Havermouth, Eight Years Before

Heath’s mother was crying.

The sound was quiet, smothered, and yet somehow it caught the ear, the drag of air into her lungs precisely toned to carry through the interior walls of the house, to echo through the ducts, to bounce off the polished floorboards, to ricochet off of the perfectly painted walls.

A beautiful house, filled with beautiful things… And ugly doings.

Heath lay in his king-sized bed, upon Egyptian cotton sheets, staring up at the vaulted ceiling of his room, with his nails digging into the palms of his hands.

“Charlie,” his mother sobbed in. “Please…” She gasped out the word.

“F-k it,” Heath muttered under his breath.

He couldn’t stop his father’s cruelty towards his mother. He couldn’t call the police to stop his father from beating her – that was a worse crime in the pack than beating one’s mate was, as calling the human police endangered the entire pack. He had appealed to the pack’s hierarchy many times to intercede on his mother’s behalf, but what happened in an alpha’s own home was that alpha’s business, he had been told. If Marion wanted to report her husband and mate to the pack, then the pack would take action, but until she did… Well, they could do nothing.

A tear slid down his cheek and he shoved his way free of the bed covers. He dressed in the darkness, before creeping out into the back hallway to the French doors. He was a couple of years off getting his car licence, but that didn’t stop him riding around on his dirt bike. The police would have to catch him in order to arrest him, after all.

He shoved the helmet onto his head and walked the bike across the paved driveway, past the elegant fountain ad sculptured rose beds, and out the front gate. Once he was on the street, he straddled the bike and started the engine, the roar overloud in the quiet suburban area, even muffled as it was by his helmet.

He revved the bike and raced along the pretty jacaranda lined streets, until he broke free of the town, heading out into the true countryside. The night air whipped by him, fragrant with the harvested crops. He turned off into Edison lands.

They had been Cartwright lands, until Jules Edison had married Catherine Cartwright, uniting the two neighbouring properties that had long been in competition. In fairy tales, it would have been a love match, and Catherine had, perhaps naively, convinced herself that it was so, when she had accepted Jules’ proposal.

Jules, however, had one love, and it wasn’t Catherine - it was the land.

Near the new Cartwright house, a sprawling modern structure that had appeared in many Country Home magazines when it had been built twenty years prior, using local stone and floor to ceiling glazed windows that reflect the beautiful fields that surrounded it, Heath killed the motorbike engine and walked it the rest of the way, the gravel grating loudly under the wheels.

He leaned the bike against the wall beneath Cameron’s bedroom window, before springing up, catching hold of the windowsill and lifting onto it, until he squatted, his toes on the ledge, and eased the large glass pane back so that he could step inside.

Cameron’s room smelled like him, the slightly salty, testosterone laden scent of teenage male mixed with cattle and hay, overlaid with the latest Ralph Lauren body spray… Heath breathed in deeply, fighting a groan. It wasn’t right, he told himself. He could breathe in the scent of teenage girls, vanilla and strawberry all day long, without losing control, but the moment he smelled Cameron…

Ah, f-k, he was hard again.

He tiptoed across the room to where Cameron was a monochrome lump beneath the covers. Heath heeled off his shoes and his top before sliding under the sheet. In his mind, they would both be naked, their skin meeting in the dark, but in reality, Cameron wore satin boxers and a t-shirt.

Cameron grunted as Heath laid against his back and reached back to grip and squeeze Heath’s thigh. “Parent’s arguing again?”

“Yeah,” Heath breathed out against Cameron’s shoulder. “Is it alright if I stay?”

“Sure, man,” Cameron was already settling back to sleep. “M’house you’house.”

“Cam,” Heath whispered into the warm silence of the bed.

“Yeah?” Cameron’s mutter was muffled and delayed by sleep.

“You’re my best friend.”

“Mine too.”

Heath closed his eyes and imagined what it would be like to stroke his hand down Cameron’s chest, over the tightly packed stomach muscles, to Cameron’s c-ck, to close his fist around it, and for Cameron to arch back into him, groaning in pleasure…

He pressed his face into Cameron’s shoulder and suppressed the ache within him ruthlessly. Werewolves were not gay, he told himself. Alphas did not want to f-k other alphas. They found female mates, and f-ked them instead, and when the mating urge rose after they turned eighteen, they f-ked human girls until they found the right she-wolf, because human girls were nothing, didn’t count, didn’t matter…

He breathed in the sleepy-scent of Cameron and felt his c-ck throb. He didn’t want to f-k a human, he confessed to himself. He wanted to roll Cameron onto his stomach, and he wanted to wrap his fingers into the russet curls that grew overlong. He wanted to suck along the column of Cameron’s throat and feel the graze of his stubble against his lips. He wanted to hear Cameron groan in pleasure as Heath gripped his c-ck in his fist.

He wanted to make Cameron beg him not to stop…

He breathed out slowly, fighting the urge to press his hips forward, to thrust his hard, throbbing c-ck against Cameron’s arse. Cameron was asleep. He might not have noticed that Heath was hard, but if Heath started grinding against him, that wouldn’t last.

He pressed his face into the thick curls at the base of Cameron’s head and breathed in, suppressing the urge to moan.

A sin, Heath’s father would say, to desire another alpha in such a way. But ever since they had been children, Heath had known that Cameron was his. At first it had been a possessive jealously that excluded others from their friendship, but in the last couple years, as they had grown closer to their eighteenth and the sexual maturity that werewolves recognised as being old enough to take mates, Heath had known that no female in the pack had the same level of appeal to him as Cameron did.

He was fifteen, three years from it being acceptable to take a mate from within the pack. Cameron was fourteen, almost entirely a year younger.

It was going to kill him, Heath thought bitterly, if Cameron took a mate. He could imagine it. Someone like Lillian Ridgeway, pretty and blonde, one of the most popular girls in the pack and high school. She’d be pregnant within a year, the first in a long line of pure-bred werewolf cubs.

They’d go to his father’s church, hold barbecues, and donate to charities, the picture-perfect werewolf power couple…

And Heath would die in small increments, in aching heart break, his mate married to another…

He gripped Cameron tighter to him, and Cameron turned in his sleep, wrapping around Heath in return, his face pressed in the hollow beneath Heath’s chest, his breath warm and moist against Heath’s skin and their legs tangling.

Heath buried his face into Cameron’s curls and let the musky scent of the other alpha lure him into sleep. He woke in the morning, with the sunlight spilling golden into the room, and Cameron’s cheek on his chest, his hand over Heath’s heart, and his knee resting against Heath’s c-ck.

Heath suppressed his groan and resisted the urge to stroke down the column of Cameron’s spine to his arse. The was a dark sin, he told himself, a dark and dirty lust, something to be buried and hidden, not to be indulged in.

He needed to hide his shame before it exposed him to the pack, and to the wider population of Havermouth.