Page 13 of A Breath of Fresh Air

“What?!”

He grins against my lips, kissing me again. “You’re not mad?”

I shake my head. “No. Not at all.”

Brett’s headlightsfollow my car all the way home, a nice reassurance against the heavy wind and rain. It takes almost the entire half-hour drive for me to thaw out, even with the heater on full blast, and I’m relieved when I finally pull onto the winding road that takes me down into Bluewater Bay, the tiny beachside town I’ve called home for the past three decades.

I turn down my driveway, passing the ‘big’ house that I used to live in. I feel sorry for my current guests that have rented it for the week — it’s always a risk to visit the beach in the middle of winter, and it hasn’t paid off for them this time around. I park on the concrete pad in front of my much smaller dwelling and Brett pulls up beside me. It’s a mad dash once more to get up and inside my tiny house, and we stand in the main room — an open plan kitchen, dining, and lounge all rolled into one — peeling off our wet layers one by one.

“I wanna get you warm,” Brett says, a hint of a growl in his voice. “I don’t like the way you’re shivering.”

Despite having never visited my place before, he navigates it well enough, ushering me into the small bathroom. Luckily Ellie and I did not go with the same design for my tiny home as we did for her old one, and there’s a full ceiling in here rather than the 6-foot-high one she had at her old place. Still, Brett’s elbow hits the wall more than once as he helps me undress, and we onlyjustmanage to both fit into the shower. On the surface there’s nothing sexy about being squashed between a cold shower wall and a big man on a mission to get you warm as soon as possible, but his urge to care for meisa turn on; by the time he’s scrubbed me with soap and washed my hair in a very blokey, no-nonsenseway, all I want is to sink to my knees and take his cock in my mouth.

Instead I wait until he’s midway through washing out his own hair before I reach around his middle, enjoying his grunt of surprise as I stroke his half-hard cock to full mast in a matter of seconds. “Fuck,” he growls, the sound of his voice sending a jolt of arousal right down to my pussy. I don’t let up, increasing my speed as I stroke his foreskin back over the head of his cock and up again. He turns to face me and I squeeze his knot, loving the way he gasps, his hand slapping against the wall above my head as the spray of water continues to hit his back. “Keep doing that and I’m gonna come,” he grinds out, yellow eyes wide, his expression feral. I love the sharpness of those canines as he bares his teeth, a growl rumbling in his barrel chest as I squeeze his knot even tighter, my right hand pistoning up and down his length. He’s already leaking precum in a continuous stream, but I want the main event. I want to see him explode. I want him to cover me in it.

“God, you’re so fucking good,” he growls, one huge hand slipping between my legs, his head tipping back with a groan at what he finds. “So fucking wet!” I whimper as his thumb settles firmly on my clit, two thick fingers sliding into me.

I buck against his hand as he thrusts into mine. “Come on me,” I demand. I love feeling so caged in, the wall at my back and his body leaning over mine. I squeeze his knot again and he erupts with a groan, his balls drawn up tight, thick spurts of white cum landing on my breasts and belly. There’s so much of it, and it’s such a fucking turn on. I buck against his hand, only to cry out when he pulls it away.

His fingers glisten as he runs them through the mess he’s made on me, circling my nipple. He lifts his hand to my mouth and I don’t even recognise myself as I open wide, sucking on hisfingers with a groan as he whispers, “Taste us,” in a tone that is so wonderfully dominant.

He dips those same fingers back through his cum, tracing a line down my stomach. I sigh with relief when he fucks his cum-coated fingers back into me, adding a third, the stretch leaving me feeling so pleasantly full. “I want your knot,” I tell him. “I want you to fuck me, and I want that knot.”

“You’ll have it babe.”

The cum is washed off and Brett wraps me in a towel. I’m carried to the bedroom and laid out naked on the bed. Brett’s mouth descends on my cunt, and the first lick of his tongue makes us both sigh with pleasure. “I missed this,” he says, his lips brushing across my skin.

I missed you.

I don’t say it. It feels too vulnerable, which is ironic given our current positions, but there’s matters of the flesh and then there’s matters of the heart, and I haven’t let a man get to my heart in a long, long time. Instead I brush my hands through his thick hair, throwing my head back as he licks me to the brink of an orgasm. “Don’t stop,” I beg, my legs shaking, and he doubles down, sucking on my clit in a way that sends me over the edge with scream, my cunt pulsing around nothing.

“Come here,” I urge him in the aftermath. I’m desperate to be filled, but he shakes his head, his tongue curling around my entrance, a moan escaping his lips.

“One more,” he growls, and it is all the warning I get before his long tongue presses into me.Holy fuck.He grabs my hand, leading my fingers to my clit, and I can see the smile in his eyes as I obey, touching myself. I’m caught in his gaze, soul open and laid bare as I give him one more.

“I knewyou were nervous about this doco. I didn’t want you watching it alone.”

I curl up on Brett’s lap, offering him the bag of microwave popcorn. He grabs a handful, cursing softly at the heat. “Sorry, I should’ve warned you they’re still hot. And thank you for coming all this way. I really appreciate it.”

He plants a kiss on my head. “I care about you,” he murmurs as the documentary intro starts, bang on ten PM. It’s so late because it’s streaming simultaneously with Australian networks, and that’s the biggest indication of all that this is a big deal. I shiver, thinking about the early days of the Unravelling. It reminds me of that time, when everyone was so panicked.

“I worry about this because of Ellie,” I say, as a preview of what’s to come plays. Interviews of people who have had loved ones disappear without a trace, stories of portals to the First Realm opening out of the blue… some of it seems a bit too much like conspiracy theories, until the image of a deer with glowing green eyes and antlers covered in blossoms flashes up on screen. I grip Brett’s arm tight, my heart beating rapidly. Those antlers look just like Ellie’s when she uses her magic.

“They won’t ever get to her. I promise you. Van will never let that happen.”

“But they almost did.” Brett was there last year. He’s the one that filled me in on the full story, letting me know just how much danger my daughter was in at the beginning of summer. I’d be more offended that Ellie never told me the truth about it all, but I know she was just trying to protect me.

I spend the next hour huddled in Brett’s arms, crying in sympathy for all the mothers whose changeling childrenhave been stolen away by the fairies. There are so many abduction stories — far more than I realised — and plenty with photographic or video evidence to back it up. This post-Unravelling world is wonderful in so many ways, but it is also so bloody terrifying that sometimes I do wish that we could go back to the way things were before.

I feel awful for thinking that while in the arms of a wolf shifter. He can finally be himself, finally shift whenever he wants to. His body is now the body it was always supposed to be. He feels more whole since the Unravelling. I don’t want him to ever lose that aspect. I’m so happy for him and his daughter.

I just want to know for certain that my daughter and her future children will always be safe, too.

There’s sucha size difference between us that when Brett is on top of me it feels like I’m being smothered in the best possible way. I throw my arms around him, clinging on as he fucks me slowly in the dark. I don’t know which one of us woke first — all I know is that as soon as his lips were on mine, there was only one way things were ending. Leaving the bottle of lube right there on the nightstand was the best decision, making it oh so easy for us.

I run my lips over his chest and nip at his shoulder, making him growl. His pupils are wide in the dark, full-blown and utterly captivating as I stare up at him. He picks up the pace, snarling, and I don’t know why it’s such a mental turn on, but it is. It’s like a switch flipping in my body, my hand rubbing my clit even faster, and I come with a deep groan.

“That’s it babe,” he whispers, fucking me through it. He pushes his knot into me with one deep thrust just as my orgasmfades, and I scream, the pressure of it a fresh jolt to my core, my cunt spasming around him again.

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