgasm built in me, and I thought it would destroy me if it burst. I was nearing that place and knew I would crash.
I didn’t care. I’d burn, crash, shatter into a thousand pieces, if only he were there, doing the very same.
And looking into his eyes, I knew he would.
He slowed for a moment, not looking away for a single second, as he pulled out and slammed into me.
The thrusts were pointed and hard enough for the breath to be knocked out of me.
I fought against his hold on my wrists, and I knew I couldn’t properly overpower him, but he let me break the hold.
My fingernails bit into his back, and I clung onto him, grounded and tethered.
My alpha, nestled inside me, right where he belonged.
Mason’s hand dropped between my legs, thumbing over that place of utter sensitivity and nerves, and I shrieked.
My nails dragged over his back. I was spinning—reeling, falling, and a scream tore free from my throat as Mason pistoned his hips, faster and faster, so hard that I felt him everywhere. My stomach, my throat, my heart.
And then my climax roared through me, and I felt myself gush, a spill of arousal coming out of me as soon as Mason pulled out.
He continued toying with that bundle of nerves until I was gasping, twitching, and yet I did not plead with him to stop.
Not when I had craved him—craved this, for too long. I never wanted it to stop.
His cock continued to thrust into me as he grunted through, chasing his own orgasm. When he went to pull out, I clamped my legs around him once again, pinning him to me.
“God, God, Bryce—”
His moan was choked out as he finally spilled his climax, and I busied myself with kissing over his shoulder, nosing along his neck, delighting in the stronger scent emanating from him. Sweat, and come, and something so Mason that I had missed.
Slowly, he pulled out, keeping his eyes on me. Groaning, more in exertion than pleasure now, he slumped next to me. In the post-haze, my doubts suddenly rushed in, and I quickly reached for my discarded sweatshirt, but Mason put out an arm to stop me.
“Don’t,” he said quietly. “Let me… let me just lie with you like this.”
There was something softly intimate in his request, and I realized he was opening his arms not to stop me from moving but to invite me into his side.
My hands trembled with anxiety as I nodded. “It's a good thing its not cold,” I teased, trying to dispel my nerves at lying naked. It was strange how sex had let me forget my worries in the heat of it, but lying naked with him like this felt more exposing than anything.
“If it was, I’d hunt something and make you a blanket.”
The words came firmly, almost too serious for me to laugh at, until I turned, finding Mason’s eyes on me.
It unnerved me, the openness and honesty in them; those guarded walls dropped.
No pretenses, no adhering to whatever anyone told him to do, or be.
This was just him—this was the man who could be Cassie’s father.
Protective and caring, loyal, and fiercely territorial.
The ache of spending so long wanting that gnawed at me, and finally pushed me into his embrace.
“I’d prefer your arms over a blanket any day.” The quiet confession slipped out of me. I waited for Mason to tense, to show some way of disliking what I said, but he didn’t. He only tightened his hold on me, skin-to-skin, completely vulnerable.
My head rested on his chest, and I splayed my hand right over where his heart beat strongly. With each beat, I imagined it was a heart I’d been allowed to have. To give me my own in return.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, his voice almost too loud in the serene cave.
“You first,” I avoided.
“I’m thinking about if I hadn’t been such an ass all those years ago, I could have spent seven years having this.”
“Sex?”
“Yes, but having you in my arms,” he murmured, “where it feels like you belong. Where you should have always belonged.”
I tried to smile, pressing a kiss onto his chest, but the weight of my own secrets shoved my peace down. They crawled up my throat, suffocating me. I was unfurling, the safety of the moment guiding me.
This was my alpha. I was safe.
“I need to tell you something,” I whispered. “I… I want to tell you that. But I don’t know how.”
Mason’s fingers combed through my hair, untangling any knots caused by our intimacy. “I’ll listen. We have plenty of time, right? June’s looking after Cassandra. There’s no rush.”
“You should be calling her Cassie.”
Mason laughed, the sound rumbling through his chest. “After just one time of us getting close like this? I don’t think—”
“You should call her Cassie,” I repeated, “because you’re her father, and a father shouldn’t be made to be as formal as I forced you to be with her. Cassie… she’s yours, Mason. Ours.”
At first, there was no reaction. No stiffening beneath me, no pulling away. I held my breath, my heart hammering in my throat. That was it—I couldn’t take it back now. I could only wait and hope that I hadn’t completely ruined something that was already barely rebuilding.
“Mason?”
Beneath me, he began to move. He didn’t pull away, not fully, but he shifted to look at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice was deathly quiet, laced with a threat I hated hearing.
Not a threat against me, but a holding back of the anger that I saw flickering in his eyes when I finally looked at him.
My defenses rose, and I couldn’t tamp it down, but Mason was already speaking again. “Cassie was celebrating her seventh birthday when we fought off the ifrit. That means…” His jaw clenched. “Did you know you were carrying my child when you left Honeycreek?”
My child.
The way he said it shuddered through me, not entirely unpleasantly. It was the claim I wanted Cassie’s father to have—the claim and protection she deserved.
“Yes,” I confessed. I wanted every layer pulled back over my body. I wanted to hide, to run, to not have to spill these secrets, knowing Mason would hate me all the more for it.
“Christ, Bryce, what the f—”
“What was I supposed to do?” I snapped, my vulnerability turning me sharp-edged.
There was a wolf I had buried deep within me, vicious and ready for her own fight.
