Hey kids, I just wanted to let you guys know that there is a character of mine that I'm introducing in this story. I usually try not to use characters that don't exist outside of the series but just couldn't find any character in KA's books that could fit into the role that I wanted filled. So I hope she's believable and serves to deepen the qualities of the preexisting characters. Just a heads up.
Also, it's not that I don't love you all anymore, I've just been super busy and will do a super personalized long AN at the end of the third chapter. The reviews have been awesome and amazing and it's been so exciting to see so many people reviewing who are usually quiet, keep telling me what you like and I'll try to put more of it in!
I kicked off my sneakers and stretched out on my awesome queen-sized bed, sinking into the fluffy comforter and stack of pillows. It was always so much easier to relax when I knew Derek was home. Neither of us were very good at talking on the phone and saw emails and text messages as mostly pointless since we'd only be apart for a few days anyway. So other than the nightly check-in message, usually something like;
Home in 2 days, 'night.
I hadn't really talked to him and missed my best friend. I'd missed hearing his voice around the house, that deep chuckle that made my heart skip and kisses… I missed kisses a lot, and cuddling.
It was ironic that being in this house with the boys and Kit felt more like a home than any of the fancy apartments I'd lived in with dad. My bedroom and the main bathroom were on the second story, on the opposite side of the house from the boys' bedroom, which was the master room with the smaller bathroom attached. Naturally Kit's room was in between the two, facing the stairs.
This was more for show than anything, all of us knew that Derek didn't make any noise so if he wanted to sneak into my room it would be easy. His dad could have set up perimeter spells and illusions like hellhounds in my doorway but he didn't. He knew that Derek and I were essentially bonded for life and that Derek was the most respectful and cautious eighteen-year-old boy in existence so we didn't hide the fact that Derek slept in my bed when he was home.
It had been a little weird at first but sleeping in puppy piles was a werewolf thing and Derek got twitchy and checked on me three times a night anyway so we'd just ended up compromising by leaving my door partway open. Derek had actually been the one who insisted on propriety for so long. Kit didn't care, he trusted us, Simon liked having a room to himself and I slept better with a two-hundred plus pound werewolf wrapped around me. It was hard to feel unsafe when the most dangerous thing in the city was cuddling with you at night.
Speaking of which... I heard an expensive-sounding engine cut off and two doors slam as the boys got home.
I quickly swapped my school clothes for yoga pants and a tank top and raced downstairs. The house was big, two stories with a huge kitchen, living room, dining room, sunroom/greenhouse and parlor. I didn't even know what you were really supposed to use a parlor for and we'd just turned it into a home office for Kit. Where the back porch would be on a normal house was a long narrow sunroom that stretched across the whole length of the downstairs, half of which had been converted into a studio for Simon with an airtight divider between it and the small greenhouse. I thought it was silly to put the driest room attached to the most humid but Simon wanted the natural lighting and insisted. There was a small partial third story with only two small bedrooms that we'd converted into an editing and computer room for me and Tori and a miniature laboratory for Derek.
It really was a dream home for the four of us, The Pack had even built a shed with attached outdoor shower for when they visited. We'd had to find the biggest doggie door at Petsmart but it was totally worth it. Our house was also backed by a stretch of woods that had been declared by the city to be a miniature wildlife preserve for some kind of endangered grasshopper that I was pretty sure Clay and Derek had just made up.
The guest house in the back had been built by the Interracial Counsel for visiting delegates and it doubled as a room for Tori when she came home from MIT on holidays. I think she enjoyed the family she'd inadvertently inherited but Tori just wasn't the family-bonding type and didn't like shared bathrooms. I'd offered to share my bedroom with her, I owed her big-time for helping me with a video I'd made the year before, but she liked having her space.
In the video I'd killed a rogue werewolf in a really horrible way so that no others would bother us and Derek had helped. Tori filmed it and encrypted it with a virus after I realized that sending our enemies proof of us killing someone wasn't the brightest idea I'd ever had. Besides the flash drive I'd hidden under the floorboards, the only real copies of the video were at Stonehaven and a safety deposit box in Portland with Paige, all the others that had been sent electronically to all the known Mutts had Tori's virus that corrupted the file immediately after viewing.
