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She stood straight too quickly, before the idea could take hold. Before she went mad and just climbed on him and fucked a goddamn werewolf. Where was her mind—Jesus Christ! The door didn’t even have a lock on it and though no one ever came by it didn’t mean they wouldn’t, one day. It didn’t mean they couldn’t catch her, with his slippery come on her hand and her uniform all in disarray, face too hot, hair all a mess, everything looking as if she just needed to be fucked, right now.

  When she finished bundling together her tray—cloth, bowl full of soapy water, various pathetic medical instruments and vials—and turned, he’d opened his eyes. And she could see it in his gaze, how sluttish she appeared. She could see him burning still, hand almost out as though he wanted to grab something on her, pull her back.

  So she ran. She ran with the tray in her hands and the water sloshing over the front of her uniform, and him calling to her forever in her head—Serena, Serena, Serena.

  She realized then with a kind of pained clarity that she should never have told him her name.

  Chapter Two

  She tried not to think about it. She tried not to think about it in the canteen, while Tara droned on about her duties doubling and the stupid wolf she was having to deal with lately—he thinks he’s going to bite me with all his teeth pulled out!—and how much she hoped they would all die. She tried not to think about it while staring up at the ceiling in her tiny room, listening for every tiny creak and crack it made because sometimes, they broke through the brittle ground and got into the walls and then you just had to run and run and run.

  Would she have to run from Connor one day? He couldn’t possibly carry on living like this. She didn’t understand why he hadn’t tried to escape a thousand times already, when really he’d never even attempted it once. He just sat in his rusty, rickety old hospital bed, waiting for her to come to him and…

  She closed her eyes and forced the images away. Why had she done it, for God’s sake? It just seemed so impossible and insane whenever she let it slip into her ordinary, everyday thoughts. It seemed like something Tara would do, only in reverse. Tara would sneak in and stab him in the night, then get seven hundred demerits for her trouble. Tara would sneakily pull his hair or otherwise tamper with him, then laugh about it over potato soup in the canteen.

  Tara would not jerk a wolf off and then wonder what it would feel like to have him touch her in return. Maybe with his hands. Maybe with his mouth.

  An agitated sound burst out of her and she shoved herself up against the wall, back to the blanket darkness, fists pressed into her eyes. He was a wolf, a wolf, and she’d touched him so lewdly and wanted him more than she’d ever wanted any human and nothing in her could figure out why.

  Because he was handsome? Because he was big? None of those things tempted anyone else. And she’d seen other wolves just the same anyway, wolves that could still talk the charming talk and smile with all of their ordinary-looking teeth, before suddenly ripping off their man-skin to reveal the beast beneath.

  Connor had never tried to charm her. She knew he hadn’t. He barely talked and when he did it was careful, so careful, as though at any second she might pull out a pin and stick it in him. And when they’d finally started their little hesitant conversations, he’d seemed almost reluctant to offer his own lost loves.

  As though sharing the books he missed or the films he longed to see again meant he had to give away a piece of himself. As though she might tell him he was wrong for loving things the government hadn’t archived—like Near Dark or I Sing The Body Electric.

  He’d told her he remembered that one for the title, and then he’d seemed to pause, eyes so still and watchful, as though considering if he should go on. But he must have seen something in her face—something trustworthy—because he had continued.

  He’d told her that those words described how it felt, to go from a man to a wolf. Like my body is singing electric, he’d said, and maybe that was when she’d first fallen for him.

  Because she had, of course. She’d fallen for him, utterly. That’s what it meant, when you couldn’t think of anything else but another person—Tara had said so, and she knew better than anybody about love and sex and all of that stuff.

  Not that she could actually talk to her about it and confirm, however. Or she could—yeah, she could if she really wanted to. They could sit down and have a nice chat about her feelings for a fucking werewolf, and Tara would smile and nod and dispense truly excellent advice.

  Shortly before Serena found herself on a one-way trip to the incinerator, courtesy of her best friend in all the world.

  * * * * *

  He called himself Commissioner Reddick, but he wasn’t really. She didn’t even know where he’d gotten the term “commissioner” from, though once—very early on, when it had still been a little startling to hear Connor suddenly speak—he’d told her it was from something called Batman in that cool, almost sardonic tone of his.

  Ever since, she’d wondered why on earth Commissioner Reddick thought of himself as a superhero made out of bats. He didn’t look like a bat, and there was nothing super about him, and when he demanded to know why she hadn’t been seeing to “the big one” she just wanted to stab him in the eye with a pencil.

  “I’ve been busy with other duties,” she squeezed out, and Reddick’s little round face became even smaller, and rounder. He had eyes like buttons, and when he got angry they seemed to lose all of their sheen. As though someone had turned a light out inside him.

  “I don’t see any extra duties on your rota, Nurse Kent,” he said.

  And, well, yeah. He had her there. Everyone was pulling extra time because of the ration bar shortage and the broth shortage and the general shortage of everything, but she was almost an actual, real nurse. She’d scored high enough in initial aptitude tests to garner her some proper training, and once you were properly trained no one wanted you slaving away in hydroponics or laundry.

