Shapeshifter - 14. Epilogue

**Kelaste**

The way back into the bedroom was a blur of lips and tongues and stumbles, but we made it onto the bed in one piece. Noom’s faded red pants lay in a sad heap next to the open door, my own had slipped down to my knees somewhere along the way. Noom didn’t let go of me, even as we plummeted over the edge of the bed and into the sea of satin sheets. His hands roamed over my naked skin with as much ownership as ever, but he wavered and got up on his knees when he found the almost healed edges of the bullet wound.

I didn’t mind that either; I needed the breather to calm my raging hormones, my racing heart.

“Does it hurt?” he asked softly, tracing the pink welt.

I smiled, squirming to get the lounge pants off my legs and the bed. “A little,” I admitted, then gasped softly as he put a little more pressure on it. He was carefully watching my face while doing it, soaking up every reaction, every twitch, every shuddering breath.

Noom leaned closer, hovering above my face as he knelt next to my chest. “But you don’t mind, do you?” he whispered in a deeper voice, more intimate, more menacing.

My whole body throbbed. “No,” I breathed, blushing hard and fighting to hold still beneath him.

His smile was angelic, his hands weren’t. He grabbed first one, then both of my wrists with his left hand, brought them up over my head and held them there against the satin bed spread, then leaned closer as the fingertips of his right hand touched my sternum. “You don’t mind at all,” he mused with nothing but a whisper against my lips, then dragged his nails down my chest and my stomach, only stopping when he reached my navel.

I gasped and bucked against his grip, groaning before I could rein myself in. Welts bloomed where his nails had drawn their burning path, followed by a prickling wave of adrenaline and heat. My skin suddenly felt too hot, too tight for my body, so I writhed and moaned, trying to shake off the intoxicating pain.

Noom was suddenly between my thighs, arching over me to keep my hands where they were. His throbbing length stood up proudly, bent a little towards his belly and glistening with drops of pre-cum.

“You’d better have some lube around here, ‘cause this will hurt, otherwise,” he growled. His cock settled on my crotch, twitching rhythmically against my own length and heating me up further.

I couldn’t get enough air to form a complete sentence, but I managed to point and wheeze, “Nightstand.” The welts on my belly throbbed in cadence with my heart and my cock, but the pain changed from a hot burning to a tingle, then to short stabs that slowly faded out.

Noom’s smile was unsettling. “Go get it,” he purred softly. Something flitted through his eyes, something dark and lascivious, and he let go of my arms.

His expression made me hesitate, but his slow, shallow thrusts, the searing rub of his cock against mine, wiped away all reason and had me scrambling to roll over and crawl towards the tiny, modern nightstand. I didn’t get far, all but one crawling step forward, then his hands found my hips and his tongue brushed that private, sweet spot between my ass cheeks.

I made a sound I hadn’t heard from myself ever before, buckling as my arms gave beneath the onslaught of lust. His tongue drew a wet, hot line through the valley of skin beneath my cheeks, pausing at the puckered muscle to stab at and flick around it, then continued lower. I shook so hard he had to steady me just to keep me from bumping into his face, laughing softly, growling against my behind.

“Get the lube, Kel,” he whispered against the lower curve of my ass, right above where it met my thigh. Then he bit me there, ground his teeth into my twitching flesh until I screamed for him, bucking against his grip to get closer, further away, anything to keep myself from coming promptly.

He let go and licked the bite. His fingers traced through the crease and down to my twitching hole, daring me to stay, to find out what would happen if I dallied any longer. I felt like a super hero when I finally managed to crawl further and reach the drawer of my nightstand. I all but threw the bottle of lube behind me, following its trajectory bum-first in my haste to feel Noom again.

I heard the snap of the bottle, then his free hand buried itself in my damp, unruly hair and tightened to pull my head back. My body followed, moving back so Noom’s cock lay nested in the crease of my ass, so close to where I wanted him but still just out of reach. The globs of lube falling on his cock and my ass felt ice cold, but quickly heated up when he started rubbing himself against my ass, spreading the slippery gel on himself and me.

“I could come like this,” he groaned, barely containing himself. His voice twitched like the flanks of a fly-riddled horse.

I panicked, bucking against his grip on my hair until he dropped the lube and grabbed my hip to keep me where I was. “No, no, no! Don’t come, I need to feel you,” I gasped and tried to angle my hips towards the leaking tip of his cock, to force him into me. The bullet wound gave a twinge at my struggling, but I ignored it. This was more important than a little unease.

He suddenly stilled with only his cock still pulsing, still hard as a steel rod, tapping my crease. “Say please,” Noom said. I could hear the pleased grin in his voice, could envision the engrossed expression on his face.

“Please,” I whined.

