No Warning

"Meaning what? You want her to marry you?" They shared a ghostly smile at that. "Ain't working out all that well for Wayne."

"Working out even worse for Mrs Wayne," Kyle agreed. "It's not healthy, anyway. I just... I dunno. I want her to accept me as I am."

Steve nodded sympathetically. It had taken him years to find Julia, and there were times now that he wanted her gone. "See, that's my problem," he mused. "She accepts the Wolf too much, the man not at all. Anymore."

"No offense, buddy," Kyle smirked, "but I'd prefer to avoid that. I mean, that's probably what happens when your man isn't as good as your Wolf." He'd meant it as a joke, but Steve's eyes glinted in return.

"Is yours?" There was no answer needed. "Thought not."

"But she loves me. That's the point." Kyle reached for his glass of water before realizing it was empty. "I know that already."

"Spidey-senses?" Steve smiled with no mirth. It could be a curse, having heightened perceptions.

"Among other things. She does." Kyle knew it. Eva was besotted, and it didn't take a rocket scientist nor a full moon to tell. "She loves me. What I need to know is whether she'll still love me even after I tell her about... me." He choked off whatever he was going to say as Michael returned, his pheromones bubbling and snapping on the air. They sat in quiet tension while the dishes came quietly down; the service here was really excellent. Except for the fucking water. Kyle was always thirsty around the full moon. He resisted the urge to pant at the table.

"The sex?" Steve sighed, looking high into the ceiling lights and gathering his thoughts. "The sex doesn't have to be a problem. Cleary, the Wolf is a voracious sexual machine; we all know this." They both reached for the salt at the same time. "Especially at certain times of month. That doesn't have to be an issue, though, if the chick understands that the man's sexual capabilities won't ever match up to the Wolf's." He blushed slightly when he saw Kyle's measuring glance. "I'm working on it, dammit. Julia... well, she's pretty voracious herself."

"It's not really the sex I'm worried about," Kyle admitted. True, he'd been having trouble lately controlling the Wolf, but so far Eva had been game for anything, at any level. "She seems to like it hard sometimes, gentler other times; it's not really what I'm trying to figure out. I'm more worried about the trust angle."

"Trust?" Steve laughed harshly. "You're in advertising, dude."

"You know what I mean," Kyle wheedled.

Steve nodded slowly, then planted his chin in his hand. "I think," he said slowly, "that you can't possibly know until you tell her. But if she really does love you?" He shrugged. "Bro, if you think she's in love with you, you've got to trust her enough not to run. You know?" He crunched hard on one of his haricots. "But if she does run? Hell, just wolf out and chase her." He laughed nastily.

"Funny."

"Look, the point is that you need to tell her soon. I mean, what I do know, and know damn well, is that you better not wait until Halloween." He scowled. "I can't think of anything a bitch would like worse than getting her date to a work party and then having him wolf out. Like, really wolf out."

"The big one," Kyle nodded. Halloween wolf-outs were always the strongest. Scariest, too. "Right."

"So tell her. Soon." Steve's piercing gaze was shifting through the room, taking in the other diners. They'd both ordered steak, very rare. "I'm distracted," he added in a low, silky voice.

Kyle sniffed the air, the signals strong. He knew exactly what Steve was talking about, the need rolling off her under the strong smell of her caked makeup. "Moon's almost full," he cautioned, though it clearly didn't matter; the moon was on the other side of the fucking planet, and look what it was still doing to Steve. Something occurred to him. "Dude, how long you been doing this?"

"Doing this?" Steve blinked, completely thrown. "Doing what?"

"Wolfing."

He nodded then, fixing Kyle in a glare that measured even as it dismissed. "I explained this to you before. At the beginning." He lowered his eyes briefly in a token show of remorse, then bracketed him once more. "Don't dwell, man. Don't fucking dwell. Everybody wolfs differently. You don't age while you're a wolf, but you do while you're a man." He sat back in the tiny, fashionably uncomfortable chair. "I'm older than I look, but not by much. I've been wolfing awhile. You know all this."

"I do," Kyle nodded, "but -- "

"No buts." He sighed. "You get tired of it. Of the rejection. That's true. Look, dude, I know where you're coming from." He looked tired suddenly. Wary. Hunted. "You want the house, the pool, the two kids and the cat." They both grinned wryly. "Okay. Maybe not the cat. But I know what you're saying. It's hard to accept that this life is all there is." He sighed. "I've told you about how I got Made, right?" Kyle nodded. "Mine was an accident too. So I feel for you. We didn't ask for this shit. But?" He shrugged. "It is what it is. Get used to it."

