Chapter 21: Two Beds

Chapter 21

Two Beds

With Drew fully in command of his faculties, I didn’t have a damn thing to do once we got in the car. He knew where we were going, he could use his own phone and nav system without any help from me, and he certainly didn’t seem inclined to start a conversation, driving a little too fast and in grim, thoughtful silence.

I’d have given a lot to know what he was thinking about, but on the other hand…probably better not to ask.

Midafternoon sun slanted in through my window, too bright and hot without the mitigating effect of the cool breeze outside.

I tried rolling my window down a few inches.

The noise and the wind in my face drove me nuts.

I rolled it back up again.

Drew didn’t say anything.

It’d taken us a little while to get on the road, time I’d spent sitting awkwardly in the kitchen with Nate, who’d made two giant pots of coffee while we waited. When I’d come back to the house, he’d told me Drew was off somewhere talking to Calder.

“Three guesses where Calder and Jared went after breakfast,” he’d said with a roll of his eyes. “Their sex life is so fucking annoying to hear about. Jared’s my ex, and he’s also Ian’s cousin…”

The story he told me, with a lot of gesticulating and a lot more TMI, would’ve been riveting as an unusually violent and gruesome and X-rated soap opera, but in my current state of mind it barely distracted me.

Still, it meant I didn’t have to do anything but sit there, drink Nate’s endless supply of coffee, wonder how he hadn’t had a heart attack with the amount he sucked down, and nod once in a while.

The crushing sensation in my chest probably had more to do with my heart cracking in half, but I chose to blame the coffee. I’d been drinking it in such small amounts lately that it made me buzz like a hummingbird.

Finally Drew reappeared, and we got out the door, the whole crew popping up like Jack-in-the-boxes to wave us off. Jared hugged me hard, said, “Anytime, Ash, I mean it,” and slipped me an old receipt for pizza with his phone number scrawled on the back. I put it in my pocket, the crinkle reassuring me of its reality.

One person in the world besides Drew who cared whether I lived or died. I didn’t know how to thank him; I couldn’t find the words. It didn’t seem to matter. He patted me on the shoulder and nodded, stepping back so I could get in the car.

And then it was just me, Drew, and my incipient cardiac murmur, off to Southern California to try to find out why I’d stolen a car.

A real party on wheels, in short.

I glanced at the dashboard display. Total travel time: nine hours and seventeen minutes. Time elapsed: twenty-three minutes.

Settling back in my seat, I tried to ignore the glare in my eyes and stared out the windshield.

We stopped a couple of times for bathroom breaks and to grab some water or a snack, but we didn’t talk other than exchanging the most basic “You want a bottle too?” remarks.

I had nothing to think about that wouldn’t make me crazy, so I looked for road signs with mileage on them, or watched the GPS tick its way down, or tried to take an interest in the changing scenery as California’s landscape morphed from green and forested, to green and less forested, to flat and full of broccoli fields, to hilly, greenish brown, and dotted with oak trees. Finally, even that melted into the twilight and vanished in the dark.

When Drew pulled into the right lane and slowed for the upcoming exit, it startled me out of the fugue I’d managed to sink into. A glance at the dashboard showed me we were less than two hours from our destination, and that it was a few minutes past ten.

“We should stop for the night,” Drew said before I could ask. “Better to get there in the morning, rested up and with lots of daylight to burn.”

I couldn’t really argue with that, especially since he’d been doing all the driving and probably needed a break by now.

But that meant a whole night in a hotel room, alone with Drew. Much worse than being alone in the car, because driving at least gave Drew an activity that made the silence feel less crushing, and in a hotel room we’d have nothing to do but not talk and either fuck…or not.

Drew pulled into the parking lot of a decent chain hotel and went in alone to get the room. I’d been staying in the car as much as possible. Totally unlikely that anyone would recognize me or that a passing cop would pick me out as a wanted man, but it wasn’t impossible.

But when he let us into our room a few minutes later, I stopped dead.

Two beds.

Maybe that was all they had left.

Drew tossed the key on the desk next to the TV remote and headed for the bathroom, saying, “I made sure to get you your own bed.”

Or maybe not.

The bathroom door closed behind him, leaving me staring down miserably at two ugly patterned bedspreads.

