Wolf Hunter (29 page)

“
Jaylen?” This time Westley’s questioning tone held curiosity instead of concern.

Jaylen went through the movements again. Figuring he couldn’t do it again, he pulled his hand into his lap and waited for Westley to get it.

“All of us together?” Westley said. “Is that what you want?”

Jaylen jerked, a nod.

“I... I...” Westley crouched in front of him, moving Jaylen away from the table. “I want that too.”

Jaylen accidentally smacked Westley in the head trying to pat him, but he got it right the next time, and Westley snaked his arms around Jaylen’s waist and hugged him. His tears soaked through Jaylen’s De La Soul shirt, making his belly uncomfortable and itchy. He was glad when Tom knocked on the door. Now they could put this idiocy behind them.

“Am I interrupting?” Tom asked. He stepped inside while Westley was untangling himself from Jaylen.

“
Jaylen and I have a proposal.” Westley stood up. Jaylen did his best to be attentive. He didn’t want to miss the inept emotional fumbling that was about to play out. This would be better than Ava’s soaps.

“
Okay.” Tom sounded hesitant. “Look, Westley, you know that today was me stepping up as your best friend. I would never claim you like that. I respect and love you too much—”

“
I know,” Westley said. “Which is why I’m claiming you.”

“
What?” Tom backed into the wall with such rapidity Jaylen wondered if a crosswind had blown through the cabin and only caught Tom.

“
Jaylen and I are claiming you. I spoke to my mother about it.” Westley spoke with unwavering precision. He hadn’t moved from right next to Jaylen’s chair, despite his talk about claiming Tom. Jaylen wasn’t sure if that was his choice to show that he and Jaylen were in this together or if Westley had sacrificed the ability to lift his feet for the confidence he was showing.

Go get him!
Jaylen gave Westley a mental cheer. Westley glanced down at him, looking alarmed, but he quickly turned back to Tom.

“
He heard you,” Leslie said.

“
Not now.” Jaylen scolded her.

“
If you think something loud enough, the wolves will hear you.”

“
Shut up,” Jaylen said.
That was what Denton had done, planting ideas in werewolves’ heads, making them insane. He’d fucking kill himself before he did that. For once, he was glad for Stania and Leslie to keep him distracted from—
holy shit
—developing telepathy. (
“I’ll take ‘the crazy I came in with’ for $10,000, please.”)
He checked if Westley had reacted to that, but Westley stayed focused on Tom.

Tom had lost three shades of color in his face. “You spoke to your
mother
?”

Westley carried on as if he hadn’t noticed. “And she said it’s not unheard of. We care about each other, we need each other, and Jaylen approves, so why not?”

“Why... not?” Tom’s mouth chewed air. “How would this work, for starters? Jaylen and I would share you?”

Good point. Jaylen hadn’t fully thought that through. Tom would want to
have sex
with Westley, and Westley would want to have sex with Tom. Jaylen mulled it over, trying to decide how he felt about that. Meanwhile, Westley seemed to have missed Tom’s point (or Jaylen had), because he said,

“
I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but we’ll work it out.”

“
What if I want to have sex with you?” Tom asked, bringing the real question to air.

“
Oh,” Westley said. He seemed at a loss. He glanced from Jaylen to Tom. “Um.”

Well, the original point of this was get Westley some comfort, wasn’t it? And wasn’t sex something that a big tactile lug like Westley would use for comfort? The man
cuddled
for God’s sake. Jaylen couldn’t take this away from him. He tapped the iPad until a cartoon of two people popped up, waited until they’d seen it, and tapped their names. Then he did the same with a picture of wolves and his and Westley’s name.

“
So, we can have sex when we’re people,” Westley said, “and Jaylen and I will have sex when we’re wolves.”

“
When do you and I have sex?” Tom asked Jaylen.

Jaylen heard the teasing in his tone and responded on the iPad with a rude gesture from Greece. Tom laughed. “Never, it is.”

Westley leaned over to look. “I thought thumbs up was good?”

“
Read the caption,” Tom said.