"I know."

"Right?" Steve shook himself, as if he was shedding water. "Look. Trial and error. If Cindy doesn't work out? You'll learn from her and move on." He chuckled. "As long as you don't put her in the hospital. Then? You'll really be moving on."

Kyle waited a decent interval, then ventured, "It's Eva."

"Do what now?"

"Eva. Not Cindy."

"Ah." Steve suddenly looked bored. "Well. The advice still works, though. There'll always be another fish in the sea. Maybe Cindy will be the next one." He wiped his mouth. "Tell her, man. Soon. That way, if it doesn't work out, you can make a clean break and move on sooner rather than later."

"Got it. I'll tell her tonight." But he didn't, of course; the sweet oblivion of inertia was just too strong, and he spent that night snarling, once more, over Eva's sweet body while he filled it. And if Steve had asked him, exasperated, why he hadn't told the bitch, Kyle would have told the truth: that the timing was just wrong. That the night was going so well. That everything was flowing so smoothly, it just seemed like a sin to stop everything and upset the apple cart.

Not that Steve would have cared, necessarily. His Julia was working late, so he'd spent a very comfortable night with clean-limbed little Kandi. She'd left his place in the early morning, bowlegged, with a haunted smile.

* * *

He slapped his laptop closed and leaned his head far back against the couch cushion, his face pointing at the ceiling and his hand going automatically to his neck to unbutton the shirt. Fuck, but Norbera was a goddamn drag. He bristled every time his work expected him to be available for a videoconference in his off hours. It made him feel like a servant. Anna and the Norbera guy had given him a parting smile just a moment ago from his laptop.

And now? Now he was on Eva's couch, and the mood was dead. It hadn't been, not an hour ago, when she'd been licking his cock like a popsicle and he'd debated about ignoring the tone from his laptop. But in the end she'd sighed, come up off his balls, and stopped pushing her hair back behind her ears. "Answer it."

"Fuck." He'd sat there with his waving penis and his trembling thighs and he'd cursed in his mind. "No. Get back to work." The laptop warbled again, though, and she'd unbent from the floor and pulled her paramedic shirt closed. She'd wasted no time after she'd come in from her shift, tempting his cock for fifteen minutes before she'd finally sucked it, and now they both wished they'd simply started fucking as soon as she'd gotten home.

"It's fine." She'd winked. "They pay you six figures, plus commission, to take these calls. We have all night, baby." She'd left him with an impish grin and an admonishment that he should do up his shirt; the Norbera people probably didn't need to see his many hickeys. "Have fun."

"Unlikely," he'd growled, but now the call was done and she came back out, stark naked and dripping from the shower, and leaned in the doorway from the hall.

"Sounded stressful," she purred. "I can do something about that."

Kyle sat in the suddenly sex-heavy room, the lust running off her like the shower water; his nose told him there were other kinds of moisture on and in her flesh, the pheromones flying into his nose and tickling deeply at the Wolf in his brain, the one that was never far off. Especially with the full moon a mere six days gone; he'd been normalizing, as he always did, but Eva was presenting herself on a silver tray and Kyle's cock was already stretching.

He stared at her a few seconds, feeling the tension build in his muscles; the itch at his collar and waist was a dull nag in his mind. He felt his legs flex under his slacks, and for her part, Eva just stood there and blushed. She knew something was up, and knew it was more than just his cock, so she was already starting to brace slightly when he sprang.

Starting. To brace slightly. But not enough.

He flew across the room with that yapping snarl he never really could control, the one that came out after he'd been forced to suppress his urges for awhile. Like, while he was on a conference call. With his naked lover presenting herself in the doorway. Even with the moon waning, all that was more than enough to make the Wolf peek out, just a bit.

She yelped when he knocked her over, his mouth already sucking hard at her neck, and she was moaning hard within a few seconds of hitting the faded rug in the hall. Her arm twisted up behind his neck and head, clamping down, leaving him breathlessly immobile as he dug at her neck; she loved that he always went there first. "Fuck!" she wailed, trying desperately to get her legs apart; he was all over her, his strength sapping hers even while it blew her to a fever pitch of physical need, like her pussy had a separate, grasping life of its own.

