in the midnight sun - act I, scenes x-xii
The last thing you remember is the bear advancing on you on her hind legs, forepaws extended. Her claws looked sharp; she had you backed up against a tree. You remember a terrible pain in your side and then that horrible, familiar sensation like your spine is being ripped forcefully from your body. You remember thinking, no no no it’s too soon no stop stop STOP. You yelped for everyone else to run and they did, but then Jeff stayed behind - or maybe he came back for you, you don’t know - and he growled at the bear, lunged at her throat and you think he must have snapped her neck with the speed he went flying at her. Then he was nudging you from behind, pushing you forward despite the amount of blood gushing from your side. His howling was so loud, HELP HELP HELP COME BACK SOMEONE PLEASE HELP and he didn’t stop urging you on no matter how much you protested.
After that it gets a little bit fuzzy. You remember trying to leap over the property line to go home because your heart and head and body were all screaming for Alex but you couldn’t. Jeff sat beside you and howled, licked you comfortingly, howled some more until suddenly there was an explosion of movement from the house. You remember arms around you, trying to hold you down because your body was out of control, but you panicked and kicked out and you don’t know what happened after that. It’s all a blur of pain and white spots in your vision and everything in you crying Alex Alex please don’t leave me I love you stay with me please don’t go.
You wake up in your own bed. It’s soft and warm and clean. As soon as you try to move, pain shoots up your right side.
Alex comes rushing in looking concerned and really, really tired. “Don’t try to get up,” he says, “you’ll hurt yourself.” He leans over, kisses your forehead. He smells good and clean and home. “I was so worried about you…” You wince slightly when he lies down next to you. Everything hurts. You let him fuss over you for a few minutes more, let him kiss you all over before you push him for explanations. Secretly you kind of like it when he does this, although you’d enjoy it more if you weren’t in so much pain.
“What happened?” you ask weakly, struggling to move around enough that you can snuggle up against him without hurting yourself.
He sighs. “I told you not to do anything stupid and brave.” You whimper when his fingers graze your side; he’s checking something but he won’t tell you anything. When he presses his fingers against the skin a little harder, you yelp and try to back away from him instinctively. “Sorry. I just wanted to check your stitches.” Once he’s done poking and prodding you, he sighs again and runs his fingers through your hair gently.
This time you’re going to be a little sterner with him. “Tell me what happened,” you insist, curling your fingers around his wrist. “I need you to tell me. Please?” Alex rubs his hand over your chest sadly. He trails his fingers down your torso under the covers, traces your hipbone lightly, tries to distract you by kissing you and rubbing your inner thigh. It doesn’t work. You pull away from his lips, sigh, and go, “Alexander. Tell me.”
“You got mauled by the bear. I thought - I thought I was going to lose you,” he whispers. “Jeff helped me get you inside so we could stop the bleeding. There was so much blood everywhere. I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do and you were changing and it wouldn’t stop and you looked…” He stops to rub at his temples and take a deep breath. “You looked so fucking small and you wouldn’t let us help you and Jeff kept telling me to get back and I wouldn’t listen.”
The realization dawns on you and it hurts more - if that’s possible - than your side. “I hurt you.”
“I’m okay. I promise.” He wraps himself around you as much as possible; you’re grateful for the warmth, and it’s comforting. Alex kisses the top of your head, tells you, “I’m more worried about you. You lost a lot of blood this morning.” More than that, it feels like you lost a lot of blood. With Alex close by, you feel okay going back to sleep for a while, so you let the heavy feeling overtake you and drown out the constant all-over achiness. The next time you wake up, it’s almost dark. You haven’t dreamed anything yet - too tired - but Alex is sound asleep beside you. You roll onto your uninjured side and press yourself against the familiar line of his body.
*
When you dream, you dream of running through an open field. It’s strangely similar to one that you and Alex walked through when you first started dating all those years ago when you went camping. And when you dream, you are always a wolf. This time you are not alone. This time, an unfamiliar brown wolf is at your side, but you’d know those eyes anywhere. Alex. You want to ask him how this is possible, but it’s a dream. Anything is possible in dreamland. He nips your back leg, then races away as fast as he can. It’s maybe the wolfish equivalent of grabbing your lover’s ass in public or putting your hand in his back pocket. You chase after him, catch up to him, jump on him. He lets you lick him all over and then suddenly you’re having sex in the middle of the field.
The weird part is that when you’re having sex in the dream, you’re both human. You missed that happening. He’s smiling at you, laughing. He says, “C’mon, baby, keep up.” Are you supposed to know what that means? He keeps you pinned to the ground, kissing you playfully until you start to whine and beg for him to pay attention to you. Once that happens, he sprints away again. You blink, and he’s a wolf once more. Weird-ass fuckin’ dream. Dream-you chases after him and you wake up with your legs still twitching.