“’
Up yours.’ Oh, geez.”

Jaylen twitched out a smile. Tom’s Rude Gestures of the World application was the best tool on the iPad.

“You’re dropping the tea?” Tom asked Westley. Jaylen had wondered the same thing before Tom had distracted him.

“
I’ll cut back. Since we killed Denton, it won’t stop me from changing, but at least it keeps some of my symptoms under control. I don’t need to quadruple my dosage for that. I could go back to a normal dose. My intestines will thank me. So, what else?” Westley spread his hands, palms up, curled his fingers up and wiggled them. After discovering what thumbs up meant to the Grecians, Jaylen fought the urge to scroll through his application for that gesture. It had to be rude somewhere.
Look at it. Wiggling fingers? Please.
“Come on,” Westley said, “lay out all your problems with this awesome plan.”

“
Well, because, because, I need an heir.” Tom said.

“
So adopt. Or, I don’t know? Surrogacy? This doesn’t end your options.”

“
Westley, I’m not a big fan of picking out a kid to kill me, or of explaining to a potential surrogate that’s what the kid she’ll carry is for.”

“
Then end it,” Westley said. “We both know you hate the idea. If your dad hadn’t been about to kill me, you wouldn’t have killed him. You’d have talked him into stepping down.”

“
I couldn’t have done that. It was too important to him.”

Jaylen cringed. Tom had to deal with a dead parent
and
with killing that parent? That sucked. Maybe he should be more messed up than Jaylen, but he’d been raised into it, so even though he hadn’t wanted to do it, it was still normal for him. Denton had redefined Jaylen’s normal.

“
All right,” Westley conceded, “but now you can. You’re pack alpha, Tom. You can do whatever you want. You could hold elections!”

“
Elections?” Tom sounded amused. “Yeah, I guess I could. Of course it’s not
traditional
….”

Jaylen had a bladder full of tea to contend with, a wet shirt sticking to his stomach, and the bottom of the chair molded to his ass. These two morons were drawing this out too long.
Hurry the fuck up.
They both jerked around to stare at him.
Shit.
He banged “Yes” as fast as he could on the iPad.

“
Okay,” Tom said, still looking at Jaylen. “Yes.”

“
Yes?” Westley asked. He took a step toward Tom.

Tom faced him. “Yes.”

Jaylen watched them come together and embrace on the other side of the table. Tom glanced at Jaylen as if to ask permission. Jaylen tapped “Yes” again, and Tom kissed Westley. Jaylen let them have their moment and then, lest they forget that he’d once had a reputation as a remorseless bastard, made the electronic voice say, “Toilet,” and chuckled in his mind as Westley hopped into action to steer him into the bathroom.

“
You need help?’ Tom asked.

“
Got it,” Westley said. He leaned down to Jaylen’s ear. “Asshole,” he said without malice.

Jaylen grinned.

Later, he lay in bed and listened to Tom take Westley. Westley’s moans from his bedroom made Jaylen’s groin tighten, but he didn’t try to touch himself. It didn’t feel right, not yet, for him to get off on this. Jaylen could see out the kitchen window. He watched the moon as he listened to Tom’s soft grunts that occasionally turned into Westley’s name. It glowed almost full. In a few days, he could mate Westley himself. He debated the merits of interrupting them now by electronically calling out for a glass of water, but decided against it when he weighed the possibilities of Tom coming out naked, probably with the condom still on his dick, against a bow-legged Westley responding to his call, and figured Tom was more likely since Westley sounded like he’d forgotten how language worked.

He flopped onto his side. Tomorrow, then. He’d already been enough of an asshole for today.

“We’re proud of you,” Stania said. “Tom and Westley deserve this.”

“
They’re super in love,” Leslie said, looking earnest.

“
Shut up,” Jaylen replied, but he only half-meant it. “I know.”

The girls settled down next to a campfire. “Good, because we thought you were thick.”

Jaylen couldn’t think of a reason to argue. “Hey, uh, I’m sorry I killed you.”

“
We know,” they said.

