Levi felt clean.

It had begun to rain outside, and the cool air that leaked through the windows felt nice against his skin. He toweled himself off, water dripping from his naked body and onto the carpet. He didn’t think anyone would be upset that he’d taken a second shower.

Rosa lay in the bed, her nudity barely concealed by the blanket thrown over her. The outline of her, the soft curves and gentle swells of her form, were visible through the sheets. She reached out and gently pressed her fingers to his lower back, trailed them down his rear end, his thigh.

Levi leaned down and kissed her, just barely, on the lips.

Her body was still hot, her face still flushed from the exertion of it. He felt a little nip of animalistic pride at that. It coursed through him. Briefly, the idea of a second round had immense appeal. But no, he wouldn’t ruin the moment.

Slowly, she climbed free of the sheets. She draped her arms behind his neck and kissed him again, then leaned her head into the curve of his neck. She felt like she fit him. Her curves met with his body like a key in a lock, the bare swell of her breasts to his chest.

“My turn to shower,” she said. Her voice was quiet and warm against his ear. “Hold down the fort for me.”

“Yes ma’am,” Levi said, sounding husky. Rosa giggled at him, then drew her hands down his shoulders, then his chest. She rubbed at him, feeling the lean muscle of his body. He was wiry, head to toe. When she broke away it felt as if she was pulling at him. She was tied to him by an invisible thread, and he was compelled to follow.

“Down boy,” Rosa chided. “I’m planning to shower, not make another mess.”

Levi had the dignity remaining to look vaguely hurt by the remark, pressing his fingers flamboyantly to his chest.

“I,” Levi said, “had no intention of doing anything impure. In the bathroom, anyways. I think I might get some comments if I hopped in the shower for a third time.”

Rosa rolled her eyes, still smiling. Then she gave something between his legs a flick, and he let out a very undignified squeak.

“Hey!” he said, again contemplating pursuit. She laughed again and waved back at him. Levi found himself looking at the chipped red paint on them, wondering how the lacquer would taste on his tongue. She slipped from the room.

While Rosa went to shower, Levi took her spot in the bed. He laid in her imprint on the mattress and breathed in the scent of her. He could feel her heat where she had been. He curled up there and fell properly asleep.

“Levi, Rosa,” came a vaguely familiar female voice through the door.

Levi cracked his eyes open and was a little startled to find himself still in the bedroom. That was odd. It seemed like every time he let his eyes slip shut these days he woke in some kind of miserable plane of his subconscious. He let his hand run over Rosa’s stomach, her back pressed against him. She had a thin layer of fat on her stomach, and it made her skin soft and supple even as Levi felt the muscle underneath.

Rosa stirred softly at the voice.

“It’s time to wake up you two, dinner is in thirty minutes,” Elizabeth called. “Can you two hear me?”

“We hear you,” Levi confirmed. “We’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“Take your time,” the woman responded. Levi heard her heels tap on the hallway floor as she walked towards the stairwell.

“Mph,” Rosa mewled. “Don’t want to move. Too comfy. Levi, carry me.”

Levi stared at her.

“I mean, I can do that, but you’re butt-naked and there’s no way I’m dressing you. Be too funny not to. Would never forgive myself.”

Rosa made a discontented noise and forced herself to rise. The sheets draped over her as she sat up, making her look like one of those Roman statues, the kind with the woman lounging on a weird bed and eating grapes. Levi had to look up what those were called sometime.

Wait, were those even Roman? Maybe they were Etruscan...

Levi contemplated rolling out of bed directly onto the floor, for old times’ sake, but decided against it in the end. He managed to climb to a standing position and fumble around in his duffle bag for a change of clothes.

Rosa, for her part, got changed into some of Elizabeth’s clothes. Levi wasn’t entirely happy about that; Rosa was supposed to smell like Rosa, not like some other woman they’d only just met. But, in the absence of some of Rosa’s own clothes, it would have to do. The outfit Rosa had worn on their way down here wasn’t just dirty, it was ruined. A combination of sweat, Levi’s blood, and his vomit had ensured that.

… Yeah, probably wouldn’t have been very acceptable to wear to dinner. Especially considering-

Levi grumbled as he pulled his shirt over his head, getting caught a tiny bit in the fabric. Especially considering that the house was supposed to be filled with wolves.

He wasn’t quite sure how to handle that yet.

On the one hand, he knew that Lycans were people, sorta. They were sentient and the like. Hell, he was one, more or less. Half-and-half.

But still...