His cock drew a wet line between my cheeks and suddenly he was pressing against my puckered opening, all with one smooth move of his hips. “Good boy,” he whispered, rearranged me slightly and pushed into me with one, slow stroke.

He set aflame everything, each fiber of my body, slowly, painfully stretching me to the point where I almost wanted to shout, stop, too much, too deep, but never quite going over that invisible line. Tiny, flickering embers of pain rushed through my nerves, heating my body to a point where I wanted to move, twitch, tug against his grip on my body, just to give that burning need a way out.

Noom held me tight, frozen, now that he was sheathed inside me, groaning softly to the throbs and tremors of my tightening body around his hard length. Even lying there, on fire with lust and helpless to his ministrations, I knew that he wasn’t being gentlemanly; the way his cock thrummed and quivered inside me told me how close he himself was to shooting.

Then he started to move. It was nothing like his demeanor before had promised, no rough and hard rutting, but low, careful, torturous strokes out and back in, accompanied by the slick, wetly crackling sounds of lube and his throaty breathing. Each of those languorous moves tapped against that sweet spot deep inside me, the one that made my own cock twitch and drip with ardor, but where I could have come from one hard stroke before, I now couldn’t. The need for more, for skin slapping against skin, for feeling him thrusting his length into me with all his might, went from a distant thought to ravenous avarice in a matter of seconds.

I tried to make him speed up, force him into me with thrusts back against him, but his hand stopped me with a sharp slap on my ass cheek. “No,” he hissed, “you don’t make demands.”

Not that the slap discouraged me, it just fed the flames. I groaned and shivered, undulated my body with the delicious hand-shaped burn on my butt, but I stopped my futile bucking. A drop of sweat rolled down the groove on my back, tickling through the fine hairs like the tip of a tongue that couldn’t possibly be there.

His hand gave up its grip on my hip, instead roaming over my back and pushing me lower, forcing me into an angle that met his penchant, but still he didn’t speed up, still he glided in and out of me with stony endurance. Something built in me, fed by each drawn-out stroke over my sweet spot, like a weight forming and growing right behind my dick. I started to pant, sweating profusely through the increase of pressure, the growing tightness in my abdomen. That weight built and built until I wanted to scream, to bite, to scratch him, myself, something, just to vent some of that nervous, heavy tension. Someone was making high, keening, whining noises, but it took me a moment to realize that it was me.

And then, without warning, my peak hit me. Half of my muscles spasmed and pulled tight, tipping me over and throwing me back against Noom and into his grip as he pinned me down, groaning a surprised melody of lewdness. My vision swam with waves of color no eye should see, blinding me and taking away the sheer thought of breathing as I bucked beneath Noom’s fingers.

Noom only ceased his thrusting for a moment, bracing one hand at the center of my back to keep me from twitching off his cock as my body tightened around it in an attempt to pull him deeper into me. I felt his nails digging into my skin as he fought against his own body, fought against following me over the cliff and into completion, snarling and gasping and frozen where he was until my body finally calmed down and relaxed. Then he sorted my limbs lovingly, whispering endearments, praise and encouragements, and picked up his rhythm again.

It hurt at first, the way his merciless thrusts rubbed against my oversensitive prostate, and I tried to squirm away, keening through the needles of painful pleasure. Then the pain faded and left only bliss, deep and throbbing and paralyzing, enough to dissolve my brain into a puddle of helpless fervor.

This time, Noom didn’t bother going slow. He jack-hammered into me with all the force and speed his body offered, shouting to each sharp slap of skin against skin and filling the room with both our cries and the heavy musk of sex and sweat, swearing as his body faltered and lost rhythm and finally exploded into a frenzied climax of uncontrolled thrusts that toppled me face-down into the sheets with him as a heavy, shivering weight above me. I felt his cock twitch and pulse deep inside me, filling me with his semen in a glorious peak of carnality, and then we both lay there sprawled and breathless, fighting to calm down and too exhausted to move.

Still I wanted more. I whined and tried to move fruitlessly and Noom laughed, a throaty, pleased sound that told me this had been what he had aimed at. To leave me exhausted and weak and still desiring him, still ultimately unsated and craving his attentions. That fucking sadist.

~*~

The ringing of Noom’s mobile phone startled first me, then him, stirring us into a sleepy panic until he finally got one arm free to grab the little thing and answer it. We must have fallen asleep at some point, still tangled into each other and lying in the wet spot I had caused, and I really didn’t feel like moving.

Noom drawled a greeting, his voice rough from relaxation and deep enough to send a shiver of pleasure through my lax body. I was almost ready to doze off again, ultimately uninterested in whoever dared to bother Noom in the middle of the night, but his next words stirred me into a dazed panic and made me sit up.

