“Still not satisfied, Alexa?” He rubbed his rock hard shaft against me playfully, and I made a noise that could have been a purr. I had been satisfied three or four times over now, but the hunger for him was far from fulfilled.
“Not yet. Why don’t you hurry up and satisfy me? Again.” The pleading note to my words made me grimace. The wolf would beg for it, under the right circumstance, but the woman in me never would.
If his snake-like grin was any indication, he loved hearing it. He wasn’t as aggressive as the first few rounds. This time, the softness frightened me. I associated soft, gentle sex with feelings and emotion. After everything we’d willingly and unwillingly shared, insecurity was beginning to creep in.
Arys’s room was heavily curtained to prevent even a sliver of sunlight through, so when the dawn broke, he paid it no mind. Around seven, I decided that I should be getting home.
“You know, Alexa,” Arys said thoughtfully from where he lay on the bed watching me shimmy into my skirt. “This could be huge for us. Imagine what we could do with that kind of power.” He grinned slyly.
“Like what? Wait. Don’t answer that. I don’t want to know what you’re thinking.” I slipped my shirt over my head and tried uselessly to finger comb the tangles from my hair. “Arys, about the memory thing…”
“I think that was a little traumatizing for both of us. Let’s just agree to keep it confidential.”
I nodded, uncertain. “Speaking of keeping things quiet-,”
“You don’t want the wolf pup to find out.” Arys nodded knowingly, and I cringed. “Don’t worry, my lips are sealed.”
“Thank you.” I suddenly felt uncomfortable. I didn’t know why it meant so much to me to keep this quiet. In part, the sex had a lot tied into it that maybe shouldn’t be public knowledge. Also, there were certain people, like Raoul and Shaz, that, for very different reasons, I didn’t want to know my personal business.
“I’ll see you later, Arys,” I called from where I’d stopped in the washroom. Pulling the glass sliver from my foot proved more painful than when the damn thing had gone in. I cursed and swore until the little shard had successfully found its way into the garbage. The debris and glass was appalling in the light of day.
“You can count on it. Do you need me to call you a cab or anything?”
I walked through the house calling back that I was fine with walking. I wanted to walk home rather than call for a ride because I needed the time to think. I dreaded the car retrieval of shame I’d have to do later. The night had revealed so much but had created more confusion as well. As I closed the door on the mess, I felt guilty about not cleaning up, but he’d insisted it was no big deal.
The second I closed the front door behind me and turned to face the day, my eyes burned and watered madly. I fished around in my purse until I produced sunglasses, which didn’t do much to help other than hide my wolf eyes. I spent the first ten minutes of my walk furiously wiping my eyes. To passing motorists, it must have looked like I was crying.
I started feeling shaky and nauseous. I hungered, and it wasn’t a fat, bloody steak that I longed for but the taste of human blood. My stomach hurt, and I had to pause near some brush where I heaved but threw up nothing. What was going on?
My shaking hands were again becoming claws, and I felt my fangs fill my mouth. The wolf was fighting to break free, and I wasn’t sure why right now. I felt little control over myself suddenly, and I was scared. I began thinking that perhaps Arys and I truly had played with fire.
Chapter Eight
I’m still not sure how I made it home, but I did. I felt increasingly worse as I walked. More than once, I had to stop, wracked with pain in my abdomen.
Shortly after eight, I fumbled my way into the house with clawed hands. Claws are a real bitch for opening doors. The more subdued lighting inside was a relief to my burning eyes.
Removing my shoes proved such a difficult task that, in the end, I gave up and just kicked until they flew off. Each one smacked the wall with a thud that broke the morning stillness.
I was dizzy, and everything began to spin. Rocked with bloodlust, my stomach churned. It wasn’t my hunger. I wasn’t the one who thrived on the blood of the living.
I staggered to my bedroom. My clawed hands left scratches on the walls as I went. After hugging the toilet in my en suite bathroom did nothing to ease the pain in my guts, I crawled to my bed. I was overcome with weakness before being overwhelmed in a sea of black.
I was out for a solid nine hours during which I had the strangest dreams. Sometimes, I saw Arys’s memories through his eyes, and others, I watched as a bystander. My brain seemed to be trying to make sense of the multitude of information that I’d absorbed earlier.