Page 41 of The Longing

“I didn’t mean to upset you earlier,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me. I’ve dropped into your life, and I know this is all new to both of us, but…” I trail off, not sure if my garbled, shivering, speech is intelligible.

“But?” Fenrother rasps.

“But…I guess we have to make it work.”

Fenrother is silent for a while, his warmth slowly infusing into me. It’s a comfortable silence, not awkward.

“I went to the Night Lands because it was my destiny, but what I found there was not the battles I was promised. There were creatures there which did not want to fight. There were demons, that part is true, and there were battles, but the more time I spent there, the more I wasn’t sure what we were fighting for.”

Fenrother sighs like he’s been holding it in his breast forever.

“And when I refused, the Faerie made sure my disobedience was punished.”

I think of the scar tissue on his wing.

“They sent me into the fire, knowing I wasn’t ready,” Fenrother offers. “But it taught me I didn’t have to obey them. It was the reason I left. It is the reason the queen seeks to control me.”

“Through me?” My voice breaks. I don’t want to be a vessel to cause Fenrother pain.

“I am what I am, and I do what my instinct tells me,” he says. “But beyond that, I am at the mercy of you.”

“I don’t want that,” I respond. “I don’t want to be your chore.”

“Believe me, little mate, you are not a chore.”

“I’ve turned your life upside down, Fenrother. I’ve dropped into your world, upset everything. You even had to get a new book to understand me…”

Fenrother’s lips hit mine, cutting off my words with a kiss. It’s a kiss he owns, not the first hesitant one we shared when I wasn’t entirely sure about his fangs and he didn’t know what a kiss was. This is confident and possessive.

Could it be all he needed was the right book?

“I am not upside down,” Fenrother says when he finally releases me. “I am the right way up.” His eyes glitter in the candlelight.

Rain hammers at the windows.

“And I know what I want, regardless of instinct,” he adds.

Something presses insistently at my thigh, and I know it’s not his tail. Heat, once wanted, now an indicator of something entirely different, floods through me.

“If you’re sure,” I whisper, “because there’s no going back.”

Fenrother hitches up his lip on one side. “You make me feel strange, Alice. Good strange. You make my pizzle do things I didn’t know it could do. I want to put it inside you.”

“Even without a diagram?” I can’t help myself.

The hitch on his lip goes higher. “I have explored you enough I don’t need a diagram. They’re overrated,” he responds, cocking his head on one side, some of the scientific look entering his gaze. “But perhaps I should check again.”

“Perhaps you should.”

“Not if you remain cold,” he says, curling his arm around me further.

“I assure you, Fenrother, I am anything but cold.”

ALICE

Fenrother plucks at the shirt I’m wearing, one of his, naturally.

“I like you in my clothing, given I have no use for it. But I want it off,” he says.

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