Drew came out of the bathroom; I went in, trying not to brush by him. But his presence filled the hotel room, like he put out a magnetic field I couldn’t escape from.

A shower and brushing my teeth helped a lot, but then I came out and found Drew already in the bed closer to the door, laptop out and completely ignoring me. He didn’t even look up.

My stomach felt cramped, sick and tight, even though I knew it didn’t have a physical cause. I crawled into the other bed and turned on my side to face away from him.

It would’ve been better, even, if I’d been able to convince myself he was punishing me for turning him down. At least then I could’ve been righteously angry with him for being a total asshole. But I was pretty sure he was hurt and upset more than anything. I hadn’t meant to give him the impression that I hated being fake-mated to him, or that being mated to him for real would’ve been awful for me. But how could I deny all of that without admitting the truth?

So he sat there with his computer and clicked away, and I lay there lonely and aching and…half-hard.

Jesus, that’s what that feeling had to be. I’d gotten so used to not being able to experience arousal that I almost hadn’t noticed.

Even as unhappy as I felt, my hand crept down, slipping under the waistband of my boxer briefs and wrapping around my cock.

God. So fucking good. I gave in to it, rubbing my thumb over the head and savoring the slight slickness there, squeezing down by the base, playing with my balls. I didn’t get any harder, just like the last time I’d been aroused.

But it didn’t matter. Being able to take pleasure in my own body again was a gift; complaining about what I hadn’t gotten back would only make me ungrateful.

Biting my lip to make sure I didn’t let out so much as a gasp, I allowed my fingers to wander a little lower, pressing behind my balls and touching my hole. My whole body tensed, my cock twitching, a tiny bit harder. I could push a finger inside myself. Feel what Drew felt when he used that part of me to get himself off. Wish I had Drew’s fingers, or his cock, instead…

“Ash, what the fuck,” Drew said flatly.

I froze, eyes wide, teeth digging painfully into my lower lip. If I let it go, I didn’t know what noise I’d make. Something pornographic, no doubt.

“Are you jerking off?”

What the hell right did he have to sound so accusatory? I could jerk off if I damn well pleased, especially since he wouldn’t fuck me!

“No,” I lied, because it was a lot easier to be brave in my head.

“Yes, you are. I can hear your hand moving. And I can scent you. You smell like honey.” His voice dipped to a low, spine-tingling register that did more to harden my cock than an hour of stroking it would’ve. “I can’t stop thinking about how you taste.”

How I tasted. He had to mean…I tried to keep it in, I really did, but this time my moan burst out of me anyway. His tongue inside me, lapping at me as if I tasted like—honey. My ass clenched tight around nothing. I felt so fucking empty, and turning my head into the pillow only muffled a few of my helpless, high-pitched whimpers.

The other bed creaked, and then mine dipped as Drew slipped into it behind me.

His body pressed up against mine, hot and hard.

“I have myself under control,” he said. “You can say no. And I’ll go back to my bed and jerk off too, and think about how hot and tight you feel around my knot.”

Biting down on the pillow didn’t help much more than burying my face in it to keep in my needy little sounds.

Drew shifted closer, his cock pressing between the cheeks of my ass even through the sheet and our underwear.

“You don’t have to say anything at all. Let me make the decisions. Lie there and take me, Ash. I’ll give you everything, and you only have to not say no.”

I needed to say no. One little word. He’d think I’d changed my mind about mating. He hadn’t spoken to me all day. Self-respect and any regard I had for Drew’s well-being…the word wouldn’t come out.

Quivering with need and anticipation, I lay there silently, not resisting as Drew pulled the sheet off of me and tugged my boxer briefs down around my thighs. He slid down too, until his hot breath tickled the small of my back.

And then lower.

His tongue darted out, tracing the inner curve of my cheek. My lungs labored with the effort of keeping in a scream of impatience.

Drew pressed soft kisses all along my crease. “Please,” I whispered.

“Please what?” Another kiss, this time closer to where I needed him but not nearly close enough.

“Don’t tease me, please, I need…” The words trailed off in a cry as he pulled my ass open with his thumbs and flicked his tongue, once, against my hole.

“You need this,” he whispered, and lapped at me with the flat of his tongue. “Your pretty ass all soft and wet and ready for me to fuck you.”

