21
Elise
I have been power-walking the hills of Mystic Falls for the better part of an hour now, and I have yet to flag down a particular werewolf. Jogging went away pretty fast, because I don’t have that kind of stamina, unfortunately. I’m a fucking chef, not a marathon runner.
It’s times like these that I miss Boston’s public transportation system, something that never happened until I moved out here. Fucking mountains. Ugh, this is why Shawn was always complaining about there being nowhere good to hike when we were together, because he was used to roaming around actual fucking mountains.
Low-key, a lot more little things like that are starting to make sense.
I peak over a hill and check my watch. Eight forty-five. Maybe it would be quicker to just call him, if I hadn’t blocked his number and deleted his contact info off my phone forever ago. I was really starting to regret that, even if it had been justified at the time.
Evening creeps up around the edges of the horizon. It’s one of those summer nights that bleeds into the day, staying up past its curfew.
I look around and recognize most of Mystic Falls. Large rocks jutted randomly out of the landscape amongst low, wandering fieldstone walls that one could easily step over. There’s the occasional building that dots along the winding mountain road, most structures sagging from their years: paint chipped and wood rotted. Even the lasting fieldstone structures had a handmade, cobbled quality to them. I find the shape of the brewery just a service road away from the main highway, the tall, brick-walled factory on one side, renovated glass walls of the offices and outdoor tables on the other side standing sharply out from the landscape, the only recent construction in sight.
And then, further up the road, the familiar slant of shoulders, the faded back of a band T-shirt I remember wearing to bed a number of times.
“Shawn!” I call out, perhaps not as loudly as I should to get his attention. Even from a distance away, he turns around, and I see his expression shift to alarmed the moment he catches sight of me.
He glances between me and the brewery, and after a moment, decides to cut through one of the fields to meet me. The mist hangs low over the ground, and I finally get close enough to him as he steps over one of those meandering fieldstone walls to me.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks, glancing at the sky, the ghostly, almost invisible moon creeping higher overhead.
“Looking for you.”
“Yeah, but . . .” he glances back at the sky one more time, like he’s worried it’ll swoop down on him. He eyes me carefully, a muscle tensing in his jaw.
The last ten or so feet between us feel like they might as well be a hundred more, when he finally sighs and shakes his head. He glances over his shoulder one more time, and then sits down against the wall.
“You already know.”
Instantly, my throat feels tight. It’s not the way I wanted to broach the subject, for him to just throw the truth at my feet, as if it weren’t even worth it to say it out loud.
No, I’m resolved to squash any guilt I have about not telling him I saw him shift from one form to another. He’s had years to tell me himself. It didn’t feel like betrayal, but a void between us, a cruel gap that lived between our hearts, a murmur between chambers. It was the first broken seam, the chip where all our issues wedged themselves and pried us apart.
“You knew in the boutique, then too.” He digs his hands deep in his pocket, his mouth set in a hard line. “And you were just going to wander around for how long? Elise, if you know, then . . . God, what if I hurt you?”
“I don’t think you would have.”
He groans and leans back, bringing his hands up to scrub over his face. He looks pleadingly at the clear, fading blue sky. “You don’t understand. I’m not myself when I . . . I don’t have the ability to rationalize and control myself as well as when I’m human.”
I bristle, unable to keep it out of my tone when I say, “Well, if I don’t understand, clearly there’s a reason for it. You didn’t tell me anything!”
He doesn’t even meet my eyes. “I always meant to tell you, really.”
“When? When were you going to tell me? Eight years ago?”
“I wanted to tell you . . . I’ve needed to tell you. But the truth was harder to express than I thought,” he says, and I do understand that, and sympathize.
It was definitely not on my bingo card for reasons our relationship crumbled; I don’t know that I would have believed him if he’d just told me, how I would have reacted if he’d tried to show me.
“I was afraid you would leave me if you knew. Even though it was inevitable that not knowing would eventually drive you away,” Shawn says. “And I couldn’t bring myself to let go of you. I always knew you were too good for me. And when we were falling apart, I kept convincing myself if I could just keep us together, we’d make it through and be happy. But it was unfair to you, and . . . I’m sorry. I wish I’d ended things before it got to that place.”
I can see the way he must have thought he could keep me and his family both happy.
