Chapter 2: That Should’ve Felt Good

Chapter 2

That Should’ve Felt Good

Drew had to be persuaded to let me close the bathroom door, apparently convinced I’d fall over and bash my head and die if he let me out of his sight for so much as an instant.

By the way I had to lean on the sink and pant with the exhaustion of getting out of bed and walking across the room once that door had closed on his worried frown, I thought his concern might be justified.

But I needed a minute alone. I needed privacy. I had to get my bearings without his life-saving but, admittedly, very slightly overbearing presence. Not that I blamed him for it given how much help I’d already required. He’d muttered under his breath, while turning as red as a tomato, that he’d been the one taking care of my bodily needs while I lay in bed, and that I shouldn’t be embarrassed. So sure, he’d been caring for me like a cross between a nurse and a mom for more than two freaking weeks, something I put away in the back of my mind to hopefully never see the light of day again, and another hour of letting him keep on keeping on wouldn’t have made much difference.

Still. With that door closed, I could start to recenter, to reclaim a little bit of what it must’ve felt like to be an independent, free adult before…before.

Not that I remembered it.

With my breath coming a bit more easily, I dared to lift my head and look into the mirror.

My breath caught again. I’d remembered my own basic features well enough: the curly blond hair, the shape of my face. But I hadn’t looked in a mirror for so long that seeing it all put together was like being shown a photo of a distant relative you might or might not recognize in the grocery store.

I had a pointy chin to go with my pointy nose and arched blond eyebrows over huge, wide, brown eyes that looked like they’d sunken into my face, with black shadows beneath them.

I looked like shit, basically. Sort of familiar and sort of not, but absolutely awful no matter whose face it was. The only thing I was missing was scraggly beard growth. I had a vague memory of the warlocks doing something to me to keep me from growing a beard to save the trouble of having their prisoners shave.

Small mercies?

No, not really.

Further down, I had scars. Lines on my arms, like I’d been cut over and over again. A weird roundish one at the juncture of my neck and shoulder that looked like a bite mark, of all things.

No, I couldn’t spend more time looking at those. I couldn’t remember getting the bite-like one. Maybe that predated the experiments, since I did remember most of my time in the prison, at least in outline? But the cuts…those I could remember, and I didn’t damn well want to. Ironic, that.

Some poking at my horrifically chapped lips and prodding at my limp, greasy hair later, and I’d had more than enough of that, too. I had a real, civilized bathroom to enjoy, and dammit, I’d use it to the fullest. At least I could fix the greasy hair.

My clothes, a T-shirt and pair of boxers that clearly belonged to Drew by the way they hung on me, went into the hamper under a set of shelves holding towels and soap, and I flipped on the shower to let it get hot.

And that’s where it all went sideways.

Somehow, I’d already gotten used to the idea that I couldn’t feel pain anymore. Weird, and creepy, and fucked-up, but okay. That was my reality now.

Amazing the things you could adjust to when your reality was a horror show.

But also somehow, I hadn’t taken the next logical step and figured out that I wouldn’t really be able to feel anything.

Pissing didn’t give me any true sense of relief. That visceral pleasure from emptying a too-full bladder? It didn’t come. I knew it ought to. I could remember that from my cell. Even in that prison, I’d had that much pleasure, at least.

And now it felt like…nothing.

The pressure eased. But it didn’t feel good.

I stared down at my limp cock in my hand.

And then I stroked it, up and down, tugging a little. And that didn’t feel good either. After a few moments of pulling increasingly hard, desperate for anything to happen, my skin reddened, and I dropped it like I’d been burned.

Not that I could’ve felt it if I’d been burned.

I couldn’t experience my hand on my dick except as a touch, as pressure. I couldn’t remember, even, if that’d been something I enjoyed before the prison, because I’d never jerked off there. I’d never had any libido at all. Maybe because they’d done something else to me…my cock hung there, flushed too pink, the damage I’d done handling it so roughly feeling like…nothing.

Nothing at all.

Drew burst through the door half a second after I collapsed to the floor, the thud of my ass hitting the tile rattling my teeth. I couldn’t feel what had to be a serious bruise. I put my hands over my face, but my ears rang and the dizziness had me reeling, so heavy I couldn’t keep myself from toppling over.