His tongue thrust inside me.

My body shook and my balls drew up. I came like that, just from the pressure of his tongue stretching me open, everything blurring around me and going wobbly and distant.

He didn’t stop, eating me out like he was starving, hot and filthy. His fingers pushed in next, slick with lube—I didn’t know where he’d gotten it from, but he’d said he’d give me everything, and he’d delivered. Drew tumbled me onto my front and shoved my thighs open, mounting me without any finesse and plowing me into the pillows, head down and ass up in the air like his bitch.

I spread my legs as much as I could, still constricted by my underwear—and took it, his hips slamming bruises into my ass and my whole body bouncing and jolting along with the bed, which screamed its protests in a chorus of jangling springs and thumping boards.

Hot come flooded into me. Drew stilled at last, panting, his knot lodged inside me and holding me in place.

As if I wanted to go anywhere. Pinned face-down on a damp, rumpled bed, body splayed open to its limit, with Drew over me, owning me…I could’ve stayed there forever. His. To use and tease and take, because nothing had ever felt so good—even before I’d lost my ability to feel. I didn’t need my memories to know that, because if I’d ever experienced more pleasure than this it would’ve killed me.

Drew maneuvered us onto our sides and draped an arm over me. I wanted so badly to take his hand and press it into my chest, tangle our fingers together and pretend that I’d never have to give it up.

Instead, I lay still, and when his knot went down and he slipped out of me and rolled out of bed, I didn’t move or say a word. He pulled the sheet up to cover me. A moment later, his bed creaked as he got back into it.

The light clicked off.

And I slept alone.

***

Silence reigned in the hotel room when I woke up, even though the clock on the nightstand told me it was only a few minutes after six.

I rolled over, blearily blinking into the dimness of the room. No Drew.

Tossing the blankets back, I sat bolt upright on the edge of the bed, heart pounding. No laptop, either, and Drew’s shoes were gone. I ran for the window, twitching the curtain back.

The SUV was still parked in front of our door.

I slumped against the window frame, relief nearly taking me out at the knees.

Drew hadn’t left me here. Granted, he’d gone off somewhere with his laptop, and probably before dawn, but the laptop thing meant he wasn’t shifting to run and going all feral again, and weird didn’t equal abandonment.

Either way, I wouldn’t be going back to sleep—not after the jolt of adrenaline, not to mention how freaking unsettled I felt about the night before.

And the day to come. I’d been avoiding thinking about it as much as possible, and to be fair, I’d had a ton of other pressing concerns, but the prospect of confronting my mysterious past left me with a horrible, hard lump in my gut. Best-case scenario? I couldn’t even imagine. But the worst-case scenarios were too numerous to count.

After a shower and a change of clothes, I didn’t have anything to do but brood. Drew hadn’t come back. I couldn’t leave, because even if I hadn’t been worried about being picked up and arrested, I didn’t have any money, a room key, or a phone.

I fingered the little slip of paper that I’d transferred into my jeans pocket from yesterday’s clothes, and glanced sidelong at the landline phone sitting on the desk.

One phone number to call in the whole world, and a phone right there.

Before I could think about it too hard, I grabbed the handset and dialed.

Jared picked up on the second ring, although his “Yeah?” didn’t sound all that encouraging.

Shit, the sun had only been up for an hour. I grimaced.

“Jared? It’s me. Ash. I’m calling you from a hotel down south. I’m sorry. I forgot how early it is.”

“Shit, sorry,” he said, sounding a lot more awake and, touchingly, a lot less annoyed. “Everything okay? Did he hurt you? We can be there in a few hours. Don’t worry about anything, we’ll—”

“I’m fine! Drew’s fine, and no, he didn’t hurt me. I’m sorry to worry you.” Fuck, now I wished I could sink through the floor, hang up the phone, and never have called in the first place. “I’m not sure why I called you. Drew went out, and I had your phone number. I didn’t—” I swallowed hard, loud in the ringing silence. Jared waited patiently for me to get it together, and I couldn’t be any less than honest in the face of that kindness, no matter how pathetic the truth made me. “I wanted to hear someone’s voice, I guess.”

“I did say anytime. And my voice isn’t all that great, but you’re welcome to it.” I heard a faint rumble in the background, and Jared laughed. “Calder says he likes my voice, but you can borrow it.”