“Fuck, Elise. I would have told you if I’d known how,” he says, voice hoarse with emotion. He shakes his head and swallows. “I still don’t know, honestly. Maybe it doesn’t matter, we’ll say goodbye after the wedding anyway.”
He takes in a deep breath, glancing up at the sky again like he’s keeping an eye on the clock, not yet hurried enough to leave, though. I don’t know whether to trust that. He’s always been a leave-the-house-ten-minutes-late kind of person.
He scratches at his chin, keeping an eye on the sky rather than look at me. “The closer we get to the full moon, the harder it is to control ourselves. This is my family’s curse. And for all I know, I’m going as feral as my aunt did. I’ve already hurt everyone by coming back. You shouldn’t come outside in the evening anymore.”
“You never hurt me when we were in the woods—” I start to say, but catch myself. I had sort of assumed the dreams were something more than dreams. Like they were clearly about him, even if I hadn’t recognized him in them at first.
His expression narrows. “What? What are you talking about?”
“Nothing, sorry. Just a dream I had.”
Shawn pushes off the wall, his curiosity moving him. “What dreams?”
“Meeting you out here, finding you in the woods. All those times I’ve seen you in the woods, and we . . . I-I mean you,” I start to make gestures and immediately abandon them.
He backs away a step, like I’m the dangerous one, or the weirdo who’s willing to fuck any wolf I just met in the woods. Like he’s not literally the wolf.
“You’ve been meeting me in the woods?” I hedge and grimace, mostly to just stop digging my own grave. “Or it’s a dream. I’m pretty sure it was just a dream.”
He looks utterly bewildered. He sort of shakes it off, and I don’t blame him for not wanting to try to make sense of the dreams either. “Look, I just want you to know I’m sorry for everything. This is why I couldn’t tell you where I was. What I was. Why we . . .”
He trails off, but I know the words he won’t say. Why we can’t be together.
Maybe it was always destined to end. This was why his family wouldn’t hear of him bringing me home. Maybe he always saw telling me as what was always going to be what broke us.
I swallow and push forward, crossing the distance between us to stand. I get closer, and realize, the transformation is already creeping in along his edges.
Already, his teeth look a little sharper. Traces of fur and whisker started slowly peeking through along his jawline, his brow, his arms. I can see the way his fingernails have lengthened and become thick, dark; the way the process bruises his knuckles.
Despite it all, I reach out and carefully touch his face. He closes his eyes and lets out a breath, looking like he’s trying his best not to lean into my touch.
I rake my fingers into his hair, cupping his face. “So, what do we do with the whole wolf thing?”
A glassy glint of vulnerability in his eyes, Shawn asks cautiously, “Do you think . . . is this something you could put up with?”
“Shawn . . .” I swallow. Looking in his deep-brown eyes, I see it. The fear that this was something he would have been correct to keep from me. It wasn’t a secret he had kept to hurt me, even if that had been the outcome.
“Maybe we could figure this out. Give it a try,” I offer just as hesitantly, ultimately hedging on what was in my heart.
“Yeah?” He nods, looking painfully hopeful and still uncertain.
My hands already threaded in his hair, I tilt his face towards mine and lean in, pressing a kiss to his mouth.
My forehead touches Shawn’s, and I sigh deeply, the sound almost blending into the chorus of the few September crickets left. My throat feels tight, like at the end of a good long cry.
I brush my tongue over his lower lip, and then against the edge of his teeth. Shawn leans into the kiss and within a few breaths, it becomes deeper, full of teeth dragging against skin, nipping at one another.
A low growl thrums through his chest to mine and makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. The prick of fear under my skin, the urge to glance at the sky pulls me away, out from the kiss.
Then he moves me bodily, a display of unexpected strength. I let out a little squeak of surprise as he gathers me up in his arms, his grip digging into my ass while he pulls me to him, the fat of my stomach against his bony hips.
And something else. The longer I stay with my body pressed to Shawn’s, kissing him, the more apparent it becomes, digging hard into my stomach. I shift just enough to make space to trace the outline of his hardened cock through his jeans.
“You’re cute,” I tell him, if only to see the way the color rises to his cheeks as he glances away from me. He’s even cuter when he’s bashful.
“If you only knew what you do to me.” He sighs, and I lean my head against his collarbone, listening to his muffled heartbeat.
