Page 105 of Smut Lovers

? T W O ?

Daylight Savings

Derrick

F ear ain’t never tasted so bitter.

It’s confusing for Derrick, who normally doesn’t mind his women a little terrified.

He likes how it lingers in the air while he’s eating them, but for some reason, the pungent smell of rotting fruit that plumes around his little fox cloys at the back of his throat.

It ain’t the only thing that’s bothering ‘im either.

Despite the first tinges of the night air, Derrick’s blood boils. It bubbles under his skin like the bright red pot on the front burner. It’s roiling, full up to the brim. If someone doesn’t curb it soon, he knows it’ll boil over like his own self-control has been for the past hour.

From his position on the front porch, he sees it—the red splatters jumping at the chance to lash out and burn someone. Sees that Georgie still hadn’t bothered to change the time on the oven since daylight savings either.

He would have tonight. He told himself this morning that he was going to.

It’s safe enough. A small thing she might not even notice until it’s too late to remember whether or not she did it herself, like so many things he’d changed or moved since he started watching her.

At first, it was a game.

A game to see how much he could get away with until she got scared, until she started looking over her shoulder. He quickly learned that these types of things—missing objects and moving items—weren't new to Georgie.

He ain’t never thought ghosts were real; it wouldn’t do well if they were, not with the bodies he’d had lying around, but damn, if he didn’ think about it now.

Even if he hadn’t enjoyed the hunt, if he’d only eaten for survival like some wolves, he’d have been fucked if he had to deal with the ghosts of his past meals.

Either way, he’d seen it. The flickerin’ lights, the way somethin’ shifted—or maybe it hadn’t shifted in front of him, but he knew it’d been moved 'cause he’d been the last one to touch it.

He would have thought it was another creature like him, someone stalkin’ her if he didn’ have his own nose to testify there wasn’ no one else around.

But there wasn’t and it was only him.

At least, he thought it was.

They had a schedule, he and Georgie, and he would have kept to that schedule too if he hadn’t been slammed in the nose with a human-shaped brick wall, walking around her house, boots on the floor by the kitchen window.

The boyfriend .

He thought him a myth. Not one phone call in weeks, no mentions of him here and there when she spoke to people in town, or when her fingers curled into the phone’s cord from where it hung on the kitchen sideboard.

There was a Polaroid that hung onto the corner of the mirror on her dresser and some men’s clothes that were still packed into the closet and dresser, but you can’t even smell him on the sheets anymore.

That was a good thing. Derrick didn’t know if he would have been able to hold for so long if he'd been able to smell another man near her, in her space, on her couch.

In her bed.

He would have killed ‘im already; he knew that for sure. But no, his next meal has been gone a long time. Awful long, seeing as he’s been watchin’ her for weeks.

Long enough that his oils on the walls, in the cloth-covered chairs, and on the couch beside the kitchen had all lost this pungent smell of rotting flesh that entered into his little fox’s den.

His.

Because she is, just cause he decided not to eat her doesn’t matter, because she’s his now. There’s nothing any of them can do about it. It’ll be easier if she just makes peace with that sooner rather than later, but he isn’t picky.

Before, Derrick could imagine the man as a far-off fantasy she hadn’t let go of, but now?

The boots mock him from their perch, the little brown bowl on a small, knee-height stand filled with new keys and a man’s wallet; the rundown old pickup in the driveway.

All evidence that this phantom of hers truly exists.

Betrayal burns in his belly, creating ulcers he knows aren’t truly there, but he rubs at his chest and stomach anyway as if it might soothe away the ache.

He shouldn’t be surprised. She’s a looker, his little fox. He can’t fault her for being with a man before him any more than she can blame him for the countless, nameless, faceless women he sampled before he found her.

At least he’d eaten them.

She would never have to worry about them popping up at her house, sitting down at her dining room table, or watching ‘im serve them food he knew would taste just as sweet as the air around her normally did.

No, they’re long gone now.

Chewed up and shit out somewhere along the Appalachian Mountains. The rest had been men, mostly, some deer when he didn’t care enough to stalk anything for too long.

