Chapter Twenty-one
Ethan
If you asked him, after he’d picked up his stumbling ass off the gross, sticky floor and managed to pry the ninth—or tenth, but who was counting?—cocktail glass out of his numb fingers, Ethan might have been willing to admit that he was smashed off his fucking face.
But it was a glorious smashed.
Sweat beaded on his skin and dripped down the hallow of his spine, soaked through his T-shirt, and made him grateful all over again for the impromptu haircut he’d given himself. He felt sticky and light, blood hot and pounding in his veins to the beat of the music as he shuffled and bounced to the bass—if badly, his timing inhibited by drink and a lack of practice.
He’d sunk himself into the heaving crowd of bodies on the dance floor, arms up, and given himself to the curtain of kinetic energy that pulsed skin-to-skin through the writhing mass of humanity. Thousands of kilowatts of energy that they didn’t even realize they were generating, all of it pouring into his skin smoother than the last sip of his vodka tonic.
He had no sense of the hour passing, nor the number of times his feet carried him back to the bar where each time a bartender appeared fortuitously in front of him and eager to serve. Until his vision started swimming from the booze and the dark and the bouncing neon lights that would leave his head aching tomorrow—but that was tomorrow, he’d worry about his body then, now he just wanted to float along the club’s energy until even his teeth were buzzing with it.
Ethan threw his head back and laughed just for the joy of laughing, not because there was anything good about his life, but because if anyone had asked him at that very moment, he’d have replied: How much worse could it get?
There was a ghost shouting in his ear, demanding to know whether he’d had enough yet, but all Ethan could think was that no, no he had not had nearly enough.
For the first time in a month, he felt bodies press in against him on all sides and except for the initial flinch, he didn’t feel like running away to shower scrub his skin raw. Instead, he pressed back into a pair of strong arms and hands that had no hesitation about grabbing onto his hips, and wrapped his own arm around an obliging pair of dark angular shoulders belonging to a woman who smiled at him and danced closer. The pink and green neon lights glowed like constellations in the stiff kinks in her hair, winking at him as she bobbed her head back and forth.
“You need another drink,” a masculine voice informed him, rumbled directly into his ear so as to be heard over the noise, a hot gust of stale air against Ethan’s neck that made him shiver and nod in agreement. Almost immediately he regretted giving up both the empty glass his dancing companion lifted from him and the wall of heat that had been keeping his backside company. He shivered, cold all of a sudden and grasping futilely at the woman who he’d been dancing with as she moved away and deeper onto the dance floor.
Left alone, Ethan’s feet ground to a shaky halt. He dropped his head back, staring blindly up into the dark as all of the lights in the club cut off together. The music played on, pulsing steady as a heartbeat.
“You’re not going to tell me this is about helping me!” Adam snarled in his ear, a gust of cold static that glimmered through the lines of energy he’d been soaking up all evening. Ethan tried to brush the ghost away, but he was persistent, this dead man he’d picked up by association. “Why are you doing this to Pat? How do you think he’d feel if he walked through that door and saw you grinding up on some big, dumb stand-in.”
“Don’t be rude, you don’t know, he could be a—grad student! Rocket scientist! Whatever,” Ethan slurred, shaking the sweat out of his eyes. He could feel the swell of music growing, building to a crescendo in the fervor of humanity moving on the dance floor.
“You said we were here to help with my case! I don’t recognize— This isn’t—”
“Do you think,” Ethan said, head lolling, “you could shut up for one fucking minute and go haunt the guy who actually remembers you?”
Silence from his kibitzer, and then Ethan felt a cold slick shiver slide down across his skin. It wasn’t the ghost, it was—unfamiliar, a purely supernatural sensation that made every hair on his body stand up in alarm. Ethan shivered and pulled his sense back into his body, trying to force some sort of coherence into his head as he struggled futilely against the booze-fugue, as the animal parts of his brain screamed in innate terror at—what?
Jerked abruptly back into his flesh, Ethan’s head swung ponderously, eyes scanning the crowd, tripping over his feet as he turned. It was impossible to make out more than flashes as the pitch black club continued to thrum with periodic bursts of light. And he knew, he knew in his gut that there was something dangerous on the floor with him. Not another dancer, something else, like a shark who has plunged into the midst of shoaling fish.
