Page 13 of The Devil Takes

I needed donuts.

Soda too.

Maybe a ring pop to suck on if I was feeling adventurous.

And fucking Tommy had taken my car to work, so I either had to wait for him to bring my car back—which I wasn’t going to do because I wasn’t a lazy piece of shit—or walk there myself.

Memories from my night in the cemetery a week ago spun to the forefront of my mind. Haden had been plaguing my thoughts constantly since the morning I’d woken up tucked safely beneath the bridge at the back of the graveyard, covered in dew droplets and a familiar black uniform jacket.

My mating bond was empty, even though I could still feel the throb of teeth and I’d chased Haden’s scent in the fabric before ultimately deciding I needed to let go. It clearly hadn’t taken, otherwise I would’ve felt him, right?

The jacket had been soft. Warm. A little small, when I tugged it on over my nakedness. But it worked well enough as I made the awkward waddling walk of shame with cum slipping down my thighs to where I’d stashed my clothes behind a grave a hundred or so feet away. As I had approached the familiar tombstone, I noticed that sitting on top lay a giant, dead grasshopper.

Poor thing.

I’d paused and debated the risk of staying out longer in the frigid-ass air as I got dressed in my usual t-shirt and ratty sweatpants, shoved my feet into my army boots, and ultimately decided to do the right thing, my cold-ass hands be damned.

With the grasshopper’s fragile body cradled in my palms, I’d made my way back to the bridge. There were too many rocks on the edge of the graveyard to dig him a hole there, and I didn’t really want to wake up any angry spirits by digging in the grass above an already full grave. So, under the bridge we went to where the soil was soft and the trickle of a stream echoed from the other side.

I’d felt stupid and a little embarrassed by my own soft heart as I dug a hole in the ground one-handed, and held an admittedly shitty funeral for the deceased bug. The dirt had clung to my skin and the familiar sensation had grounded me, even though the silliness remained.

It felt familiar due to the countless hours I’d spent tending to the dirt at the greenhouse I worked at part-time.

Realistically, I knew the grasshopper probably didn’t care whether or not it was buried. Hell, most critters didn’t have funerals at all. Actually, none of them did, probably. (I’d have to Google that later.) I was pretty sure burying the dead was a human thing. So the funeral was probably more for me than the grasshopper.

But…

Thinking about leaving its body to rot in the wind?

Hell no.

Little dude deserved more dignity than that.

The jacket clinging to my shoulders continued to be suspiciously warm as I patted dirt over the no-longer-empty grave, rose to my feet, and squinted through the darkness to the other end of the bridge. Sunlight peeked beneath it, revealing nothing more than moss-covered boulders and fallen leaves.

No creatures, purple or otherwise.

No dudes parading as skeletons.

If my ass hadn’t been absolutely reamed the night before, I probably would’ve thought I had imagined the whole thing. But I could still feel the stretch of Haden’s knot, a phantom pleasure that had my hole clenching and my neck throbbing where he’d bitten me.

And that was a whole other thing, wasn’t it? The fact that he’d fucking bitten me at all. Who did that? What a dickbag. Especially since whatever pseudo-heat had started the night before had apparently fled with the first beams of sunlight. My pills had decided to magically work again this morning because the air was just as stale and dead as it usually was. Haden’s scent was almost entirely gone, despite the fact that I still had his cum leaking out of my ass.

A bite and run.

Asshole.

I hadn’t known what to do.

So I glared into the darkness, raised my dirt-covered hand, and flipped off the shadows. When that didn’t make me feel any better, my stolen jacket and I had plodded unhappily back toward the parking lot to forget the night before and take a much needed shower.

I figured the least Haden could do was let me keep his fucking jacket since he got to keep my virginity.

The only thing that had kept me sane was the fact that despite the scar on the back of my neck, the bond hadn’t seemed to take. I was more sure of that as time passed without the telltale ache of longing for a partner I wasn’t even sure was human.

But that had been a week ago.

And now, I was here crossing the highway as the bitter wind bit at my cheeks, wondering why the hell I couldn’t seem to forget that night. In my dreams, I hunted for the memories, unable to stop. And unable to forget the fact that Haden’s jacket was shoved under my bed, hidden inside a box for safe-keeping. I didn’t want Tommy to see it and ask where I’d gotten it.

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