*
“Nightmare?” Alex asks when you wake up.
You shake your head. “No, just weird.” He doesn’t ask what it was about and you don’t tell him. He kisses you until you can’t breathe, but gently, like he’s afraid you might break. Maybe you will. It hurts when things brush against your side, still, though it’s nowhere near as bad as it was. You silently thank God for your accelerated healing factor.
He rubs his nose against your cheekbone and says, “You should sleep some more.”
“Okay.” You go back to sleep. Everything feels fuzzy and awful, anyway.
*
In the morning you feel much better. You get out of bed, go into the bathroom and look at your body in the mirror. The line of stitches is messy and hurried; you can tell how panicked Alex must have been when he did them by how ragged they are. The wound itself looks okay. It’s kind of pink still, but it has mostly healed over. The scar on your hip from where the bullet clipped you looks worse. It still hurts a lot, actually, and you’re walking with a bit of a limp to compensate for it. Alex must already be awake. His side of the bed was cold.
You find him in the kitchen, staring blankly at the coffee maker. You hug him from behind. “Not awake yet?” you tease, pressing your lips to the back of his neck. It’s a little disappointing to find him wearing a shirt this early. To be honest, you had been hoping to make up for some lost time today since your homecoming yesterday had been so… painful, for lack of a better word. You slide your hands down the front of his boxers; he gasps and you feel his back stiffen slightly.
He says, “Your hands are really cold.”
“Warm them up for me then.” You let him push you up against the kitchen counter, kiss him like your life depends on it. You keep your hands in his shirt, grasping the fabric to pull him closer to you until there is no space between your bodies. He’s being more cautious than usual and keeping his hands away from your injured side. So are you though, you suppose. The scratches on his arms are still red and angry and your fault.
“So. Cold hands,” Alex says between kisses. “You know what an awesome cure for that is?” You hope the answer is sex. Because it’s been a week since that happened and - honestly - that’s one thing about being a werewolf with a human mate that is kind of depressing. Everyone else gets to have tons of awesome werewolf sex because they’re all paired off, and you get to run around with Jeff and Evan, monitoring the perimeter to make sure no one can edge in on the pack’s territory. Although, you’re not entirely unconvinced that the new guy’s bitchiness and jabs at Evan aren’t some kind of weird flirting on their part. Evan does tend to fall all over him like a lost puppy. It would be cute if they weren’t so particularly vomit-inducing.
You hop up onto the counter so you can wrap your legs around Alex’s waist. Mine, you think happily. Mineminemine my Alex my mate MINE. At this altitude, you are almost the same height. He makes a soft, breathy noise when you start kissing his neck. The noises change to something a little more wanting when you push his boxers down and dig your fingernails into his hip. “Missed you,” you mumble against his skin. Your skin is buzzing with the promise of sex; instead of walking back to the bedroom Alex picks you up and carries you back, sets you down on the bed very carefully.
Alex says, “I love you,” then he frowns, because obviously sex is not going to work with you on your back. “Can we just,” he sighs. You sort of move onto your less-injured side and lean forward tentatively. “This is not going to work either. What if we…?” His frustrated look is so adorable that you almost don’t mind being too mangled to have sex. Almost. You kiss the corner of his mouth and shift around until you can lay your head on his chest and hear his heartbeat. This is good too.
“I love you more than anything,” you tell Alex. “Even if you are an idiot sometimes.”
The first time you and Alex had sex, he was so nervous that his hands were sweaty and he asked if you were okay about a hundred times. It hurt a little, like you’re pretty sure most first times do, but the reason he was so nervous kind of makes sense. He is the only person you’ve ever been with. He is the only person you ever want to be with. So that’s a pretty special thing, which makes the way he was so nervous and sweaty okay because even though it was gross, it was also really cute. Most of all you remember the afterglow; you curled up next to him with your head on his chest just like you are now, and he stayed awake with you until the sun went down and you had to leave him. He didn’t tell you he cried afterward, but you knew. You can always tell when he is upset. And right now, he feels probably a hundred times more upset than that first time.
Sometimes you wish Alex were the moon so you’d never have to leave him. “Hey,” he says. “You went away in your head somewhere.” He has his arm around your shoulders. You want to push yourself into his body, under his skin. You just want to stay in bed forever and not deal with life.
Because as soon as you’re better, you’re going to have to explain everything and Jeff will have to explain everything. People are going to be really pissed off at you, and it isn’t like you can tell Alex about it because you’re trying so hard to protect him from this. Somehow, no matter how hard you try, it doesn’t feel like enough anymore. It presses in on both of you from all sides; the wildness feels a little bit closer every month no matter how far you run, no matter how many join the pack. You’re straddling the line pretty firmly for the moment, but it won’t last forever.
