When college started again, I found myself more distracted than ever. I found myself sitting in class, present one minute and the next, I’d be thinking of Jules. Sometimes I thought about usual things, like what we were going to do that weekend, or I wondered what trouble he was getting into in class. Other times, I’d think of something totally random, like his lips. I’d think of them for no particular reason and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Sometimes I thought of the way he ran his tongue along his bottom lip when he’d just kissed Storm. He did it slowly, without thinking. I could tell he was doing it to taste her. Once I started on that train of thought, I couldn’t shake it. I’d think of his lips for hours. I’d think of the way he threw his head back when I made him laugh sometimes. Sometimes, not all the time, he’d suck his bottom lip into his mouth when he stopped laughing and would scrap his teeth against the fullness of his lip as he released it. Sometimes it got so bad that when we walked home together, I’d try to make him laugh just to see if he’d do it.
Sometimes he did.
Sometimes he didn’t.
I’d been a twice daily masturbator for years. It wasn’t a problem. It was perfectly normal for an unshifted shifter my age. Shifting was like a second puberty, and as we got closer to our first shift, the worse it got. We might not have known much about the ins and outs of shifting, but even we knew that. Everyone knew that. Things being what they were, in the weeks after Storm left, I found it necessary to bump myself up to three times per day. If not four.
Sometimes it helped.
Sometimes it didn’t.
Jules’s mood stayed low all through January and through February, too. It picked up out of nowhere in March.
“Wanna hit the town?” he said one Saturday night.
“Sure, why not?” I was surprised that he wanted to venture out. We’d hardly been out since Storm left. He’d been too busy moping.
We went out and we had a lot of fun. Jules was working the room and I was skulking at the bar—his word, not mine. He was talking to a cute brunette. She was laughing at everything he said, so at least from where I was standing, he looked like he had a good shot. I was toying with the idea of heading home. I wasn’t particularly in the mood to find a girl to smile at that night. I was about to head over to tell him I was leaving when I saw him lean down and whisper something in her ear. His lips moved slowly and deliberately. I could see him breathing into her hair. Her eyebrows dipped down and her mouth dropped open ever so slightly. She gave him a sideways glance and he nodded. A big smile spread across her face. He leaned down again and that time, I watched him closely enough to read his lips saying, “That’s him over there.”
The brunette followed his gaze, and her mouth formed a small circle and then broke into a smile. Jules took her hand and they walked in my direction.
“You coming, or what?” he said, giving me the cockiest smile I’d seen in my life.
I didn’t answer. I just set my drink down and followed him.
The brunette’s name was Sandy. She was pretty and very, very sweet. She must have spent some time that day baking because she smelled like vanilla and frosting. She was three or four years older than us and worked as a receptionist at a local accounting firm. She was no shifter, and she was awfully sweet, but I tell you, Sandy was wild for a human.
“D’you guys play with each other or is all this for me?” she asked when we got back to her place.
“Uh . . .” was all I could get out. I could tell right away that I really, really liked Sandy. I liked her face and her body, and I liked the way she smelled, but mostly, I liked the way her mind worked.
“Nah,” said Jules, “we’re all yours.”
She undressed us both. She did it slowly. Neither of us moved. We let her take the lead. She had us stand side by side and then she dropped to her knees. She took turns blowing us. When she blew me, she held Jules in her hand and stroked him firmly. Her coordination was nothing short of impressive. We had to stand close for her to be able to touch both of us at the same time. Really close. My arm was pressed up against his. His skin was hot. Hotter than hers. I could feel the hair on his forearm brush up against my skin. It agitated me. It made me feel wild, too. It made me feel even wilder than Sandy. It was one hell of a night. It was by far the best night I’d had since Storm left. By the marked improvement in Jules’s mood, it was the best night he’d had in a while, too.
Jules and I never spoke about it exactly. It’s not like we plotted or planned for it to happen. It wasn’t a deliberate decision or anything like that; it was just that over the next few months, more often than not, when we went out we ended up sharing a woman between us.
12
Bythetimesummerrolled around at the end of third year, I was having shifting dreams almost every night. Sometimes they were easy to shake, and other times they stayed with me all day. I thought constantly about what Storm said about our pack and Dalton messing with our magick. I’d turned twenty-one by then, and when I wasn’t horny or angry, I was riddled with anxiety.
“Do you ever worry about the fact we haven’t shifted yet?” I asked Jules when I couldn’t take the stress of keeping it in any longer. It was a sultry night and we were at the creek, sitting and sweating under the willow tree.
“Nah,” he said, as if the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. “Why would I?”
“Because we’re both twenty-one now. Twenty is the usual age for our pack to have their first shift and that’sreallylate compared to other packs. Don’t you ever worry that our pack hasn’t bred since we were born and now we’re not shifting? Maybe Storm was right. Maybe our magick is getting fucked? Have you ever thought about that?”
“Nah, I’ve never thought about that. Don’t need to. I know why I haven’t shifted yet.”
“Whyhaven’t you shifted?” I couldn’t imagine a single reason on earth why anyone would stay in this awful limbo one second longer than they needed to.
“’Cause I’m waiting for you, dumbass.”
I was quiet for a long while after that. Eventually, Jules said, “Come on, I’ll push you on the swing.”
Jules had a very, very limited amount of time he could sit still for. I knew I’d already used up that time and then some, so I got up and begrudgingly squeezed my legs into the swing. He started pushing slowly, waiting until I had plenty of momentum, before pushing hard. I leaned back as he did it and tried not to think about how good his hands felt on the small of my back. The wind hit my face as I swung forward, and on the way back my hair fell across my face like a dark curtain. The next push was hard. I leaned back, kicking my legs out in front of me and sailed through the air.
Thwack!
