ROMANCE: PARANORMAL ROMANCE: Coveted by the Werewolves (Paranormal MMF Bisexual Menage Romance) (New Adult Shifter Romance Short Stories) (193 page)

              “You don’t even know what she looks like now.  It’s been over ten years; what if it’s morphed into Quasimodo or something?” Ian asks.

              Jack’s mind skips back to the day Jenn’s appendix had ruptured and his family had left him in Amanda’s care.  Painfully shy, he masked this by being overly active, by annoying Amanda so much that she would lock herself in another room just to get some peace from him.  But that day, there was something else in her eyes—fear and something new.  Sympathy, perhaps.  She had sat with Jacky on the living room couch and tried to explain what had happened to his sister, and that she would be all right.  And for the first time ever, Jacky let himself sit down next to her and be hugged.  When she wrapped one of her long, tan arms around him, his nose filled with the scent of her perfume, something fake and berry, something so utterly girl that Jacky wanted to reach up and touch her.  How exactly he wanted to touch her, he did not know, but more than anything, he wanted to wipe that fear from her eyes. 

              As it neared nightfall, Amanda put him to bed and went to take a bath in the guest bathroom.  Something nameless pulled Jacky from his bed in his Spiderman pajamas that he could not believe he had let Amanda see and to the bathroom door.  At first, he made excuses for himself, saying he was only headed to the kitchen for a glass of milk, but soon, knees knocking together, he found himself holding his breath as he pressed an ear to the bathroom door.  The water was running and he heard Amanda walking around.  Soon, he heard her unzipping her jeans, and he was carefully pressing his eye into the crack between the door and the frame that would let him peek in.

              Everything was murky from the poor lighting, but Jacky could see enough to knock the wind out of him.  Amanda was stepping out of her jeans, peeling them off of strong, round thighs and discarding them carelessly.  He held his breath as the bottom of her top climbed its way up her torso, until she was standing there in nothing but her bra and panties, both a bubblegum purple color with little happy faces on the bottoms.  Jacky felt a familiar stirring in his pajama bottoms, one that he had discovered last year, one that didn’t give him any sleep until he had taken care of it.  Was this the nameless thing that always made him want to touch her when the other girls in his class held no interest for him?  This is what he felt for his older sister’s friend, the one who was already in college and would never look at him except to tell him to put on his Spidey pjs?

              But there was no time to think about that, because Amanda was unclasping her bra and sliding off the happy face undies.  Her little bubble butt sprang free, so bouncy that Jacky wanted to rest his head on it; he noticed that she was not looking at herself in the mirror.  If he looked like Amanda, he thought, almost grinding himself against the door, he would do nothing but look at himself in the mirror all day.  Then, with a splash, she was gone into the bathtub.

              Knees shaking, Jacky slid down to the ground.  How long he sat there, listening to the sounds of soaping and running water that were beyond his field of vision, he did not know.  It was only when he heard the drain release that he picked himself up and hammed his eye almost painfully to the crack again.

              What he sees there nearly stops his heart.  Amanda is advancing towards the door; does she suspect something?  Jack steps to the side of the door, heart beating so loudly that he is sure that if she cannot see him then surely she can hear him.  But there is no sudden opening of the door, no screams, nobody condemning him for looking.  One minute passes, two, five, beat along like an eternity, and he slowly presses himself back to his peephole.  Amanda has retreated back to the sink, and—oh God.

              Oh God, she is rubbing lotion on herself, all that already smooth skin taking on a satiny sheen that he knows will haunt his memories forever.  He takes in the long curves of her legs, the press of her pink-nippled breasts on her golden thighs and feels himself growing hard in that brand new way.  His heart rate accelerates again, and just when he thinks it’s over—she’s done her legs after all—he sees her reach over and almost deliberately rub lotion on her bottom.  Jacky has to bite his lip from crying out.  What he wouldn’t give to be those fingers, that lotion, or just to commit this image of his first naked woman to memory forever.

              Not that he needed to worry.  Because that image is still before his eyes today as he slides into his blue suit jacket under the watchful eyes of Ian. 

