Page 56 of Lost and Bound
If He Needs Me
It felt too damn easy.
That thought kept nagging at me for the month after Arik declared me officially alive and real, as I slotted more and more seamlessly back into my pack with every passing day, as I went to bed every night in Calder’s arms.
The only time I didn’t worry about it was those stolen hours in between a day spent with the pack and a night spent asleep, when Calder made me forget everything but him, everything but how thoroughly he owned my body and overwhelmed my mind.
I couldn’t deny it anymore. He fucking owned me, and it terrified me—whenever he wasn’t actively taking me apart. Which, to be fair, he did often. In the shower, kneeling behind me and eating me out until I muffled my screams against my braced forearm. In the bed, where he spread me out and sucked my cock and fucked me, or draped me over his chest and made me ride him until my trembling thighs wouldn’t hold me up, knotting me so that I stayed splayed across him for hours while he fucked me again and again every time his knot started to go down. I’d given up on trying to make him get rough with me, even though I still wished he would. If he had, it would’ve let me believe he only wanted to release the pent-up need of years without getting laid.
It would’ve let me believeIonly wanted to release the pent-up need of years without getting laid.
But he didn’t. He kept handling me with care, like a package marked ‘fragile—this way up.’ Except that he turned me over and upside down all the time, so maybe not. But his fingers stroked me so tenderly, his mouth caressed me so softly…and I stopped fighting it. I lay under him and let him worship me, or something that felt perilously close to worship.
Neither of us brought up talking to Arik about breaking the bond. But that didn’t mean I didn’t think about it all the time, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Because as well as I’d started settling back into the pack, Calder kept himself aloof.
The afternoon of the day Arik had pronounced me officially Jared Armitage, Matt passed the word to the pack that I wasn’t off-limits anymore.
And boy, did they ever come out of the woodwork. In a literal pack, crowding into the kitchen and surrounding me, with pats on the back and rib-cracking hugs, and tears from my great-aunt Alice, who’d always had a soft spot for me and saved me extra cookies. I had to tell my story a dozen times—although I left out a lot more than I had when I’d spilled my guts to my cousins. Part of me wanted to punish myself by explaining everything that had happened before Hawthorne kidnapped me, but Matt pulled me aside after the first outpouring of wonder and surprise and relief.
“Don’t tell them what you did,” he murmured in my ear, low enough to evade werewolf ears. “There’s no reason to. It’s over. They don’t need to know.”
“But—”
“No,” he said firmly. “Ian and I are over it. So forget about it.” He squeezed my shoulder and gave me a little shake. “Forget about it, Jared. I’m going to. I’m never going to mention it again. Clean slate.”
I’d always been closer to Ian, with Matt a little apart, five years older and more of an authority figure than a friend. Sometimes, even often, I’d resented him for it.
But in that moment, I couldn’t possibly have been more grateful to have Matt telling me what to do, taking responsibility.
“Thanks,” I choked out, and then Amy, a girl we’d all grown up with who’d mated the quiet nerdy guy who’d always had a crush on her and produced two gorgeous kids, grabbed me by the arm and yanked me back into the fray.
I held her new baby and congratulated her beaming husband, listening to him tell me about his older son’s first steps until a couple of second cousins dragged me out back to show me the greenhouse they’d started building.
Ian grinned and handed me a hammer and a pair of work gloves.
And we spent the rest of the day…being a pack.
And the day after that, I woke up in the morning, staggered downstairs yawning and looking for coffee, and had one of the pack councilors ask if I still remembered how to repair a fence, and could I give her a hand.
I did and I could. And doing honest, physical work, outdoors in the free fresh air and surrounded by people I’d known all my life, healed me more than years of therapy would’ve done. I started to feel like a person again.
But Calder kept himself apart, and the more I reintegrated into the pack, the more distant he became. He’d retreated outside while the pack welcomed me, and when I admitted he and I had mated and the pack tried to go find him and get all congratulatory, he’d shut them down with polite but terse comments about how it was temporary.
Maybe he intimidated them, and maybe they just showed some unusual tact in the face of both of our brief, neutral responses to their questions, but after that they dropped the subject and everyone ignored the elephant in the room.
Well, the glowing-eyed, glowering shifter the size of a small elephant, anyway.
Calder spent time with Arik, sitting in the garden and talking in low voices.
He went into the woods alone for hours at a time, coming back lathered with sweat. But if he shifted for his runs, he never let anyone see. I still didn’t know what he’d shift into if he ever allowed me to witness it, and I didn’t have the courage to ask him or Arik.
He grabbed his own food when he needed it, and he appeared like magic when I headed upstairs for bed.
But otherwise, he might as well have been a ghost, except that no ghost would’ve been able to fuck me like that. He managed to keep himself out of the way to a degree that frankly astonished me, given how much he stood out.
And it felt too easy, too simple, too…uncomplicated. Weeks went by. Calder didn’t cause any trouble, and he didn’t interfere with my homecoming, with the time I spent catching up and fitting back in.