  They wanted you to one day beat werewolves with lead pipes and then write the results down in a ledger. She’d already started writing proper reports about Connor for them, after all. Reports like, Today I couldn’t get his dislocated shoulder to go back in the socket.

  “I’ve been helping out in the Class Three ward,” she said.

  Which was a complete and total lie. The Class Three ward made her barf, but luckily Tara was only too happy to take on the mangled limbs and blood-red sheets. You know. For shits and giggles.

  And in exchange she’d taken on Connor, because Connor was boring and never screamed when people scored him with rusty nails.

  “I see. I see. Well, may I just remind you how important the big one is?” She thought of said big one’s face, so still and lovely. “It’s been a year and he’s shown no sign of rebellion, no change to a bestial form. He could be a halfway point.”

  How she hated Commissioner Reddick and his ridiculous, half-baked theories. Everyone knew there were plenty of wolves that didn’t change all the way. Everyone knew it, and still they battered him and electrocuted him and hosed him with ice-cold water, as though if they could only hurt him enough the human race would be proven superior.

  “Of course,” she said and nodded.

  “So if I hear you’re not visiting him every day, we’ll have to have another chat.”

  She tried not to close her eyes. He thought she was just shirking duties! God, if only he knew. If only he knew she had a truly excellent, excellent reason for not visiting Connor every single goddamn day.

  She didn’t even want to look him in the eye, for fuck’s sake.

  “You won’t have to have another chat with me, sir,” she said, and that much was true, at least. It was tough to have to go to him, but Lord it had been tougher to stay away.

  “I’m trusting you, Nurse Kent,” Reddick said, but he was a fool too.

  She couldn’t even trust herself.

  * * * * *

  When she first walked into the ward, she did her best not to look at his face. He wa
s staring at her intently, she could tell, but if she could only keep her eyes on the tray in her two hands or on the clinical green of the floor or on nothing, nothing at all, everything would be okay.

  She was Nurse Kent, professional. He was a blank spot who needed cleaning and fixing.

  Lord, she didn’t know how she was going to get through this. Even if she managed to pretend he didn’t exist, somehow, at some point she was going to have to run her hands all over his naked body. And something about that just seemed desperately unfair.

  Who on earth had ever thought of this stupid practice? Couldn’t they clean themselves, for God’s sake? Well, the ones who no longer had hands probably couldn’t clean themselves, but as far as she knew Connor still totally had those two appendages.

  Unless they’d taken them on the day she’d been away from him. Oh God, what if they’d taken his hands or worse, his face, or even worse than that his gorgeous, amazing—

  She breathed out, long and slow. No, no, no—his hands and face were still there. And his…other thing was still there too. She could see it beneath the bed sheet, already too thick and probably halfway to hardness and oh this was all just a mess.

  “I thought I’d never see you again,” he said, which just made it even more of a mess. At least if he’d said something simple and straightforward like, Oh, I see my half-hard cock is making you wet again, she could have pretended there was just a weird sexual current between them.

  No deep sadness and sweet longing. No hearts and flowers and other things that probably didn’t even exist anymore, up there in the world she’d never seen.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m your nurse.”

  There. That straightened things out. Now he could see what a professional she was, and absolutely nothing more.

  “Yeah, but last time you did things that most nurses—”

  “Let’s talk about something else!” she said, only it came out way too shrill. It almost sounded like the morning whistle blowing—that’s how shrill it was.

  But it made him quiet. She could hear him shifting on the bed, but that didn’t really count as noise. Her own tremulous breathing—that counted as noise. The way her own chest was rising and falling, and her uniform was chafing against her burning-hot body—that counted as noise.

  It sounded loud enough to block out rational thought in her head.

  “Well, I wasn’t going to mention it…” he started, and she willed him not to finish his sentence, oh how she willed him not to. “But then I realized how desperately aroused you are and it seemed sort of rude not to.”

  She whipped her gaze to his, immediately. Was he messing with her? Was that the ways things were now? She’d touched him intimately, so he got to make little barbed comments about her ridiculous horniness while his eyes fixed on her in some awful, hungry sort of way?

  She didn’t think so. Oh no, she didn’t think so.

  She snapped around and faced the little table by his bed, back almost to him. Hands busy with very important nursing kinds of things. And if her legs were sort of trembling as she did them, well, it didn’t mean anything. It just meant she’d had a hard, hungry day—because of him—and she had a tough, annoying task ahead of her—also because of him.

  If he didn’t want to do anything to make those problems better, he could just go screw.

  “Serena,” he said, which was almost as bad as the arousal comment. The urge to spit at him that he shouldn’t call her by her first name swelled up inside her, large and black and awful, just awful.

  But then, if she did he’d never call her by her first name again. If she snapped at him, he’d probably retreat and then what? They’d go all the way back to cold silences and empty nothingness, until one day some doctor would give her a card saying he’d died and she’d been moved to Ward Three.

  “Serena, I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said, because he was too good at this game. He was so good she didn’t even think it was a game. He’d long since passed the point where he could rip off his man-skin and surprise her with a claw to the face.

