in exasperation. “Do we really need rules about who sleeps with who and when? You’re all my mates, and you’re all each other’s mates. Give us some guidance here, Elias. Are smaller couplings bad for the pack?”
“There’s nothing in the books about it. The ancestral scribes were heavy on the importance of keeping the bond strong but light on the specifics of how.”
“The bond is fucked,” Jack Henry said. “We’re falling apart.”
Saul put a hand to his chest with a pained inhale.
“We’re not falling apart,” Jasper said sharply. He pulled Saul closer to him. “We’re building. Building takes time, that’s all.”
“No, let’s be honest,” Elias said. “Let’s say it out loud. The bond is failing, and it’s my fault. I’ll let Jasper fuck me. I’ll do what I have to do.”
“I’m not going to fuck you. Find another answer.”
Elias didn’t have another answer, and as little as he wanted Jasper to fuck him, it hurt to realize how strongly Jasper didn’t want him in return. That was how excluded from pack dynamics he was.
“It’s not Elias’s fault the bond is fucked,” Jack Henry said as he dropped his fork onto his plate. None of them were eating at this point. “It’s mine. I’m not letting Jasper get me pregnant, which is the point of all that sex we’re having. That’s how a pack gets built.”
“It doesn’t get built on your unwilling back,” Elias said.
“Or yours either,” Jasper said. “Which is why I refuse to fuck you. You don’t want it, so I won’t do it.” Jasper slammed his head against the framing behind him with a reverberating crack. “It’s obviously my fault. I’m the one who’s supposed to know what he’s doing.”
“Stop,” Saul begged. “You don’t have to have all the answers, Jasper. You’re not in this alone. None of us are in this alone, and no one has to be anyone they’re not because we belong together. Fate said so.”
Saul started crying. Jasper pulled him into a hug, and Jack Henry came over to hug him from the other side. “Don’t cry, Saul. It’s definitely not your fault.”
“I don’t want it to be anyone’s fault. You don’t know how much it means to me to have a home and a pack. A family. A good family,” he emphasized, crying harder. “Please don’t leave me.
“Saul.” Elias crept closer to him, pulled by the tug of the bond that was weak but there. He crouched in front of his big mate. “We are a family, and sometimes family fucks up—gets mad, says shitty things, has to take a step back and figure out how to fix whatever’s wrong. This is normal. It doesn’t mean anyone’s leaving.”
Saul looked up at him with the prettiest brown eyes Elias had ever seen. The bond panged.
“I love you,” Elias told him.
“You do?” Saul beamed through his tears.
“Yeah, packmate. A lot.” There were so many ways to love other than sex, and Elias did. He opened his arms, and Saul dove into them, separating himself from Jasper and Jack Henry, but only for the moment it took before they piled on top. The words ‘I love you’ were repeated over and over. Elias told everyone he loved them, and he meant it. And everyone said the same back, and he believed them.
“We’ll find a way,” Saul swore. “We have to.”
JACK HENRY
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dee flapped her carmine-tipped fingers in her face like a strangely evolved bird. “I’ll tell ya, honey.”
Jack Henry was in her office, sorting through a stack of old invoices. They’d all been paid. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that some of them had been paid more than once. Since Dee didn’t have a filing system or a check register or any way to verify what had already been paid and what hadn’t, a company only had to send a second bill to get paid a second time. Some companies had apparently figured this out, most noticeably the one that serviced the water cooler. Based on the amount of money Dee had been sending them, her students drank enough water to grow roses in the Mojave.
“Tell me what?” he asked.
“These hot flashes are the pits.”
“Is that what that is?” He’d grown accustomed to her flapping, had figured it was a nervous gesture, though Dee was hardly a nervous person. “You’re trying to cool yourself off?” Like everything Dee did, the process wasn’t very efficient.
“You don’t even know.” She scraped at the strands of hair that had escaped her customary bun, trying to get them off