No Warning

That always got her halfway there. Just that. That feeling of possession, like he owned her. Like she was powerless, completely unable to escape.

He swiped at her hip, and she flipped automatically onto her knees. Funny, but she'd never really enjoyed taking it from behind with her other boyfriends; it always seemed like Kyle never wanted to do it any other way, and this time he mounted her before she was even set. He was eager tonight. She didn't even have time to plant her elbows before he was grappling her hips, towering over her, a lithe shadow in the night with a cock that seared into her with no resistance at all.

"Ughh," she wailed, unable to control herself, struggling to hold herself still under the awesome power of his crushing thrusts. He always went fast, his hips swinging almost spasmodically, driving that shuddering cock of his in and out of her slit at a punishing rate that made every stroke blur together: Eva experienced it as being constantly filled with cock, but also constantly stimulated, his dick pulsing hard against the tight walls of her vagina.

She came swiftly, powerfully, no sooner getting her elbows squared than they gave out again with a soft thump when her face hit the pillow. Dimly she felt the merciless grip of his fingers on her ass, knowing she'd need to talk to him again, half-teasing, about clipping his nails. He'd actually cut her last week, the blood running in a few thin trails down her thigh, though of course she'd been too orgasmic to give a shit.

Like now.

She let out a screech of need, her body battered under his, and for a short while everything became soft, muffled, stretched-out, like a cotton ball pulled between the fingers. She was in control of nothing at times like that; it was all Kyle, his thick cock carving into her, hollowing her out, and at the height of her orgasm he came too with that wolf-howl he'd probably learned in his frat.

She teased him about the howl, but she'd never wish it away.

When he came, it felt like a dam bursting in her pussy, the pulse of his dick feeling like he'd jammed his fist up inside her. She slumped, limp, a rag doll while he pumped into her again and again, claiming everything she was and everything she'd ever been, and each time they fucked every other lover she'd ever had faded further and further into the irrelevant past, because now there was nothing for her but Kyle, fierce Kyle, savage Kyle and the carnivorous way he fucked, leaving nothing on the bed because he was putting every bit of himself into his woman.

She was proud to be his. Proud he'd chosen her. Proud she was deserving of his muscled body and that feral gleam in his eye, and it was moments like that that she realized how quickly she was falling under his spell. Falling in love.

She only hoped he was, too.

* * *

He woke up after she'd already left, his tangled consciousness only dimly remembering hearing her shower. "Fuck," he grunted to himself, squinting furiously at the sheets. He was lying in a massive wet patch with a suspiciously vast quantity of coarse, straightish hair, each strand an ombre of black merging to a rich chestnut, and he sat up in bed when he realized what that meant. Because there was a hell of a lot more hair than there'd been last week, or the week before, or the week before that.

It was getting harder and harder to keep himself from wolfing out with Eva. He was losing it, a little bit more and more each time. He sighed deeply as he eyed a long rent in the topsheet, its edges clean and straight like they'd been sliced by a razor. Or, say, a claw. He shuddered, thinking about what would have happened had he swiped his girl instead of his mattress. Thinking about Wayne's wife and her many stitches.

Abruptly, Kyle picked up his phone and shot off a text, listening dully as Eva puttered around in the kitchen. She'd be making him a cup of coffee, he knew; she always did. And not with a smile, either; with something more. A deep, knowing look as she brought him the steaming mug. It was moments like that that he realized how quickly he was falling under her spell. Falling in love.

He knew she was, too, which was why the text was so important. He never, ever got this part right, but Eva... Eva was special. So he whimpered a sigh of relief when Steve replied right away.

Lunch sounds great. 1215? Let's try Bernoulli's on 26^th.

Kyle smiled tightly. Steve would help. Steve owed him, always and forever. He slipped the phone under his pillow just as Eva used her ass to open the door, his mug in her hand and that veiled and grown-up look on her face.

* * *

Anna was visibly displeased when he told her he was slipping his lunch block. "You always do 11:30-1:00, Kyle," she fretted, leaning against his office door. He was never sure with her whether that pose was designed to make her look like a streetwalker, or whether the effect was inadvertent, but she sure did it a lot. And her perfume, an assertive application of Burberry Brit Sheer, didn't help. "Just watch. 1:00 is going to roll around and I'll be looking for you just by habit, and I'll forget you're on lunch."

