Heath Gale

Havermouth, Present Time

The town was untouched by time as if it had just been yesterday, and not five years before when she had left it, a broken, fragile eighteen year convinced that she was in love. Officially she had won a scholarship into an exclusive art school, jointly paid for by a donation from Zeus Forest Works and the founding families of Havermouth. Unofficially, the Havermouth werewolf pack had sent her away.

It had taken hundreds of therapy hours to realize that what she had thought was love was the result of the skilled and prolonged application of gaslighting. Once she had begun to learn just what that was, she had recognized the behavioural patterns.

Once she had finished her three years of art school, with help of friends from the therapy group she had changed her name and gotten a job on the other side of the country. She had not visited her parents in Havermouth. She had not left on the best of terms with either parent, but most particularly her father. She not returned when they had separated, nor when her mother had met a new man and moved downstream to Trayrock.

Whether Aislen would travel to Trayrock if her mother remarried was a problem that had been superseded by a phone call from Zeus Forest Works to advise that her estranged father had been killed in a logging incident.

How she felt about his loss was complicated, and she had ruthlessly repressed it, shoving it back behind the rush of activity needed in order to get ahead in her work-schedule and then shut up her apartment so that she could drive three days across the country in order to be there for his funeral.

The town was hauntingly indifferent to the years in between her visits, it’s pretty, painted houses with their cottage gardens bright with flowers the same as they had always been. The same tree-lined streets, the tangled branches overhead dappling the sunlight through the windscreen. The same school uniform on the high school students as they walked home from school.

For a moment, a group of boys recalled to her a memory so vividly that she almost saw the faces of the Triquetra on these others and the experience had her heart racing and her palms sweating on the steering wheel. “Repressed trauma,” she told herself. “Resurfacing because you’re back in this shit-hole.”

She parked out front of the lawyer’s office and spent a moment composing herself. She applied her lipstick and dabbed some perfume on her pressure points before opening the door. It smelled the same, she thought as she closed and locked the car door behind her, the air heavy with jacaranda musk from the blooms being trodden underfoot.

She walked over to the old-fashioned storefront keeping her head down. Between her oversized dark sunglasses, her dyed hair, the bright lipstick, and her gothic style of dressing, she shouldn’t be recognizable to anyone who had known her before, she told herself, and yet she hurried across the sidewalk in remembered shame.

The bell above the door chimed as she entered and she removed her sunglasses, sweeping her eyes across the little reception. Three chairs were tucked under the front window facing an unattended reception desk. The artwork on the wall caught her attention. It was a watercolour of a house by the river. She felt her heart pick up a beat in alarm. She knew that house, and she knew the artist who had painted it.

F-k.

“Ah, hello, can I help you?” A blonde woman walked into the reception from the internal door, pausing behind the reception desk, her eyes taking in Aislen’s black lace gothic top with its corset detail and her pencil skirt, down to her studded and spiked heels, before returning to Aislen’s face. “Are you lost?”

“Definitely,” Aislen agreed, walking forwards, and taking her clutch out from under her arm. She opened it and removed her ID and change of name form, sliding them across the countertop to the woman. “I’m here to pick up the keys and paperwork that you are holding for me. Morgana Ivy, formerly Aislen Carter.”

“Oh,” her shock was comical. “I remember you,” she said. “But you were… different then. Lillian Ridgeway.”

“Yes, I recognized you,” Aislen replied taking back her ID and returning it to her purse. “My stuff?”

“I’ll be right back,” Lillian retreated to the door, closing it behind her.

Aislen sighed, her eyes returning to the picture on the wall.

“One of Rhett’s,” Heath Gale said from the open internal door, and she jumped, instantly back five years before, when she had last seen him. He was as handsome as ever, his blonde hair kept almost militarily short, emphasizing his strong, square jaw, the paleness of hair striking against the bronze of his skin, and the storm-cloud grey of his eyes.

He wore an immaculate blue three-piece suit. His tie had small triangles in different shades of blue and grey, and his hand when he held out an A4 envelope towards her, wore a signet ring on the smallest finger showing the celtic knotted triangle. “It has been a long time, Aislen,” he said, his voice and eyes like ice.

“Not long enough,” she replied crisply, refusing as always to be intimidated by him. She took the envelope carefully so as not to touch him and looked within. There was a set of keys, as well as a watch and ring in with a thick wad of documents. “I just sign these and return them to you?” She asked him.

He took a pen out of his pocket. “They will need to be witnessed. I can do that for you if you sign them now.”

“Why not,” she gave a casual shrug as if he had no effect upon her whatsoever though every instinct within her told her to run, run, run. Or worse, to jump him. F-k, she thought, she was no longer a hormonal teenager, so there was no excuse for the surge of lust that she felt when she looked at him. She set the envelope onto the countertop and slid the papers out. “Want to give me a run-down of what I’m signing?”

“The first document covers the funeral arrangements, agreeing to have the insurance company pay the funeral director’s costs. The second document is regarding the life insurance. The third document transfers the house into your name. The fourth transfers his car, bank accounts, and other assets to you,” his tone had no inflection, not even boredom.

She flicked her eyes up to his, unfamiliar with the emptiness. The Heath that she had known had been charming, wild, wicked, mean, and always laughing or snarling. His eyes showed no expression when they met her, ice, ice cold and reserved.

Her eyes dropped to his lips, remembering how they had felt against her own, his taste on her tongue, and her body remembering his against it. She looked away, knowing that her skin had flushed – the curse of a fair complexion. “Right then,” she said opening the pages to the first arrow sticker that indicated where a signature was needed.

He set the pen down on the paper before her. He had moved closer, standing just behind her, and she could smell his aftershave, feel the brush of his breath in her hair. He breathed in, scenting her, a werewolf trait. She tried to pretend that the hair on the back of her neck was not standing on end, and that her nipples had not tightened to points, her body hyperaware of his as she picked up the pen.

“My current name, I presume?”

“The paperwork was made in your legal name,” he replied, the words almost breathed into her ear.

She scratched her signature over the line and passed the pen back to him, her fingertips grazing his in the exchange, and for a moment she saw herself as she had been as a teen, her long hair fisted in Heath’s hand as he thrusted into her mouth, Rhett between her legs, and Cameron, sweating under his efforts, thrusting into her from behind, and she drew in a sharp breath, her clit throbbing in memory.

Heath wrote his name neatly under his signature and handed the pen back to her. His eyes, as their gazes met, held the iridescent shimmer of a werewolf. They continued to sign the forms without speaking, but every small movement they made seemed to her to balance on the cusp of something dangerous.

“I will lodge these,” he said returning the pen to his pocket and stacking the papers back together neatly.

“Thank you,” she barely managed to breathe the words, her entire body seeming to burn with desire. F-king hell, she thought, even after five years, he could f-king turn her on just by sharing space with her.

“You still smell like ours,” he said under his breath. She jerked her head up, but he walked to the internal door as if he had said nothing, and closed it behind him, leaving her shaking at the countertop.

“F-k,” she grabbed hold of the envelope with the keys and her father’s personal effects. The sooner she got the f-k out of Havermouth the better, she thought as she hurried back to her car.