“I still don’t speak French, Gael. English please.”

I leaned forward and strained my ears, listening intently to the voice on the other end. Noom sighed and put the phone on the crumpled bed sheets, switching to speaker mode and rolling his eyes at my efforts.

“My family was elated to hear of Mr. DeLargo’s death, although it would have been courteous to be informed by my nephew instead of some lawyer,” a cultivated, heavily accented voice said. Gael, I presumed and instinctively hugged Noom’s arm. I needed something to hold on to, facing family. My track record with blood kin was abysmal at best.

Luckily, Noom was incited enough to take control of the exchange before I had a chance to think of an answer to that. “Fuck you very much, Gael. That asshole was still Kel’s father, so you’d better control your glee and try to be courteous yourself, or this is gonna be a very short discussion. Now, what do you want? Are you after the money?”

I held my breath, frozen in shock. Then Gael laughed, and I threw a wide-eyed glance at Noom. I would have apologized profusely, but I somehow got the impression that Noom’s reaction was just what Gael had expected and maybe hoped for, like a game of tug-o-war over control that both of them relished.

“Defensive, defensive. I didn’t mean to insult your amant, mon ami, I apologize. My family has been cursing his father’s name for so long, it comes naturally to me, but I will try to contain myself. Now, I’m not calling about the money, because that would be rude. I am calling to reconcile and reunite my family, which has been missing one member for two decades. Theodore is gone and you reached out to us, so I don’t see why we can’t, how do you say, scoot closer to each other.”

I hugged Noom’s arm harder, staring at the phone with what felt like a scared face. I wasn’t used to family wanting to meet me after they had gotten to know me, so I dreaded repeating that cycle. I wasn’t willing to get my hopes up, almost loath to even risk giving them a chance to meet me and leave me as soon as they saw how I really was, but a small part of my heart still urged me to not give up, not yet.

“We both haven’t had the best experiences with family reunions,” Noom replied, looking down at me questioning. His eyes were asking what I wanted to do, which I appreciated, but couldn’t answer. He didn’t seem to know what to do, either, but at least he found the right words. “What do you propose we do?”

Soft, low noises resounded in the background on Gael’s side, and I suddenly knew that there were other people with him as well, whispering to each other. I raised my brows at Noom, but he didn’t seem to notice it and kept frowning at the phone expectantly.

Finally, Gael cleared his throat and replied, “We’d love to invite you to visit France and stay with us for a while.”

“No,” Noom said, not even bothering to eye-ask me first. That one answer illustrated how wary he felt towards Gael. I agreed, if privately. Family had never meant safety for me.

Gael didn’t falter. “I thought you might say that. In that case, how about we visit you, just me and my cousin, on your home turf?”

This time, Noom and I had a short but poignant eye conversation, a mixture of brow tilts, frowns, shrugs and nods that ultimately brewed down to a rather careful, “That might be acceptable, as soon as things have settled a bit. How about we exchange contact information and plan your visit for the summer?”

A few more pleasantries later, Noom disconnected the call and huffed exhaustedly. “I really hate family obligations. We’ve got to put them in some hotel, as far away as politely possible when they visit.”

“Agreed,” I grumbled, trying to keep the dread out of my voice. I really didn’t know how to feel about the idea of meeting my mother’s family; I had almost no recollection of her except for a low-simmering feeling of grief and loss. I knew I had loved her like nobody else, but I couldn’t remember why or for what, except that she’d been my mother. There was a chance that her family was just as hellish as my father’s side, a fifty-fifty game that I really didn’t look forward to.

I didn’t want to think about this anymore. I shook myself resolutely, let go of Noom’s arm and hugged his waist instead, rubbing my lower arm against his soft length until it twitched interestedly. “Let’s go back to bed,” I offered softly.

Noom put the phone back on the nightstand and turned towards me, his eyes already darkening with hunger.

“Let’s.”

~*~

Real life didn’t stay away for much longer. At eleven o’clock the next day, I was already sitting in front of a big, wooden desk, staring blankly at a heap of papers with lots and lots of legal words on them. The lawyer with the nasal voice had caught on to my being well again quickly, which meant that even Noom couldn’t find a good enough excuse to dodge him any longer.

Noom had bowed out of the legal procedures concerning my father’s inheritance, though, which meant that I was alone. It rankled. I would have loved to ask his opinion on all this… this.

I still wasn’t all that sure he’d stay with me, although he hadn’t shown any more signs of trouble since that electrifying sex we’d had. I had even been optimistic at breakfast, discussing his plan to remove the booby traps from his home and listening in intently on his call to Mike. The bounty was gone, no more takers had raised their ugly heads. I was as safe as before and Mike was rich. We’d wired him a portion of my rainy day money right after the call, a hefty fifty thousand dollars that made Mike a happy boy.

