Page 45

Through the bedroom window, Sascha watches the wind bully an old tree, its branches speckled with new buds.

Yesterday was the first day of spring, and while they don’t yet have a bedframe, Zuhr and Anise surprised Sascha and Avery with a matching bedroom set they trash-picked.

A lightly-abused dresser, bureau, and nightstand now line the walls, staring judgmentally down at the bags and boxes of half-unpacked belongings, along with the mattress that slides on the wood floor when they fuck.

Instead of accepting the offer to have Sascha’s bedroom furnishings shipped to them, they’d opted to sell everything.

Why should he and Avery sleep in comfort while the rest of the pack was relegated to the ground?

Avery is finishing up a shower in the half bathroom attached to the master they share.

Zuhr nearly cried with relief when she found out Charlie would be getting his own bedroom for the first time in their lives.

Completely the opposite, Sascha was overjoyed beyond words for a living body to cuddle up to, rather than an impassive stack of pillows.

A stray dog barks outside, chasing a possum that probably ate fermented grapes and got lost on its way home. Poor thing shouldn’t be waddling around this late in the morning.

When the dog quiets, Sascha stares at the ceiling and listens to the pipes shriek as the shower turns off.

He has to focus to hear Avery puttering around because you don’t easily forget survival skills that tell you to be as quiet and as invisible as possible.

Sascha hopes one day he’ll be comfortable enough to sing in the shower and curse out loud when he trips on the rumpled bath mat.

For some reason, waiting for Avery to exit the bathroom leaves Sascha in a state of contemplation.

He looks at their barely-passable furniture and squirms on cheap memory foam, reflecting on having a cushy mattress atop the nice bed frame that matched the polished furniture set where he’d stored more clothes than he needed.

He remembers feeling loneliness so deep it left him cold in his marrow.

This leads to him turning on his phone, and as Avery saunters out of the bathroom in a cloud of fragrant steam, Sascha says, “I totally forgot to delete PROWLR.”

Avery stops halfway across the floor. His lips purse. “I haven’t thought about that fucking app in ages.”

“Yeah, me neither. Being mated will do that to you.” Sascha stretches out on the bed, tucking one hand behind his head as he searches for PROWLR in his app list.

Smirking, Avery crosses the rest of the way to the bed. “I dunno. You sure you don’t want to have a threesome with any chasers? ”

“Not since Betty,” Sascha responds automatically, prompting Avery to burst into laughter.

“Don’t be mean. She was at least polite when she propositioned us.”

“Polite and very, very drunk.”

“Lots of drunk people aren’t polite at all.”

“Fair enough. Will you stop standing over me like that?”

Avery laughs, drops the towel he’d strung around his waist, and deposits himself over Sascha’s chest, knees spread on either side of his ribcage. Sascha thumbs his hip, other hand keeping his phone in the air as he flips through the hookup app.

“I can’t believe when we met, we were just going to pump ‘n’ dump and never see each other again.”

“I did my best to make sure we never saw each other again anyway,” Avery points out.

“Because you were embarrassed about the lack of pumping and dumping.” Sascha pinches his cheek. “You and your adorable intimacy issues.”

Avery smacks his hand away, but he’s grinning. “Fuck off. What do you think would’ve happened if we’d actually fucked?”

“No clue. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to stalk you. Hey, I feel like I should ritualistically delete my account. Do you think we could light a fire in the backyard?”

“And risk burning down the house?”

“Don’t insult Sheridan’s fire-building skills like that.”

“It’s not Sheridan I don’t trust. There’s no guarantee this old corpse building won’t maliciously reach out and catch the flames on purpose.”

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

“Do not invoke 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’d have 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 thumb over 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?”

“My relationship with Betty is none of your business, sir.” Avery barely gets the last word out before they both dissolve into huge, gasping bursts of laughter.

After several moments of barely breathing, Sascha can feel his face burning red, and his stomach hurts.

Just as he’s coming down, he accidentally knocks his phone into Avery’s cheek.

Avery smacks the phone out of his hand, then his mouth drops open in surprise when he misjudges his strength and sends the device skidding across the tired hardwood.

Sascha laughs until he’s howling, laughs louder than the situation deserves, and Avery laughs at how hard he’s laughing, until they’re a wheezing lump of tangled limbs sprawled on a shitty old mattress.

Sascha smiles wider than he ever thought possible and informs Avery in the most serious voice he can manage, “I don't think I have the lung strength to go down on you after laughing like that.”

Avery lets out an exhausted, hysterical chuckle and pats Sascha’s thigh. “I'll give you ten minutes to recover.”

“You're a saint.”

“No, I'm your mate, and dealing with your dumb jokes is my job. ”

Smiling, tired and fond, Sascha strokes Avery's cheek. “You're good at it.”

“Does that mean I get a pay raise?”

“Is oral sex a valid form of payment?”

“Maybe if you’d actually get around to it!”

It takes them so long to stop goofing around that Sascha hasn't been naked for more than two minutes when Beryl hollers for them all the way from the third floor, despite their bedroom being on the main level.

Grinning helplessly, Sascha says, “I owe you one,” and they both get dressed without complaint.

Leading a pack without the resources Sascha grew up taking for granted hasn't been easy, but learning to share the challenge with Avery has been Sascha’s greatest accomplishment.

He carries the weight of being a pack alpha with reverence, valuing it all the more because one wrong move, and he'd have never gotten the chance.

Until now, no one thought Sascha or Avery deserved packs of their own, but Avery was right.

Being an alpha is about more than perfect, impenetrable strength.

Most importantly, a pack shouldn’t feel controlled by their alpha because no amount of alpha magic can force trust, and without trust, loyalty is brittle.

Without the pack’s loyalty, an alpha is never far from being abandoned.

On his own, Avery was lost, and though Sascha had his family in theory, he was no less alone.

Beyond having slipped into a mate bond, beyond finding love, the two of them—outcast, imperfect—discovered purpose in leading as a team.

Watching each other’s backs, finding balance with their individual strengths and weaknesses.

It means more than the sculpted, perfect image Sascha was raised to envy.

The Concorde pack is everything the world told Sascha and Avery they’d never have because alphas like them aren’t good enough to lead.

Together, they’re proving those fuckers wrong.

The Concorde pack will return in

Werecreatures vs. Shifters #2,

Landing on Their Feet.

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