Ethan felt strong hands grab him from behind and he jerked, spun, looked down to stare into the pale grinning face of a predator. He throat tightened down as her fingers traced the lines of his chest, smoothing up his body and curling around the back of his neck. She stared into his eyes as she set their bodies swaying softly in counterpoint to the pulse of the EDM spinning out of the sound system. He supposed that anyone else would have considered her…pretty if not precisely gorgeous, but there was something about the slope of her mouth, the fall of blonde hair under the shifting pink and blue lights as they winked back into existence above them, that made his heart stutter and stop, his entire body seizing with dread as images flooded into his brain.
Her fingers toyed with the edge of his hairline, cool and buzzing with a kind of magic that certainly made his teeth buzz but not in a way that felt exciting. Ethan stood frozen in her grasp, rooted by the soft floral scent that wafted off her skin without a hint of sweat, just something faintly metallic as she leaned up on tiptoes and slipped her tongue seamlessly into his mouth. That buzzing magic filled his senses, but it wasn’t like sparks or fireworks, it felt like the totality of his nightmares made flesh and pressed against him. He could hear his dead sister’s laugh echoing in his ear, see her in the flashes of light and pale skin, but for a terrible minute he couldn’t make his limbs move to push the interloper away.
If you’d asked him, after he’d ripped himself away from the clutches of the fucking vampire trying to suck his face, Ethan would have admitted that he was entirely too drunk to deal with everything screaming through his brain—fear, disgust, guilt, oh fuck, Patrick—and it was that thought, that name mumbled by his fumbling drunk tongue into her cool, bloodless lips, that finally snapped Ethan out of his panic. He dug his nails into her arms, summoned his magic, and let it pour out of him into her until she jerked away, skin smoking. Her eyes glinted, animal green irises in the dark as her pupils narrowed into angry vertical slits.
“Fuck you!” she snarled, and he could see the flash of fangs now as well, even though his head was spinning from the drink and the magic and— “I was only being friendly!”
“You call that friendly?” he slurred, tripping over his feet as he backed away.
“You want to see what unfriendly looks like?” but her words were half-drowned out by the other dancers as the music changed into an upbeat remix of—something, something bright and young that Ethan didn’t have the mental capacity to recognize.
He turned and started shoving at sweating bodies, afraid to use his magic even if it would have made things easier, afraid that if he let it go again he’d kill something—norms were so much more delicate than wolves and vampires, even drunk he could remember that much. It was akin to swimming upstream, but even once he’d made it into the damp night air, Ethan couldn’t make himself wait long enough to get his bearings.
By the time he stopped, hand raised half-heartedly for a taxi that wasn’t anywhere in sight, he realized that he was lost and not even his ghost—either one of them—was anywhere in sight.
Patrick
He hadn’t been home for long before the front door opened with a bang. Pat turned, confused, not drunk but maybe a little fuzzy around the edges. He felt drained, narrowed down from his conversation with Vector, wrung out from the emotional high of finally admitting his fears to someone who could understand them, and he wasn’t in the mood to continue his spat with Ethan. He felt too raw to face his mate’s sharp tongue.
A quick glance around the living room had shown that Ethan had attempted to clean up the chaos he’d made of the downstairs, but there had been no clue as to the mage’s location.
Now Pat stared in shock at the pale, sweating visage of his partner leaning in the front doorway. He smelled strongly of—so many things that Pat sneezed, the wolf instinctively shaking the smell of strangers and hormones out of his nose as it tried to put the scents into order, but Pat knew what it meant. Alcohol, lots of people, smoke, which no club could ever quite get out of its atmosphere no matter how many years it had been banned: Ethan had been out drinking and dancing too by the disheveled look of him. Something about the smell reminded Pat of that morning they’d met in the Captain’s office; him tired and frustrated after a night dealing with the Walker crime scene only to have this Detective Ellison roll into his sphere smelling like stale sweat and liquor and someone else’s spunk from where he had been out fucking all night.
Conflicting emotions pulled at Pat, his wolf too shocked at first to snarl and rage, and it was that hesitation that gave him time to notice that despite all of the rest of it, Ethan didn’t actually smell like sex. And Pat hated the cold wash of relief that swept through him as he realized his mate hadn’t gone so far as cheating on him, at least not like that.
“What—?”
