Just because Casey had always lived in one place and spent all his heats there didn’t mean he didn’t know about the options. In certain moods he spent a lot of time window shopping online for options, in fact.

They had five days to go before the full moon when he looked up from his phone, confirmed that the scenery outside was Still North Dakota, somewhere between Devils Lake and Minot, and then asked Adam, “Have you ever been around a gas fireplace?”

Adam frowned. “Uh... no, I don’t think so. Not while it was burning, anyway.”

Casey nodded and backed out of that listing. There weren’t many options, but in December just about everything there was, was available, even on relatively short notice, even taking into account their full moon werewolf policies.

“How do you feel about renting a cabin for the full moon?”

Adam glanced over at him again, his frown only getting warier. “Uh... yes? If...”

Casey waved his hand. “It’s possible and safe and legal and I have money and I want to. Do you want to?”

“Yes,” Adam said more definitely, and Casey nodded and tapped the button to book the place.

“Does it have a fireplace?” Adam asked, several miles down the road.

Casey snorted. He fully intended to show Adam all the pictures—they had plenty of time to cancel if there was a dealbreaker somewhere—but obviously Adam didn’t have that kind of patience.

“Yeah, and a fire pit outside. I thought gas might be nice because we could leave it burning and not worry about it all night if we didn’t want to, but wood’s nicer, and the place has regular heating too, so we won’t get cold if we let the fire burn down.”

Also, they didn’t say anything nasty about omegas in their werewolf policy and their extra cleaning fee for staying through the full moon was entirely reasonable. Casey didn’t feel the need to spell that out to Adam right now.

Adam nodded, and drove on in silence for a little while. Casey didn’t bother looking down at his phone; he could feel Adam winding up for another question. “Is it, uh... where?”

Clearwater, and the Hathaway pack, were another hour or two west of Minot. The next pack they were actually scheduled to visit was almost due south of Minot, outside of Bismarck. Casey honestly hadn’t paid much attention to the location of the listings—he’d been zoomed out so far on the map that they’d all seemed close together, and long drives obviously didn’t faze Adam.

“Uh... oh, it’s back this way, actually, almost to Devils Lake.”

It would make a longer drive to either of the possible next stops, but it was better than a place that moved them nearer to Clearwater. Adam would have felt like he was being pushed, and Casey honestly had no idea if it would help anything to push him in that direction, even if he could be sure Adam wouldn’t dig his heels in and push back.

“Oh,” Adam said. “That’s not a bad drive, as long as the weather’s clear.”

Casey nodded. The further north and west they’d traveled—and the deeper into November they’d gotten—the more Adam’s studies of weather maps had intensified, any time they were driving outside of a pack’s lands. Leaving the Beltrami Niemis, Adam had insisted on stopping at a Farm Fleet to buy blankets, snacks, bottled water, and assorted other stranded-in-a-blizzard supplies, piling them up in the back seat with all the other accumulated odds and ends.

“You know we’re werewolves, right?” Casey asked. “We can just shift and—”

“Wolves can freeze to death too, especially caught in the open and confused by a blizzard,” Adam had said flatly. “And, yeah, we might turn into one of those cases where we go into some kind of hibernation until the next good thaw, but I have other things to do with my time for the rest of the winter.”

Casey hadn’t argued with anything after that, except to throw a bunch of candy and some magazines into the cart. If they were going to be stranded somewhere together, he wanted to be able to eat chocolate and catch up on celebrity gossip while they were at it. Adam would probably find celebrity gossip infuriating, which ought to generate enough heat to keep them toasty for days.

They’d gone another ten miles when Adam said, “Thanks.”

Casey looked over at him, having completely lost track of what Adam might be referring to.

“For... the full moon. For figuring out where to go, and, uh... inviting me.”

“Well, you’re kind of my ride,” Casey pointed out. “It’d be a long walk, even...”

Even shifted, he’d been about to say, but he hated shifting. There was no way he’d do it to walk anywhere, let alone a couple hundred miles, and yet it had been on the tip of his tongue. He frowned at the road, trying to fix the feeling in his mind—not quite a memory, but a sense that that was a normal way to travel a long distance. Did that come from before, too?

Had he seen a car pulled over anywhere near where he saw the dark-haired alpha standing, that time he saw him in the snow? But he had definitely seen the alpha wearing clothes—and he’d worn boots outside the Beltrami Niemis’ house—and those would be difficult to take from place to place while shifted.

How...?