Her teeth closed on his ear, desperate to take in any part of him, and he tossed her mouth away as though he were fighting her off. His body pinned her, but so did his eyes, suddenly, cutting through the lust to bore into the deepest part of her brain, and for a moment all she felt as he stared at her was fear.

So she shuddered.

He was back on her at once, gentler but no less insistent, his lips closing over her cheeks, her nose, her mouth as she strained upward tongue-first. She needed him, and he knew it, teasing, always keeping any part of himself out of her mouth, whipping her into a frenzy, and as always he waited for her tears to come before he gave her a kiss.

Cool and hot at the same time, satisfying her desires even as it built them higher, his mouth sizzled on hers. She was weeping, laughing deliriously as she gave him her tongue, knowing Kyle was the best she would ever have, sensing instinctively that she'd never find a man quite like this one. He was like an animal at times like this. Her fingers tightened at the back of his neck, clawing hard at his shirt. "I want to tear this shirt off," she murmured thickly, his body lean and hard against hers, and she thought she might just do it whether he allowed it or not.

And his fucking pants, too.

His hand released her wrist in time to slide in between the rest of his shirt buttons, helping her pull, the fabric straining from all sides before it finally gave way. Seventy Nordstrom's dollars worth of his shirt, shredded in the service of a woman's lust, and Kyle figured it was money well spent; he was holding himself over her on his taut arms, his tongue flickering at the hollow behind her collarbone as her jittery fingers fumbled at his belt, his zipper, desperate for him. "I'm already hard, bitch," he snarled in her ear, knowing what it would do to her. "Feel it." He rocked his hips crudely between her hands, and she groaned.

"I feel it," she whimpered.

"It wants you," he hissed. Her hands were shoving frantically at his boxers now, the silk sliding between her nails. "It wants to mark my woman."

"Fuck!" she grated, her feet scrabbling against the bunched rug as she tried to open herself. "Get inside me," she demanded.

"Please," he reminded her. She had his naked cock in her hand now, firm and hot, her fingers gripping it hard.

"Please," she wailed, and he looked down at her. She knew what he wanted. She stared up at him, her mouth wide and panting, nodding like a bobblehead as she tipped his massive, silken head down toward herself, the precum glimmering. She didn't blink, feeling his heat as she steered his cock closer to her skin.

"You know what I want. First," he reminded her, his voice cold and a little sibiliant. "Do it."

"Now?" She would do nothing without his permission.

"Now." He looked down at her through fierce, slitted eyes, letting his excitement surge as she drew his cock to her trembling nipple and used it to kiss its dark, rough flesh. They both gasped, his precum drooling onto her tit like saliva. "Fuck," he marveled.

Marking her.

"Take me. Now," she begged. "Like this," and she was biting her lip as she made the request; he almost never faced her when he took her, but she needed that tonight. "Please."

He lowered his body slowly, teasing her with his dick, his pants forgotten once he'd worked them over his feet. He left a sticky trail across her slack belly, down over the stubble she'd left at the border of her pubes. And then he was nodding at her, willing to give her what she needed. "Like this," he agreed, still with that menace behind his voice, and she sighed hard as he pushed his head against her clit.

"God!"

"Like this." He whispered it in a low, satiny rumble, both his hands now clawed over her wrists while his penis held her pinned an inch deep in her slit. She was humping at him, desperate, her eyes wide, and once he had her hands fastened to the rug he let himself fall, slowly, into her pussy.

He seldom took her like this, from in front, at least not when the Wolf was out. Kyle was mesmerized, with his still-heightened perceptions, by the reactions of Eva's face. She fascinated him; he saw the pulse in her neck, the flicker of her eyelids, the flaring of her nostrils. He smelled the sweat off her body, hidden so poorly beneath the shower soap, riding above the thick rolling scent of her pussy. He heard the gasps, each one deepening as he pushed inch after slow, rigid inch inside her waiting body, the silence on the hallway floor giving everything an immediacy that was almost painful.

He was halfway in when he stopped, waiting until her eyes fluttered back into focus, and then he wedged his feet inside her calves and kicked Eva's legs convulsively outward, like a frog, the action pivoting him smoothly the rest of the way into her. She grunted as his invading cock drove the breath from her lungs, and then her eyes snapped wide as she realized he was rooted, their pubes mingling. His were thick and lustrous enough for both of them.