The rest of his question was cut off by a hard mouth on his as Ethan crossed the short hallway and grabbed him, pulling their bodies into sharp contact that made every word in Pat’s head fly right back out. He surged into the other man, cupping Ethan’s face in both hands as he tried to make the angle easier, shivering at the feel of teeth biting into his lips. He whined at the taste of Ethan in his mouth again, finally finally, sharp and turned up to eleven, the scent of him not entirely obscured by the smell of everyone who had dared put their hands on him tonight. And Pat knew that he had to erase every one one of those hands, until Ethan smelled like no one except the two of them, otherwise Pat feared it would drive him mad.
He bit back, not as hard maybe—not with his wolf, sinking fangs into the smooth unbroken skin of Ethan’s neck, to mark him, to make it clear to any interloper who ever saw him that he belonged to Patrick, and not to them—but hard enough so that when Ethan pulled away to catch his breath, his lips were soft and slick and rubbed raw both from the kisses and where Pat’s stubble had marked him.
“Don’t stop,” the mage said, breath hitching as he dug his nails into Pat’s back and tried to pull them closer together. But there was no closer, not while they were still wearing so many clothes and standing in the middle of the sodding living room.
Pat grabbed Ethan’s hip hard with one hand and with the other peeled his T-shirt up and over his head, flinging it away. He felt marginally better the second he had nothing but soft skin under his hands, sticky with dried sweat though it might have been. Just to feel Ethan without the other man cringing away from him felt like a blessing as Pat pressed his face into his mate’s neck, rooting around for that distinctive tang that spoke to Ethan’s magic, that smelled distinctly of him—and lately, of them. Ethan shivered a little as Pat opened his mouth against tendons and lapped gently just to taste; it was almost better than the scent.
Long arms reached around his shoulders and held on as he pressed them back into the hallway. Ethan’s back thudded against the wall at the same time the mage dug his fingers into Pat’s hair, pulling his head up so that he could bring their mouths back together, kissing and kissing him until Pat’s face felt hot, his dick ached, and his lungs screamed for oxygen. He pressed hard into Ethan, angling their hips together. The other man obliged him by hitching one leg over Pat’s hip, helped along by his hands as he slid them down, cupping Ethan’s ass and hoisting him higher up against the wallpaper. He groaned into the kiss as Ethan wrapped both legs around his waist, trusting Pat to hold them both up, and grinding their dicks together even though the angle wasn’t the best. It still felt—
Pat tore his mouth away from Ethan and ran his tongue down the man’s soft cheek—he must have shaved more than just his head before he left the house, Pat realized with another jealous twinge that made him growl under his breath. He laved the skin, tracing the taste of salt across Ethan’s skin as he tried to squirm against Pat’s hand digging into his ass.
“I want—I want you—”
“Yes, you have me,” Pat murmured into his skin.
The hand in his hair pulled viciously, making his eyes water. “No, I want you to kiss me,” Ethan demanded.
Pat couldn’t see any reason to argue, even if he would have loved to continue tracing every inch of Ethan with his tongue, if Ethan wanted kisses then Pat would oblige him. He licked into Ethan’s mouth, hot and sloppy without any kind of finesse or attempt to appear less over-eager than he felt. He didn’t have as much experience kissing as the other man did, or at fucking for that matter; to this day Ethan remained the only person whom Pat had ever felt the desire to couple with, and while the disparity in their experience often left a kernel of doubt to germinate and grow in the back of his mind about his ability to satisfy the other man in that way, in moments like these—when he actually had Ethan in his grasp, when their mouths met and their teeth bit in, when Ethan shuddered and moaned, hands pulling him closer—the doubt vanished from Pat, leaving behind nothing but a certainty that he was precisely where he was supposed to be: pressed skin-to— Oh.
Pat pulled away, grinning like an idiot as he let go of Ethan to tear his jacket off and start in on the buttons on his shirt. Ethan made no move to assist him, just slouched there against the wall with his lips soft and wet, face tinged with red that reflected up off the flush staining his cheeks and forehead. Green eyes that looked unusually dark in the half light watched him as Pat tore at his buttons, ripping off one or two in his haste to be rid of the shirt, joined on the floor soon after by his tank top and loafers as he kicked them off as well. Less encumbered now, Pat reached for Ethan again only for the mage to intercept him, their fingers tangling together in a parody of two lovers holding hands.
Ethan pulled at him, backing towards the stairs. “Come on,” he said, not quite meeting Pat’s eyes, voice low and rough, already turning away.
