Shapeshifter Ch. 07

The thought of my father sent a pang of pain through my chest, made it hard to breathe. There was no way in hell Theo was still alive. Noom wouldn't have left the estate without making sure of that, but here we were. I still had left-over feelings for him, after all, he had been family, but I didn't mourn his death. I mourned the relationship we'd never had and never would have, and the knowledge that I was alone now. All the people I had known and loved were dead. Well, not all of them.

Noom shuffled around on the couch, his position only marked by a small trail of smoke rising from behind the back rest. I smiled and crept closer, peeking over the edge of the couch to get a better look at him.

He wasn't wearing a shirt, and he had an ashtray sitting on his chest. He was still wearing the same ratty red pants as the last time I had seen him, but most of the blood stains were gone and it had obviously taken a tumble in my washer and drier. His hair was tousled and limp against the armrest of the couch, curling towards the tips and looking baby-soft without all the hair spray and gel.

The urge to touch him, pet him, rub up against his clean, relaxed body, was there faster than I could draw a breath. I mewled softly, and he jumped, almost tipping the ashtray before he remembered and picked it up, throwing me a dirty look.

"Are you trying to get shot?" he snarled, holding away the lit cigarette when I slipped over the backrest like a snake, boneless and single-minded. I plopped down on his half-naked form, biting down a pained sound when his stubbly torso rubbed against the healing wound in my chest.

He set the ashtray down on the warm skin beneath my shoulder blades and put his empty hand on the small of my back, drawing lazy circles on my naked skin as he took a drag of his cigarette. His eyes were back on the TV, blandly watching some action flick, but his words were all for me, intimate and low. "Are you feeling better then?" he asked, not bothering to hide behind his usual grumpiness.

I dug my face into his chest, sucking in lungfuls of his scent and shivering with the sheer explosion of smells. He had showered, but the perfume was almost gone from his skin, leaving me to inhale all that was uniquely him, down to the arousal that our close contact woke.

"Yes," I purred against his chest, taking a quick, daring lick across his sternum. He tasted salty and spicy, slightly bitter where he had sprayed himself with deodorant, but that didn't stop me from turning my head, dragging my tongue across his chest and gently suckling on his right nipple. It made him twitch and his breath hitched, but he played it cool, tapping the cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and squirming just a little.

"I knew your TV would kick ass," he said, clearing his throat as his nipple pebbled beneath my tongue.

I grinned against his moist chest and it broke my suction, so I switched over to the other one. I sucked hard on the little nub, squeezing it between my teeth.

This time, he twitched and groaned, littering a few hot flakes of ash onto my back before he snubbed out the cigarette. The ashtray clattered onto the coffee table, then both of his hands gripped and kneaded my back, pulling me closer to his hot body.

I came up for air when his hand skimmed the wound on my back, where the bullet had entered. It didn't exactly hurt, but I was so sensitive there that I twitched nonetheless. "I need my wound wrapped," I mumbled, breathing heavily against his wet skin.

Noom circled the pink groove another time, this time so careful and soft that I shuddered instead of twitching. My cock sprung from its dormant, half-hard state to fully engorged with that one caress. An answering, hot bulge pressed into my thigh and filled the air with the thick, musky smell of Noom's lust. The lounge pants were loose enough for Noom to easily shove his hands beneath the waist band and grab my ass. He growled low in his throat, kneading and moving me against his hard cock.

It brought up a memory.

I leaned forward, pushing my butt into his hot, powerful hands and whispered against his lips, "I want to see you on my black satin sheets, naked except for cigarette smoke." It was the first lustful thought I had ever had about him, back when he had still tried to figure out if he should kill me or not. I still liked the idea, now even more than back then.

Noom didn't react like I had hoped. Instead of throwing me over his shoulder and carrying me to the bedroom caveman-style, he sighed and extracted his hands from my pants. "You need to eat first, you're skin and bones," he said regretfully. Then something else went through his face, a kind of concern I couldn't decipher. "And we need to talk. A lot has been going on since you've been shot."

I groaned against his chest, sagging into a heap of frustration. He was right about the eating part, I was almost as hungry as that time in the underground service room, but that didn't do much to calm down my cock. I could have handled eating and then getting my brains fucked out, but 'talking' sounded ominous and not sexy at all.

Noom slapped my ass. "Up you go," he huffed, pushing himself upright with me still on him and letting me feel all that powerful muscle work beneath my pliant body. God, he was hot!

I waited until he was almost sitting before crawling off him. My nose had already told me that something was in the oven, not baking or something, but on a low burner. The spicy scent of Asian cuisine made my mouth water and enticed me into the dining area with Noom prowling after me.

"I didn't know what to order from your fancy- schmancy restaurant, so I took something with a lot of beef and something with chicken, spicy and not spicy, and a bunch of rice," Noom said behind me. He sounded annoyed, which in his case probably meant he was flustered.

I opened the oven and pulled out the boxes, almost doubling over when my stomach growled and tightened with hunger. Somehow, Noom had gotten all the right dishes, adding to that two hot ones I hadn't tried yet. He even helped me carry the giant heap of food to the table, then sat back and watched me stuff myself.

"I always wonder where all that food disappears to," he pondered, lazily shoveling a helping onto his own plate. "You eat twice as much as me, but you're still a bean stalk. I have to hit the gym at least three times a week to keep the pounds off."

So he was trying to put off talking about what that lawyer was all about. I could roll with that. "My metabolism works really fast to keep up with all that shapeshifting and wound healing," I explained between bites, gorging myself on beef and chicken. "I don't eat as much when I'm not hurt, but I'll never be able to get fat."