              “I’m pretty sure that unless she was bitten by a radioactive spider, she couldn’t have transformed into a snaggle-toothed hunchback, man,” he tells his friend.  “And besides, I want to see what she looks like now.  I have a feeling she’s one of those girls who just gets better with age.”

              “I think you’re seriously misguided by your pre-teen fantasies,” Ian answers.  “But if she’s still hot, why don’t you bring her over after dinner?  Maybe we’ll both get to know her a little better,” he winks.

              Jack puts on his shoes and does a final bow in front of the mirror.  He steps in front of Ian and sweeps out a questioning arm.  Ian nods in approval and tosses him his wallet.  Catching it, Jack bows again.

              “Maybe I will bring her by,” he says slowly, heading for the door.  “Maybe I will.”

              “Have fun and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!” cries out Ian in his stead, making fake kissy faces at Jack’s back.  Then he slumps back into the couch and covers his face with his hands.

*              *              *

              Minutes stretch endlessly long after Jack leaves the apartment.  Rising lazily from the couch, Ian makes his way into his studio to stand in front of the full-length mirror he uses for self-portraits, surrounded by his commissioned paintings.

              Ian considers himself in the mirror, twists this way and that, then takes off his shirt.  After posing and brushing his long blonde hair back, he considers his roommate.  And how ever since that fateful night in college, all he can think about is how to get Jack back into bed.

              Ian smiles.  Back into bed.  It sounds like the beginning of a terrible porno movie.  Wry grins aside, all he knows is that the one guy he has ever wanted to be with has been silly little green-eyed Jack.  Little Jacky.  Ian steps away from the mirror and steps instead in front of his easel.  As he lifts up the paintbrush to free-form, his mind drifts back, tumbling past images of tight muscles and soft brown hair.

              Jack and Ian had been assigned to the same dorm room their first semester of college and after a semester of living with each other, never considered having a different roommate.  They partied hard, drank the same beers, and always respected each other’s privacy.  But more than that, they never bothered to be anything other than completely themselves around each other.  There was a reason they decided to live with each other even past college.

              For all the proposed bro-ness that ultimately helped propel him into the life of a hedge fund manager, Jack turned out to be a one-woman man.  And when the girl he had been going out with for two years ended up in bed with her literature professor Jack’s sophomore year of college, Jack was beside himself.  Ian was already fast asleep when Jack stumbled into the room, tripping over himself and swearing like a madman as he clutched a nearly empty bottle of tequila.  The minute he saw that bottle, Ian knew something was wrong.  Tequila was a sorority girl’s drink.

              “What’s the matter sweetie?” Ian lisped like a Valley Girl, rubbing his eyes as he sat up in bed.  “Lost your big?” he cooed.

              “None of your shit, okay, Ian?  I’ll fucking kill you, I’ll hurt—“ and Jack had broken off, sobbing, collapsed on their communal rug, the tequila dribbling out next to his face where it lay, overturned, in his hand.

             
I’ll hurt indeed
, thought Ian as he picked his friend from the floor.  Laying to rest all stereotypes about wimpy artist types, Ian was a pro MMA fighter, a hobby he had pursued for most of his teenage and adult life; that was why Jack was always little Jacky to him, even though Jack was by no means a small guy.  He lay Jack down on his wide queen-sized bed, and waited for him to blubber out the story.

              This did not take long.  In a fit of uncharacteristic tears, Jack raged on for an hour about how he had tried to give his girlfriend her birthday present and instead, found her panting aloud in a fake British accent to the professor inside her about how manly he was. 

              “It was
disgusting
,” Jack raged, sitting up and grabbing Ian by the collar.  Ian gently, but firmly directed his hand away and winced at the image of Jack’s very blonde preppy girlfriend riding the old tweed he knew to be her lit professor. 

              “You don’t paint too pretty a picture,” he agreed, leaning back against his pillows and absent-mindedly stroking Jack’s hair.  Jack hiccupped and began to cry again; this lasted for a good ten minutes until the tears subsided into a silence that almost fooled Ian into thinking it was all over.  Then suddenly, Jack was looking up at him, peering so piercingly into Ian’s almond-colored eyes with his huge green ones that it almost floored him.