"I'm sure you'll manage, Anna." She pouted, long and lean and always, always wearing black. "You know I get my hours in. You don't need to worry about me."

"That's the point," she snapped. "You're reliable. That's why I worry when you're not around and I have to depend on all the other fucking dipshits around here." She sighed, the air sliding out past too much bright red lipstick. "Fine. Take your alternative lunch. I'll just wallow in the mediocrity of the rest of the team." Her eyes lit up. "Meeting your girlfriend, Kyle?"

"None of your beeswax, Anna," he chuckled back, and she left him with that wistful puckered-lip smile she saved just for him. Kyle was deeply aware Anna wanted to fuck him, and was even more deeply aware how wrong it would be for him to ever, in a million years, fuck his boss.

Besides, he was falling in love with Eva. Hence, his lunch date with Steve.

He took a rideshare to 26^th Street, the driver talking volubly about the sights as they passed until, at last, Kyle cleared his throat. "I'm not a tourist, dude," he said curtly, and the driver's bushy beard had mousetrapped closed, the two of them passing the rest of the trip in Prius-inflected silence until they pulled up in front of Bernoulli's. "Thanks, bud."

"Mm." Kyle sucked back a snide retort, reasoning it was probably better not to discourage the kid: gainful employment, after all, was better than his mom's basement. "Have a good one," he said sourly, the car moving away from the curb with an electric whine even before the second syllable was out. Kyle was already finished submitting the negative review even before he stepped into the restaurant.

"Hi!" The hostess clearly worked as a model when she wasn't seating customers, a recent refugee from the university. She had those massive eyes and the baked-on makeup that made people think of Disney princesses when they saw her, and Kyle was impressed when she eyed him closely. Her smile filled out beyond its usual stylish pucker; he could tell by the way her lipstick cracked. "I'm Kandi. Tell me you're not eating alone, sir?" Her laugh was a pleasant trill, and Kyle just smiled.

"I'm meeting a guy here. Steve Porvek? I think he was making the reservation."

"Was he?" She didn't seem interested in anyone but Kyle, which surprised him until he remembered that the moon was only a few days from the full. Women always had strong reactions when the moon was waxing. Their senses seemed to zero in on what was happening in Kyle's body, and he wondered absently whether that was what was happening with Anna lately. "You should make the next one," she went saucily on, her finger running down the reservation list.

"What?"

"Well, that way I can talk to you on the phone." Jesus Christ, Kyle reflected. He'd never been hit on this blatantly. She licked her lips. "Right this way, sir. Table 27." When she plucked out a menu and spun toward the seating area, she clearly knew he'd be studying her ass, smooth and clean in a pair of expensive black pants that might as well have been bodypaint. She carried herself well, her shoulders back and her head high, moving through the restaurant with that sense of superiority that reminded everyone she was with the most desirable male in the place. He could smell the pheromones rolling straight from her pussy.

Kyle, who after four years still had trouble thinking of himself as... well, as what he was, just tried to keep a low profile.

Kandi reached a nicely-appointed table, all snowy napkins and heavy forks, and pulled out a chair for him. "Mr Porvek's not here yet, but if there's anything I can do to take care of you..." She smiled, hopeful and hopeless at the same time, her eyes wider than he'd have imagined possible.

"I'm good. Thanks," Kyle replied shortly, and her fingers on the chair trembled against his back as he sat. "Just some water."

"Mm. Still, or sparkling?"

"Still, I guess." Kyle smiled blandly up at Kandi. "I'm sure we'll be ordering soon."

"Great. Michael will be your waiter," she added over her shoulder, and Kyle noticed the pulse of the muscle over her eye as she forced herself not to wink. He smiled weakly, then settled back to sort out the smells while he waited.

It always got bad so near the full moon. His sense of smell became acute enough to make it a major ordeal to pass Casa de Taco. That was one of the reasons, he knew, that Steve had suggested Bernoulli's: high-end places tended to use ingredients that smelled better. He inhaled once now, briefly, and knew at once that the coffee cream in the center of his table was about three, no, two days past its prime. He knew they used precut cheese, too, the smell of the plastic container sticking in the air like gum on the sole of your shoe. But everything else seemed fine.

