Page 64 of Pareidolia

He’ll have to content himself with the fact that the house’s back yard touches the edge of the forest, and he can probably come and snatch me out through my window whenever he gets bored.

Or…

Nox said he could step into the town anytime he wanted, that he could make the people here worship him like a god.

If he could do that, could he do something as simple as exist in a house that wasn’t hidden in the trees?

There’s something satisfying about the thought—bringing him here to this place that I’ve hated for so long… dragging a monster into the rooms where my mother treated me like one. I could let him fuck me against every surface that held a memory until there was nothing left but the thought of how it felt for his teeth to tear into my skin.

Nox took up enough space that he could chase away whatever ghosts lingered in the halls of my childhood house.

It was a thought.

Of course, there was every chance he’d hear that I was going to be staying here and he’d break my legs and drag me back into the forest, and the job application I had stuffed into my bag would be useless.

I shake my head and turn my back on the house. How am I supposed to stay here, to play pretend, when that’s all it is?

I never wanted a home.

I never wanted to want something the way I want Nox. I wanted to know what emotions were, what fear felt like.

I didn’t ask him to make me want more… but with my childhood home looming behind me and the fact that I couldn’t leave even if I wanted to, I’m starting to realize that it doesn’t matter what I asked for.

The only thing that matters is that now that I’m here, now that he broke me open and made me into this—a monster with more feelings than I’d ever had as a man—he has to fix it.

He has to give me everything.

CHAPTER 25

NOX

I don’t like Aspen going to town. He’s not trying to hide who he is anymore, not trying to pretend he’s a stranger instead of someone who grew up here. People look at him and have memories—attachments.

They look at him and think that he belongs to the town, that he belongs to them.

It’s a temptation to step from the forest and take them all in my wings, to leave them breathless and broken until they understand that he belongs to me, to the trees and the shadows.

Instead, I watch him as he shops, as he smiles and interacts with others… and I wonder how they don’t realize that the expression he wears is a mask.

He goes to a little diner and stays for nearly an hour, and the entire time I can feel curiosity and apprehension rolling off him… but whatever he’s worried about never seems to come about.

There’s nothing in this town that can touch him—nothing that could possibly hurt him.

And yet…

I don’t like the way people look at him, the way people smile at him. I don’t like when he runs into the ranger from before and leans against the wall while they speak. Looking at them, they’re eye level. They look like they fit.

The ranger wouldn’t have to change his shape so his cock wouldn’t tear Aspen in half while they fucked.

I don’t find myself staring at humans and wondering if the form I’d chosen for myself was wrong very often, but when the man leans in and brushes his fingers against Aspen’s shoulder, it makes me pause.

It makes me think.

And when Aspen turns and I can feel a black emotion pouring off him, some determination that I don’t understand, I wonder… if I tore the ranger’s arm off, would it make that expression disappear?

I force myself to stop watching him before I break a centuries-old line that I said I wouldn’t cross.

But if I slaughtered the entire town, Aspen wouldn’t have a reason to leave the forest ever again.