The video not only protected me and Derek but also any of our family members from attack so Tori had done the encryption with no strings attached since she benefited from it as well. After that, after seeing how far me and Derek were willing to go to protect our family—which included her—she'd been tolerable to the point where sometimes I even considered her my friend, instead of just my almost partial sister-in-law.
"What'd you bring me?" I jumped up and down as soon as the boys came in the front door.
Derek smiled when he saw me and passed me the smallest paper bag in his collection. We went into the kitchen, which was separated from the dining room by a long counter with bar stools that we used more often than the dining table.
I opened up my soup container and cream of potatoey goodness wafted up. Simon slid over a Styrofoam cup which turned out to be a root beer float. I let crocodile tears well up in my eyes as I looked at the two of them, identical smug grins on their faces.
"You two are… just…" I sniffled and dramatically wiped at my eyes. "You're more than any girl could ask for!" I draped my arms around their necks and hugged them.
"Told you she'd like the float." Simon said with laugh.
"Ridiculous." Derek mumbled, shaking his head.
"Okay so tell me how your trip went." I sat down, hooking a stool out from under the counter with my foot for Derek.
"Good." He pulled a stack of burgers out of the biggest bag, pushing the medium-sized ones to Simon. "Elena's really excited about your video."
I stole one of his fries and he narrowed his eyes at me with a mock-growl.
"Awesome, that makes my seat count…" I tallied up all my guests in my head. The four of us, Tori, Jaime, Jeremy, Elena, and dad. "Nine. Good, I went ahead and reserved ten just in case so that works out perfectly. Oh! I can give my extra seat to Haven!" I exclaimed, thinking of my friend in editing class who'd done the audio of my senior project as a part of her own senior piece, chopping and engineering the audio clips to match up with the documentary perfectly. "She's in the music department and she's going to DJ the second half of the party as most of her senior project."
"Sounds like a cool chick." Simon said around a mouthful of burger.
I nodded slowly, giving Simon a glance then looking away before he caught the calculating look on my face. Haven was cool, she wasn't particularly pretty and usually wore somewhat frumpy clothes but she was funny and really nice, two qualities that Simon needed to see more of outside the family.
Derek caught my chin and made me look at him; narrowed eyes searching mine, obviously having glimpsed my scheming thoughts in my face or posture. I opened my eyes wide, looking like Bambi dipped in glittery innocent sparkles. He didn't buy it for a minute.
"Nice car." Someone called from the entryway and Kit kicked off his shoes on his way down the hall and into the kitchen. "There'd better be a double jalapeno cheeseburger if those bags are from Fat Bob's." He glared until Simon produced a big paper-wrapped bundle of cheesy spicy burger. "Who needs a wife when I've got you guys?" Kit grinned and dragged a bar stool around so he could sit on the opposite side of the counter and face all of us.
"How's the case?" Derek asked, unwrapping his third burger.
Kit shook his head. "Not good, and the Cabal's won't get involved because it'll look too suspicious. But the Cortez's did pull some strings to get a group of grad students on our research and policy team."
Kit was only one of a group of supernatural's who tried to help others from our world when they got in trouble with the human government. Usually the Cabals cleaned up before the local police got involved but in Chris Blakeman's case he'd fallen through the cracks. Blakeman was a sorcerer who'd grown up with the human grandparents on his mother's side when his parents died in a car crash. When his powers started really showing when he was twelve his grandparents did the only thing they could think of, sent him to therapy and a psychiatrist. Unfortunately being a supernatural meant that Blakeman's brain was wired a little differently than a normal twelve-year-old kid's and when he was prescribed an anti-depressant… the results weren't pretty. The combination of new chemicals being produced by his brain and his natural magic had been explosive, literally, and he accidently caused the deaths of his grandparents. Even worse, in New York a juvenile who is thirteen, fourteen or fifteen years old can be tried as an adult in criminal court and the lawyers on the other side were pushing for the same treatment for Blakeman even though he had been twelve at the time.