Casey pulled up the little note file on his phone and added another question to ask, if he ever got a chance. Did we travel shifted? How did we take our stuff with us?

His one clear memory was of being carried, being scared, and Alpha had suggested that that was a memory of leaving the pack he’d been born to. They’d been human-shaped then; Casey’s hair had been braided.

Casey closed the note file and realized Adam was still—not watching him, exactly, because his eyes were on the road, but paying attention to him. Casey shook his head and leaned over to press a quick kiss to Adam’s cheek. “I mean, you’re welcome. And like I said, who matters more than where. If I didn’t want to spend it with you, I wouldn’t care where.”

Adam smiled at that, his heart beating a little faster. Casey leaned in closer to him and let the feeling of the waxing moon drive all other thoughts from his mind for a while.

Casey had planned to give them more time, but of course it snowed all week, which slowed down the surveys so that they visited the last few omegas on the morning of the full moon. They stopped to buy heat supplies in a harried rush, splitting up to shop and finding each other again at the Nissan to dump their bags in the back, which was so full now that Adam had to spend a minute rearranging shopping bags to make sure he could still use the rearview mirror.

They reached the cabin a couple of hours past noon, which meant the early-December moonrise was only a few hours away. The heavy overcast made it look like evening already when they pulled up to the cabin, and Casey could feel the pull of the coming moon like an itch under his skin.

He’d had his share of unsuppressed heats. He had thought he knew what it would be like. He had figured it would be better, easier, knowing that he was going to get exactly what his body—what he—wanted for once.

Casey had somehow not considered the closed feedback loop of three hours in the car with Adam, each of them sensing the other’s rising desire and being turned on further by it. There hadn’t been a flake of snow in the last sixty miles and Adam’s grip on the steering wheel was so tight Casey was a little worried he was going to break the thing. Neither of them had spoken in more than an hour; Casey thought they were trying to keep from even breathing in each other’s directions. The Nissan might never be fit to rent to a werewolf again.

As soon as Adam had the car in park, Casey threw the door open and flung himself out into the snow, heaped shoulder-high on either side of the little parking area the owner had cleared for them. He’d loosened his coat in the car and managed to throw it off before he totally buried himself in the snow, crawling and rolling in it until his senses were washed clean and his fever-hot skin was blissfully almost numb.

He sprawled out on the surface of the snow and stared up at the sky for a moment, letting his breathing and heartbeat slow and listening to the quiet around him. He heard a heartbeat nearby as the thunder of his own eased out of his ears, but it didn’t sound quite like Adam’s.

Casey sat bolt upright, looking toward the sound, and stared at the wolf who stood there. He was huge, unmistakably a male alpha, his fur all in shades of gray, darkening to black at his ears, fading to white at his feet. And he was just standing there, watching.

Watching.

Casey scrambled up to his feet, fell, and got up again, snow up to his waist, looking around wildly. There was no one else in sight, only him and the wolf, and Casey’s mind was a frantic jumble of observations.

Did we shift to travel? Had the wolf followed them all the way from Minot in this shape? Was this what his stalker had been waiting for? If the pack was so intermarried, did he think Casey was a suitable mate? Did he mean to steal Casey’s heat from Adam?

“Adam!” Casey tried to yell, but it came out first as a strangled croak. Where was he? Why had he left Casey alone to be found by this stranger? “Adam!”

The second time it came out as a proper scream, high and terrified, and before he’d even finished the wolf was shifting, and Adam stood there, thigh-deep in snow, naked, his face already crumpling into a worried look as his hands came up in surrender.

Casey stared, his own hands falling to his sides, while the obvious explanation failed to connect in his brain. Adam had been the wolf. Adam wasn’t wolf-shaped anymore. Adam...

Adam had come when Casey called him, when he was scared. He’d been scared for no good reason, but...

Casey pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Why did you do that? You said you don’t shift on the full moon.”

The moment was broken; he heard Adam tramping closer through the snow. “It’s not the full moon yet. I was just trying to give you some space. We obviously both needed to, uh, cool off a little.”

As long as Casey stayed human-shaped—and it was hard for an omega approaching heat to change shape—his heat wouldn’t affect Adam while he was wolf-shaped. That made sense. That made a lot more sense than the wild leap to conclusions Casey had made when he saw an unfamiliar wolf. “I, uh... I’ve never seen your wolf shape before. I didn’t recognize you.”

“Yeah,” Adam said. He was only a few feet away now, and he’d stopped moving. “I figured that out. You would’ve been shoutier if you were scolding me for shifting and surprising you.”

