26
Shawn
Considering how yesterday started out, things are going really well.
Despite previous resolutions against it, I am now pro-waking up in the woods naked, as long as Elise is also there, her body pressed to mine.
She’s still fast asleep when the sounds of birds wake me. Her head rests on my arm, the odd leaf or pine needle poking out of her hair.
Elise, here. I still can’t believe it.
I draw long, gentle scratches up and down the back of her thighs. She shifts in my embrace, rolling over to give me better access.
Every few scratches or so, I pause to trace the curve of her ass, gently squeezing delicious handfuls of it. Unabashedly, that part is just for me, even if she smiles and makes a little pleased sound as she dozes, tucked perfectly against me.
There are few pleasures greater than jiggling your mate’s ass and watching it shake like Jell-O in a minor earthquake. Amazing. I don’t know how this never gets old.
We fell asleep before my knot went down enough for us to separate. It must have happened sometime in the night. Probably for the best, considering my morning wood is pressed against her stomach currently.
She finally rolls over, dragging a kiss from my chest to my jaw.
“Oh, your breath is terrible,” she mumbles, making a face. She reaches for a blanket that isn’t there, and then sits up a little more, frowning. She blinks sleepily, taking in the woods around us.
It’s hard not to be afraid it’s not really as good as it seems, that everything could feel so perfect and right. I hold off on the knee-jerk need to panic, though.
“So . . . this isn’t too much?” I ask, pushing up on an elbow.
“No, not at all. You know, it isn’t actually that much more body hair than you have normally.” She yawns into a hand, before rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
“I, um. Yeah. I was more concerned with the teeth and claws part,” I mumble. Between the Band-Aid covering her shoulder and the dried blood of my bite on her arm, I’ve scratched her up in the last couple days.
Elise is picking some leaves out of her hair when she turns and catches my stare with her gorgeous doe-eyes.
“How long before I can show it off, you think?” she asks, and glances down at the bitemark, stretching her arm to admire it better.
I didn’t even realize I was holding my breath, but a sigh of relief escapes me, and I smile. And then my brain stutters over the image of her actually doing that, and my cheeks and the back of my neck get hot.
I look away and run a hand through my hair and fail to come up with anything resembling a sentence. “Oh. Um, yeah, I, uh—”
“Oh, you’re so cute when you’re bashful,” she giggles, stepping one leg over me and straddling my hips, her soft thighs making my cock twitch underneath her.
No one can fluster me like she does, and I’m happy to just melt in the feeling of it. It’s such a pleasure to be bewitched by her.
I twine her fingers with mine. I’ve missed being able to touch her like this. “And you’re sure you could put up with this side of me? It’s not exactly as avoidable as I used to think.”
“I wouldn’t want to avoid it,” she says, her expression so soft and sweet, I can’t help but reach up to touch her face. She leans her cheek into my palm and bites the corner of her mouth thoughtfully. “But maybe next time, can we like, drag a futon out here?”
Next time. It pings something so optimistic in me, for once without the painful apprehension of hope. Just certainty.
I like that idea. Maybe we can even build a little open-air shelter to keep it off the ground, but still accessible for a wolf with no opposable thumbs.
I can’t remember the last time I felt so complete. There’s a weight off my chest that I’ve lived with for so long, I forgot it was there.
I foresee waking up naked in the woods with some regularity in my future. Our future, I remind myself, and can’t help but grin at nothing in particular.
After maybe another half hour or so, lingering in the sleepy embrace of morning, breaking a couple more public-indecency laws, we decide it’s time to get moving before we die of exposure. The trail of clothes we find scattered through the woods is an improvement, but it’s still a little chilly.
We even find both of her shoes.
“You really didn’t have to shred my dress,” Elise says, frowning at the way her skirt doesn’t quite cover everything anymore. Oops.
She wrinkles her nose as she picks it up and shakes some dirt off it, the fabric fluttering where I tore through it.
A bunch of pine needles and other debris from sleeping on the ground had stuck to her, embedding lightly in her skin—a great excuse to keep touching her. I couldn’t stop. This morning is like something out of a dream. I don’t want it to end.
“Maybe we can just live out here in the woods,” I suggest teasingly, but, honestly, I’m willing to commit to that idea if she’s down. Sure as hell beats having to go tell my family what happened.
“I’m so hungry, I can’t even listen to jokes.”
“Your house isn’t that far away, y’know.”
We could go there, and I could make her breakfast and our world could stay just the two of us.
“My cottage is like seven miles from the Hayes House. We didn’t run that far into the woods, and I’m not walking seven miles before breakfast.”
“Seven miles if you take the roads,” I point out, but don’t push it further. “Yeah, we probably have to go back to the scene of the crime. At least for a shower and change of clothes. The others probably want to know that we’re alright too.”
“And apologize to Logan for ruining his wedding.”
“Yeah, even if he did start some of it.”
She grimaces, flicking some more pine needles off her legs. “Can we leave out the part where we boned it out in the woods?”
“If we’re going to tell them you’re my mate, that you know about us . . . I think it might be implied. Or just unavoidable.”