He hasn’t ever truly paid much attention to his conquests, but now…

Well, Georgie’s thick little tummy and her wide hips, would melt any thoughts of them from his mind. Her shapely curves that tuck in at the waist just enough to give her that so-coveted hourglass shape?

Oh yeah.

Makes him hard just thinking about it, especially when she wears those fucking dresses. Long, thin dresses with buttons down the whole damn thing. Like a little present, wrapped in all the right places.

He knows she doesn’t think it’s enough. Some days she winks at herself in the mirror. Others she avoids looking at the pooch of her belly, at the way it touches the tops of her thighs when she sits on the bed to take her shoes off at the end of a long day.

How many times has he imagined himself coming up behind her? Kissing the worry off of her neck, nipping at all her wandering thoughts she keeps bottled up in that big brain of hers.

He likes all the things he’s seen her poke and prod at, even if she doesn’t say she doesn’t like them. Maybe he’s being presumptuous to think she doesn’t, but she certainly spends her fair share of time trying to smooth it all out if she does.

Maybe it’s just a girl thing. One of the many small gestures in the language they speak that he’ll never fully understand, no matter how many sisters he has.

He wonders what they would think of her.

He’s inclined to believe they’ll like her, even if not all of them at first. It doesn’t matter, of course; they won’t have to see them for long. Long enough to get her scent to them if he’s gonna stay here, to make sure they know she’s his.

His cousins’ll eat that shit up: him comin’ home with a woman.

Probably try to get him to join the pack again.

Maybe he can, he guesses, though he’d prefer to keep as far away as he can for as long as he can. None of that really matters, no matter how much he wants her to take pride in all those things that make her so fucking delicious, he’s been hangin’ around like a lovesick little pup.

It doesn’t matter that he likes that her hips melt into her ass in one big heart shape or that her thighs are abundant, that he thinks it might make it all the better when he’s between them.

It doesn’t matter that he hopes she’ll suffocate him with them one day, because he knows it’s not time yet.

First, he has to get this fucker out of her house.

The little green numbers scream that it’s way past the time for eating, yet his pretty little fox stands, facing him, her eyes dazed as she washes the same dish over and over again like it’s sprouted grime before she’s even shut the water off.

And she still hasn’t eaten.

Her bowl sits untouched, yet he hears the rough clanking of tableware. Sees the man eating like he’s never had a meal before.

He knows how good it is.

He’s had plenty of her cooking now, even if she doesn’t know it. Even if it was cold, hard scraps, ‘cause she thought he was a fucking dog. He’d have to break her of that habit too. Dogs didn’t last long in his world.

Cowardly little shits.

But it’s so unlike her, this break in her routine, which he now has down to the second. In the nights he’s watched her, it hadn’t changed. Maybe it’s been weeks, months. He can’t fuckin’ tell anymore. Like the animal parts of him are too muddled with his human self.

It all bleeds together. The hunger curling in his gut makes time slippery—a montage of her scent, flashes of her face and voice as she moves about, nothing of note in particular that he can even put his finger on long enough to remember what it is.

He thought he might get bored at some point, but it’s only become a fixation. A comfort.

He’s built a sort of ritual around her time at home, watching her through the open windows so far out into the woods.

He thought for sure she might start to feel funny keeping them open all night the way she does when he stands so close he can practically smell the pineapple-papaya scent of her body oil.

All this time, he’s seen her have not a care in the world, but tonight?

Tonight she’s on edge.

Tonight she’s a ghost of herself, whispering in and out of consciousness as she speaks to the man behind her.

At one point Derrick thought she was staring at him , but she was only tracking the movement behind her in the glass. Her back is ramrod straight. Her knuckles clench down on the sponge so tight he thinks it might rip in her hands.

As much as he doesn’t want her to see him just yet, it burns him from the inside out knowing this man has her attention so fixedly that she could stare past him like that. Burns him so bad he almost doesn’t hear the man when he snaps at her.

“God, you don’t listen worth shit, do you?”

Blood rushes to his head. It moves so fast he damn near falls over; might have too if he weren’t already gripping the porch’s railing next to either side of his legs from where he sat. The wood crumbles under his hand as he tries to give himself somethin’ to keep in place.

To ground him.