Enchanted cookies from the spellcasters.
Mousse made by the angels.
Chocolate cheesecake from the sirens.
We attended the world's most uncomfortable family dinner halfway through the week, and it was... fine.Gwen told our parents what had happened with Simon, and I tried to be supportive while they all cried and hugged each other.
They hugged me, too.
Thank god Callum was there to hold my hand, because at one point, I was seriously considering making a run for it.
Maybe after heat, I'd be more interested or more able to try to reconnect with everyone, but at the moment, I was in survival mode. All I could really think about was chocolate and my mate and sex.
We had a lot of near-sex, because of that.
Alot.
Callum did, in fact, prove himself insatiable, and I sure as hell wasn't complaining.
After a challenge where I spent the entire thing sitting on Callum's lap, sweating like crazy even with the help of his magic (outside of a short trip to the car, where I rode his fingers to take the edge off), I was forced to accept that heat was coming in hot.
Sable couldn't take over when I was this close to heat, and she was so sleepy that communication was hit or miss. When heatreallyhit, I wouldn't be able to talk to her at all.
I'd have to go through it alone.
At our dinner at the café, Jonah warned me with the pack link that I didn't have long.
Everyone there could see that I was so hot I was dizzy and wobbly, and they mostly left me alone. When I caught Liv's gaze, she nodded, understanding what I wasn't saying.
Callum held me close through the meal, his blissfully cold magic wrapping around me and radiating to the point where almost everyone else in the cafe had been wearing sweatshirts. Darius was the only one who didn't.
We were both quiet on the drive home. Callum's grip on the steering wheel was tight, and there was frost climbing beneath his hands again.
He knew the situation.
No amount of oral or finger-banging had helped ease my need for more than fifteen or twenty minutes, even when I wasn'tfully in heat. What I'd been told about mated pairs was definitely correct.
Tears burned my eyes when we got home and I found our kitchen table covered in a spread of chocolate fondue with sliced fruit and baked goods to dip in it.
He was doing everything he could to make this easier for me.
Callum sat me on his lap and held me close while I tried to enjoy it. He didn’t eat.
Heat was hanging heavily over my head, clouding my mind and making me desperate to curl up in my nest with Callum. Naked.
So, so naked.
I needed him so badly.
"Thank you,"I murmured into his mind, when my stomach was so full that I couldn't handle anything else.
"Don't thank me. I can't take care of you the way a male werewolf could." He had to grit the words out.
"It's okay. I don't want you to be a werewolf."I leaned back against his chest and closed my eyes, trying to soak in the last few minutes I had with him before my personal hell began."I love you just like this."
His body stiffened.
The stash of snacks and drinks he'd collected for my heat (in an attempt to make up for his lack of werewolfism) filled not one buttworolling carts on my side of the bed.
