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“I treated you like that.”

“But I didn’t try to be anything else!” I said. “And that’s why you wanted Opal. Because she was fighting for herself. It’s only recently that I’ve even started doing that. For way too long, I just let the world happen to me, and if it hurt, I tried to make myself even smaller, as if I could be so small that I would be too insignificant for anyone to bother hurting me. If there was nothing left of me, then I didn’t want anything. If I didn’t want anything, I couldn’t be disappointed.”

“Shit,” he said.

“No, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s just Vincent… I know you just said that you can’t accept things from other people unless you feel it yourself, but I feel like he…”

“He made it occur to you to want things?”

“It was so stupid of me,” I said. “But until he was asking me what I wanted, I hadn’t realized it would be, like, acceptable to want things.”

“Fuck,” he said. “I think that’s on me.”

“No point in blaming each other anymore,” I said. “Let’s just try to be happy in the future.”

“Wow,” he said. “That’s very good of you to say.”

When he left that night, I marveled over how his scent didn’t affect me at all.

Of course, several days later, I was realizing that my period was late.

SO, THE WOLF-ON-HUMAN thing, it had happened a few other times, maybe.

I was going into heat frequently, something that might have actually been cause for concern, because to be going into heat once a month wasn’t normal for omegas, but Vincent and I were enjoying it too much to try to fix it, I have to admit.

And also, he would break the heat really fast by doing me in wolf form.

I was not sure why it worked, and he wasn’t either, but we both really liked it. I would go into heat and I would go out and run in wolf form and he would chase me and catch me, and put his teeth into the scruff of my neck and I’d shift back, and he’d lick me all over and I’d come hard on his wolf tongue, and then he’d fuck me and knot me, and…

Maybe the last time, he’d shifted back to human form before he came?

Or maybe it was not so safe for him to be coming in me no matter what form he was in? Maybe werewolf sperm is just sperm, no matter what?

Maybe the problem wasn’t the heat sex, maybe it was that going into heat that often was short-circuiting my birth control pills. We were having a lot of sex regardless, when I wasn’t in heat, and we were just trusting the birth control to work during that time, not really being very careful otherwise.

I think we both wanted it to happen.

I don’t know.

At any rate, my period was late.

It was January. The last one of these little sessions had happened in the frigid cold, and I remembered his hot wolf tongue on my shivery taut skin, the juxtaposition of the two sensations, the intensity of it, the sheer snugness of his thick knot stuck in me, and the way it felt to be with him, the sweetness of our joining.

We were still living in the apartments above Cork’s, and I still didn’t have a job. I had not opened the art studio as a space to display or sell art, though I had some plans of doing it. I’d been living off the rents on the building—which were more than adequate to live off of. The building was mine free and clear, and I paid a company to take care of repairs and things. I paid into a savings account to cover the costs of such things.

Casey had come to visit me a few times. It had been winter, so we had not gone out on the river. We’d walked around the old town square, though, and she’d seen Damian from afar, and she’d told me he was ugly as fuck, and I’d said she was crazy, because he was not ugly.

“Well,” she’d said, “he should be ugly. The fact he’s that hot is a crime against nature.”

It was Casey I called while I was waiting to check the pregnancy test.

“What are you going to do?” she said. “Are you and Vincent going to get married?”

“I mean, let’s see if it’s even positive,” I said. “We have not talked about that.” We had talked about buying something together, having a cabin on the river, that dream that we’d spun before his fight with Damian.

“Oh, shit,” said Casey. “He’s going to bite you.”

I got a shivery feeling about that. Sometimes, when we were fastened together after sex, his knot stuck in me, he’d scrape his teeth against me. Sometimes, even when there was no knot, and we were just snuggling together in bed, he’d do the same thing.