He caught me, his strong arms around me as solid and warm as they’d been in my cell.

Naked and sobbing and with my vision gone all black and sparkly, I leaned into them, leaned into him, and let my head fall against his shoulder.

His hands petting my hair, stroking my back, holding me close, didn’t register as anything but a touch. They gave me none of the sensations I vaguely knew I should’ve had from that much contact with someone so incredibly good-looking and attractive, not to mention kind.

Was I attracted to men in the first place? I really had no fucking clue.

I shook and shivered and completely lost my ever-loving shit, a stranger in my own body, in my own mind.

Drew kept talking to me, but I couldn’t focus on it. He moved me. I huddled against the wall, bereft, wishing he’d hold me again. A second later he lifted me up, cradled me against his chest, and stepped into the shower, a big, square stall with no tub—perfect for carrying someone into. Maybe he did this a lot.

I started to laugh, a hysterical hitching of my chest that was nearly indistinguishable from the sobs. The water felt hot.

It didn’t feel good.

Nothing had ever hurt so much, in a way that didn’t affect the physical at all. Had this been the goal of their experiments? To see how much mental anguish could hurt when the body’s responses were eliminated from the equation?

Those bastards would never know, at least, since Drew and the other terrifying guy had apparently ripped them to shreds with their claws and fangs and sprayed their blood all over the concrete walls.

At least I could still feel mental pleasure as well as mental pain, it turned out.

After a few minutes the heat soaked into me enough that my body’s shock wore off. I started to get some strength back in my limbs and wriggled in his arms.

“I can stand up,” I whispered into his chest, barely audible over the rush of the shower.

“Wait a minute, okay? The heat might make you black out again,” he said, his voice rumbling through me.

That should’ve felt good, I bet.

I squeezed my eyes shut against another wave of dizziness. Fine. I’d stay where I was.

Although his arms had to be getting tired—or maybe not. I didn’t know a ton about alpha werewolves, but obviously the enhanced senses were true and not a story, since he’d heard me over the shower pouring down around us. And clearly the supernatural strength had to be true, too. His muscles weren’t even trembling from the strain of keeping me up against his chest. I might be unhealthily thin, but still. The dead weight of a full-grown man would’ve had me staggering immediately.

He held me for a long time, letting the water rinse me, letting me calm down. The dizziness receded. A few details I’d missed started to seep into my consciousness. Sopping-wet fabric against my skin, for one. I blinked the shower water out of my eyes and peeked at him. Yep, soaked blue cotton.

“Do you always shower with your clothes on?” I didn’t bother trying to raise my voice and strain my scratchy throat.

His arms tightened a fraction. “Only when I’m showering with someone else who’s naked and who I’m not sleeping with,” he answered after a moment. “I didn’t want to come off as even creepier than I did before.”

I still didn’t have a lot of control over my body, but one of my hands lay curled against his chest. I managed to straighten out my fingers so I could stroke him gently with the tips of them. He’d given me so much comfort with his touch, even though I couldn’t enjoy it properly. Maybe he hadn’t been in that place as long as me, and he might be a big, clawed badass, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t starved for human contact too, for someone giving him some comfort in return.

“You didn’t come off as creepy. Seriously. I don’t mind being a stray cat.” Did I sound as dumb as I felt? Definitely yes. “Anyway, I think I can actually stand up now.”

Without replying, Drew carefully let my legs down and propped me up on my feet. I leaned on him for a second and then dared to pull out of the supporting circle of his arms.

I fixed my eyes on the water sluicing over the tiled wall. Now that I knew what I looked like, and what he’d been doing for me to keep me as more-or-less clean and healthy as I’d been when I woke up, eye contact felt like an impossible ask. Would an actual cat with all the litter and gross-smelling fish paste food have been better or worse for him to deal with? Who knew, but a cat wouldn’t have felt like crap about it, at least.

“I’ve got this,” I muttered, and to my abject relief Drew pushed the shower door open and stepped out, shutting it behind him and giving me the privacy of the frosted, hammered glass.

Washing up at least lived up to my expectations, because the sensation of being clean versus filthy didn’t have much to do with pain or pleasure; it simply involved my skin not being coated in a layer of scum.