Poor Kandi had no idea what was happening to her as she approached Table 27 for the second time, with the second customer. Mr Porvek? Tyvek? Something like that; all she knew was that she wasn't thinking too clearly around these two. Well, that wasn't quite accurate: she was thinking very clearly, but about all the wrong things. Her work was not complicated, though the standards were very high and the managers were all over the staff because of it, but at the end of the day there wasn't a lot of focus required, doling out tables at Bernoulli's.

Which was good, because right now her job was the furthest thing from her mind. She swirled instead with ideas and visuals of a most distracting nature. She'd begun dampening her thong as soon as she'd seen that first guy, the guy at 27, which was odd; he wasn't really all that attractive, just sexy as hell. She'd led him to the table knowing, beyond a doubt, that if he seized her arm here in the middle of a trendy, crowded restaurant, stopped her, bent her over, and started fucking her, she wouldn't merely fail to object. No, she'd widen her stance and shove back into him, and be damned to the consequences.

Walking back to her station after seating him had been like drinking a cold glass of iced tea on a humid summer day. But then his friend had come in, and everything had gotten worse; she felt, leading Steve to the table, as if she was buffeted between two powerful forces, the quiet guy sitting and the quiet guy following her, and she knew she'd need to burn her underwear tonight. Some smells you just couldn't get out, and she was sopping for these two.

Her mind's eye showed her an arresting image as she walked, the menu loose in her hand. The fantasy took shape in two or three strides, played out in another two or three, and was still going on when she seated Steve Porvek across from Kyle over at 27. She walked away shaking her head, not trusting herself to speak, and afterward all she remembered clearly was an unshakable mental image of the two men taking turns pumping her full of rich white sperm behind the bar. She winced that evening as she peeled off her pants, her slim inner thighs a hot red patch of chafe all the way down.

As expected, she did need to throw away her thong.

"Cute hostess," Steve mused, glancing after her.

"She wanted you to bone her."

"Yeah?" Steve shrugged. "No, she wanted the Wolf to bone her." He shook his head a tad, then wrinkled his nose. "Cream isn't fresh."

"The rest of it smells okay," Kyle smiled. "Nice choice."

"Yeah, I took a client here last week. Seemed fine." He sniffed cautiously. "It's different now, but still not bad. Food's excellent, too."

"Nice." Kyle sipped at the water, delivered a few minutes earlier by the carefully obsequious Michael. "Waiter's gay."

"Mm-hmm. He was just here..." he sniffed once more, "within the past three minutes, I'd say." Pheromones. Pheromones were everywhere. "So what's on your mind, kiddo?"

Kyle grimaced. Steve called him that a lot, even though Steve was younger by a couple years. It had to do with the other way they measured time, and in that way Steve was many years older. He was, in fact, the senior member of their pack. "It's Eva."

"Yeah?" He'd met her a couple weeks ago at a block party. "What's wrong? She seems great."

"She is great." They piped down as Michael approached and took their order, and once he'd left behind a discreet basket of bread rolls and gone back to the kitchen, Kyle frowned. "I think he's bi."

"Is that it?" Steve was rubbing his nose thoughtfully. "I thought I caught a whiff of something else there. Just a little, though." He nodded judiciously. "It could have been pussy. Not recent, though."

"No, not very. I'm kind of hung up, Steve-o."

"What's the problem?"

"She's invited me to a party at her work." The ice cubes in Kyle's glass clinked as he set it down. "A Halloween party."

"So?" Steve glanced side to side, still not getting it, until his eyes suddenly widened in understanding. "Whoah. Dude. You still haven't fucking told her?"

Kyle looked out the broad picture windows at the front of the restaurant. "I still haven't fucking told her."

"My god." Steve went for one of the rolls. "I mean, what's it been? Months?" Keith nodded. "Huh. I wondered why you wanted to see me today." Steve chuckled. "The kiddo needs advice from the meister, huh?"

"Says the man whose woman only fucks the Wolf now," Kyle snapped.

"Well, at least she knows about the Wolf." Steve sat back with that annoying sense of superiority he had, but Kyle held his tongue. He had requested the meeting, and he did need Steve's advice. Steve had been at this for a long time, longer than any of them. "So what do you want to hear, dude?"

"Whatever you have to tell me," Kyle replied bleakly. "You know how to do this shit. And you owe me."

Steve was nodding. It was true: the alpha had a responsibility toward his pack. And Steve had always taken that responsibility seriously, after some good-natured ribbing. It was the least he could do, and they both knew it.

