Blood & Wine

31 | Iris

I plopped down next to Fynley, the sun beating down our skin. I loved being a werewolf—even though the temperature had dropped below fifty, I didn't need a jacket or jeans to go for my run. It wasn't until the twenties that I would actually get cold. "Hey, loser," I said, starting to stretch.

Every afternoon, before all the other werewolves got together, we went for a run to blow off the steam, the sexual frustration at having two mates not having sex with us. It didn't work, but it did give us some alone time to try and... restructure our relationship. Also, to vent, because we had a lot of stuff to vent about. "Hi."

I looked over at him. He was laying on his back, eyes wide open as he stared into the sky. "You sound...upset?"

"Frustrated," he replied. "I just spent three hours taking a nap with Eden against me."

I laughed. "Why would you do that to yourself?"

Our situations were a little different. Fynley and Eden were Mates, and she hadn't accepted it yet. She thought he was lying or joking when he announced it at the party, and every time he had a chance to tell her he was absolutely serious, he bitched out and didn't send the text or press the call button. Instead, he preferred to rub one out himself, while the rest of us had to deal with his attitude. And his scent.

Dasher, on the other hand, was a different story. He was still struggling to get over Alyssa, and I understood that, I really did, but it didn't stop the fact that all I wanted to do was have him bend me over and put a child inside of me. It was getting very ridiculous how unbelievably sexually frustrated I was.

It wasn't like we could even find some form of release with someone else. When you recognized that Mating bond, absolutely no one else would do. The idea of even looking at Fynley romantically had disappeared the second Dasher had Changed. Dasher, my Dasher, the half-witch, half-werewolf that would one day kill his father.

Fynley wouldn't even look at another woman. Even when Eden first got here, and he was still pretending that we would Mate one day, ignoring the fact that she was his Mate, the sex wasn't good for him. For me, yes, but for him? He struggled to finish, to even get turned on.

I had known he had found his Mate, and I stayed far away from Eden. Which wasn't hard. She didn't come around unless it was to Club Lust, and even then Fynley tried his best to ignore her—like his eyes didn't drag to her every single time.

Water under the bridge, though.

"Because I can't tell Eden 'no.' Every time I look at her, I just want to say yes. Even if she told me to impale myself in the chest with the sharpest dagger in the world covered in wolf's bane, I would say 'yes' without a second thought," Fynley explained.

"You are so dramatic."

But I understood him. Anyone with a Mate that was actually equally yoked with them understood. You couldn't tell them no, couldn't begrudge them anything that would make them happy—even if that thing was walking away. It was why I didn't so much as touch Dasher unless he wanted me to.

Sometimes, though, I found myself staring at his lips and thinking about the one time we kissed, and when he caught me, he looked so guilty that I immediately stopped looking for a few days.

It was just my instincts.

"Iris, I am dying," Fynley groaned.

I rolled my eyes. "Aren't we all?"

"No, I really think I am going to die if I don't have sex within the next month."

I lifted myself up and looked at him. "Ask her."