The open affection in his tone made my eyes sting. God, what would it be like to have a bond, a true bond, like theirs? Actually, now that I thought about it, I had no idea precisely what their relationship was, and finding out suddenly felt incredibly important.

“You and Calder, you’re mated, right? I mean, bonded? Is that a really nosy question? I take it back if it’s offensive.”

Jared laughed again, a low, mellow chuckle that gave me a good idea of why Calder liked his voice so much. “Not offensive. Ash, look. What we all went through—you can ask me anything you want, or say anything you want. You, and me, and Calder, and Drew, and that fairy Calder told me about. We’re the only people in the world who get it, unless there’re any other survivors out there who escaped before us, or who they let go. And honestly, I kind of doubt it.”

His grim tone matched my own pessimistic assessment. I’d thought about that too, and I also doubted it. Some nights at Drew’s house in Idaho, when I’d woken up screaming, it’d been because I’d been having nightmares about all the other people who must have died there.

And how close I’d come to being one of them.

“Yeah,” I managed. “Yeah, I feel that way too.”

“Okay, so you don’t ever need to apologize as long as you’re not, like, trying to kill me or something, and I know you’re not. It’s cool, dude. And to answer your question: Yeah, we have a mating bond. Knotted and bitten and everything.”

Which meant Jared had been knotted and bitten, since Calder couldn’t possibly have been more of an alpha.

A hundred other questions boiled up, fighting each other to see which would be the first to trip tactlessly off my tongue. Asking Jared how Calder’s knot felt in his ass had to be off-limits, right? No matter how many prisons we’d all escaped from together.

Instead, what came out was a question I hadn’t even realized I’d wanted an answer to.

“Can a mating bond make you love someone?”

“Hell no,” Jared said, without the slightest hesitation.

My grip on the phone went so tight the plastic creaked. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m really, really sure. It can make you want to please your mate, or feel reactions like you would if you loved someone. Like, if they’re hurt, you’ll be frantic to make them feel better, because the bond’s protecting itself. But it can’t create emotions that aren’t there. I mean, you can feel what your mate’s feeling, and that could fuck with you. But it can’t actually change the way you feel, deep-down. No magic can do that.”

Every word chipped away at the defenses I’d been building, trying to shore up my determination to keep Drew at arm’s length.

Well, emotionally, at any rate. Physically not so much. His cock wasn’t as long as my arm, even though it felt like it sometimes when he had it in me all the way.

If a mate bond couldn’t make you feel anything you didn’t actually feel, then a fake mate bond spell couldn’t either, right?

Unless it could, because Arik’s spell could do all kinds of things.

Shit, I was so confused.

“Ash? You still there? I know that explanation kind of sucked. Sorry if I broke your brain with it. What are you asking for? Maybe you could try and tell me what’s up, huh?”

I hadn’t meant to spill my guts to Jared; then again, I hadn’t meant to call him in the first place.

Maybe my magic had been guiding me again, giving me impulses I’d have put down to an unusually well-developed instinct before.

But I found myself telling him everything. Haltingly, and skipping over a lot of what I’d already told the whole gang when they first sat me down and interrogated me, but everything.

I sounded like a whiny teenager calling some kind of late-night radio show.

But Jared didn’t laugh at me. He simply listened, making interested little hums in all the right places even though I rambled and backtracked and probably made him wish he’d thrown his phone out the window instead of answering it.

“He can’t make up his mind about mating me until he’s in his right mind, but he can’t be in his right mind unless his brain thinks he’s mated,” I finished. “So I don’t know what the hell to do. And it’s killing me.”

“Okay,” Jared said slowly. “So I’ve heard a lot about you being afraid Drew has fake feelings he caught from magic. But what about you? Why aren’t you worried that you wanting to be mated to him isn’t real? Because the spell’s working on you, too, in case you’d forgotten.”

That hit like a hand grenade. I slumped back in the desk chair I’d dropped into at some point during my long vent.

The spell was working on me. The scratch on the back of my neck had stung like hell while I stood under the hot water of the shower, and my ass still throbbed a little from how thoroughly Drew had fucked me the night before. I could taste and feel again.

So how did I know I hadn’t been pushed into wanting to mate with him by the spell?