Tomorrow’s the wedding. There isn’t a whole lot of time to do everything I want with him. I want to bring him back to my cottage and curl up on my couch with him for the evening, even though rationally I know that’s impossible.
He must have a similar thought, because he kisses the top of my head with an air of finality.
“We should get you to the brewery sooner than later, maybe you can call someone to pick you up from there. Someone not related to me, hopefully.” He grimaces, making a vague gesture to the rest of himself, “You don’t want to see me this close to the full moon. This is bad enough already.”
My heart pinches at that. I don’t want to leave this moment with him feeling like this is still something to hide from me.
In a moment this vulnerable, I want him to feel cherished and worthy of love, but I don’t have it in me to just tell him I love him all of a sudden. Maybe I never stopped, but I can’t just bare my heart like that. I’d been burned by loving him before.
But I could show him, and maybe that would be enough.
An idea strikes me as my hand slides down his stomach, stopping at the top of his jeans.
The breath stutters in his throat, and I can hear his teeth click together. He pulls out his phone to check the time. I glimpse the 9:03 on his screen before he puts it away.
“I have . . . maybe another hour before I really need to go. I can usually hold it off that long, at least.”
“So . . . what you’re saying is we have at least fifty-five minutes to get over there, and maybe five minutes to spare?”
He chews the inside of his cheek, a hand covering his mouth as he considers me. “Maybe more like three.”
With one hand, I unbuckle his belt, pop the button, tug down the zipper of his jeans. He glances over his shoulder, but doesn’t stop me from getting his dick out in what might technically count as public. I suppose someone could take ten minutes to walk over the hill from the brewery and see us, or drive past us at seventy-five miles per hour.
I finally slide an open palm down the hard length of his cock, finding the opening in his boxers to pull it out, my hand wrapping around the base. I watch Shawn’s eyes flutter closed and his mouth bite down on the pleasure of that first touch.
My breath catches a little as I let myself glance at his cock and realize it’s not quite how I remember it. It’s thicker, flushed a deeper, needier red, his cockhead taking on a slightly pointed tip, more distinct veining down the shaft. I hadn’t fully considered how complete the transformation under the moon was.
Realizing his cock is even a little wolf-y right now, makes my clit pulse alive. Maybe all those weird dreams should have prepared me a bit better for how intensely this would turn me on.
I give him a light, experimental stroke, and tilt my head and look up into his eyes.
His nostrils actually flare.
In my hand, I feel his cock twitch, and I can’t help but smile. I move back a step, slipping to my knees.
Bringing the tapered tip of his cock to my lips, feeling its heat against them, I lick in small teasing flicks, listening to every reaction in his breath. Taking the head into my mouth a little bit more each time, I stroke what doesn’t comfortably fit, my hands wrapped around the base.
“Go easy on me,” he says, the sort of self-deprecating joke I’m used to from him, and there’s something I can’t quite make out. There’s a dark, low, smoldering heat in his voice I’m not familiar with.
He must know I would take that as a challenge, so I dip down to take the head of his cock in my mouth for a good, hard suck. He makes a strangled noise, his hand tightening on my shoulder.
I lave my tongue over the head and up and down the length of him, but I don’t think I could even attempt to deepthroat him for the life of me. Nope, a girl has gotta have boundaries.
I gather up all the saliva in my mouth and draw one last, wet, messy stripe up the underside of his dick. Then I pull back, kneeling on the ground. I tug my shirt up to my collarbone and pull my heavy breasts out of my worn sports bra.
A moment of self-consciousness passes over me. The ways my body is different now, the weight I’ve put on, the stretch marks, the way my breasts don’t have the buoyant bounciness of a twenty-year-old, and are just probably a few too many inches lower than he remembers.
My heart stammers for a second, and I wonder if I should reconsider this, glancing up at him.
Stunned is a very good look on Shawn.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” he says with no shortage of awe, his hands cupping my breasts, his thumbs finding and toying with my peaked nipples, his attention rapt over them.
“Well, maybe just a bit.” I try not to smile.
I lean forward, my hands skimming over my breasts, sitting up a little straighter to bring them up to the same height as his hips.
I cup my hands on either side, pressing them together, enveloping his cock entirely. The slick path of spit on his cock connects to my sternum, making it a little bit easier to get some movement started.
His head tips back as he sucks in a sharp breath, enjoying the stroking up and down his shaft. I watch the way his chest rises and falls in time with my grip coming up over the tip, squeezing the softer head.
