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It’s dark and well past dinner when Astrid gets home. Not late enough to necessitate slinking around, but something about the house already feels asleep, and she takes care to be quiet as she locks the door and slips off her shoes.
Astrid exhales a quiet, almost unrealized, sigh when she finds only Bren still up in the living room, on the sofa in what looks like only a dressing gown and socks. He replaces a book on the nearby table, which she recognizes as one they’ve all been passing around recently, on the development of magical abilities in children. His hair is loose, still wet and wavy at the ends, and as she approaches him she reaches out her hand to ruffle it, then thinks better of it and ends up only running a strand through her fingers as he looks up at her.
“Hello.”
“Hi.” It would be an easy motion to climb over the back of the couch, like a dance partner not venturing even a foot further from him, but she’s old enough to know better than that. She goes around the long way, and folds herself between him and the sofa.
“Were you working? This late?” On the surface he smells of soap, but Wulf and Essek’s scents are still on him underneath, evidence of a long afternoon probably spent in Essek’s bed. A good thing, she reminds herself. They’re a pack, they should smell of each other, spend time with each other.
“It’s not that late,” she says, perhaps too quickly. Preparations for Harvest Close always mean extra work, and lately she's been taking on even more, hoping to build up favors and goodwill for the next few months. The fact that it keeps her away from the pack for longer, away from Essek and their moods at each other lately…best not thought of. “Is anyone else still up?”
Bren shakes his head. “They both wore themselves out.” The movement of his eyebrows and his barely restrained smile leave no doubt as to how. Up close, he looks quite debauched, lips soft, bruises on his open stretch of collarbone. It kicks up a yearning in her, a wish to have been home a few hours earlier.
“And you didn’t?” Bren has been so needy, so eager for all three of them lately — she wouldn’t have been surprised to find him asleep between Essek and Wulf. He’s not one to want to be alone after sex.
“I wanted to talk to you.”
Chills in her heart, she doesn’t want to talk about anything that requires that phrase as preamble. She swallows that feeling, keeping herself casual. “Whatever for?”
“I have some…news. I thought you should hear it from me first.” He puts a hand over his belly and Astrid knows what he’s going to say next in a brief, vivid flash and she doesn’t want to hear it, not right now, so she grabs his wrist with both hands and speaks before he can.
“You?”
“Yes, Alpha.” He wraps his free hand around hers, prying her free of his arm and taking both of her hands in his. A gentle version of an old combat training exercise. “Me.”
Her mind is blank and overfull at once, scrabbling for purchase amidst a wave of emotion. “You’re sure? You’ve — you’ve been to see someone?”
“Quite sure. This morning.”
She can't ask “how” this has come to be without it sounding hopelessly childish; she knows perfectly well how with the way they've been carrying on lately, with Bren's extended, needy heats these last months and her own matching, exhausting ruts. How many times she's given him her knot, felt at the soft pudge of his belly when he was full of her. How many times she’s talked of putting a pup in him, to say nothing of how many times she’s thought of it.
But Essek is due in just over a month and Astrid is still waiting to feel something more parental than possessive, to look at the bedroom they've been rearranging as a nursery, rather than just the same room with an especially cutesy new decor. She’s the only one of them who hasn’t really added anything; she can’t count the wool she spun when it was Bren and Essek who knitted it. Last week she’d picked up a bag of flour in the kitchen and thought, this is how much the pup will weigh, and then she’d nearly dropped it.
And even if she doesn’t have Essek right now, even if this pup has driven some wedge between them that will never quite be the same, she has Bren and Wulf. If Bren becomes like Essek has, terse and moody and not needing her, if Wulf devotes all his time to caring for both of them…
But then again, it’s all too soon. Maybe he’s asking for another sort of support. “What are you — do you want it?”
He stares at her, blue eyes sharp and searching. “It’s a little sooner than we’d thought, but…we’ve talked about this. Of course I want it.”
“I thought with Essek’s pup —” And there, in the space of minutes, she already feels the change in their pack, no longer one pup, the pup, but two, a need for differentiation: Essek’s pup and Bren’s pup.
“I’m told people manage with more than one.” How dare he be sweet with her, how dare he make that wry, amused smile at her. “I think it will be nice in its own way — having two so close in age. They’ll be able to rely on each other.”
There’s something in Bren’s joy, his confidence that makes Astrid realize it’s not the first time today he’s having this conversation, and then she kicks herself for being so self-centered as to think that he would save the news for her. “What did Wulf say? Essek?”
“They’re excited. They’re happy.” Laced in there is the urging, the request for her to join in with the rest of them. Be excited. Be happy. “Wulf said they would have to keep an eye on me, make sure you didn’t steal me away all for yourself.”
That nearly put a smile on her face. “He wouldn’t stop me.”
“Even if it didn’t smell like yours?”
It takes her a moment but…oh. Of course. Astrid isn’t the only one who’s been sating Bren’s heats. Popular wisdom is that an alpha will predominate in a mixed pack, but nothing is impossible. “You think —?”
He shrugs, the teasing smile returned to his face. “Who’s to say? I’d rather not call bets on something we’ll know soon enough.”
