Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen
Havermouth, Five Years Before
The shopping trip ended abruptly, with Tiffany leading them back to the car immediately.
She sat behind the steering wheel, gazing out the windscreen without seeing the pedestrian traffic that walked by. “I have never, ever, been so embarrassed in my whole life,” she said, and started the car.
Aislen’s chest was tight. She did not speak, letting her hair fall forward to cover her face.
“Do you know why I am embarrassed, Aislen?” Tiffany demanded.
“Because of me,” Aislen did not have to guess.
“Because of you,” Tiffany agreed. “Because the doctor was concerned enough about your welfare and mental health to tell me, and the store clerk, just how disturbed a child I gave birth to eighteen years ago. A child who the entire town knows is fornicating with three different boys, and who, at the vigil for that poor woman’s dead baby, tells her that she can communicate with spirits.”
“I did not!” Aislen’s head jerked up. “I did not say anything like that.”
“I wish I could believe you, but after your behaviour this past month, I honestly don’t know what to believe, Aislen Louise Carter. That doctor says that’s what you said, and she was extremely apologetic about mentioning it to me," she grimaced. "But she recommended that I take you for a mental health assessment.”
“My mental health is fine. She’s a fucking bitch,” Aislen replied, crossing her arms and leaning back in the chair.
“The sooner you leave this town, the better, I think,” Tiffany replied. “The sooner you get away from those boys, the better, as well,” she added, as she pulled into the driveway. “I am sorry, however,” she said softly, “that you found that dead child, and I am sorry that I had to hear about it through strangers, and not you.”
Aislen reached for the door handle. “It’s always my fault, isn’t it?” She snapped over her shoulder. “Something terrible happens to me, but it’s still my fault.” She slammed the car door behind her, before opening the back door to yank out her shopping bags. “Well, fuck you, Tiffany.”
“Aislen Louise Carter!” Tiffany was outraged. “You don’t get to speak to me like that!” She pursued Aislen up to the house, grabbing her by the elbow at the door and yanking her around so they were face-to-face. “You apologize right now!”
“No,” Aislen replied. “I’m not fucking apologizing.”
“Mind your manners when you speak to your mother,” Patrick opened the door and glared down at Aislen.
“Or what? You’ll give me another black eye?” She spat back up at him. “Fuck you too!”
“Get inside, Aislen,” Patrick said between his teeth. “I’m not having a shouting match with you on the front porch. Get inside and go to your room.”
“And stay there!” Tiffany called out, as Aislen shoved past Patrick and stormed down the hallway to her room. “I really don’t know…” Tiffany said to Patrick. “I just don’t know what to do with her.”
Aislen slammed the door shut behind her and dragged her chair over, jamming it under the doorhandle. She pulled the suitcases out from under her bed and unpacked her shopping bags straight into them, before tearing through her room, looking for anything else to pack.
“I’m glad,” she said to herself, angrily. “Glad,” she raised her voice, snapping the word out over her shoulder as she heard her parents move down the hall, “that I’m leaving this fucking place. This whole fucking town. I’ll never come back to this shit hole. Never, ever, ever.”
She finished packing the suitcases and shoved them back under the bed before flopping face down on the mattress. She fell asleep crying, waking to darkness and a still house. She pulled on a jacket and put the grimoire into her bag and slid the window open.
If she was going to live in Rideten, she reasoned, she was going to have to practice the bubbles. There were a lot more people in Rideten than Havermouth, after all.
As she climbed out the window and made her way up the drive, she wondered what the Triquetra would be up to. Had they gone back to the river house together, or to their own homes for the night?
The moon was three-quarters full in a cloudless sky, and the night was quiet, with no call of wolves.
She went to the gazebo and sat at the table, using the little light to read by.
“What are you doing?” Heath stepped out of the shadows, naked, and she jumped in surprise.
“I could ask you the same thing,” she said, as she closed the grimoire and slid it into her bag. He sat on the bench next to her. “Plus, where are your clothes?” She knew, of course, that he had been in his wolf form, but she couldn’t resist seeing what he had to say.
“They’re over there,” he gestured vaguely. “It’s easier to fuck if you’re not wearing clothes.” He lifted her onto his lap and gathered up her skirt, hooking his fingers into her panties and sliding them down her legs.
“Aren’t you cold?” She shivered, but his skin was hot against hers.
“No,” he nuzzled under her chin to kiss along her neck, his hands busy undoing the buttons of her shirt.