You say, “I think I need more sleep,” and Alex nods sympathetically. He kisses your forehead and settles for just holding your hand when you finally find a position comfortable enough to sleep in.
Next
After that it gets a little bit fuzzy. You remember trying to leap over the property line to go home because your heart and head and body were all screaming for Alex but you couldn’t. Jeff sat beside you and howled, licked you comfortingly, howled some more until suddenly there was an explosion of movement from the house. You remember arms around you, trying to hold you down because your body was out of control, but you panicked and kicked out and you don’t know what happened after that. It’s all a blur of pain and white spots in your vision and everything in you crying Alex Alex please don’t leave me I love you stay with me please don’t go.
You wake up in your own bed. It’s soft and warm and clean. As soon as you try to move, pain shoots up your right side.
Alex comes rushing in looking concerned and really, really tired. “Don’t try to get up,” he says, “you’ll hurt yourself.” He leans over, kisses your forehead. He smells good and clean and home. “I was so worried about you…” You wince slightly when he lies down next to you. Everything hurts. You let him fuss over you for a few minutes more, let him kiss you all over before you push him for explanations. Secretly you kind of like it when he does this, although you’d enjoy it more if you weren’t in so much pain.
“What happened?” you ask weakly, struggling to move around enough that you can snuggle up against him without hurting yourself.
He sighs. “I told you not to do anything stupid and brave.” You whimper when his fingers graze your side; he’s checking something but he won’t tell you anything. When he presses his fingers against the skin a little harder, you yelp and try to back away from him instinctively. “Sorry. I just wanted to check your stitches.” Once he’s done poking and prodding you, he sighs again and runs his fingers through your hair gently.
This time you’re going to be a little sterner with him. “Tell me what happened,” you insist, curling your fingers around his wrist. “I need you to tell me. Please?” Alex rubs his hand over your chest sadly. He trails his fingers down your torso under the covers, traces your hipbone lightly, tries to distract you by kissing you and rubbing your inner thigh. It doesn’t work. You pull away from his lips, sigh, and go, “Alexander. Tell me.”
“You got mauled by the bear. I thought - I thought I was going to lose you,” he whispers. “Jeff helped me get you inside so we could stop the bleeding. There was so much blood everywhere. I was so scared, I didn’t know what to do and you were changing and it wouldn’t stop and you looked…” He stops to rub at his temples and take a deep breath. “You looked so fucking small and you wouldn’t let us help you and Jeff kept telling me to get back and I wouldn’t listen.”
The realization dawns on you and it hurts more - if that’s possible - than your side. “I hurt you.”
“I’m okay. I promise.” He wraps himself around you as much as possible; you’re grateful for the warmth, and it’s comforting. Alex kisses the top of your head, tells you, “I’m more worried about you. You lost a lot of blood this morning.” More than that, it feels like you lost a lot of blood. With Alex close by, you feel okay going back to sleep for a while, so you let the heavy feeling overtake you and drown out the constant all-over achiness. The next time you wake up, it’s almost dark. You haven’t dreamed anything yet - too tired - but Alex is sound asleep beside you. You roll onto your uninjured side and press yourself against the familiar line of his body.
*
When you dream, you dream of running through an open field. It’s strangely similar to one that you and Alex walked through when you first started dating all those years ago when you went camping. And when you dream, you are always a wolf. This time you are not alone. This time, an unfamiliar brown wolf is at your side, but you’d know those eyes anywhere. Alex. You want to ask him how this is possible, but it’s a dream. Anything is possible in dreamland. He nips your back leg, then races away as fast as he can. It’s maybe the wolfish equivalent of grabbing your lover’s ass in public or putting your hand in his back pocket. You chase after him, catch up to him, jump on him. He lets you lick him all over and then suddenly you’re having sex in the middle of the field.
The weird part is that when you’re having sex in the dream, you’re both human. You missed that happening. He’s smiling at you, laughing. He says, “C’mon, baby, keep up.” Are you supposed to know what that means? He keeps you pinned to the ground, kissing you playfully until you start to whine and beg for him to pay attention to you. Once that happens, he sprints away again. You blink, and he’s a wolf once more. Weird-ass fuckin’ dream. Dream-you chases after him and you wake up with your legs still twitching.
*
“Nightmare?” Alex asks when you wake up.
You shake your head. “No, just weird.” He doesn’t ask what it was about and you don’t tell him. He kisses you until you can’t breathe, but gently, like he’s afraid you might break. Maybe you will. It hurts when things brush against your side, still, though it’s nowhere near as bad as it was. You silently thank God for your accelerated healing factor.