The whole thing had been an accident. An innocent game of pickup basketball under the lights down at Briscoe Park. No moon that night, though at the time Kyle had no reason to pay attention to moon phases. Just a bunch of guys from a couple of local buildings. Kyle hadn't known Steve well, not then, but their firms did a lot of business together. It had been a typical chain-link-fence game between young, type A professionals, full of brutal steals, obscene taunts, and hard fouls that, by unspoken agreement, didn't do much facial damage; all of them had to show up in suits on Monday morning.

He'd been hanging out near the paint, peering around for someone to pass to, and Steve had been all over him, the mouth-breathing son of a bitch. Looming, like the grim reaper, playing his D close enough to just about blot out the lights. Kyle had faked left, then right, and Steve had stayed right with him until, with a strangled grunt, Kyle had summoned up his torque and spun hard around, leading with his elbow.

The elbow had connected hard into Steve's mouth, and both men had fallen back with dual cries; the ball sailed harmlessly off into the night, but Kyle had sat up and leaned over toward Steve. "Sorry, man. You okay?"

Steve hadn't said anything, and at first Kyle had been stunned by the expression on his face: a look of heavy shock verging on despair, and it had nothing to do with his own cut lip. No, he was staring at Kyle's arm, which had been cut open.

By Steve's teeth.

"Dude." Steve had spoken with quiet, harsh urgency as the game went on around them. "Get up and come with me. Now."

"What?" Kyle's smile had faded. The fuck? Did this crazy motherfucker want to fight him or something?

"Now." Steve was already up and striding toward his stuff in the corner where everybody had slung their water bottles. "Now!" He'd half-turned, walking backward now with hard choppy strides, and with a blank stare Kyle had sprung to his feet and followed.

"Now then." They'd arrived at the pile of stuff, Steve pawing through a string bag with his firm's logo on it. "You need to shut up and listen to me." He sounded harsh, even savage, each syllable a merciless whispered bite. "My tooth cut you, and that's a big fucking problem."

"What? You afraid I damaged your dentures?" Kyle had cracked, and then Steve had looked up at him with a glare of such blazing, withering scorn that Kyle had shut right down. "What is it?"

Saying nothing, Steve had pulled out a flask, just an ordinary-looking one like you'd get as a groomsman, and when he shook it it sounded nearly empty. "Tell you later." Steve's voice had gone sharp, almost growly, with an undertone of fierce impatience. "Right now, just give me your fucking elbow." Kyle held his arm wordlessly out, and he noticed that when Steve bent close to look at it, he kept his mouth well away from Kyle's skin. "Fuck." He flicked a glance up at Kyle. "Amputation might work," he muttered.

"What?" Kyle was sure he'd misheard, but Steve already had the flask unscrewed. Out came a faint trickle of what looked like water, but as soon as it hit his cut it foamed into a frothy golden cloud that set Kyle's arm tingling strangely. Almost like the feel of Novocain going in.

"Feel anything?" Steve demanded tightly. "Any numbness or warmth?" But he was already shaking his head. "The bubbles tell me what I need to know, anyway."

"What's in the flask?" Kyle asked a little timidly, but Steve was just shaking his head.

"Holy water. Bro," he said wearily, looking up with a strangely resigned sigh, "I'm sorry. But you're fucked."

"Fucked?" Kyle blinked. "It's just a scratch." A scratch that was strangely itchy as it repelled the water. The blood was still flowing, sloughing away the golden foam, and with a feeling of lightheadedness Kyle realized he'd stopped caring about the basketball game. He suddenly knew, with a sense of deep and painful certainty, that he was wrong. "It's not just a scratch."

"It's not just a scratch," and Steve had sounded sad, so sad. They'd met for lunch at the diner with the almost-clicking plates the next day, and since then nothing had been the same. Nothing at all.

"I owe you," Steve agreed now, sitting in a better place where the plates didn't click. He sighed. Kandi was staring at them both from the hostess station, as he knew without looking; the hackles on his neck told him so. "That's why I'm paying for lunch. But, I mean, you know how it is. It never really goes well, telling women about the Wolf."

"It goes worse when you don't tell them," Kyle shuddered. He was thinking of Gretchen. Greta? No. Gretchen. He was almost sure of it. Oh, and Roberta; she'd been very, very upset that one morning after the full moon when she'd woken up to find him, fully Wolved, slung on his side of the bed. Her screams had woken him up. "But that's the thing. I want this one to last."