Casey lowered one hand to look at Adam. He was still naked, his skin flushed all over from cold, not yet turning pale.

“I was kind of expecting that,” Adam added. “You know, kind of—Adam! And then snowballs or something.”

Casey put his hand back over his eye and let out an unsteady laugh. “I do not sound like that when I’m mad. Also I’m kind of afraid your balls are going to turn to snow, and I’m going to want you to have them intact in a few hours.”

He heard the whoosh of displaced air and dropped both hands just as Adam settled into his wolf shape and bounded up to perch on the surface of the snow, massive paws spread wide to distribute his weight. His head was higher than Casey’s, like this.

“Well, okay, that’s not exactly what I was getting at,” Casey said, holding out a hand to the massive gray wolf. “Are you just showing off, now? Because you are pretty fucking gorgeous, like that.”

The tilt of Adam’s head and the prick of his ears could have been sincerely questioning or sarcastic. It was harder to tell in wolf shape, when Casey was human and hadn’t had any practice with Adam in this form. The low, slow wag of Adam’s tail was a hint, though.

“Yeah, no, you’re hideous the other way,” Casey said dryly. “This is a relief, honestly—”

He didn’t get any further than that before Adam tackled him into the snow.

Adam finally herded him up to the porch of the cabin when Casey was soaked through and unable to talk anymore for his chattering teeth. Their bags were already waiting, just inside the front door along with their coats and Adam’s clothes, and Adam must have turned up the heat as well. Opening the front door felt like opening an oven, and Casey hurried into the welcome warmth.

He started peeling out of his wet, snow-crusted clothes immediately, still standing on the rug just inside the door. Adam followed him in and pushed the door shut, brushing up against Casey as he did. Casey looked down at the big wolf, gray fur now tipped all over with white from wrestling in the snow, because Adam wanted to give him some space, and was willing to play with him, roll around in the snow, so Casey could settle down and think straight.

It was very Adam, and it reminded him of something they probably should have discussed sooner. He had meant to say something in the car, before he’d realized how fraught that enclosed space was going to be.

“Adam? Could you shift for a second?”

Adam did, concerned frown already in place as soon as he straightened up. “You should—”

“I will, in a minute,” Casey said. He was shivering, but he could speak clearly enough if he concentrated. “I just—we should have talked before, but—”

A weird look crossed Adam’s face, and he said, “Whatever you—”

“Let me talk,” Casey snapped.

Adam took a half step back and put one hand over his mouth.

Casey shut his eyes and took a deep, careful breath through his mouth, trying not to breathe in too much of Adam’s scent, so he could keep his head clear. “I just—I know you’ve never been with an omega during their heat, and maybe you think you know what it’s going to be like, but you don’t. But I do know, okay? I have had a lot of heats in my life, and I haven’t spent all of them alone, so I know what is going to happen. I knew that when I asked to spend my heat with you.”

Casey peeked through his eyelashes. Adam was looking wary and uncomfortable. Casey pointed sharply at him. “Yeah. That. Don’t do that tonight, please. Because for one night only, your studly alpha dick is in fact going to melt my fragile omega brain, and I need you to just roll with it and fuck me and not freak out on me. You’re not doing anything bad to me. This is what I asked you for. Okay?”

Adam’s wary look firmed into resolve. “Okay. I... well, I probably don’t understand. But I’ll remember that that’s what you need from me tonight.”

Casey nodded. “And I won’t—I’ll forget a lot of it, okay? Like a fever or being really high, not the way I forget bad things. I’ll remember some stuff, but... a lot of it’s going to be gone in the morning. I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t remember all of it either. It takes alphas that way sometimes too.”

Adam frowned at that, but he didn’t flinch and didn’t back away. Maybe he’d expected that; maybe they were just too close now to back down. Casey stepped in to give Adam a quick, hard kiss, then took off for the bathroom up in the cabin’s loft, which had a big bathtub under a skylight.

The skylight was, of course, buried in snow, but a faint glow of daylight shone through it. Casey peeled out of the last of his wet clothes and filled the tub with just barely warm water, then realized that he hadn’t brought up any of his stuff. Casey turned toward the bathroom door, only to hear a soft thump and rustling, and big wolf paws padding quietly away.

Casey closed his eyes, his heart squeezed with a feeling he tried not to name beyond Adam. He waited until he heard Adam’s heartbeat—different in wolf-shape but rapidly growing familiar—move downstairs, and then he opened the door and snagged his toiletries kit, which Adam had set down just outside. The rest of Casey’s stuff was on the bed in the open loft, the biggest in the cabin.