He rubs his nose against your cheekbone and says, “You should sleep some more.”
“Okay.” You go back to sleep. Everything feels fuzzy and awful, anyway.
*
In the morning you feel much better. You get out of bed, go into the bathroom and look at your body in the mirror. The line of stitches is messy and hurried; you can tell how panicked Alex must have been when he did them by how ragged they are. The wound itself looks okay. It’s kind of pink still, but it has mostly healed over. The scar on your hip from where the bullet clipped you looks worse. It still hurts a lot, actually, and you’re walking with a bit of a limp to compensate for it. Alex must already be awake. His side of the bed was cold.
You find him in the kitchen, staring blankly at the coffee maker. You hug him from behind. “Not awake yet?” you tease, pressing your lips to the back of his neck. It’s a little disappointing to find him wearing a shirt this early. To be honest, you had been hoping to make up for some lost time today since your homecoming yesterday had been so… painful, for lack of a better word. You slide your hands down the front of his boxers; he gasps and you feel his back stiffen slightly.
He says, “Your hands are really cold.”
“Warm them up for me then.” You let him push you up against the kitchen counter, kiss him like your life depends on it. You keep your hands in his shirt, grasping the fabric to pull him closer to you until there is no space between your bodies. He’s being more cautious than usual and keeping his hands away from your injured side. So are you though, you suppose. The scratches on his arms are still red and angry and your fault.
“So. Cold hands,” Alex says between kisses. “You know what an awesome cure for that is?” You hope the answer is sex. Because it’s been a week since that happened and - honestly - that’s one thing about being a werewolf with a human mate that is kind of depressing. Everyone else gets to have tons of awesome werewolf sex because they’re all paired off, and you get to run around with Jeff and Evan, monitoring the perimeter to make sure no one can edge in on the pack’s territory. Although, you’re not entirely unconvinced that the new guy’s bitchiness and jabs at Evan aren’t some kind of weird flirting on their part. Evan does tend to fall all over him like a lost puppy. It would be cute if they weren’t so particularly vomit-inducing.
You hop up onto the counter so you can wrap your legs around Alex’s waist. Mine, you think happily. Mineminemine my Alex my mate MINE. At this altitude, you are almost the same height. He makes a soft, breathy noise when you start kissing his neck. The noises change to something a little more wanting when you push his boxers down and dig your fingernails into his hip. “Missed you,” you mumble against his skin. Your skin is buzzing with the promise of sex; instead of walking back to the bedroom Alex picks you up and carries you back, sets you down on the bed very carefully.
Alex says, “I love you,” then he frowns, because obviously sex is not going to work with you on your back. “Can we just,” he sighs. You sort of move onto your less-injured side and lean forward tentatively. “This is not going to work either. What if we…?” His frustrated look is so adorable that you almost don’t mind being too mangled to have sex. Almost. You kiss the corner of his mouth and shift around until you can lay your head on his chest and hear his heartbeat. This is good too.
“I love you more than anything,” you tell Alex. “Even if you are an idiot sometimes.”
The first time you and Alex had sex, he was so nervous that his hands were sweaty and he asked if you were okay about a hundred times. It hurt a little, like you’re pretty sure most first times do, but the reason he was so nervous kind of makes sense. He is the only person you’ve ever been with. He is the only person you ever want to be with. So that’s a pretty special thing, which makes the way he was so nervous and sweaty okay because even though it was gross, it was also really cute. Most of all you remember the afterglow; you curled up next to him with your head on his chest just like you are now, and he stayed awake with you until the sun went down and you had to leave him. He didn’t tell you he cried afterward, but you knew. You can always tell when he is upset. And right now, he feels probably a hundred times more upset than that first time.
Sometimes you wish Alex were the moon so you’d never have to leave him. “Hey,” he says. “You went away in your head somewhere.” He has his arm around your shoulders. You want to push yourself into his body, under his skin. You just want to stay in bed forever and not deal with life.
Because as soon as you’re better, you’re going to have to explain everything and Jeff will have to explain everything. People are going to be really pissed off at you, and it isn’t like you can tell Alex about it because you’re trying so hard to protect him from this. Somehow, no matter how hard you try, it doesn’t feel like enough anymore. It presses in on both of you from all sides; the wildness feels a little bit closer every month no matter how far you run, no matter how many join the pack. You’re straddling the line pretty firmly for the moment, but it won’t last forever.
You say, “I think I need more sleep,” and Alex nods sympathetically. He kisses your forehead and settles for just holding your hand when you finally find a position comfortable enough to sleep in.
Next