Some truths are weird and uncomfortable. It’s just another Band-Aid we have to rip off.
Now that I think about it with a little more perspective, actually, this is the last way I’d have thought I’d be bringing Elise home to my family. Re-introducing her as my mate. Being certain that’s who she was to me.
Maybe that’s what I needed to feel in my heart to find the conviction to tell them before. Or maybe I needed the conviction that this is who she was to me to learn that she was my mate this whole time. I don’t know. There’s no way to really be certain that the universe decides someone is your person like that. But I know I want that to be who she is to me; and to me, that is more than enough proof.
It’s going to be different this time, because my mom’s trying to change.
“Are we going to include the fact that we’ve already been married before?”
I can’t contain the grimace that question inspires. Elise makes a similar face as she watches mine. I shrug and hedge, “Maybe not? It might not be totally necessary.”
She rolls her eyes and gives me a playful shrug. “So, we’re not taking any lessons from this.”
“Hell no. I don’t care for parables or whatever.”
“Oh, ok. Maybe we won’t even bother explaining, then. We’ll just stop in for a shower and change of clothes.” She snorts. God, I love how she does that. It makes me smile instantly.
“And . . . after we shower, and all that. What do you want to do?”
“Then I’ll invite you over to the cottage. You can help me unpack some of the things I started boxing up.”
I don’t even try to hold back the way that makes me grin wider. That’s something to look forward to. No matter how telling my family goes, this is what I wanted, and it’s going to be worth it.
She holds my hand while we walk back toward the house, her pair of heels in my other hand.
“I gotta go back to Boston, water my plants and stuff.” I sigh, already dreading it.
“You have plants?”
“My neighbor has plants. I don’t know when they became my responsibility.”
I bite down against a joke about just abandoning them and staying here forever. I want to be mindful about how we move forward, deliberate about how we both take up space, and make room for each other in our lives. As much as I would love to dive into the unknown with her, I don’t want to trample what she’s built for herself.
“So I’m thinking, we can ease into this. I’ll rent an apartment up here, so you can invite me over or kick me out whenever you feel like. It’s probably going to take a few weeks to get everything squared away.”
“I like that plan.”
“Cool. Very cool.”
“We’re doing this with like, a little more thinking than we did the first time, right?”
“Mm. Marginally. But I’m excited for it all, all over again.”
She squeezes my hand a little tighter as the house comes into view and the trees part to let us out of the woods.
The grounds of the Hayes House feel haunted by yesterday’s disaster, a feeling that lingers heavy and urgent in the air like the smell of something burning.
Everything we set up for the wedding is in shambles. Some of the guest seating and tables are flipped over, there’s torn white bunting and battered bunches of flowers everywhere. The dance floor set up on the patio is scattered with clumps of grass and dirt. The big flower arch at the end of the aisle is laying on the ground.
I’ve done my share of walks of shame, leaving a hookup’s apartment the morning after and sneaking home in yesterday’s clothes to the teasing of old roommates. I’ve never actually felt all that embarrassed about it before, but then again, I’ve never had a whole crowd of spectators.
All the Carrington pack members are gone, from what I can tell. It’s just my family.
Some of my extended family that I haven’t seen in a decade or more are still here, attempting to help my mom clean up the torn-up backyard. Of course, my mom’s too much of a polite host to ask them to leave after things became a disaster.
Well, that’s lovely. They all stop what they’re doing and look up when Elise and I walk out of the woods together. I try to smile and awkwardly wave.
There isn’t really hiding what just happened, I guess. It’s clear we’ve both taken a tumble in the dirt.
Somewhere along the way back I recovered the jacket of my ensemble but I’m still missing my shirt, part of a pant leg and both shoes. I’m carrying Elise’s muddy heels, and while she’s tied the torn part of her skirt together, her pantyhose is so shredded one side has become a loose sock around her ankle.
Everyone here is a werewolf, and, I have to assume, has either the same or greater amount of knowledge about what being mated means, but maybe they don’t necessarily know that I ripped her underwear off her body, or that I donated my shirt to the cleanup effort when it came to all that mess I knotted in her.
I try to resist the urge to check that it’s not that bad, as Laura spots us and bounds over. Behind her, a few more family members including Mom and Aiden trickle out across the lawn to us.
“Holy shit, I can’t believe you came back, and you’re ok? Logan is gone. I don’t know how the wedding can go on now—” Laura stops short right before us, cutting herself off with a loud gasp.
Maybe we don’t even need to think about it that much. Maybe the crescent of dried blood on Elise’s arm is enough.
“Shawn . . .” my mom says, warning in her tone. Her eyes widen when she gets a better look at my mate. “Oh my god, Elise.”
“It’s really not that bad.” Elise shrugs, trying to play it off, but she still winces a little at the movement. Her eyes drift to my relatives staring from the backyard patio, and red scorches her cheeks. She shifts incrementally behind me.
Laura is a lifesaver, and she moves quickly to pluck a white tablecloth off the ground and drape it around Elise like a shawl, or maybe a shock blanket. “What happened?”