“
Oh. Good.”

“
Jaylen?” A tall, thin, young black man with square glasses perched on his familiar nose walked onto the scene. He hooked his thumbs in his jeans pockets and grinned.

“
Sunny?” Jaylen asked.

“
Hey, little brother.” Jaylen had thought he’d forgotten how cool Sunny used to sound, smooth voice borne of hours and hours of listening to soul records and mimicking the suave style, but Sunny sounded perfect in his mind, so some part of him must have remembered and kept it in storage at the back of his mind.

“
What are you doing here?”

“
I wanted to tell you I’m proud of you for everything. And I love you.”

“
I messed everything up. I was supposed to avenge you and Mom and Dad.” It was weird to think of Sunny as older and look at him to see a boy of eighteen. Jaylen felt sixteen again.

“
Jay. Don’t. We want you to be happy now. You’ve got West and Tom. Tomorrow’s gonna be a good day. I promise,” Sunny said.

“
Okay.” Jaylen blinked away tears. His hallucinations weren’t real, but right now he wished to Hell and Heaven that this one was. He tried to imagine himself going to Sunny and hugging him, but it didn’t work that way, so he kept still and said, “Thanks.” He’d trust his brother, always.

Sunny nodded and was gone.

The girls roasted marshmallows. Jaylen declined Leslie’s offer to make him a s’more and listened until their voices guided him into sleep.

EPILOGUE

ON A TRIP back from the hospital for one of Jaylen’s appointments (still paid for by Mr. Knox’s insurance), Westley had spotted a two hundred pound pink quartz rock at a roadside sale. He’d paid $400 for it, brought it home, and dropped it on top of the grass at the back of his property line.

Now the wild flowers had taken over. The rock tumbled with Great Blue Lobelia, Wild Lupine, Bergamot, Dotted Mint, and Evening Primrose. Westley tended them, though with less structure than he gave his garden. He liked the haphazard growth, liked how the flowers didn’t respect any boundaries. The plants closest to the pink rock crept up over and around it, wrapping it in color. He often stared at it as he did the dishes, sometimes rubbing his sponge over the same plate a dozen times before he noticed.

“Ow!” He didn’t need to look to know Jaylen’s wheelchair had bumped his leg. For a second, he thought Jaylen had done it on purpose, but when he turned, Jaylen’s head was lopsided on his shoulder and his eyes were turned to the ceiling with no evidence that he was looking at anything. Westley eased Jaylen’s hand away from the small knob that controlled the chair’s movements. Jaylen made a soft sound as Westley lifted his hand up and kissed it. “Hey. What did we say about crashing into me? You’re a menace. No wonder they don’t let you out on the roads.”

Jaylen’s other hand tapped at the iPad resting on his lap. “
Beer me.”
Westley had chosen the electronic voice that sounded the most like Jaylen’s, though he wasn’t sure if that was for Jaylen’s benefit or his. Sometimes it seemed to depress Jaylen to hear a man’s deep sex-on-two-legs voice saying the words he couldn’t. He’d learned to change the voices on his own. The current choice was a woman’s light Scottish brogue.

“
You know, I could remind you I told you I wouldn’t wait on you hand and foot,” Westley said as he went to the refrigerator. He opened a can of Pabst which, for some unknown reason was Jaylen’s favorite. Maybe it was a relic of a life where he had to get by on fumes and pennies. He draped a tea towel over Jaylen’s Black Eyed Peas shirt and tipped the can to his lips. Jaylen was getting better at getting his lips and tongue to work together, but a decent portion still dribbled onto the towel. “You’re doing good,” Westley said.

Jaylen tapped his iPad until a full screen picture of the back of a hand extending its middle finger appeared. Since Tom had given him the iPad, Jaylen had used every country’s bird-equivalent twice. Jaylen thought it was the greatest invention ever, since it had returned his autonomy. Thanks to it, he no longer needed to wear a diaper because he could tell them when he needed the toilet, a usefulness that thrilled all of them, but doubtless Jaylen most of all.