              “Why doesn’t anyone love me?” he asked, and the intense vulnerability in his eyes almost swallowed Ian whole. 

              Oh Jacky, sweet Jacky.  “I love you, man,” Ian said, planting a brotherly kiss on top of Jack’s hair, which smelled like beer and shampoo.

              “You do?” Jack sat up and looked intently at Ian.  Something tender was there, something so innocent about the question that it startled Ian out of his usual sarcasm.  Jack seemed suddenly completely sober, even though it couldn’t possibly be true. 

              “Of course I do.”

              Hesitantly at first, Jacky placed a hand on Ian’s chest, and Ian’s heart began to hammer with the unexpected move.  Looking down, he clasped Jack’s hand in his and looked back into the big green eyes that threatened to drown him if he looked too long; but even then, he couldn’t tear his eyes away.  Jack leaned forward and kissed him softly on the lips, and it changed Ian forever.

              He had fooled around with boys before, and it was indiscriminate.  But he had never felt before what he felt when Jacky touched him so innocently and sweetly.  Leaning forward, Ian kissed him back, grasping his face in his hands and almost literally drinking him in.  He felt the soft bristle of Jack’s boy’s haircut against his fingers, felt Jack’s body arch as he surrendered himself completely to Ian’s touch.

              They melded into each other.  They tumbled, legs and torsos over sheets until their bodies rubbed against one another in a frenzy older than sliced bread.  They kissed each other’s necks and faces, hardly coming up for breath, traced each other’s nipples until they both moaned.  “Jacky, Jacky,” Ian gasped, but Jacky silenced him with a kiss.  Their fingers roamed over each other’s abdomens, and it was sloppy and hot, and unpracticed and incredible.  And the best part of all was watching Jacky forget that stupid girl, watching his green eyes come alive instead.

              Ian touched Jack’s cock, which was hard and velvet-soft simultaneously.  He held Jacky in his hand until he felt him swell, felt him begin to lift his hips in rhythm with the motion that milked him, heard his ragged gasps fill the air around them like the sweetest symphony Ian had ever known.  Sweet little Jacky, coming undone.

              Ian could not tear his eyes away from that incredibly angled face, cheekbones so sharp he knew he would cut himself if he leaned too close.  A single drop of moisture pearled at the head of Jacky’s penis, and his lips formed soundless, wild words that had no name or meaning, when suddenly, Ian felt Jacky’s hand pushing him away.

              “No, no, no,” he heard Jack mutter, and felt his heart crumple.

              He pushed himself off the bed and went to the couch, leaving a half-drunk and confused Jack behind in his dorm bed.  He stared outside at the moonlight, teeming with the rage of rejection and a hard-on that matched it in intensity.  He sat up, cradling his head in his hands.  He heard the bedsprings creak as Jack stood up from the bed, felt his warm presence on his naked back as Jack joined him on the couch.

              Lips touched the bare knobs of his spine, and Jack’s hands closed gently on his shoulders.  “I meant,” he whispered into Ian’s neck quietly, “Not like this.  Not after some girl.”  Ian turned around to face him.  Jacky’s eyes were wet and shining in the moonlight.  He said nothing.  When he woke up the next morning, still on the couch where he had lain, wrapped around Jacky’s wiry body, Jack was gone. 

              Four years later and Ian finds that the image he is free-painting on his canvas is Jacky’s body.

              He groans and tosses his paintbrush down onto the ground; the wooden handle clatters against the floor.  Did he love Jacky?  Did it really matter?  The fact was that “after” never really came, and he could still taste Jack on his lips at night if he squeezed his eyes tight.  Could still feel the ribbed press of Jacky’s cock in his hand as he stroked himself, imagining Jacky doing the same in the adjoining room.  And when he wanted to come, all he had to do was build up to the moment of the single pearl of moisture that signaled to him that Jacky wanted him, too. 

              Did he still want him?