In short, Kit was working a ton and not getting much appreciation for 'defending a monster.' He usually came home exhausted and sad so we all had been doing the housework and doing our best to make him laugh when he was home.
"I've always wondered how Fat Bob's makes such a perfect ice cream float." I mused idly, pushing the cup across the counter for Kit to try. "They don't have a ton of foam at the top but the soda is still bubbly."
Kit smiled, knowing our make-dad-laugh master plan by heart now. "I'm sure Dare can figure it out."
Derek reached for the cup but I swatted at his hand. "No! If he goes all Bill Nye on it then all the magic will be lost."
Simon grinned, it was the same smile as ever but there were still traces of tightness around his eyes, as there had been for the last year. "Sure but if you volunteer to be a guinea pig then you get to drink like a dozen floats."
Kit smiled then, and it touched his eyes, unlike Simon's smile. Both Derek and I had been worried about Simon for awhile, he'd been quieter after the incident on the camping trip, smiling less and not as genuinely when he did.
After dinner and a few rounds of Soul Caliber 4 we got ready for bed. As it got warmer out I'd exchanged my long flannel jammies for linen shorts and a cotton t-shirt. Derek had started wearing light pajama pants to make his dad more comfortable—not that Kit had really cared but pants just seemed less intimate than shorts.
With my teeth brushed and face washed I collapsed into the fluffy comforter face-first, earning a chuckle from the doorway.
"Ooo affeh" I actually said 'so happy' but the pillow and mouthful of comforter muffled my words and got me another laugh.
"Move over bed-hog." Derek turned off the light and flopped down next to me.
I tilted my head until I could see him, just a dark silhouette with green eyes. "Missed you." I managed to get enough of my mouth out of the blanket to speak coherently.
Derek pushed me on my side of the bed before curving his body around mine. He may have been twice as big as me but when I was asleep I could magically take up the vast majority of bed space.
"How are you feeling about your show tomorrow?" He asked, lowering his voice so it was mostly just a vibration in his chest under my cheek.
"Good, bad, exhilarated, terrified." I paused with a frustrated sigh. "I can't wait to get away from this school though."
"Drugs again?" Derek's voice took on an exasperated edge. There'd been three raids this year alone, unfortunately a high-performance school like ours kids got stressed out and turned to drugs for help. Both prescription and non-prescription, Ritalin, Adderall and Concerta were just a few of the prescription stimulants that you could buy in any of the bathrooms or locker rooms. Then there was the illegal stuff, cocaine and pot were the two main recreational drugs floating around—coke for energy when meds weren't around and weed to relax after taking so many stimulants.
The FDA and FBI had been getting stricter about medications since cases like Chris Blakeman's started becoming more and more prevalent. Kids all over the country suddenly started having violent reactions to prescription drugs when they had no history of the illness that the medication was supposed to treat. The schools and government had responded by dramatically increasing the number of locker searches and drug tests which did little more than seriously cut into the time we had to complete projects and homework, which made kids more stressed, which made them take more drugs which made… you get the picture.
"I just wish someone would find whatever doctor is being suckered into writing all these prescriptions. They can't stop filling the prescriptions at the pharmacies without knowing which are for drug suppliers and which are for kids with actual ADD." I grumbled, it was a situation we'd discussed many times, one that I'd been more angry with after Derek explained how ADD worked. I'd always thought it was just an excuse for parents to medicate their hyper kids but ADD was actually a medical condition where blood flow was insufficient in the frontal lobe of the brain, cutting off access to the parts that controlled focus and memory.
I shook my head sharply, trying to ignore the shitty situation at school and focus on the half-dressed man in my bed. I gave him a sly glance. "I could definitely use a distraction."
"Chloe…" He said in a warning tone, knowing what was coming.
