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Avery elbows him. “Stop that. Worrying. It’ll be okay, okay?”

“Okay,” Sascha agrees, then drops a kiss on Avery’s forehead before towing him through the front doors of a quaint little inn.

They make it to the room without Sascha having to carry Avery along with both their backpacks, but it’s a near thing. He dumps Avery on the king bed and helps him out of his shoes and pants. Avery is deep asleep by the time Sascha gets his t-shirt off.

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

Avery

When Avery wakes up, he’s curled against Sascha’s side, both of them in nothing but underwear. Sascha’s awake, poking at his phone. Avery smacks the device out of Sascha’s hand, knocking it to the mattress, and throws his leg over Sascha’s waist. His lips descend, and they kiss like they’ll die without it, Sascha squeezing Avery’s hips hard enough to make him gasp. He bucks down, finding Sascha already hard under his ass.

“We donot—” Sascha moans when Avery bites his neck. “—have time to fuck right now.”

“Do we have time to shower?”

“I don’t think showering is negotiable.”

Avery kisses him quickly, there and gone, then bounces backward on the bed. “I’ll blow you in the shower, then.”

Neither of them lasts very long, which Avery supposes is a good thing. He licks come from his lips as he climbs off his knees, only to be swept up by Sascha, kissed, and finger-fucked with his back pressed against the cold tiles. Then Avery washes Sascha, following the contours from his firm pectorals to his toned belly, then down to his well-muscledass. Sascha ends up face-first against the tile, moaning while Avery, on his knees again, circles his tongue over Sascha’s hole.

It ends with Sascha massaging hotel conditioner into Avery’s hair, Avery’s cheek resting on Sascha’s chest, right above his heart. They rinse off and exit the shower to find half an hour has passed, but Avery doesn’t regret it, and Sascha doesn’t appear to either.

They dress, then go to the complimentary breakfast bar on the main level and try not to look like starved dingoes with how much food they eat, even if it’s an accurate descriptor. Then, heaving twin sighs of exhaustion, they shrug on their heavy backpacks and leave the hotel with a friendly wave to the concierge, as if nothing’s wrong. Just another couple on vacation.

“What’s the plan?” Avery asks tentatively, worried by the way Sascha is frowning at his phone.

“I can’t get same-day tickets for a flight off the island. They’re booked until tomorrow, so we’ll have to take the ferry to St. Ignace instead. I was hoping to avoid that obvious of a play, but I don’t want to stay here too long. We did our best to throw them off our trail, but they have numbers on their side, so they could easily spread out, cover more ground, and…”

Avery knows better than to express optimism, but he does so anyway. “The island is really busy, and it’s still early. We’ll get to the ferry and take a taxi north out of St. Ignace until we can get a car, like you said. It’ll work out, Sascha.” Sascha doesn’t reply, which means Avery’s attempt at reassuring him didn’t work. Without anything else to say, Avery grips Sascha’s hand, squeezes it once, and follows him into the street toward the docks.

Not wanting to look around and see what he’s missing, Avery stares at the road as they walk, allowing Sascha to tow him. Despite extra strength from the werevirus and building muscle on Dennings Farm, he’s beginning to wilt under theheavy backpack again. All Avery wants to do is get onto the boat and sit down, which makes it twice as bad when Sascha’s fingers tighten, and he stops abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk.

“Where?” Avery asks, because he doesn’t need any other signal to know they’ve been caught.

“Up ahead, by the ferry booth. One cougar and one wolf.”

“Have they seen us yet?”

Sascha pulls Avery behind a building. “Don’t know.Fuck.” He pulls out a tourist map of the island, frowning hard as he studies it. “Okay, if we go through here”—he indicates a courtyard advertising nearby bathrooms—“we can get to Market Street and hit Fort, and if we follow that to Huron, it’ll take us into the woods.”

“Wonderful,” Avery says, sarcasm thick. “Exactly what I wanted. More traipsing around through a bunch of fucking trees.”

A hysterical grin overtakes Sascha’s face as he stuffs the map into his backpack. “This time, I have no idea where the fuck we’re going either. I’ll try to take us in the direction of the airport, though.”

“‘Try’ being the operative word?”

Sascha only laughs, and it’s not a happy one, but Avery laughs too. They must look unhinged, speed-walking down the road wearing equally manic grins, but not a single person seems to notice.

True to Sascha’s word, taking Fort Street to Huron Road brings them to a fork, both sides branching into different sections of a massive chunk of forest. Sascha frowns at the map again before saying, “The roads here are a fucking nightmare. Anyway, we’re going right.”

That’s the more heavily wooded road. Avery only sighs.

Sascha continues to mutter while they walk. “I’m thinking we can walk to the airport and maybe just… hang out inside until we can get a flight.”

“So, tomorrow?”