I Bite She Sucks Bloom, Penelope (howl and other poems TXT) 📖

Knowing he was about to come pushed me over the edge. My whole body tensed, and I felt my walls grip him as I gasped into his ear. “Oh God,” I said through gritted teeth. “I love you.”

My eyes snapped open as he came.

I felt the twitch of his cock inside me and the vague sense of increasing warmth and something filling me. But more than that, I felt my words echoing between us. Had I really just said that? And where the hell did it come from?

Riggs closed his eyes, arching his neck back with a happy half-smile as he came. When he opened them again, they were both brown. He kissed my nose, smiling wider. “I love you too.”

43

Sylvie

It had been three days since I was turned, and I had to admit I already missed the sun a little bit. I was sitting outside on a grassy knoll a half hour’s walk from town with Gravy Boat at my side. He was purring while I scratched his head.

“You probably wish Riggs was here, don’t you?” I asked him.

He rubbed his gums on my hand, marking me in his weird cat way. I grinned. Gravy Boat felt like one of the few things that still remained from my old life. It hadn’t even been two weeks, had it? I gave up trying to figure it out because it didn’t really matter. I’d lived more in this short span of time than I’d lived in my whole life before. It was like packing a lifetime into a to-go container and binging it on the car ride home while driving with my free hand.

It was a misty night, with little beads of water clinging to the tall grass around me. I had my back against a tree, which was surprisingly comfortable. To my right, the sleepy town of Silverback was dark and dormant. To my left, I could see a nearly endless canopy of green trees from the relative height of my little hill.

It was chilly, but I didn’t feel the cold like I used to. It was almost like there was a disconnect between my brain and body. I could sense some things I used to sense—cold, discomfort, and pain, but they didn’t reach me as viscerally as before. It was more muted, like a little flashing warning light in my brain I could choose to ignore if it was convenient.

“He will be back before morning,” I said to Gravy Boat. “Riggs and the pack have to ‘roam’, whatever that means.”

He’d tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t quite get it. Apparently, part of being a werewolf in a pack meant going for wild wolf excursions in the woods together. They’d hunt, play—yes, he’d said they would play—and just run. Apparently, it helped somehow with the whole Alpha thing.

He seemed to think he needed to solidify his claim as Alpha before we could get the pack to help us rescue the others from The Coven. Whether it made sense or not, I was learning to simply roll with things.

My werewolf boyfriend has a wolf in his head that tries to grab the wheel during sex? Yeah, sure. No big deal. He wants to go play in the woods with the other wolves before we rescue my sister from the bad guy vampires? Makes sense.

I was grinning, even though I had no right to be. I should’ve been petrified for what was about to come. I thought part of me was starting to learn to embrace the danger, though.

It was part of living out of the bubble, wasn’t it? You could hide from any and everything. You could put your walls up and live safe in your cage. Or you could kick the door open and go out there. You could take the good with the bad and wake up without knowing what to expect. You could let your mind live or cage it to keep your body alive.

In his own way, Riggs was teaching me to let my mind be free, even if it meant putting my body at risk.

I thought about what we’d told each other last night in the diner. We’d said the big “L” word. I’d always rolled my eyes at movies or books where people professed their love so quickly. “You like each other,” was what I wanted to scream at them. Love was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be this big ordeal that took a long time to cultivate and develop.

Now I wasn’t so sure. I’d tried to talk myself down from the ledge of love ever since last night and so far, failed.

Maybe love wasn’t a finished product. It wasn’t the culmination of years of work and perfect conditions. Love was like a sickness to be caught. It grabbed a hold of you and made you know with every fiber of your being that you were in this for the long haul. Somebody else had crawled inside your heart and mind. They’d spread roots and now removing them would be as painful as removing one of your own organs.

Maybe that’s why they called it falling in love. Except it felt more like this scene I’d seen in a movie once. The girl had been walking on a forest trail and she’d taken one wrong step. That slight loss of footing had sent her sliding down in the dry leaves towards a hill beside the path. Within moments, she was sliding, then the hill got steeper and she was tumbling. Eventually, she was careening down the hill like a ragdoll, completely at the mercy of gravity and momentum.

I smiled. I guessed that’s where I felt like I was. I’d slipped into falling for Riggs, and now all I could do was fight the fall or embrace it. Last night I’d decided to embrace it.

I heard Kyla coming long before I saw her. My new vampire-enhanced hearing really was spectacular. I could even tell it was her because of the