CHAPTER 29 - GUILT

IVY’S POV

Knox is at the clubhouse and I am crawling out of my skin.

He left at 6 PM on his motorcycle for a “pack business” that he didn’t elaborate on and a kiss pressed to the bite mark on my shoulder that sent the double heartbeat in my chest into overdrive.

It’s been five hours since the front door closed behind him and my body has spent every one of those hours reminding me that it was rewired three nights ago by a half-shifted werewolf and that the operating system he installed runs on a fuel source that is currently unavailable.

I’ve tried reading. I’ve tried studying. I’ve tried watching a show that I can’t follow because every time a male character speaks in a low register my thighs press together and the echo of Knox’s heartbeat in my chest thumps harder like a dog hearing its owner’s car in the driveway – except the car isn’t in the driveway.

The car is across the city at a werewolf biker compound and I am alone in my bed vibrating at a frequency that no amount of normal stimulation is going to address.

I slide my hand between my legs anyway because desperation doesn’t negotiate with logic.

My fingers find my clit and the contact is there, but it’s like listening to a song through a wall when you’ve heard it played live. The resolution is wrong. The depth is missing. My body keeps reaching for the wolf heat that should be radiating through every point of contact, and searching for the pheromone transfer that lit up my nervous system like a city grid during the Level 2 shift.

Sadly, it finding nothing but my own human temperature and my own human fingers and the absence is so acute that it almost hurts more than not touching at all.

I try harder. I use the technique Knox taught me – left side, tight circles, two fingers inside, curl forward toward that spot – and the pleasure builds but it builds WRONG, and the peak I’m reaching for keeps moving further away because my body has tasted something supernatural and has decided that human-grade orgasms are no longer acceptable currency.

I close my eyes and think about Knox. His hands, his mouth, the way his body changed against mine during the shift, the stretch of him at Level 2 that I can still feel like a phantom pressure when I clench around my own fingers.

The memory helps – my hips start rocking against my hand and the pleasure sharpens and I’m climbing toward something that might actually work if I can just hold the image of him in my mind long enough.

But the image slips.

Knox’s hands become different hands – longer fingers, steadier, precise grip, the kind of hands that hold a pen in a very specific manner.

The voice in my ear shifts from Knox’s low growl to something quieter and more measured, and suddenly I’m not thinking about golden eyes and clawed fingers but about amber flecks and reading glasses and the controlled pressure of a thumb dragging across my bottom lip while the hand holding my jaw trembles with the effort of not pulling me closer.

Dominic.

I’m thinking about Dominic. His chest pressed against my back that day in his office, the rigid length of him against my spine that neither of us acknowledged, the wet chair that we both saw and ignored.

I’m thinking about the way he said “insufficient” in class like the word was designed to make me want to prove him wrong on my knees, and my fingers speed up and the pleasure spikes in a way it hadn’t when I was thinking about Knox and the difference is confusing and terrifying and my hips are lifting off the bed and I’m close, I’m actually close for the first time tonight–

I hear a knock on my door.

My hand yanks out from between my legs so fast I nearly pull a muscle, and I shove it under my pillow and drag the covers up to my chin and say “yeah?” in a voice that sounds too squeaky.

My mom opens the door and leans against the frame in her pajamas with her hair wrapped and her face soft with that warmth she's been carrying since they came, and she’s holding a mug of tea and the sight of her – gentle and unsuspecting and wearing the engagement ring that Dominic put on her finger – makes my stomach turn so violently that I’m glad the covers are hiding the flush on my chest.

“Just wanted to say goodnight, baby,” she says, and she crosses the room and sits on the edge of my bed and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear the way she always does.

Her fingers are warm from the mug and she smells like chamomile and cocoa butter, and I want to cry because her hand is touching the same face that Dominic held in his office and the same hair that Knox wraps around his fist late at night.

“You’ve seemed distracted lately,” she says, and her voice is careful in the way it gets when she’s trying not to pry. “Is everything okay at school?”

“Everything’s great, Mom.”

She studies my face for a second longer than comfortable, and I hold her gaze and smile and pray that she can’t see the guilt leaking out of every pore or smell what I was just doing with my hand under this pillow, and she nods and kisses my forehead and says “Love you, baby” then takes her tea and closes the door behind her.

I stare at the ceiling.

The arousal hasn’t gone away. It’s sitting in my pelvis like a fist clenching around something it refuses to release, and my mom’s footsteps are still audible in the hallway and I should feel ashamed enough that the desire dies completely but it doesn’t die.

It simply changes temperature, and the frustration of being interrupted at the edge by the one person whose existence should make all of this impossible is so layered with guilt that I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and breathe through my teeth until the urge to scream passes.

I can’t finish now. My mom’s voice is still in my ears and her chamomile scent is still on my pillow and the image of Dominic that was about to push me over the edge has been replaced by the image of her face and the engagement ring catching the bedside light, and wanting them both – her happiness and his hands – is a contradiction that my body doesn’t care about but my conscience can’t survive.

I roll over and press my face into the mattress and the ache between my legs throbs in time with the double heartbeat in my chest, and sleep doesn’t come for a long time.

When it finally does, I dream about amber eyes and a locked office door and a voice saying “insufficient” while my mother makes tea in the next room.

I wake up around 3 AM because something feels wrong. I look at my bedroom door and notice it’s cracked open.

My mom closed it when she left. I know she closed it.

Was it always cracked?