He thought of the teeth sunk into that pale-furred forearm. Arthur buzzed with irritation.

Rosa had pulled on one of the dresses Elizabeth had loaned her. It was a summer dress, made of bright white and blue fabric. It was in a pastoral style, like something you might find in an idyllic town in Switzerland, though not quite so poofy.

Levi thought she looked beautiful. It fit Rosa just fine, no matter what Elizabeth said.

… Again, he may have been a bit biased. Had it only been a few days ago they had been walking by the riverside, the sky purple and orange and sorbet? Levi snickered and had to cover his mouth to prevent more from escaping. They had both been so overdressed... It wasn’t really a happy laugh, more a kind of delirium at the idea that so much had changed so quickly.

“Are you laughing at me?” Rosa accused.

Levi shook his head, grinning at her between his fingers. “No, no, not laughing at you. You look great. Just... life.”

Rosa stared at him like he’d said something immensely stupid, but with an odd bit of fondness that softened the blow.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“That’s all ya got? Our lives have been in immediate peril for the past... three or so days, and your comment on that is ‘life’?”

It was Levi’s turn to stare.

“Levi, we got abducted by a government agent. I watched you get interrogated, admit to manslaughter, then beat a supernatural wolf-man to death. Then we were involved in a high-speed chase and you briefly forgot your own name. Frankly, ‘life’ doesn’t begin to cover it. But, that said, thank you,” she smiled at him. “I like the dress. It’s a touch tight around the shoulders, but I like it.”

“... Rosa I-”

She held up her hand, cutting Levi off. Then she put her hand on his head, sinking the digits into his curly mess of hair. She ruffled it and he puffed out his cheeks in reply. He hated it when she did that...

Or so he pretended.

“I am not looking for an apology,” she intoned, giving him a reassuring grin. “We’re both in this boat together. It just happens to be... the middle of a very intense storm.”

Levi cleared his throat awkwardly.

“C’mon Levi, pull it together,” she teased. “We’re going to go see the other doggies. Doesn’t that sounds like fun? You wanna go for a walk?” She asked in a high-pitched, teasing voice. “Walk?” she repeated, patting her thighs. “Walk?”

“Not funny,” Levi deadpanned.

She poked him in the side.

“Yes it is. It’s totally funny.”

It was a little funny.

He stubbornly fought back the grin and the tinge of anxiety he was having at the idea of meeting so many wolves. He knew, intellectually, he was safe. But, after the past few months of torturous paranoia, the past few days of active pursuit, it was hard to allow himself to relax. He still felt like prey. It was not a comfortable feeling.

As they left the room and walked down the stairs, Levi quickly discovered that he could smell them. The wolves below, in a bewildering variety of strange and foreign mixtures, had an undercurrent that ran through them, a blistering blue bolt that shouted that they were together, they were one, they were pack.

Family. More.

Rosa squeezed his hand as she walked down the steps. Her bare toes splayed on the wooden steps, and Levi noted that they were freshly painted. Elizabeth must have lent her some blue nail polish.

The sound of the clamoring voices downstairs grew, and Levi wondered if they should go wake Derrick just in case. The man was asleep in one of the bedrooms upstairs, trying to recover from the strain so many cantrips had placed on his body. By the time he decided that they should his feet were already touching the hardwood of the ground floor.

Elizabeth stood outside the doorway to the kitchen. It was an old-fashioned inlaid sliding door, embedded into the wall and currently pulled shut. Levi could hear the voices coming from the other side, rambunctious, laughing voices.

“Levi, Rosa,” she said, grabbing the door handle. “The Golden Gate pack welcomes you. Things may get a bit intense, they’re excitable with new people. You understand.”

Rosa nudged Levi’s stomach with her elbow.

“Like regular dogs,” she whispered.

“Elizabeth can hear you,” Levi hissed back. Elizabeth was, after all, a werewolf. She blushed a bit, but her smile didn’t falter.

Elizabeth gave a light laugh and tugged the door open.

The interior of the dining room was crowded, perhaps intentionally given how physical Lycans often were. Lit by a warm orange glow, the space was fairly sizable, but it appeared to contain in excess of forty people. Levi, of course, was most impacted by the smell. It was such an odd cocktail of scents. There were the usual ones that resulted from a crowd, of course. The smell of sweat and breath and laundry detergent from all of their clothes. But there were odd things too, odd things like the faint scent of peppermint lingering in the background. A little bit of a chemical smell from what Levi had learned was a bitterant used in the manufacturing of computer chips. Air-duster for keyboards. Ink from ballpoint pens. The smell of the meal they were eating, which they had been informed was a few prime-rib roasts that had been slow-cooked at a packmates house.