Well, I did, that was all. I knew it. If I knew anything, I knew that, and those feelings hadn’t suddenly appeared, either.

“I just know,” I said lamely. “I mean, how do you know when you feel anything?”

“Exactly. And to make sure, I think I need to ask Arik,” Jared said with something that sounded a lot like glee. “He needs to start getting up earlier in the morning anyway. It’s good for him.”

This time I could hear Calder clearly in the background. “I’m not coming to rescue you if he turns you into a frog.”

“Ribbit,” Jared said cheerfully, and Calder laughed. There was some creaking and rustling—Jared getting out of bed, probably. “Hang on a sec.”

Footsteps, another creak, more footsteps, and then a heavy knocking.

“Wakey wakey!” Jared caroled. “I need Arik. Matt, kick his ass out of bed. Magical consultant time, chop chop.”

I’d never been so glad to be on the other end of a phone line from someone. Could Arik turn me into a frog from this distance? Probably not, right?

After a minute, another creak and a thump suggested a door had opened. Arik’s voice carried clearly. “This had better be a fucking emergency—”

“Ash has a problem,” Jared cut in. “He needs to know if that spell you put on Drew can make him want to mate Ash for real. Didn’t it make Matt love you when you had it on him?”

“I really wish you and Ian weren’t all close again,” Arik growled. “He needs to shut his big fat mouth once in a while. Fuck. And yes, it did make Matthew think he loved me, and no, I wasn’t incompetent enough to include that in this version of the spell. Any more questions?”

My heart leapt at that, but it wasn’t enough.

Grumpy-bordering-on-homicidal as Arik sounded, I did have more questions, and if he turned Jared into a frog—well, at least it wouldn’t be me. And Calder wouldn’t let him leave him that way, right?

“Wait!” I cried. “Yes! Jared, the problem is the magic Drew had on him from the beginning made him want to claim me! So if it’s not Arik’s spell, it could still be left over from—”

“For fuck’s sake, just give me the phone—”

“Hey, let go—”

“Ash?” Arik’s voice, now speaking directly into the phone. Shit, he sounded so much angrier without any distance.

“Yeah? Um, I’m sorry for—”

“Shut up and listen,” Arik snapped. “The original magic amplified his alpha instincts. So yes, that could’ve made him want to mate you, and—I said shut the fuck up and listen!” I closed my mouth. “That magic caused him to want to claim you, but my spell negated the effects of the original magic,” he went on, almost insultingly slowly. “All I did was make his own innate magic respond to you as if you were already mated. He knows you’re not mated, or he wouldn’t want to mate you. And there’s nothing making him want to mate you except if he actually wants to mate you. Are we clear? Anything else?”

Oh, God. My head whirled, and I had to lean it against the chair and close my eyes to try to get my balance back, even though I was sitting down already.

He’d suggested mating because he actually wanted to.

Of course, the only reason he’d given me was that it’d solve our problems, not that he really wanted me.

That felt like ice water down my shirt.

But all right. At least he’d been rational. He’d been speaking for himself, and that took an enormous weight off my shoulders.

“Yes, we’re clear,” I said meekly. “If we did mate, would it reset everything back to normal? Would it, you know, fix us?”

“Yes, it would, and that’s a shitty reason to get bitten. Good, that’s settled. Nate’s sending you an overtime bill for this.”

A door on the other end of the phone slammed loudly enough to make me jump.

“’Kay,” Jared said after a second. “There’s your official answer. Jesus Christ. I think I’m going to avoid him for the rest of the day. Worth it, though.”

I winced. “I’m sorry.”

Jared’s sigh gusted down the line. “No worries. Anything else I can help you with? Maybe without the pissed-off in-laws involved?”

His teasing tone made me smile and relax a little. At least Jared wasn’t mad at me.

“No, and thank you. I’ll call you soon? Let you know what happens? Not so early in the morning, obviously.”

“Anytime. And you’d better. I want to hear from you within a couple of days, okay?”

“Okay.” We said goodbye, and I was still smiling a little as I hung up the phone.

That hadn’t exactly been the answer I’d wanted, but it was a whole lot better than I’d been expecting.

I put on the hotel-provided coffee pot and pulled back the drapes to let in some sunshine.

I had a lot to think about before Drew got back.