“And you just happened to be out at night, at the graveyard,” she tilted her head to the side, her body heating under his caresses, despite the night air being cool on her skin.
“I am often out at night.” His thoughts were filled with the argument between his parents that had driven him out of the house and into the night, rather than trying to sleep through it. “We came upon you here before, when all three of us were out together, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember.” She also remembered that he’d brought the other sex toy there to fuck, but with his thoughts in her head, and his distress about the fight going on at his home, the anger and betrayal was muted.
He cupped her breasts, teasing the nipples with his thumbs. “Lean over the table, Aislen, so that I can fuck you.”
“I’d rather face you,” she said, because the posture he wanted was the same they had put the other sex toy in.
He was pleased that she wanted to see him as they fucked. “Alright,” he lifted her and set her on the table, standing and stepping up to her, his cock nudging against her cunt.
She stroked her hands up his arms, and over his shoulders. “Kiss me, Heath,” she whispered.
The white light of her torch turned him into a creature of silver and grey, an anatomically correct sculpture of a man that had wandered away from someone’s mausoleum to seduce her in the gazebo. His eyes were cast into shadow, his eyelids lowered, his gaze on her lips as he leaned down to kiss her, their breath mingling.
His hands closed on her hips, drawing her closer to him, and he groaned into her mouth as his cock penetrated her just slightly, his thoughts shifting to how the wet heat of her cunt around his sensitive tip contrasted with the cold night. He lingered there, teasing them both by rocking in and out, her slick cooling over him, the transition from the heat of her, to the cold without her, drawing his balls tightly to his body.
He breathed out slowly, controlling his body’s response, pushing back the urge to come, whilst he deepened the kiss, exploring her mouth with his tongue leisurely, and his hands stroking up under her shirt and jacket, caressing her skin.
She crossed her legs behind him, seeking to draw him into her, but he held back, in no hurry, as once they had fucked, he would have no excuse not to go home again…
His rocking movement pushed past the hold of muscle and pressed against her g-spot with each tilt of his pelvis. She could feel the heat of orgasm building. “Heath,” she whispered against his lips. “I’m going to come soon.”
“No,” he replied with a smile. “You’re going to come for the first time soon. We both know that you have more than one orgasm in you. Cameron is right, you are a little slut for us.”
How was it possible, she wondered, for someone to simultaneously make a person feel so good and so bad?
He saw the flicker of emotion cross her face and misinterpreted it. “Fine,” he thrusted into her fully and with force, driving the air from her lungs with the impact of their bodies colliding. “Lie back on the table, Aislen, so I can fuck you hard.”
She lowered back to her elbows and then laid over the tabletop. He began to drive himself into her, the slap of skin loud, the jolt along her body jerking her back along the table. He caught her hips and dragged them towards him as he thrusted into her. All tenderness and intimacy in the act had gone, she thought, as she gazed up at the rafters. She could have been anyone, or no one at all. Just a random hole which he used to get himself off.
She had been right, she told herself. Her instincts had been right from the beginning, from that first flash of insight into Cameron’s mind. Somewhere, deep within herself, she had known that the Triquetra would use her. How different the last month could have been if she had just trusted in her instincts. Perhaps she would have made friends, people who enjoyed and valued her company. She would probably have remained a virgin, waiting for the right person to come along, and maybe edging slowly towards it with a nice boy who was slightly geeky and wasn’t interested in football…
Heath cried out as he came, and she realized that, despite their conversation, she hadn’t come twice. She hadn’t even come once.
He stood, panting, holding her arse aloft as he had dragged her half off the table, his cock still buried deeply in her. After the exertion, his stomach and arm muscles stood out against his skin, and he was impossibly perfect, impossibly beautiful, as he recovered his equilibrium.
“You didn’t come,” he said, looking up at her, his grey eyes translucent in the moonlight, with the shimmer of his wolf like oil across the pupil.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told him, wriggling to be free, and holding her shirt together. “I should go home.”
He released her, and eased back, confused by her sudden haste. “Why rush off?” He asked.
“Well, you’re naked and you’ll get cold, and it’s a school night.”
“We’re not going to school in the morning.”
“Well, I know that, but my parents don’t, which means I still have to get up early and get ready like normal or they’ll notice… And we sort of had a fight,” she slid off the table and searched under it for her underwear. “They’ll be looking for any reason tomorrow to get down on me, so I don’t want to make it easy for them.”
“Don’t go,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to go home yet.”
She worried her bottom lip with her teeth and then sighed. “Let’s go get your car and go to the river house.”