Eva's curly hair thrashed back and forth on the scarred rug, a giddy chuckle coming from her throat. She relaxed in his hands, beneath his body, around his dick. "You're so sexy, Kyle," she husked.

Kyle didn't answer. The Wolf did. Even now, six days from the moon, there was enough of the Wolf to take care of her. He was growling, back on her neck, shaking her head back and forth with his clamped mouth, and she let out with a high, keening wail as he took her, ruthlessly, jabbing into her slit with steady, brutal thrusts, regular as a metronome, his ass rising high as he drew all the way back.

Eva gritted her teeth against the shamefully swift wave of her orgasm, feeling it crash over her inexorably from her fingers and toes, driving straight into that liquid space behind her groin, the space that slurped at his cock and then gasped with its absence. He didn't often claim her like this, slowly, but when he did she had time to marvel at her own ability to accept him, her willingness to let him have his way with her.

Her trust in the teeth grazing her neck.

She whimpered suddenly, giving up, breathing thickly past his ear as she came. It was useless to wait him out. Always useless; he'd always been able to make her cum, effortlessly, and through the hot angry-cloud mist of her peaking climax she knew it again, reminding herself she'd never, ever have such a man. She grappled him, never wanting to let him go, vowing to keep him inside her forever, and he fucked her steadily through it. His eyes gleamed vaguely yellow as he felt her respond around him, but then she was closing her own eyes and riding the wave.

And then it was all sound: the thick slurping noise of his cock in her cunt, the slap of his thighs smacking hers, the softer thud of his balls swinging against a crotch gone white and frothy with Eva's stirred juices, and the faint sobby noises she made as she came; Kyle chose not to wait, snarling his last three savage strokes into her, and then she hitched her breath and felt the warm rush of his spastic cock, the moist wind of his howl in her ear, and then she smiled deeply knowing she was filled with him.

Afterward, they lay on the smeared rug and breathed hard into the dark, cum-scented hallway air, and she ran her hands through his suspiciously thick chest hair. "Mm, fuck baby," she cooed. "I'm so looking forward to showing you off." Her tongue found his nipple. "Such a fucking stud."

"Showing me off?" Outside, hard stars glimmered. His arm was falling asleep under her head, but the bedroom seemed miles away.

"The party." She sounded good, all thick and sated and muzzy, his cum swirling in her pussy. She licked him some more. "The Halloween party, baby. At work." His eyes snapped open. Fuck.

He still hadn't told her.

* * *

"Wait. So, like what was his actual advice?"

The bat pinged, but neither Kyle nor Wayne bothered to see where Sanders' shot went. Nobody on the Copy Riders could hit for shit. The softball would sail up into the void, ponder its life at the top of the arc, and then decide to head straight for the opposing left-fielder's glove. Every fucking time.

"Nothing useful." Kyle grimaced. "Like, I was looking for ways and means, you know? Techniques."

"Techniques." A slow grin spread across Wayne's face.

"Not sex techniques, dumbass." Kyle rolled his eyes. "I don't need help with that."

"No, I get it," Wayne laughed. "I'm just fucking with you. Like, you needed to know how to break the news to Eva, and Steve just stayed up in his ivory fucking tower." Wayne's feelings toward Steve were complicated. Unlike Kyle, Wayne hadn't been bitten by Steve; he came from a totally different lineage, which tended to cause friction sometimes. "Sucks, dude, when your alpha doesn't hook you up."

"It's fine." Kyle sighed. "I knew what I was getting into. Steve's just not that kind of guy."

"Well," Wayne shrugged, spreading his knees wide on the metal dugout bench, "if you want my advice, I'm happy to square you away." He glanced aside at Kyle, then went on. "Steve's right about telling her right away. Like, right the fuck now. Like, yesterday."

"That ship sailed," Kyle admitted glumly. "It's not the kind of thing you can just come out and say."

"True."

"Like, what, you're reading Sports Illustrated, then you put the magazine down, smile at your girlfriend, and say, 'By the way, babe, I'm a fucking werewolf.' Like, who does that?" Wayne was laughing again. "I was thinking, you know, maybe a nice dinner."

"A nice dinner," Wayne taunted. "Sure. Before you tell her she's been getting fucked by a Hound of Darkness." They were at the far end of the bench, the other Copy Riders strung obliviously out along its length, but still they spoke in hushed tones. "Dude, ain't no dinner that nice."

"How'd you do it?" Kyle was curious about this, anyway. "How'd you break it to your wife?"