Page 106 of Feral Werewolves

“Come to my bed?”

I hesitated.

She seized my hand. “Just come on, Lazarus,” and she yanked on me.

I was too startled to fight.

We got back to the room, and she shut the door andclimbed back into the bed. She patted the space next to her. “Lie down.”

Tell her no, I admonished myself.

“Lazarus that bean bag chair is not big enough for you, now liedown.”

Damn it all to hell.I tugged off my shirt and crawled into the bed with her. I was still in the sweats we’d gotten from Liam’s place, no boxers.

She lay her head on my chest, and I put my arm around her. She pulled the covers over us. “Turn out the light,” she said, and she yawned.

I turned out the light.

She squirmed in against me.

I got a fucking erection. Inwardly, I swore at it, angry, helpless. Hopefully, she would not notice. I couldn’t help it, anyway. I wasn’t going to do anything with it. I didn’t even want to do anything with it.

She ran her hand up and down my chest, sighing.

This did nothing to stop my cock from being so hard.

She kept doing it. Every time she trailed her hand down my chest, it went lower. She touched my stomach and then lower than my stomach, and I tried to reach out and stop her, and I didn’t do it. What the fuck was wrong with me?

Eventually, she had her hand on my dick. She found it all hard and ready for her, and she made this happy little noise in the back of her throat and wrapped her little fist around it and squeezed. “Hi there,” she breathed.

“Don’t do that,” I choked.Stop her. Remove her hand from your genitals, for fuck’s sake.

She let go of me. “Oh. Sorry.” She sounded really embarrassed. She scooted away from me, to the other side of the bed. Now we weren’t even touching.

Fuck!

I needed to say something to reassure her, so that she knew that I wasn’t rejecting her, but that also I was not in this bed with her to take sexual advantage of her the night after she’d been violated. I tried to think of the perfect thing to communicate both of those things, but what I actuallysaid was, “Why would you do that?”

She laughed that same laugh she’d laughed downstairs on the porch—harsh and bright and bitter.

“I’m sorry,” I said immediately. “Fuck, Clementine, I am so sorry.”

“You’re always sorry,” she said darkly.

I pushed aside the covers and started to get out of the bed.

“You’re leaving now?”

“I knew it was a bad idea to come in here,” I said in a gruff voice. “I don’t know why I did it at all.”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t go. Stay, please.”

I hesitated, half in the bed and half out.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess it was fucked-up of me, but I just thought… I thought it would help. I thought it would help me feel better about it. I just want to blot the whole thing out, like it didn’t happen, and if you… if we… I would have asked Paladin, because he was the gentle one, but then Paladinisn’tthe gentle one, and… I’m sorry. Just stay, though, please.”

“‘It’ means…” I couldn’t say the words out loud.