Now I wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

“It’s just…” I began, swallowing nervous saliva, “what am I supposed to do with so much money?”

Mr. Anders, the lawyer, smiled his bored little smile. “Whatever you want, Mr. DeLargo. It’s yours to do with as you please.” We’d had a short discussion about what to call me when he had insisted on using my full last name, DeLargo-Lagrada. I had finally broken him from that habit, so we were making headway in my book.

I couldn’t help it. “What if I don’t want it?” Or rather, what if I had to choose between twenty-one billion dollars and Noom?

“Then forty percent of the money goes to the new CEO of Flatland Inc., the other sixty percent to your grandparents. All assets will be liquidated, of course, but that would leave you with nothing.”

I didn’t know the new CEO, but I knew my grandparents. They were bad people, heartless and cold. They didn’t deserve the money. “Can I give it to charity?” I asked, mulling my situation over for the ump-teenth time.

Anders bobbed his head thoughtfully. “Well, most of the estate has been invested in the business, stocks, real estates and the likes, but the funds would be under your immediate control, so yes.”

I could take the money and gauge Noom’s reaction, then give it away, couldn’t I? But would he let me, or would he freak? I couldn’t not take the money, that much I understood. God, this was getting more complicated by the minute! If I kept going like this, I’d chew a hole through my lower lip and not get anywhere. One step at a time.

“Where do I sign?”

Anders put stacks of paper in front of me, explaining the marked sections and showing me where I had to sign. I only understood half of it, but I signed anyway, more interested in being done with this than filling my head with legal terms. It took us fifteen signatures and almost twenty minutes to get everything in order, and when we were finished, I was sweaty and exhausted and even more worried than before.

Noom was waiting for me outside the office, looking too calm and too neutral. “All done?” he asked. It sounded more like a ‘what the fuck?’, or maybe a ‘why do I need to be here?’, but he didn’t say that. I shrugged and we walked, down the hall and past the elevators, back to the stairs we had come up earlier.

“You’re pasty. What happened?” he pressed on, tailing me like a lion on the lookout for the right angle to kill. Our steps echoed through the staircase like the first rumbling of a thundercloud, but he kept up with me easily.

Twenty-one fucking billion dollars. How was I supposed to tell him that?

I stopped when my feet touched asphalt and the street stink of urine, cigarettes and car exhaust wiped away all traces of Anders and his ozone-scented paper. Noom huddled next to me, lighting a cigarette out of habit and hissing out a puff of smoke as he stared at my face, waiting. Was I seeing a new side of him, or had he always been that patient?

“What if I gave it all away?” I asked, ripping my gaze away from the dirty pavement and looking up into his face. “All of it, the whole bunch, everything I got from him, because of him. Would you still grow tired of me?”

This time it was Noom who looked away, raising one corner of his lips to a half-smile and bumping his shoulder into my chest as he turned slightly and started walking. I followed him, switching sides to avoid the cigarette he so carelessly dangled at his side.

“It depends. Do you plan on becoming boring?” he quipped, offering me a drag of his cigarette, which I took leaning over and trotting to keep up with him.

I smiled through the cloud of smoke escaping my lips. “You know, when I first saw you, back at the club, I was actually at the point of contemplating suicide because I was so bored with myself, my life,” I said. “Then I met you, and since that first night, I haven’t been bored once. Or suicidal. Or anything else than exhilarated.” Maybe it was the monumental amount of money I had just inherited, or the sheer craziness of how I had come to this moment, but the thought of telling Noom these things didn’t scare me anymore. I still didn’t know how his head worked, still was unable to estimate how he might react to different things, but I found myself strangely fearless in the face of those unknowns.

Noom scoffed, taking another drag of his cig and throwing one arm over my shoulders to pull me closer to his side, bathing me in his scent in the process. “Just so you know,” he drawled, smiling his crooked smile, “I won’t leave my house. My house is holy. You can move in if you leave your money at home, but no scratching posts and no shedding your kitty fur all over the furniture. That shit corrodes right into the carpets. I won’t be your kept toy, so don’t even think about buying me stuff whenever you feel like it, and I sure as hell won’t give up my job. We clear?” When I didn’t answer quick enough, he looked over and rolled his eyes.

“Stop grinning like an idiot.”

“I’m not doin’ nothin’,” I mock-drawled through a contorted grin that I simply couldn’t shake.

We walked for a while, listening to that companionable silence building between us. Just before the embers touched the filter, Noom snipped the butt into a gutter and threw me another glance.

“You good?” he asked a little quieter, more earnest, almost worried.

“Perfect,” I said.

The End