Pat followed because of course he had to follow, was physically and emotionally incapable of doing anything else, tripping over his feet in his excitement as he hurried up to the master bedroom. Ethan had stopped in the doorway to work on his jeans, peeling them off before he walked over to the side of the bed. Pat enjoyed watching the flex of his ass as he moved, eyes slipping down long pale legs covered in fine hairs, darker blond than the hair on Ethan’s head.
He ripped at his own belt, hands clumsy still with his anticipation as it threatened to bubble over. He was hard and tenting the wool, and he didn’t stop until he was naked, one hand wrapped around the base of his cock as his eyes slid up Ethan’s back. The other man just stood there, head tilted down as though he were studying the bed.
Pat let go of himself and crossed the room to press his hips up against the curve of Ethan’s ass and leaned in to skate his mouth over every exposed inch of his mate’s skin he could reach. A shiver raced over Ethan’s skin, raising goosebumps. Pat licked and sucked a bright red mark into the bump of his shoulder, flexing his hips in time with his tongue as he worked, until his heart beat so hard and loud in his chest he would be surprised if Ethan couldn’t hear it too. He ran greedy fingers up Ethan’s sides, stroking soft skin, reaching around to trace the dips in the planes of his chest—less defined than he remembered, but still firm and yielding in ways that made Pat catch his breath. He tweaked one nipple between thumb and forefinger, desperate for Ethan to make a nose, and he wasn’t disappointed.
The other man tensed, head raised while a soft, “Ahh,” fell from his lips, an exhalation that sounded somewhere between desire and pain.
Pat nosed at the short strands of hair behind Ethan’s ear, pressed a kiss to the same inch of skin, and then demanded in a rough voice, “Tell me what you want.”
Silence for a long moment while Ethan’s chest rose and fell under his hands, skin flushed, his heart beating in counterpoint to Pat’s own pulse through skin and fingertips, fresh clean sweat smelling of the mage and no one else dampening the edge of his hairline, and then Ethan pulled away, stepped up and knelt on the bed.
He dropped his head and shoulders, softly submissive in a way that made desire leap up in Pat’s gut, and his voice when he answered was rough. “Touch me, please.”
Excitement made his hands clumsy as Pat rid himself of his socks, sheepish, and then came up short when he remembered that they weren’t in his bedroom, no matter that it was the mirror image of his house, he wasn’t about to use lube that belonged to one of the kids who usually lived here for crying out loud. He leaned into Ethen’s back, squeezing his shoulder, as he said a hurried, “One sec. Just let me find something to use.”
“There’s lube in bathroom.”
“I’m not using a nineteen year old’s shitty—”
“No,” Ethan interrupted him, still in that same soft, rough voice, “it was in my bag when we—I had it in my shaving kit.”
“Oh, well in that case,” Pat said, pressing another fleeting kiss to Ethan’s neck, overjoyed that he could do that again. He hunted up the lube and returned to the bedroom, already smearing it over his dick and fingers. He grabbed Ethan’s hip with his clean hand and reach down, urging him to spread his knees wider so that Pat could slip a couple of fingers over his mate’s hole, shivering at the feel of soft, pliable skin giving under his ministrations. Pat tucked his face into Ethan’s neck as he worked first one and then a second finger into his body, testing the resistance and then the give as Ethan loosened up, knees sliding another inch apart. Pat slid his clean hand up to his shoulder, urging him further up the the bed and onto his hands and knees.
“Fuck,” he groaned, watching his fingers stroke in and out in an agonizing rhythm, slowly, in part because they hadn’t done this in awhile and he didn’t want to hurt the other man, but also because a secret part of Pat enjoyed the sensation. There was something grossly intimate about reaching inside his mate’s body, touching such a delicate, secret part of him, feeling him give around Pat’s intrusion, feeling every shift of the muscle as it tensed and then relaxed, feeling the way Ethan’s body trembled under his touch after so long spent cut off from touching. Pat wanted to savor this, but he also wanted to feel it around his dick too, so he pulled away after a minute or two and took himself in hand pressing his hips up against the curve of Ethan’s ass, kept pushing until the tip slid in with a slick noise accompanied by pressure that made Pat gasp and swear and press his face against Ethan’s back, shuddering breaths racing in and out of his lungs while he struggled not to go too fast, not to lose himself, not to come.
Finally, he felt strong enough to keep moving, working his dick into Ethan’s plaint body and then pulling back out in a languorous stroke that made goosebumps race over his skin. Pat kept his hold on the base of dick as he pulled all the way out, eyes trained on the place there they met as he pressed in again, entranced by the way the mage’s flesh parted around him.
