about | background | characters | fiction | illustration | preview

Fragment

He is obsessed with the way Lucius smells.

Coffee and crushed grass and cigarette smoke that's not his (Lucius would never be caught doing something as distastefully mannish as smoking.) Clothes that have been worn so often that even washed they carry the memory of all the places they've been, things they've inhaled in the rich scent of. Soapy-sweet smell of clean hair, clean skin, and the musky scent of man beneath.

For one maddening moment, he wants to do something disgraceful, mark Lucius as his own, rub his scent over him and onto him, somehow, in a way that will never wash off. Blood, urine, sperm; but their scent is transient and Peter never wants Lucius to smell like anyone else.

He buries his nose in Lucius's hair, and feels him shud der.

It's a shame, he thinks, that he has to keep doing this, has to keep renewing the smell of Lucius in his nostrils, has to keep renewing the smell of himself on Lucius. If he knew it would stay, if he could remember the scent as clearly, always, maybe he could stop. Maybe he could walk away, return to his old life, pretend the wolf in him was dead and that no others existed. Pretend there was no Pack and no Alpha and no Lucius, who looks at him with such hate that he almost mistakes it for love, now and then.

Lucius is angry and all teeth, but in the end he is a pup, the thinness of his arms almost delicate, the bones in his lean body long and slender like some elegant bird's. Peter is afraid Lucius will break, throwing himself against the s olid immovable rock that is Peter, with muscles rounded and hard from fighting all his life, his spirit just as indefatigable. But in the end it is vanity to think that, for he is not as strong as he likes to believe, and he is wearing down, cracking, wanting nothing more than to lay down and sleep.

Peter tightens his arms around Lucius.