Eyes shift back to me, and I glance away, running a hand through my hair.
I don’t really know what to say first. Maybe that it’s ok, she knows we’re all werewolves. We’re obviously way past that, but I don’t know how far we need to backtrack to get everyone on the same page.
“Oh. Um. Right. Hey, Mom, you’ve met Elise. Funny story, she’s also my ex-wife.”
Those are the words that break Elise from her reverie of embarrassment, and her knee-jerk reaction is to elbow me in the side. “Hey! Why are you leading with that?”
“I mean, all of it’s bad,” I mutter, shrugging and rubbing the spot.
Mom’s face drains of all blood. I’m honestly a little worried she’ll faint or something. Eyes darting rapidly between us, she just echoes the words, “Ex-wife?”
I try really hard not to glance to the relatives by the patio.
“We got divorced like eight years ago. There’s a lot to catch everyone up on,” I explain weakly. I try to smile to maybe encourage a more cheerful mood, but it probably comes out as an anxious grimace.
“Oh, you weren’t here for that part. So, first, Shawn was all like, put me back in, coach, to Elise,” Aiden is recapping for my mother, in what might be the most unhelpful way possible.
Yesterday evening is a little hazy to me at this point, but I swear I did not call my ex-wife “coach” at any point. Sure, most of the details are fuzzy because of full-moon-fuckery, but not that fuzzy.
“Did you really use the words, ‘put me back in’?” Laura asks immediately, making a face like she’s just barely holding back on a joke too dirty to tell in front of my mother.
“Obviously, because it worked on me,” Elise replies dryly before I can tell Laura to can it. She gives me a look that is completely unreserved in how happy she is, and everything else in the world melts away.
“You know what, you can embellish however you like, I’m going to find my mate a change of clothes and a hot shower,” I say, and I take the opportunity to tug Elise away.
We make it maybe another ten feet before my mom repeats, “Mate?”
I wince and stop on the stairs up to the patio, glancing over my shoulder. “How much do you really want me to explain?”
“Oh, that’s why you asked about . . . ugh, ew.” Aiden grimaces.
Deanna has one arm crossed over her chest and the other supporting her head as she processes it all. Or attempts to and just gets stuck somewhere along the way.
“I love you both,” she says at last, before shaking her head and waving her hands between the both of us. “But what the fuck?”
Aiden looks like he’s never heard Mom swear before, and I can count on one hand how many times I have.
“Mom . . .”
“I need a minute, but I need to figure out what to do with all this mess first,” she says, gesturing to the lawn, and looks resigned to that. It’s probably easier to tackle things within her power.
She stands still, looking out over all the destruction for a moment, before she steps forward and hugs Elise and me both. “You’re both grounded.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“Let’s take a minute, and sit down, get a glass of wine,” Laura offers gently, sliding her arm through my mother’s, even though it’s probably ten a.m. at best.
“Yeah, Aiden and me will handle the rest of the family,” I add, because I know that’s probably what she’s most worried about right now.
“Aiden and I,” my mother corrects me out of sheer rote memory when she pulls back; it doesn’t look like she even registers speaking.
“No, I said me, not you.” I roll my eyes. Elise snorts, and, when I catch her eye, she breaks out into a wide smile. God, I’ve never loved anyone so much. I never want to let go of her.
Elise puts a hand on Mom’s shoulder. “Everything’s ok. We can handle it.”
She looks at Elise, and for all the shock still remaining on her face, there is some warmth. “Thank you, dear.”
Laura tugs on my mom’s arm and leads her back inside. Once they’re out of earshot, Aiden sidles forward and says to us in an undertone, “Logan hasn’t come back yet.”
I grimace. I don’t remember everything that happened during our fight, but I don’t think either of us did any lasting damage. It was just a bit rougher than our usual tussles.
I shrug, honestly glad that he’s not around right now. “He’ll be fine. He’s just gotta lick his wounds a bit first.”
I turn around and find Elise looking curiously at the patio full of distant family. “Is that your whole family?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
Her stare remains on them, as she shifts her weight from one foot to another, considering the overturned chairs, the flower arch that could probably be propped up again. “I mean, we eloped on a crazy whim the first time. And, well, it’s no Atlantic City, but . . .”
I watch Elise’s gaze sweep across the lawn. I’m pretty sure there’s no way I’m catching her drift. Still, the endorphins from the other night give me the unwarranted confidence to catch her eye and ask, “Are you about to suggest we throw taking it slow to the wind?”
Elise rolls her eyes, but she grins. “Well, we’re already here. We can always just get divorced again, right?”
This utter madwoman. I love her. I did say I would do it all over again, and I mean it. Marrying her again is going to be such an adventure, and I can’t wait for all of it.
“You sure can try,” I tease, stepping into her space and cupping my hands around her face. I brush a speckle of dirt off her cheek, and dip down for a kiss that is more grinning against her face than it is anything else. I pull back for just a second.
“You’ll still be mated to me though, right?”
She clasps her hand over mine. “You can’t get rid of me that easily.”
“Clearly. It barely worked the first time.”