And, under it all, that searing blue line. It was a bright blue thread that ran between them all, that united them all, made them from a cluster of indistinct scents into one giant collective mark of pack, and pack, and pack. It said to anyone that wanted to know: “we are one” and “we are together” and “we will protect each other.”

Levi longed for it.

It was somehow familiar and not at the same time. Something he remembered, but it wasn’t him remembering it.

Rosa took a deep breath next to him. He realized that she was likely a touch overwhelmed by the sound, rather than the scent. There were a great many voices, voices, and music, and the sound of feet on the hardwood.

She took a second deep breath.

Then she tugged him into the crowd.

Levi was a bit startled by the pull as she rushed forward. Wolves turned to them, eager eyes watching, bodies crowding around them.

Hands pressed to Levi’s arm, his neck, his shoulder. Strangers touching him, people inspecting him with eyes that flashed red in the dark. Levi felt like he should be panicking.

For some reason, he wasn’t.

People closed in around the pair, smiling, introducing themselves in a blur of scents and names. People kept hugging him, then releasing him as Rosa pulled them deeper in. When, at last, they were so submerged in the sea of smiling faces they could not see the shore, Rosa stopped pulling and let the people writhe around them.

“I’m Jace,” said a man with freckles across the bridge of his nose and big, round ears. Cute and boyish, like he’d never broken a bone or a heart.

“Hi, I’m Lucy!” said an excitable young woman with ribbons woven into her braid. Her eyes were heavy with a lack of sleep.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Veronica,” said a professional woman who had unbuttoned the top button of her dress shirt and taken off her heels so her feet could touch the bare carpet. Her toes were painted purple.

“Denny,” said a man with wide, pale eyes and a ghost of a smile on his lips.

It was so much. Almost too much.

Almost.

Rosa pressed to his side and grinned up at him. He blinked and realized that, somehow, he was smiling too. Some massive man, must have been at least 6’6” and 270 pounds, wrapped his arms around them both and hugged them so hard he lifted them off their feet. Rosa let out a wheezing laugh.

Something fizzed and bubbled in Levi’s stomach, in his chest. This wasn’t his family, no. But they were accepting him, protecting him, at least for a few days. For just a little while, he was a part of them, and he could feel himself becoming a part of them.

“You have pretty eyes!” said a woman with blond hair and bangs that hung over her eyebrows.

“Elizabeth said you’re from up north?” asked an older man with a t-shirt for a band no one had ever heard of. “Are they all as weird as they say?”

“You’re the guys with the Mustang?” asked a younger guy who Levi thought smelled like the inside of a car’s engine: gasoline and oil and steel. “Badass! Must be a bitch to keep running though.”

Rosa seemed to be having some kind of fun with all of it. She hugged people back, unabashed by the openness and physicality of a pack of excited werewolves. She seemed to fit in here, slotting into the group with the same ease that she did everything else.

Levi had never felt more in love with her than he did in those moments, watching her join hands with a woman she’d never met before and smile at her like they had been friends their whole lives. The wolves herded them to one side of the room, and they ended up by the dinner table. Food was laid out in platters and people served themselves with paper plates and plastic forks.

Levi found himself eating in a hurry to get back to...

To what?

Back to the not-puzzle-pieces. He tasted the roast on the end of a plastic fork and marveled at these people. Marveled, and wondered, and envied.

The answer was simple. It was because they weren’t partially here. These people, this pack, was one family, one whole, all by themselves. They were here as complete individuals, every bit of themselves, for every moment of their meal. He could see them in their entirety, unafraid, comfortable in their skin and in their community.

Levi felt a pang of jealousy. Then, intense gratitude, because they had allowed him in, they’d made him part of their whole for a few nights. It was an honor, a great degree of trust, given to him freely and without reservation.

Who was Derrick to these people to ask so much of them and to have it be given?

Who were Elizabeth and Baxter to grant it easily, without reproach or hesitation?

He hadn’t known how much that little tickle of that blue line at the back of his mind could mean. Hadn’t known how much he missed something he was pretty sure he’d never had.

“Your tail is wagging,” Rosa taunted playfully on his left.

“Shut up,” Levi laughed.

Rosa waggled her eyebrows up at him and he laughed harder.

They threw their paper plates away and pushed back into the crowd, into the bodies, into the music.