And by the time I got out of the shower, I’d managed to talk myself into a state of acceptance, at least.

I’d been imprisoned and tortured, with a probable kidnapping at the beginning of it all. I’d lost my memories and my ability to feel pain, physical pleasure, and possibly other sensations as well that I hadn’t stumbled over yet. Drew had had to clean up after all my various bodily functions, bandage me, and tend to me in ways that made me cringe.

Fine. That was where I was at. What choice did I have but to move on with the circumstances I’d been dealt? No more hysterical sobbing fits, no more panic attacks. That didn’t get anyone anywhere. Okay, so I’d earned a couple of those, to be fair. That didn’t mean I needed to have any more.

Drew had big, fluffy towels to go with his high-end shampoo and rosemary-lemon soap, and I found clean clothes on the freshly-made bed when I stepped out of the bathroom: boxers, sweatpants, thick cozy socks, and a long-sleeved T-shirt.

Seriously, it could have been a lot worse.

Also, the air held a tantalizing smell of food.

Much worse.

I eyed the windows warily as I dressed. They had blinds pulled across them, probably in deference to me wandering around after the shower, since Drew seemed to think of everything. Did I have the courage to pull the blinds back again and take a look at the real world? I had a sneaking fear that everything would’ve changed since I’d seen it—not that I’d necessarily know the difference.

But there could be zombies out there. Or killer tomatoes.

Actually, killer tomatoes might be all right. My mouth watered. I could so freaking handle some giant evil tomatoes after my recent experiences. I’d become a hardened man. And I could use a giant sandwich right about now. Those tomatoes wouldn’t know what hit them.

In that spirit, I finished rolling up the sleeves of my shirt—the pants had stretchy cuffs, so they didn’t need rolling, but they’d bunched around my knees ridiculously—and crossed to the window, pushing back a couple of panels of the hanging blinds.

Trees. I blinked in surprise, craning my neck to peer as far as I could through the edges of the window.

Yep, trees. It took me a second to get past the simple sight of living greenery and persuade my higher brain functions to engage. I soaked it in: the long shadows underneath the branches, the sunlight coming from the opposite side of the—house, definitely a house, since I was looking out a second-floor window and this couldn’t possibly be an apartment given the surroundings. The way the branches swayed and their evergreen needles bobbed and weaved in the breeze. I caught a little flutter between two of the branches, and a flash of blue. A bird.

An actual, living, free creature. Right there in front of me.

I gawked at it like an alien from another planet seeing its first Earthling.

But something about it made me feel uneasy, wrong. Partly that came from not having seen anything that wasn’t gray and hard and awful in so long, but partly…yeah, that was it. This didn’t look like what I’d expected.

Boise was a city, right? I mean, cities had things like buildings, cars, streetlights, people. And now I had that fucking Journey song going through my head, which pissed me off even more: of all the things to remember, those lyrics had to be what had stuck, and not, you know, my freaking hometown or my family, or…?

And shit. Shit.

I staggered away from the window and its view of lots and lots of trees and made it to Drew’s chair, dropping down and putting my head in my hands.

So much for no more panic or hysteria.

I might have a family. I mean, strike that, surely I hadn’t hatched out of an egg, although I shouldn’t rule it out entirely given everything else that’d happened to me—but in all likelihood, I had to at least have biological parents if nothing else.

But I might have…a wife and kids felt wrong, especially since the face I’d seen in the mirror didn’t look like it belonged to someone old enough to have gotten that far in life, even with the lines of strain and pain and exhaustion etched around my mouth and eyes. You never knew, though. A husband? A girlfriend, boyfriend, siblings, a very large sentient evil tomato pining away for me and calling the police every day for an update?

Human, fruit, or other, there might be someone out there waiting to find out what had happened to me.

Maybe there’d been a funeral. I shivered.

And then I scrubbed my hands over my face and sat up.

No. I was better than this. Or if I hadn’t been better than this before, at least one upside of my situation was that I could turn over a new leaf and become better.

No wallowing, no freaking out.

Drew had to be somewhere around here cooking, and I needed to eat. I needed to face the reality in front of me.

If that reality included whatever smelled so enticingly delicious, so much the better.