  “It’s just so hard for me, to have you come in here every day and know that you…to feel that you might…”

  When had she started trembling all over? She couldn’t remember. She could barely remember her own name, so recollecting details like minute body movements seemed like a Herculean chore.

  “I mean, I’ve never been sure…”

  He was lying. He had been sure, she knew he had. He’d smelled it on her all along.

  “But God, the other day when you came in it was like a wave coming over me—I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop myself—do you have any idea how long it’s been since—”

  She let herself look at him then. Just out of the corner of one eye—though out of the corner of one eye turned out to be more than enough. He’d put a fist to his mouth, like before when he’d tried to keep his own moans in, only this time…this time he was trying to keep something else in. Something like words he obviously didn’t want to say.

  Oh, how she longed to help him say them.

  He cleared his throat and when he continued, he seemed…calmer. Or at least calmer by comparison to the shaky heights his voice had gotten up to before.

  “I’m sorry. That was…inappropriate and irrelevant,” he said.

  She realized, then, that she’d clenched her hands into fists at her sides. That her fists were actually kind of shaking with the effort it took to keep her fingers closed and away from him.

  “I just wanted to explain why…it happened. And tell you that it won’t happen again. No matter how I imagine you feel, no matter how I respond to that or want you, I won’t ever let myself get into that state. I can control myself. I can always control myself.”

  Her voice came out different, when she finally managed to speak—like something far away and not related to her. As though something had broken inside her and could never be fixed again.

  “What if I can’t?”

  He looked confused. She could see it, even out of the corner of her eye.

  “I—”

  “What if I can’t control myself? What if all I can feel is this beating pulse between my legs?”

  Her voice was clearer now. Stronger.

  “I mean, I know what you’re saying. You’re saying that it turns you on, to know that I’m excited. To know that I want you. And I do, God, I do. I don’t even know why I thought I could stand here and pretend.”

  “Serena,” he said, and she was sure he meant it as a scold. Unfortunately it came out rough and heated, and the pulse between her legs beat harder.

  “It isn’t just your body—though God knows it’s been a pleasure to run my hands all over that gorgeous thing—it’s the way you are too. You’ve been kinder to me than any other man, did you know that? I’ve never even dared to speak like this with anyone else, because I’m always afraid of what they’ll say. But I’m not afraid with you. Isn’t that funny? I’m never afraid with you.”

  She looked at him then. It was okay to look, now that she’d accepted everything—even though his eyes were burning bright and she could see the hint of teeth below his upper lip, and when he shifted on the bed it was obvious, so obvious that he had an erection.

  The beat between her legs became an ache, a long and insistent ache, and when he said, “You should be,” it only got worse. Not better, the way it was supposed to. It should have dried up completely, with words like those coming out of him and his body all tensed like that—as though ready to pounce on her at any moment.

  But it hadn’t. Instead she could feel herself getting wetter and wetter, and she could see him reacting to it in the way he’d probably always wanted to. Like a man half-crazed with lust, after a hundred years of starving in the desert.

  It was intoxicating, unbelievable—so much so that she found herself scrabbling for the buttons on the front of her uniform.

  But he didn’t do what she expected once two of them were undone and a third had starte
d buckling under her trembling fingers. She’d braced herself for grabbing or ripping—not violent exactly, but certainly forceful—and nothing of the kind came. He just looked stunned for a second, eyes never leaving her busy fingers, and then when he finally spoke it was only to ask a completely insane question.

  “Are you taking your clothes off?”

  She wasn’t sure what to say. Yes seemed too simple, no seemed like something a person would say if they’d completely misinterpreted the whole scenario. And oh God, she hoped it wasn’t the latter. It couldn’t be the latter, right? She could see his stiff cock beneath the sheet like an immense exclamation point, and he’d said all that stuff and she’d told him she wasn’t afraid and—

  “Oh…I thought…do you want me to keep it on?”

  “No, God no—I just didn’t think you’d want to be that close to me…with all of your skin…naked… Are we going to be naked?”

  “Of course I want to be that close to you—I mean, unless you want to do something else—”

  He ran two shaky hands through his hair, then glanced at the door.

  “Put something under the handle first. Just…put something up against it.”

  He was trying to keep his tone even and reasonable, but it wasn’t really hitting anywhere close. She couldn’t blame him, however. Her legs felt like water as she ran to the door and shoved some flimsy, nothing chair underneath the handle, just as he’d suggested.

  It wouldn’t make any difference, she knew. But that wasn’t the point, really. It wasn’t the thing that made her knees knock and her heart try to escape out of her body. No, her heart was trying to escape because they were actually going to do something that required a wedged-shut door.

  And when she turned back around to face him…Lord. He looked even better than when she’d first stepped away. He looked so good she could hardly make it back across the room, and her hands wouldn’t cooperate when she told them to finish unbuttoning her dress. She got to somewhere around the seventh button down, before he stopped her with hands that seemed too patient and too steady, and pulled her down to touch his mouth to hers.