The man is like medicine.
Sometimes I forget.
“These old assholes,” Ty mutters one night during this endless in-between week. “Always up in my face, telling me that I should learn respect and bend a knee to my betters. Always whining that they don’t have what we have here. Mind you, not one of them bothered to listen to me when I told them how to do it themselves.”
“The exact point I keep making,” I agree.
He runs his hand over my head as I lie there, limp on his chest. His voice is low. Something like proud. “I hope you also tell them that you’re a better queen to me without a crown than any of their women could dream of being.”
I smile against his skin. “I assume that goes without saying.”
Then I crawl my way down the length of him, passing all the delectable ridges in his hard torso. I taste him as I go, lowering myself until I can take that giant cock of his in my hands, lick him until he groans, and then open my mouth wide to take him in deep.
Not that he lets me do that for too long without taking control.
He holds me down until I’m sobbing out his name. Then he makes me scream it.
The next morning, he wakes me up with an arm beneath my belly to tilt my hips up. He gets his teeth on my neck as he pounds into me, making me come hard and long, groaning out the glory of it into his soft mattress and his sleeping furs.
“Happy Thursday, babe,” he growls in my ear, his deep voice rich with satisfaction and laughter. “Kick ass today. It’s not even wolf week yet.”
I think about that when I stop and get coffee in Jacksonville, running into a little party of wolves from the Dakotas. I’m sure they tell me which Dakota, but I don’t track it.
“Must be fun,” says one of them, a little shit of a male wolf that I vaguely remember as a cub five years ago. “Acting like a human girl. Thinking you’re one of them.”
“The way you think you’re a wolf?” I reply, with a smirk.
He doesn’t like that, though some of his friends laugh. I don’t have to make nice with assy cublings. Only their kings.
But it’s a common theme. After I get my coffee, I walk back outside and find another group of wolves. They’re from all over, and they’re a little too interested in a couple of human old ladies trying to access one of the shops.
Human old ladies I know.
“Good morning, Mrs. Bloom,” I say. I nod at her friend. They were both librarians when I was in school, and I thought they were old back then. Now they practically creak. “Mrs. Schroeder.”
“Happy holidays, Maddox,” says Mrs. Bloom. “The tourists are already taking over the streets, I guess.”
“I didn’t think we had tourists these days,” says Mrs. Schroeder. “I thought they got eaten.” I remember then that she was the one who let me read too much Stephen King at a tender age.
“It’s that time of year,” I reply merrily.
I turn back to the wolves after the old ladies go inside. “Leave them alone,” I say, as softly as I’m able. “Or you can take it up not just with Ty but with the other two powers in this valley. Believe me when I tell you that none of them will be happy.”
“Do you mean your sorceress friend?” one of them asks. Another snot-nosed male. “Or do you mean the vampire?”
“You know that you’re supposed to go to an oracle, hear what they have to say, and then go back to being a wolf, right?” asks another. Also snot-nosed. Also male. “You’re not supposed to act like you’re an oracle yourself.”
“I’m pretty sure I can tell your future,” I say mildly. “If you keep talking.”
“Everyone gets it, Maddox,” says the lone female in the group, who, in fairness, is likely here to find a mate. I’d be bitter too if fools like these were my options. “You’re not like the rest of us. You break tradition whenever you feel like it. Congratulations. Not everybody has that kind of leeway.”
What I don’t say is not everybody has that kind of guts. I don’t say it out of respect for the female, who admittedly doesn’t have the choices I do. There’s no Ty on her horizon.
But that’s what I’m thinking as I walk back to my truck, and then wish that I’d had a fight with both sets of wolves, because Johanna is waiting for me.
She’s leaning against the side of my Explorer, looking around at all the wolves and humans and assorted other creatures on Jacksonville’s main street as if they’re all out here specifically to irritate her.
Though when she sees me, it’s pretty clear that I’m the one who irritates her the most.