“Fucking, shit.” Pat let go of his dick and grabbed Ethan’s hips in both hands. He used a bit of wolf-strength to shift them higher on the bed and started to move his hips, keeping as much of his dick seated in the hot, slick clench of Ethan’s ass as he could, savoring that too.
Pat straightened up, spine cracking as his hips pumped, fingers bruising, and his nose full of the scent of the other man as their combined sweat mingled, the warmth from their bodies strengthening it to blot out all the other scents that Ethan had carried home with him.
The wolf rose up in him, a delighted, snarling thing that raked through his blood, singing for him to howl his pleasure to the whole damned street, to the city.
Pat leaned forward and pressed Ethan hard into the bed, until it shook with the movement of his body stroking harder and faster into his mate. He had one elbow planted on the mattress, the other hand digging into Ethan’s hip to hold him steady while Pat worked him over, and his teeth pressing still human-dull into pale skin. He gnawed a little on Ethan’s shoulder, feeling his orgasm coiling up in his gut, and it was only the immediacy of it that brought Pat back to himself enough to realize that the least he could do was give the other man a helping hand. With his slick hand, he reached for the Ethan’s cock, the wolf eager to feel its mate’s arousal, to bring him off, to taste his come, and he was brought up short when his fingers found Ethan soft.
The other man tensed, one hand coming around to grab Pat’s arm, pushing his hand away but it was too late. Pat froze, lust and confusion fighting for dominance in his brain.
“No,” Ethan said in a choked voice, “No, don’t—don’t.” His nails raked over Pat’s wrist, trying to pull his hand away from his dick.
A numbness bloomed in Pat’s chest. Ethan grabbed his hand and tangled their fingers together. He shook himself, tried to shake a little of the wolf out of his brain, tried to focus on what was happening. His hips stuttered to a stop, torn between pulling out and pressing forward again.
“Wha—”
Ethan’s hips skittered, a little aborted shimmy as though he were trying to get Pat to keep moving. But his voice sounded—it wasn’t just rough, it sounded wrong now that Pat was paying attention, as he demanded, “Please just make it—don’t stop.”
Something sharp and salty stung Pat’s nose, not sweat, not come—
Dread curdled in his gut, that numbness spreading worse than anything he’d ever felt before, and as quickly as it had come, the fire in his blood retreated, arousal shrinking away from whatever was happening here. Whatever was really going on, because it wasn’t—it wasn’t what he’d thought. Not—
“Ethan?” Pat asked, more a whisper because he felt fear too.
Beneath him, Ethan tried to speak and couldn’t, the sound of the words choking him, making him cough as he tried to get his breath back, his fingers tightening reflexively around Pat’s as his hips moved. Pat slipped out of him, and Ethan pulled away, leaving him feeling cold, letting go of their hands as he curled down into the bedspread, entire body starting to shake silently.
“Fuck,” Ethan rasped in a wet voice, face hidden in his arms, fingers clenched around the duvet.
He looked small and fragile under Pat, worse than something breakable—Pat tore his thoughts away before the guilt could choke him. He didn’t know what to do. What Ethan wanted. He’d said, he’d told Pat that he wanted him, wanted to fuck, he’d— But he hadn’t, and he wasn’t, and now— Pat needed Ethan to say something, anything, to tell him what to do, and he hated himself a little bit for needing that when the other man was so visibly upset.
“Did I hurt you?” he asked, lost.
“Stop staring at me,” Ethan said, voice loud and harsh, a slap to Pat’s senses.
Pat jerked off the bed, erection gone, stinking of sex. He looked away, thoughts racing. He thought he might be sick.
“What can I do?” he whispered, desperate for the mage to explain what was going through his head, but Ethan’s shoulders just heaved as he kept his face pressed into the bed.
With no better idea what to do, Pat fled to the bathroom. He leaned against the closed door, listening to Ethan’s erratically beating heart for what felt like hours until there came the sound of clothes being pulled on, and quiet again until eventually Pat could tell that Ethan had fallen into an exhausted sleep. Then he turned on the shower as hot as it would go and scoured his skin until even his wolf anatomy struggled to keep up with the abuse.
He slept downstairs on the sofa for the second night in a row, but before he went to sleep, he made sure to go through and pick up all of their abandoned clothing, thought about running a load of laundry, and then had to ball it up in a garbage bag, which he left in the garage where at least he wouldn’t be able to smell it.