Casey hoped it was as sturdy as it looked, but it was far too late to worry about that now.

He slid into the water and soaked first, holding as still as he could while he warmed up, searching for a bit of calm. He didn’t find much, but he wouldn’t, this close to the full moon and knowing he was going to spend it with an alpha who...

Well. With the first alpha he’d ever wanted to spend a full moon with.

There were... probably a lot of things he and Adam should have talked about before tonight, but that would have required Casey to have some idea of what he wanted to say. He was going to say all kinds of stupid things during the full moon—I love you was probably only the most obvious—and if he was certain of any of that, certain in the way where he was ready to actually say it, he would have had at least some idea of how to have that conversation beforehand.

As it was... well, they’d been winging it so far and it hadn’t gone too badly. Looked at that way, this was just one more night of Casey and Adam flinging themselves at each other and seeing what happened, and honestly that seemed to be the only way they got anywhere at all. Why mess with the system now?

Casey sat up and drained some of the water out of the tub, now that he and it were equally room-temperature. He ran in more water, hotter, and dripped in some bath oil, his own homemade herbal blend that was just scented enough to register pleasantly to a werewolf’s nose. A startlingly summery, green smell filled the bathroom as the water steamed, and Casey got to work preparing himself for the night ahead.

This part was mostly familiar, at least. The thrumming energy and phantom itch under his skin—itch wasn’t the word for it, and it wasn’t exactly anywhere, but it was also everywhere. His whole body was winding up as the moon got closer, but it wasn’t exactly like being turned on. His skin was sensitive, his dick and his hole and his nipples, but also his fingers and toes and tongue and the shivery spots on his hips and throat and everywhere in between.

Still there was this sense of not yet to it. He didn’t actually want to be touched, didn’t want to finger himself or jerk off. He was just vibrating a little with the tension of being almost there, knowing what was coming—and knowing that he didn’t know, not entirely. This wasn’t going to be like last night but more, and it wasn’t going to be like the heats he’d spent with omega or beta friends but better.

This was something that was going to divide his life into Before and After, and hopefully this time all he’d forget was the part in between where he was out of his mind on the moon and pheromones.

It wouldn’t be like the other forgetting, but Casey was never very lucid during actual heats, and the whole thing tended to be a blur afterward, a few general impressions and the occasional crystal-clear flash of memory: sometimes sight, sometimes a specific sensation or scent or sound.

He hoped it was going to be good. He hoped he remembered something good, and not Adam’s face looking horrified or disgusted or—

Casey shut down that whole train of thought and got out of the bath. His heart was beating fast, his adrenaline rising. He could barely dry himself off, his skin felt so thin, and he felt wet and open and ready. Almost.

Almost.

Casey opened the bathroom door, mouth open to shout, but Adam was sitting on the end of the bed. He’d spread a cloth over it and moved all the pretty matched bedding to a hopefully-safe corner of the room. There was a pallet of Gatorade on the floor at the foot of the bed, a cooler Casey didn’t recognize that was probably full of snow, and shopping bags full of snacks.

Adam had his feet propped on the cooler, his hands on his knees. His cock was already hard, standing up against his belly and flushed a startling red.

Casey watched Adam’s hands tighten harder on his knees at the sight of him—and the scent, no doubt, rolling out on the warm and humid air from the bathroom. Casey breathed in Adam’s scent, and had a startling moment of déjà vu that took him a second to place; it wasn’t a memory like the ones that had been finding their way back into his head.

It was, he realized, a fantasy. He’d had it about Adam in particular a month or two ago, and he’d been imagining this about Some Alpha Somewhere since he was about thirteen.

He wanted Adam. Just wanted him. Breathing in his scent made Casey’s whole body light up, his dick twitching and his hole aching to be filled. He smelled entirely like an alpha, entirely male, and he was undeniably focused directly on Casey—but none of that was scary. It should have been; it had been, a little, the first time they had sex. But now it wasn’t. Maybe it hadn’t been for a while, but Casey couldn’t trace it back now. All he could feel was the wanting, and the moon—

Rising. Now.

Casey made a high, startled noise that he hoped he would forget and was mortally certain he would remember for the rest of his life, dropped his towel and launched himself at Adam.

Adam’s hands came up just right to catch him, and if he still crashed in with bruising force, neither of them cared. Casey was kissing Adam hungrily, reaching for his cock while Adam was still dragging them both all the way onto the actual bed, trying to say something calming and failing because Casey was licking his breath right out of his mouth.

