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Sascha laughs. “Don’t call our pack house a corpse. You’ll hurt her feelings, and she’ll summon more termites.”

“Donotinvoke them,” Avery says sternly. “Can’t you just delete the goddamn app like a normal fucking person?”

“No, I can’t, because without this cesspool of an app, I’dhave had to use Grindr, and if I’d used Grindr, I wouldn’t have met you.” Pausing, Sascha asks, “Did you ever use Grindr?”

“Oh, all the fucking time before I got turned.”

Sascha tilts his head. “Would you go back to it?”

“Back to what? Grindr? Fuck no.”

“No, like… Before.”

When Avery realizes what Sascha’s asking, his face slackens, eyes going unfocused. Sascha waits, anxiety mounting, and just as he’s about to apologize for asking a stupid, insensitive question, Avery says, “No. I wouldn’t go back. To before.” Then he swallows hard.

Sighing, Sascha sets his phone down and tilts Avery forward until his arms are braced on either side of Sascha’s head. He pushes up on his elbows to kiss Avery’s clavicle, lips ghosting over faded scars, impressions of thick claws and wide jaws. Overcome by protective affection, Sascha wraps himself around his mate, rumbling contentedly when Avery rests more of his weight on Sascha’s shoulders. They end up in a weird knot, with Avery half-curled around Sascha’s head, running his fingers through his hair while Sascha tries his best not to squeeze his skinny-but-nicely-toned ass. Eventually, he loses the fight.

Avery makes a very not-averse sound, prompting Sascha to start kissing whatever of Avery’s chest and abdomen he can reach. Then he nibbles the many hills of his narrow ribcage, and Avery hiccups a laugh and flops sideways in a bid at escape. Sascha doesn’t let him go easily, but Avery stops fighting back when he ends up pinned against the mattress with Sascha licking down his stomach.

Sascha stops right next to Avery’s navel and drums his fingers on Avery’s hip.

“What’re you waiting for?” Avery demands.

“I think you should be the one to delete it. PROWLR, I mean.”

“Oh my god.Sascha, I just want you to eat me out,” he says, but it’s an exercise in futility because Sascha is already reaching for his phone again.

“Look, it’ll only take a second.”

“I thought you were gonna delete your account first.”

“No, I’m saving my login info so you have something to remember me by if I faint while trying to repair the roof.”

“Sascha Nikolai Concorde, you are under no circumstances allowed to get on the fucking roof.”

The use of their new pack name—the one that took them all months to agree upon—puts a ridiculous, sappy grin on Sascha’s face. He’s still getting used to hearing Concorde instead of Madison, but every time Avery full-names him, everything goes wobbly and light in his chest.

Concorde: an agreement, harmony, or union. That or grapes, which Sascha is okay with too. Even Charlie thought it sounded fitting for a pack of nine strange people of different backgrounds and species coming together to form a family with no idea what they’re doing, and once the seventeen-year-old approved, that was that.

“I bought this house; I can climb on the roof if I want to.”

“Oh, really? I wonder what Petra and Aunt Marty will have to say about that.”

“Nevermind,” Sascha says quickly, and uses Avery’s descent into laughter to pull up the PROWLR account settings screen. “Okay, here’s the delete account page, if you insist. All you gotta do is press the thing. Are you sure we can’t light a fire?”

“I’ll set your pubes on fire if you keep insisting,” Avery huffs, but he still steadies Sascha’s phone so he can artlessly hit the delete button, followed by the guilt-trippy ‘Are you sure?’ prompt. “There. It’s done.”

“Now you gotta uninstall the app.”

“I’m already on my way.”

Sascha watches with a smile as Avery hovers his thumbover the little app icon, almost seeming to have his own moment of reflection. Then, his face goes impassive, and after a long press, the app disappears from the list.

“There, it’s done. Are you gonna go downtown yet, or should I grab that vibrator you finally bought me instead?”

As Sascha promised during Avery’s first heat—one of three over the course of the summer—he used Avery’s twenty-ninth birthday as an excuse to drop over a hundred dollars on a brand-name magic wand that made Avery scream the moment he saw the box.

“If you threaten to leave me for a vibrator again, I’m gonna start calling it Betty. Think you’ll still be able to use it then?”