“Hmm.” She slips her hands from his, one settling on his leg and the other on his shoulder. Why is it easier to picture a pup with Bren’s eyes and Wulf’s dark curls than one mixing her own features with Bren, or even Essek? “Were you all…celebrating, this evening, then?” She swipes her thumb across the marks on his collarbone. If she could not have been home earlier, why did she not leave something on him this morning? She wants to remind anyone who would touch him that he is hers, that his pup is hers, dark curls or no.
“Only incidentally. You know how Essek’s been lately.” She does, but these last few weeks only from hearing Essek and Wulf together, from tasting him on Bren's lips. Astrid would never stoop to anything so pathetic as to linger just outside closed doors, waiting to be invited in, but she might sit down here, listening to sounds that filter downstairs, knowing how many paces and how many seconds it would take her to be there. Knowing she could be there but isn't, unsure whether to blame Essek or herself.
Something of this must show in her face, because the joy in Bren’s softens into something more placating. “Astrid. Just give him time. It’ll be different when the pup is here.”
Bring me something, she thinks. Keep me near if not close. Remind me of the scent of him, the scent of the pup I'm not ready to meet. She shakes her head, trying to appear more casual about it than she's ever felt about any member of their pack. “It's not like that.”
“I’m not going to make you talk about it.”
For so many years she had been able to rely on Wulf to not call her out on things she was avoiding, conversations she was avoiding having — and for years most of those conversations had been things she could always leave at her own door. Now, the easy problems are the work and the thorny ones are at home.
She shakes the subject from her thoughts. “Are you tired?” Essek had needed more sleep, hadn’t he, even earlier on? It had made such a difference when he’d begun to sleep as much as trance, when she’d suddenly stopped being able to rely on him being awake at odd hours. Her mind feels like a loop running backwards, recalling everything that had been important six months ago.
“Why? Do you want to tuck me into bed?” Bren’s voice lilts just a touch over the question, and his eyes glimmer, and just the hint of that challenge, that brattiness in his eyes is the relief of a steady handhold on a sheer wall, and by instinct Astrid practically pounces on him, pinning him back into the sofa. He is still hers, here, in this moment, and there is always so much she wants to do to him. Even amidst all this.
“I want you right here,” she breathes, their bodies pressed so hot and close together. His scent is so potent, here in this moment, and already she can sense that, too, how it has begun to change. It’s subtle, enough that she could forgive herself for having not parsed it yet, but he’s a little less familiar to her — and yet somehow a little more hers.
She unties his robe and takes him all in, bare in front of her, lanky and hairy and just a little soft. She moves down him, her face lingering in his chest but skimming delicately over his belly. He stifles a gasp in his hand when she licks a stripe over his stiffening cock. Again the scents of soap and pack greet her from the hair along his groin.
They haven’t had much use for positions beyond her climbing on him and knotting him lately; when her body is clamoring to penetrate and his to be penetrated, it is simpler to solve all their problems at once. Now, faced with the consequences of that kind of fucking, she wants to push her own pleasure aside and spoil him. He groans so soft and sweet as she takes him in her mouth, and he’s always been the perfect size for her, such a wonderful weight on her tongue.
He keeps his hand pressed to his mouth — trying not to wake the others upstairs, of course — but she can hear a succession of “Astrid” and “Alpha” as she continues to work at him. When she slips two fingers into his slick hole she knows he is hers, held between her mouth and her hand. She finds the place her mind has been yearning for as soon as she walked in the door, motion and scent and bodies melded together and all thought secondary.
Bren lasts longer than she would have thought, if she’d thought about it. He gives her little warning besides a punctuated gasp and a slight arch of his body, and she swallows down the evidence of his pleasure. Perhaps it should sate the part of her that wants to eat him more than it does. But then again, perhaps her hunger for him runs deeper than flesh and fluid.
He’s purring, full and throaty as she lays herself back down next to him, still as clothed as she’d been coming in the door. It makes it easier for Astrid to ignore her own arousal, mentally deferring it to her own bath later. Even when he reaches for her, palming her through her robes, she pulls his hand away wordlessly. He’s hers in this moment because she’s kept him satisfied.
Cautiously, she presses her hand between them, over the hair covering his belly. Another item on the list of things she only has because she lost him for so long. Along with Essek. Along with Essek’s pup.
“So that’ll be…” The weather had still been warm in his last heat; how had she missed how long it had been since then? Had she taken it for a given now that Essek was so far along?
“Spring.”
“Spring,” she echoes. An entire Rexxentrum winter of making sure Bren is properly bundled up, or, better still, cozy and indoors. “You’ll need a new coat.”
“I might carry small, you never know,” he hums, and Astrid can only laugh.
As if anything he does could ever be so unobtrusive. As if any of this could be so easy.
But Bren is already shrugging back on his robe, leaning his weight onto hers. “Take me to bed?”
She rolls her eyes. “Am I to carry you?”
”You wouldn't, if I asked?” But he is already climbing over her, onto his own feet--languid, lazy, looking rumpled if deliciously pleased. He holds a hand out to her and smiles.
As if it is all so easy. She takes his hand, and they go to bed together.