Page 26 of Feral Werewolves
I grinned back, squeezing his hand.
8
kestrel
PALADIN WAS GONE, and he hadn’t done anything, as usual.
It wasn’t that Paladin shirked his duties on purpose. He really just forgot. I knew it. He’d always be really apologetic when I reminded him of whatever it was he was supposed to be doing. For whatever reason, he couldn’t keep it all in his head.
It annoyed me, but I also had a very difficult time being angry with him. He was Paladin.
I kind of loved him, you know.
I was pretty sure Lazarus did, too.
Lazarus and me, we were sort of friends, I guess.
Or, uh, colleagues? Like, we respected each other and we recognized that teaming up made sense to our survival, and we’d grown used to each other in the interim. We had genuine regard for each other, but it wasn’t like what we felt for Paladin.
If Paladin hadn’t been here, it might not have worked anyway. He was sort of the peanut butter in our sandwich, the sweet, sticky part that made everything taste good.
Anyway, all of this made it hard for me to be annoyed with him. I knew I’d find him somewhere, probably playing Tetris on his phone or something, and I’d be like, “Hey, you said that you were going to clean out the chicken cooptoday,” and his eyes would get all wide, and he’d be like, “Sorry, I’ll get right on that.” And he would, if I hadn’t gotten really annoyed and just done it myself at that point.
Which I did do. It just seemed easier sometimes. Things needed done, and I could do them.
Today, I was out looking for him, but I didn’t find him.
I found Lazarus, out in the fields wrestling with our plow, which seemed to be broken. He’d gotten it working a little bit earlier in the week, but it had broken again. I’d asked him if he wanted me to help him take a look at it, but Lazarus was the kind of guy who didn’t do well with sharing problems, exactly.
I got it. I wasn’t always up for the group approach either, but sometimes, just talking something out with someone would help you shake things loose.
He, however, liked to think on his own, try things, then go back to the drawing board. If I offered him advice, he wouldn’t say anything, but he’d be irritated. He’d take it like an insult, like I doubted his prowess or abilities or something.
I tried to stay clear when Lazarus was in his fixing-mode.
Today, I only swung by to ask if he’d seen Paladin, but he had not, so I ended up walking the perimeter of the farm, looking to see signs of his having been there.
Then I found him, and he wasn’t alone.
They were out by the bird bath. It used to be in the back yard, because this farm had probably once been run by some old-lady-farmer’s-wife who did things like keep hummingbird feeders and have a bird bath.
When we took it over, I moved the bird bath out here.
She was holding hands with him, and she was laughing, and they were looking around at everything, and it hit me right in the middle of my chest, like a punch to my solar plexus, how nice it was to see her out here, how much I liked her laugh, how pretty she was, how strange and tangled up my feelings were about her.
They weren’t all good feelings, that was the thing.
I did feel protective of her and a little in awe of howpretty and poised she was. I did think about how good it would be to see something pretty and graceful at the breakfast table, how it would settle something in me to have that focal point to my life, a woman, someone to do all thisfor.
But there were other parts of it, too, and they weren’t good.
I wanted to fuck her.
I saw her and got an immediate erection, and I remembered how she’d been on her knees, taking my cock down her throat, and I got this sea of images in my brain, all kinds of fucked up things. Restraining her, holding her down, coming on her face, smacking jiggly parts of her body just to watch them jiggle, forcing her to beg for all kinds of things, never letting her wear clothes at all, just keeping her inside the farmhouse, maybe in a little apron that covered her tits and pussy but left her shapely little butt bare…
I must have made a noise.
They turned around, and she saw me. She let go of his hand and came for me, like a moth drawn to the flame, really, an eagerness coming off her in a way I could actually scent.