I brushed my lips against his chest, dragging my fingernails lightly up from his hip to his ribs before he caught my wrist.
"Chloe don't start." His husky whisper held a note of desperate pleading.
Derek was unyielding in his opinion that it was disrespectful to fool around with his dad sleeping next door, which I completely agreed with, I just liked testing his conviction. It was a game we played that more often than not just ended with a brief tickle spat and then sleep, but it was always more dangerous the first night he was back and I usually kept myself in check. Usually.
I arched up and pressed my lips along his collarbone. It was a favorite spot of mine and one I usually reserved for later in the game when things were winding down, not at the beginning when Derek's control was already taught.
"I'm serious. I will go sleep on the couch." He threatened but made no move to leave.
I smiled, taking my time to look him over now that my eyes had adjusted to the dark. There were so many well-defined muscles that I didn't know where I wanted to start touching. My absolute favorites though were his triceps, I loved the cut in the line of his arm, and his serratus anterior muscle—the group that lined his upper ribs. These had been less defined when we first met but when he'd started training to fight with Clay they had become more prominent since they were primarily responsible for the extension and recoil of a punch (yes I googled, I couldn't help it! They're hot).
With Derek's ability to see in the dark he had no trouble watching my expression as I blatantly drooled over him. Ogling didn't bother him nearly as much as touching but when my eyes started following the line of his inguinal ligament—that would be the sexy line at the hip that slopes down to-
"Stop." He snapped quietly, catching my chin and keeping my gaze above his waist.
"Stop what?" I asked innocently, eyes fixed on the curve of his mouth.
"You know what. Stop whatever you're plotting or thinking of plotting."
"Okay, I'll stop plotting if you kiss me." I met his eyes as he tugged me to him.
As soon as our lips brushed I pushed into the kiss, distracting him for the moment it took to slide my leg over his waist and sit up, keeping my mouth on his. I tangled my fingers in his hair and pinned him to the bed, kissing him deeply.
"You said-" He started, eyes narrowed but his glare was fixed on my mouth.
"That I'd stop plotting, this is acting, totally different." I stretched forward, sliding my body along his until he grabbed my wrists and flipped me over with a low growl.
My breath caught in a gasp when he jerked my body against his, catching my neck in a gentle but firm bite that made my pulse race. With both of my wrists in one hand and my body stilled with the arm around my waist I couldn't move. Even my head was pinned by his teeth at my throat. I wasn't scared but a thrill ran through me at how easy it was for him to overpower me.
That was the real core of the game, seeing how well Derek could control the half of his brain and body that was ruled by instinct, and I knew exactly what instinct the wolf was responding to. I could see it in the wildness in his eyes and the rigidity of his body as he held himself absolutely still, fighting for control.
"Too f-far?" I murmured, voice catching as slid his bite along the side of my neck, replacing his mouth with his cheek.
After a few shaky breaths he released me, staying poised on his elbows and knees. Another breath and he shook his head. "Not quite."
I pushed up and kissed him lightly, rubbing my nose against his. "So you surrender?"
His eyes narrowed dangerously. "You. Are coming to Stonehaven with me this weekend. And you are going to pay for this." When I visited Stonehaven with Derek we stayed in the same cabin we'd shared the first time and Derek had no reservations there.
I smiled slowly. "Is that a threat or a promise?"
He kissed me almost bruisingly hard, pressing me into the soft pile of bedding and ran one of his big hands teasingly down the side of my body, thumb brushing the side of my chest. "Both." The growl was back and he settled into the bed, scooping me under the covers and pinning me there with one of his arms.
I nestled into the curve of his shoulder, annoyed by the comforter that separated his skin from mine but happy that he was once again sleeping beside me.
"Love you." I whispered against his skin.
"Give me a minute to stop being sexually frustrated before expecting pillow talk." He grumbled and I grinned, nestling into his body. He sighed, an annoyed and exasperated sound that I heard a lot of. "I love you to Pigeon."
I kicked him from under the covers and drifted to sleep listening to his soft laugh and steady heartbeat.