S. Yule - Lycan Contempt

The closer he’d gotten to home, the louder his wolf howled and clawed to get out. Now, guiding the bike down the drive to his house, the wolf was nearly inconsolable. The need to throw his bike down and release the predator for a hard run nearly overpowered him, but he’d always demanded control of when and where he shifted. The key to maintaining a balance with the human and the wolf that lived inside him was accepting them both and never denying the other existed. He’d met many lycans that treated the wolf as if it were a separate part, an intruder. That never worked. He was both man and wolf and no amount of denial would ever change that fact.

He was at peace with whom and what he was. He respected the predator, and the predator respected him. His personality never wavered when in wolf form other than some natural traits, such as dominance, became more pronounced. There were things that were more pronounced in human form as wel, such as approaching situations with more caution. Not that his wolf was reckless, but the predatory nature sometimes outweighed the precautionary nature. Yet he would never do something in one form that he would not do in the other.

He let out a long sigh when the house came into view. Dusk was giving way to darkness and his wolf howled louder for freedom.

“Just a few more minutes. I promise,” he muttered.

He stopped the bike in front of the garage and got off. He pushed it to the door where he entered the code into the keypad. The door slid open with a few loud creaks in protest of not being used in his absence. He’d make sure to oil everything up tomorrow. He parked the bike beside the burgundy truck that sat inside.

“Wel, helo there, girl. Did you miss Daddy?” He ran his hand down the side of the truck. She was a vintage GMC 1971 four-by-four 1500 that he’d lovingly restored several years ago. “I’l take you out tomorrow to blow the cobwebs out.”

After getting his bag from the bike, he hit the button by the door to close up the garage and made his way to the house under the covered walk that connected the two. He keyed in another code at the side door and went inside. He preferred the code locks because he’d lost too many keys after shifting.

After having to break into his own house on more than one occasion, he’d finaly gotten enough. He supposed he could simply have left his doors unlocked when he was out on a run, but he preferred to keep the place secure.

While he wasn’t afraid of intruders, he didn’t want to give any stragglers, or possibly other lycans that happened upon him, an open invitation to his home.

His stomach rumbled loudly, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten since early morning.

He dropped the bag by the door after closing it, shrugged out of his leather jacket, and tossed it onto the back of the couch. The house was dark, but he knew every nook and cranny. Even if he didn’t, his superb eyesight wouldn’t fail him. He opened the fridge and sighed.

“Should have caled Wil to let him know I was coming back this evening,” he grumbled at the empty shelves staring back at him.

Wil was the old man that he’d hired to look after the house when he was away. He would have happily stocked him up on food had he known of his return.

No matter. He had plenty of canned staples. He nudged the fridge door closed and began rummaging through the cabinets. Finaly, he selected a can of sliced potatoes, spam, and peaches.

“Yum.” He grimaced after flipping on the light and fishing the can opener out of a drawer beside the sink. “I’d kil for a steak the size of a car right about now.”

He plopped the potatoes into a frying pan he puled from another cabinet and placed it on the stove before going to work slicing up the spam. In no time, the potatoes were sizzling and he added the imitation ham.

“Doesn’t smel half bad.” He slid the concoction on a plate and picked up the bowl he’d dumped the can of peaches in.

He set it al on the table and got a fork. The first bite proved that it smeled better than it tasted, but it was food, and he was hungry.

“First priority tomorrow is food shopping.” He’d have to drive into town, which was over an hour away, but that gave him a golden opportunity to take his truck out for a good, long run.

“Speaking of running.” He pushed the now-empty plate away and stretched his arms above his head, unknotting the tension between them.

He stood and stripped off his clothes, folded them, placed them on the table then went to the front door, and opened it. He stepped out onto the covered porch and let his wolf come to the surface. Fur sprang through every pore on his skin, and his muscles contorted and changed shape. Within seconds, he was leaping off the porch and into the woods in a ful out run. The forest was pitch-black; not even the moon was out, which told him a storm was coming, that and the fact that he could smel it and feel the heaviness in the air.

Good thing Connie chose today to fuck me over. If she’d waited any longer and he’d started his journey a few hours later, he would have most likely not made it home before the storm. By the way his skin was tingling, it told him it was going to be a bad one. Definitely groceries first thing in the morning. For now he would let the wolf he’d kept suppressed for so long—and al for that bitch, Connie—free. His ears twitched forward and his snout rose toward the sky before a lone howl eerily pierced the thickness of the air.

Kish had run in the woods for hours, and by the time he’d dragged his worn-out ass back to the house, it had been al he could do to stay awake long enough to shower and crawl into bed. He sighed when his head hit the pilow and instantly drifted into sleep . . .

He stood in the trees at the edge of the clearing and watched her. She wasn’t the usual type of woman he’d go for. She was short and had a few extra pounds on her rear and hips, but those extra pounds only made her curves that much more alluring to him. She wasn’t fat by any means. In fact, she was a tiny thing, but he supposed he’d gotten so used to dating the wispy model types that he’d completely forgotten what a real woman looked like.

And she was definitely the definition of a “real woman.” She held her hands out and spun in a slow circle with her face tipped up to the sky and her golden hair cascading down her back. The snow danced and twirled all around her, landed on her skin, then melted into glimmering water droplets. She took his breath away, and without thought, he started to go to her until logic pushed through to the front of his brain.

“Never again.” He’d promised himself he’d never fall for another woman after Connie, never allow himself to be hurt again. And some deep instinct warned him that this little slip of a woman could rip his heart into a million bloody pieces without trying hard at all.

He was no stranger to being hurt by women— women who’d professed to love him, who’d one after another sworn his scars didn’t matter. He’d always recovered, but a void was always left behind. Soon, that void grew, overlapped, and became one huge ball of resentment, doubt, and bitterness. One huge ball of fuck-over-Kish that was lodged next to his heart. He wasn’t a dumb man and was coming to realize that the void didn’t have everything to do with heartbreak. He could admit that some of it had to do with pride.

In fact, as woman after woman ultimately rejected him because of his face, he’d grown to expect nothing less of them, even though he’d try to convince himself the next one was different.

This woman, however, this goddess swaying in the snow as if she were a kid experiencing the fluffy flakes for the first time, was not shallow.

He didn’t know how he knew this, but it was so.