"Well, now you've got the money to buy yourself obesity." Noom's lips quivered. It was a strange expression, almost painful to watch.

I frowned. "What?"

He turned away his gaze, picking through the food on his plate and sneering at it. "Money. You've got it. Heaps and loads of it, to be exact. People have been trying to throw Flatlands Inc. at you for days, get you to sign stuff, get you to come to headquarters. It's really annoying," he said calmly.

I stared at him blankly, hoping for some insane epiphany as to what he was talking about. It didn't come and I didn't know what to say, so I looked down at my food and kept quiet. I was still a little hungry, but now eating felt wrong. Everything felt vaguely wrong.

Noom set his fork down with a clank, stood up and fiddled around with the coffee machine, his back turned towards me. His anger smelled like licorice, sweet and sharp and bad. But what was he angry about? The silence, maybe?

"I don't understand," I whispered towards my helping of rice, tucking my head between my shoulders. I knew what Flatlands Inc. was, and I had a vague idea about the necessity to sign papers after the death of my father, but what would I need money for? Why did Noom think I had money?

This time, the clanking came from the coffee cups. Noom set them down with quiet force, like grandma had whenever I had said something stupid. She had started ignoring my phone calls a short time after the cup-clinking had begun. I started to shiver. What if Noom stopped taking my calls?

Something hit me, something invisible, powerful, fierce and fearsome. I jumped up hard enough to send my chair flying, yelling outright and surprising myself.

"Are you leaving me?!"

Noom froze, then slowly turned his head to throw a wide look at me, too shocked to bother hiding behind his usual anger. It was too raw, too natural to not believe I had just caught him red-handed.

"You are, aren't you," I whispered, taking a step closer on buckling knees. "You're trying to come up with a way to get away from me without me noticing. Like a thief, sneaking off after your deed is done."

He finally turned around, holding on to the kitchen table and morphing his face into the old angry mask. His eyes burned into mine, his jaw muscles jumped. "In just a day or two, you won't need me anymore, but you'll be too grateful, too nice to say anything. You'll just let me hang around you, grab you, molest you, until one day you'll say 'no, not today', and then it'll spiral downward. You'll change your locks, marry some stupid bitch, move into the Evergreen Isles and I'll be alone again. Thanks, but no thanks."

In all his crazy talk, I just heard one thing and it made me snort, then giggle, then laugh at him outright. I almost couldn't talk through my outburst of insanity, but I somehow gargled the words out. "Me, leave you? Are you crazy? I love you, why the hell would I—"

I realized my mistake too late and not even slapping a hand across my mouth could undo what I had just said. Shit, shit, shit! Here Noom was telling me his deepest, darkest fears and my reaction was a blurted-out, noncommittal 'I love you'?

Noom stared at me dumbfounded. At least, I hoped that was what his stony, wide-eyed face meant, but right now I couldn't be sure of anything. Maybe he hadn't heard my slip-up?

"You shouldn't say 'I love you' when someone is trying to break up with you," he wheezed out, like a balloon with a loose knot. "It's unfair to do that."

I blushed furiously. Okay, so he had heard, so what? He obviously didn't take me seriously, which was good. No, no, it was bad, really bad! My heart fluttered with confusion and my backbone started tingling and itching like an oncoming change waiting to happen, adding to the chaotic fear in my heart. I didn't know what to do, but I knew I couldn't let Noom leave, not like that, not because of something I had nothing to do with.

I jumped him where he stood, next to the coffee maker, all tense and tight and nervous, and crawled up him until I could wrap my legs around his waist. "I won't let you go. Not like that, not ever," I growled, my voice matching my out-of-character behavior, and grabbed his baby fine hair. It felt just as soft between my fingers as it looked and it even smelled like that, intoxicating and intimate. "I love you and if you leave me, I'll—" I hesitated, trying to come up with a grown-up end to that sentence, and not getting anywhere. If he was slipping away from me, why bother with being grown-up, sane? "—I'll hunt you down and chain you to a wall and throw away the key so you can't ever run again," I snarled, right before I kissed him.

It wasn't a nice kiss, or a tame one, it was hard and harsh, all teeth and tongue and nails scratching across his back. At first, Noom tried to ignore it, me, but he didn't last for more than a few seconds before he broke down. He grabbed my ass so tight he was parting my cheeks and whirling us around so I was sitting on the kitchen counter with him tucked between my legs, as he dominated the play of our tongues.

I groaned into his mouth, trapped between his shivering body, his hard grip and the press of his naked chest against mine. Noom's hard, hot bulge rubbed against mine, so close, so enticing, but still unreachable. My stomach fluttered as I fumbled with the buttons of his pants, all but ripping them off in my haste to free his swelling length.

As soon as his cock sprang from its confines, I wrapped my hand around it, gripping him tightly, angrily. Noom groaned, almost doubling over with sensitivity at my touch, but he didn't stop me, didn't push me away.

"I won't let you leave. You're mine," I whispered, stroking his length to make my demand clear.

He finally raised his head, finally looked back at me, and he was so afraid. Whatever I had said, whatever I had done, it had rubbed him raw until nothing but the man who saw his girlfriend hacked to pieces was left. That man who now found himself trapped between loneliness and another love, another risk for heartbreak.

I saw him stare at the abyss and stilled my hand. This was too important for petty diversionary tactics.

One second. Another one. A third. I wanted to shake him, to scream, but I didn't.

The fear melted and Noom drew a deep, shuddering breath. Then he smiled wolfishly, pulled me against him, against his hard, throbbing cock until I wrapped my arms around his neck. He turned around, carrying me towards the bedroom like I weighed nothing.

"Mine," he growled.

~~~~~~~~~~ FIN ~~~~~~~~~~