“You made me feel like nothing—no, not even that. You made me feel so small, Mason, that I felt I was barely better than the shit you wiped off your fucking boot. You and the pack. You let them say such vile things to me; you never stopped them. You preach safety now, yes, embracing and welcoming anything that once wasn’t welcomed, but back then, you were an asshole. ”
“I was,” he shouted. “Anger and hurt cracked his voice. And I’ve spent the last seven years hating myself for it, feeling this emptiness ever since you left.
Now I know—it was because you took something of ours with you.
Cassie isn’t only yours; she’s mine, too.
How could you make that decision alone, Bryce? ”
“Because I was terrified, Mason!” I shouted right back, pulling away from him.
I yanked my sweatshirt to my chest, covering myself.
Glaring at me, Mason did the same, tugging on his pants.
“I was terrified you’d reject her the same way you rejected me.
I didn’t think you would protect her. If you couldn’t protect me, then I had no idea if you would protect her.
I couldn’t risk it. Not around you back then, and not around them.
It doesn’t matter how many fires they put out, how much good they do around town; they still shunned one of their own. They caused me so much damage, Mason.”
I wanted him to gather me in my arms, to once again acknowledge that his pack had been wrong, that he’d force each of them to the floor in forgiveness of what they had done to me.
I wanted my alpha to make it better. To have his hand take mine, to say that everything would be okay, and he would stay, and we’d figure it out.
That he was hurt, but we could talk it through until there was no more anger and resentment between us.
But he didn’t. He only stood up and pulled on his shirt.
“Where are you going?” I asked, the bite gone from my voice. All that was left was a hollow emptiness.
“I don’t know,” he growled. “Away from here. I can’t—I can’t be here right now.”
Panic rose in me as he walked away from me. At the cave mouth, he looked back at me. Betrayal flashed through his eyes, and I went to call out to him, to beg him to stay the way I’d always wished he had begged me all those years ago.
But Mason only turned his back on me and ran away.
Once again, I was left alone in the cave, the memories of how he had touched me all that I had to keep me warm.
***
As soon as I got through the front door, June sat in the living room, wine glass in hand. She took one look at me, and her pinched.
“You look like you need this more than I do.”
Sighing, she picked up the wine bottle on my coffee table as I collapsed onto the sofa next to
her. She grabbed a spare wine glass from the kitchen and returned to me.
Everything hurt. My chest hurt from the sobs, my eyes felt dry and gritty from how much I had cried in that cave after Mason had left, and my body was just weak from everything.
“I want to curl up into a ball,” I mumbled. “I just… I can’t endure all of this. Mason, Honeycreek… everything.”
“Come here.” June held out her arms. “Let me hug you like we used to do when the other was too stressed to cope.”
And, as if we were teenagers again, I let myself flop against her. Her arms went around me, and I sighed at the familiarity of it.
“Cassie is Mason’s daughter.”
There was no point in hiding it anymore. June had never been one to push, and she had been patient with me. The silence in the room was deafening, and I anxiously clenched my hand around the glass stem before drinking deeply.
“Well, shit.” June’s bark of laughter surprised me, and I turned to her.
“Shit?” I repeated. “That’s all—”
“Not all, but… honestly, I suspected something. You’ve been so cagey about your life, and
you glared at Mason as if he were evil incarnate whenever he entered a room.
Plus, there was the way you’d look at him.
I knew you had a crush on him, but… well, I can’t deny I’m a little hurt that I didn’t know you slept together, let alone that Cassie is his, but I’m not going to chew you out about it. ”
I welled up, hugging June tighter. “God,” I muttered. “I’ve messed up everything.”
“Does Jackson know?”
I nodded. “I made him swear to secrecy. I told him that Mason wasn’t abandoning me, though, that he could never, under any circumstances, know.
He was furious when I told him, wanted to hunt Mason down there and then, but I couldn’t let him.
I told him this was between Mason and me, not him and Mason. ”
“Good point.”
“I don’t want to face any of it,” I whispered, pulling back and sitting facing my best friend.
“But at the same time, I’m relieved. It's been so goddamn lonely out there, June. I’ve missed you; I’ve missed my brother.
In a way, I’ve missed a pack. Not them, of course, but the belonging.
White Bay was a place I could focus on Cassie to forget how much I felt emptiness within myself.
If I just pieced her life perfectly together, then what I felt wouldn’t matter. ”
“It will always matter.” June squeezed my hand, offering me a small wince of a smile.
“And,” I hesitated, “Mason and I slept together again. In the, um, the same place as the first—and only—time.”
“Do you want any more complications added to your life, girl?” June laughed, shaking her head. “Like, are you actively seeking them?”
I snorted, her humor already making me feel slightly lighter. Or, at least, distracted. “The only thing I’m seeking is knowing that somehow things are going to be okay, and maybe a pizza and wine.”
“Just like old times.”
“God, I missed you,” I groaned, almost crying all over again. “I don’t even know how I went without you for all these years. How did I even do that? I’m sorry that I caused it for both of us.”
“The only thing I care about right now is that you’re here, and I can be in your life again. All I can ask of you is this.” Her face turned serious, and a dread pooled in me, knowing she couldn’t forget what I’d done—“Do you want pepperoni or meat feast?”
And despite the evening I’d already had, I let out a small laugh.
“Pepperoni,” I told her. Because no matter how much I hated myself over what I’d done to Mason, even to Cassie, and hiding the full truth from my brother so I wouldn’t ruin his friendship with Mason, I just wanted to enjoy a normal pizza party with my best friend.