We start with a few slow, experimental thrusts, adding more saliva to his cock to make the friction between my breasts a little easier.
Before long, he’s rocking his hips into my chest while I clutch my tits around his cock.
I’ve done so much avoiding him lately, even when I kissed him the other night. How many times did I even look directly at him this week, until I was kneeling between his knees, stroking his cock?
Time has cut into his face, there are creases around his eyes that didn’t used to be there. The years have definitely blurred my memory of him. Or maybe back then I’d been too busy curling in on my insecurities to really, truly look at him the way I am now.
When his cock pushes up between my breasts, there’s just enough bend in my neck to drag my tongue over the head of his cock, or to give the occasional teasing suck between every few strokes.
I don’t know what Shawn thought was mystical about my tit-jobs, I thought they were fairly standard.
His shoulders heave with a labored breath and he grinds out, “Fuck, I’m not going to last long.”
Before I can make a teasing comment in return, I feel something else start to disrupt the rhythm of my tit-job. A swell towards the base of his cock, growing more prominent with every pass between my breasts.
I slow my heaving bosom, taking his cock in my hands again, laying my eyes on this new addition. There’s a bulging knot split by a seam of veining, swollen near the base of his shaft. I could feel a more intense heat coming off the skin as a bead of precum welled at the tip, his balls tightening below.
I trace my fingers over the formidable curve of it, marveling for just a moment. Is this supposed to go inside?
“That’s my knot.” Shawn sighs, the muscles in his neck tense as his chest rises and falls with heavy breaths.
“Knot?”
“It’s . . . kind of a wolf thing. I mean it is a wolf thing,” he mutters. He glances away from me, dragging a hand over his face, but I can still see the rush of red peeking between his fingers. “It’s for mating.”
“You never knotted with me before.”
“Maybe we weren’t ready for that,” he pants and swallows. “Wolves mate for life. Or you’re supposed to.”
There’s something about that statement that makes me bristle. Maybe it’s the guilt I feel at leaving without a goodbye, or maybe it’s that I’m still gun-shy at the thought of commitment.
Whatever it is, I drop my eyes to the ground at his words, not really able to handle the weight of that statement. Part of me wants him to explain what he means by that, but I can’t stop and interrogate him about it, so I just focus on finishing this.
“Elise—” Shawn starts to say, interrupted by his own climax. He comes with a groan, hot spurts of his release painting my clavicle, my neck. It cools almost the second it touches my skin, but there is something extremely gratifying about his climax dripping onto me. It’s interrupted by a stinging pain in my shoulder creeping into my awareness, as he grips me too hard.
His cock twitches the last of his release against my tits. A low, guttural rumble in his chest becomes a snarl, the corners of his mouth dragging down. My eyes widen, seeing him shift further into his wolfish form. It’s startling to witness, hearing the creak and snap of bone.
I can’t help but recoil.
“Ow!” I hiss, pulling back out of Shawn’s grip, but that only makes it worse. I realize as he lets go of my arm, the tips of his claws pull out. They had dug in, perhaps even emerged further as he’d gripped me through his climax.
I fall back on my ass, scooting away from him in the dirt. I clutch a hand over where the pain in my shoulder is, and my palm comes away wet.
“Shit, Elise, I’m sorry,” he starts to say, but the words are tainted by the wolfish gnarr now in his voice. He starts to reach a clawed, jagged hand to me.
“It’s ok. It was an accident—”
I glance at my hand, the way my palm is fully red with my blood. I can see when the metallic scent hits him, the way he shudders and shifts a little more into the monster he was afraid I would see.
He looks horrified with himself, but it’s hard to decipher the human expression from the wolfish features surfacing. He backs away, stuffing his cock in his jeans haphazardly and clearing the fieldstone wall behind him in a swift movement. “You need to get home, lock the doors.”
“Shawn, I know you didn’t mean to,” I plead, almost yell, after him. He’s halfway across the field again when he stops and barely turns to me.
“Elise, please. I couldn’t live with myself if worse happened.”
The fading sun catches and reflects a bit of scarred skin on his arms, a few thin scratches where his coat doesn’t come in.
I can see them then, the marks his mother left in his arm, scars nearly as old as he is, before he turns and runs away.
This whole fucking family, man.