Then Adam’s fingers brushed over his hole, sending moonlit lightning up Casey’s spine, and Casey let his heat take him.

Adam’s hands were rough, a little clumsy, but he held on tight, his hands covering those shivery spots on Casey’s hips that maybe had never actually been sensitive or interesting before the first time Adam held him there. He was holding on now, driving up into Casey and in, and in, and in, and...

It was later now, Casey’s body full of the warm satisfaction of coming at least twice, his hole pleasantly aching even though Adam was no longer inside him. Adam’s arm was around Casey’s neck, refusing to let him stick his head in the cooler, insisting that he had to drink some Gatorade. “I will figure out how to thread a straw through your nose if you don’t fucking hydrate, but I promise you neither of us is going to enjoy the experience.”

Casey was jolted by the vivid mental image of Adam doing exactly that, and in the few seconds he held still Adam tipped the bottle up to his lips and Casey realized he was dying of thirst, and...

Later again. They were knotted, and Casey was crying again while Adam’s hands ran up and down his back, and Adam’s hands felt nearly as good as Adam’s cock, as everything, and that was why he couldn’t stop crying. He wanted to tell Adam to stop so he could pull himself together, but also he never wanted any of it to stop, and...

“I could just live in the backseat of your car. Do you have a car? Our car isn’t really yours, is it? But I love our stupid blue Nissan so much, it’s almost like home, we kind of live there already, don’t we? Do you live somewhere? You must live somewhere. Why don’t I know where you live? And...”

Later still, starting to be early, and pleasure was shot through with pain now, both equally necessary. Casey was definitely getting fucked, but the angle was all wrong. He squinted at Adam, who was improbably far away. “Why are you down there? I can see your cock, how are you fucking me?”

“I want you to know that I am counting,” Adam said. “And that’s the eighth time you’ve asked me that in twelve minutes, Case.”

“Yeah,” Casey said, because none of that had sounded important but it was polite to acknowledge when someone else said something. “But why are you down there?”

“Because I am one tiny but important percentage point closer to my right mind than you are,” Adam said, “and my dick needs a break. So I’m fisting you. With my fist. And...”

Casey was sticky, and tired, and sore, and he had the distinct impression that he’d done and said a lot of stupid things last night, but Adam was snoring a little with Casey sprawled over his chest and it was an alarmingly endearing sound. It was annoying—if he were less tired he’d already be hitting Adam with a pillow or tugging him into a different position—but it was so mundane, so far from the frenzy of heat and the high drama of Casey’s everything.

It was just Adam, sleeping too deeply to move, too deeply to wake himself with his own snoring. Adam was entirely off guard with Casey, and Casey...

Casey abruptly remembered saying I could just live in the backseat of your car to Adam and buried his face against Adam’s chest, cringing in embarrassment. At the same time, he wasn’t sure he wouldn’t say exactly the same thing over again the first chance he got.

He’d like to stay on this road trip forever, suspended between packs with Adam. He didn’t feel homesick anymore, because he was home already.

When Adam had been worried about Casey getting pregnant during this heat, he had said, We’re not even bonded yet.

He hadn’t said, I don’t want to have a baby with you. He hadn’t even said, It’s too soon. And when Casey had said he wouldn’t get pregnant by mistake, Adam hadn’t hastened to make sure that meant Casey wouldn’t get pregnant on purpose, either. He hadn’t even seemed particularly pleased or reassured. He hadn’t said anything at all to that.

Casey hadn’t been sure before his heat—not enough to talk about it, not enough even to think about it clearly. He hadn’t known exactly what he wanted, or what he was ready for, and he knew that he still couldn’t make this decision yet, not for both of them, not without having some idea of how they’d make it work. Casey was willing to stay in the car with Adam forever, but he didn’t plan on giving birth in one.

They could make it work, though, one way or another. Casey had a pack—a whole pack of packs—who’d be happy to welcome another little one and help two new parents along. Casey might even finally earn the title of Auntie, if he was someone’s mama.

It might not take, anyway. It probably wouldn’t. He hadn’t been lying when he told Adam there was a good chance he couldn’t get pregnant right now even if he wanted to.

But there was a chance he could, too. And lying here with Adam in the snow-shrouded morning after, Casey wasn’t ready to give up on that chance.

He snuggled more firmly into Adam, shoving him just enough so he turned his head and stopped snoring, and he went back to sleep without getting out of bed to shift.