Tiger Winter - 3. Boyfriend

“I love that restaurant,” Zeke folded his arms behind his head as he walked, looking up at the clear night sky, “they always do such lovely little starters. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Emmett smiled falsely. ‘Little’ had been the operative word in that sentence, because the food had been fancy and tiny, more like splashes on a plate costing far too much than actual food. To compound the problem he had been due to have another proper sized meal, but had forgone it in order to maintain his sculpted appearance in front of Zeke. His stomach was only not growling violently because Emmett had snuck most of an extra bread basket on the way to the bathroom and filled himself full of carbohydrates. He’d feel awful in the morning, but it was worth it when Zeke snuck under his arm and ran fingers across his chest over his shirt. The young man purred gently in happiness.

Despite the miniscule portion sizes, Emmett couldn’t describe the dinner as anything other than lovely. Like a real date, they had talked about everything that passed through their heads. Zeke asked about his job, how it was they actually measured the movements of animal populations and why it needed doing. They talked about the weather and the imminent change in seasons; Emmett waxed lyrical about the love of ice and Zeke had looked at him strangely, but admitted to making snow angels in the park when no one was watching. Emmett asked Zeke what it was he did, why he had been transferred in and out of town, and discovered that his date was a bio-scientist with a first class degree in horticulture and was a senior executive of the company who managed the plants in malls and high-end office buildings all over Ontario. They had flirted over delicate ravioli and quail with truffle sauce and played footsie under the table. Every time a waiter had walked by they had needed to stifle giggles, and both of them had spent a lot of time blushing. It had been a perfect first date, and to Emmett, it was wonderfully topped off by the knowledge that there would be no chaste midnight kiss on the doorstep and trudging home, because as they neared Zeke’s building, the other man already had his hands in Emmett’s pockets.

They kissed in the privacy of the elevator, being bold for the eight seconds it took to get them to Zeke’s apartment and hurriedly straightening their clothes as they stepped out into the long hallway. Zeke grinned and swivelled his hips while he got the key in the lock, and Emmett was on him the moment they got through the door. He kicked it shut behind them as he pushed Zeke up against the wall, holding both his wrists in one large hand. His date writhed and moaned in anticipation as Emmett ran a palm down his front and pressed against the thickening shape of his erection through the thin material of his suit slacks.

“Mmm…” Emmett kissed the young man, open mouthed and hard, keeping Zeke pinned with his own body as he felt him up, “I missed you.”

“I can tell,” Zeke panted, “oh!” he exclaimed as Emmett’s fingers slipped past his clothes and squeezed his arse. “Bedroom?”

Emmett grinned salaciously.

“I think we’ll just stay here,” he ground his hips against his lover, kneading his behind with strong fingers. “I love the way you moan.”

Zeke responded by blushing hard and practically dissolving against him. He got Emmett’s fly open, his thick cock springing to attention, and Emmet had to let go of the slender young man to roll a condom from his pocket over himself. Ten seconds later Zeke was only wearing his trousers and boxers on one leg, his shirt half open and pulled askew, and he cried out in a mix of pain and pleasure as Emmett thrust into him. The polar bear sunk into his lover up to the hilt and wrapped Zeke’s legs around his hips, his own erection trapped between them, and groaned as Zeke pulled him in for another oxygen-depriving kiss. Zeke was clinging onto him as much as he could, Emmett bracing them against the wall as he began to fuck his partner with animalistic abandon.

“Oh god… Emmett!” Zeke’s fingernails dug into his shoulder and the back of his neck, their foreheads touching as the pair of them sweated, half-dressed and desperately turned on. His blue eyes shone in pleasure and desire, and Emmett kissed him hard enough to clack their teeth together, tongues duelling for the upper hand. Emmett won and Zeke purred and moaned against him, his whole body vibrating with lust, turning the air around them pink and hot.

Emmett tugged Zeke’s shirt open, buttons skittering away across the floor like terrified mice, bent to press his tongue over one pink nipple and sucked the hard bud into his mouth as Zeke practically screamed. He rammed into his partner, loving the smooth, hot, soft but tight grip of the young man’s body, and snarled as Zeke tightened around him, staining Emmett’s shirt front with his come. Emmett pulled them away from the wall, took ten steps to the sofa where he laid Zeke over the padded armrest without removing himself from the sheath of the other man’s body and fucked him until he roared in orgasmic ecstasy.

“God, I’ll never get bored of that,” Zeke ran his fingers through the short buzz of Emmett’s pale hair and the polar bear kissed him in a slow satisfied sort of manner. “You’re gonna be all sleepy now, aren’t you big man?”

“Nah, ‘m good,” Emmett lied, pulling himself up and out of his partner with a lewd wet noise, “can I use your shower?”

“Go ahead,” Zeke sat up, but grabbed Emmett’s hand as he turned away, “can I get a kiss?”

Emmett grinned happily, scooped the slender man up in his arms and kissed him hard.

“How about you just come with me?”

Zeke’s shower wasn’t really big enough for two full grown men one of whom masqueraded as a bear a lot of the time, but they made it work, switching places to duck in and out of the streaming water. After Zeke scrubbed himself down he gave Emmett a quick peck and exited the steamy little box. Left alone, Emmett sagged against the tile wall and dozed happily as he washed himself. Dinner might not have been great as far as the food went, but this was turning into the best first date he’d had in years. There was nothing about Zeke that drove him crazy with lust per se, but fucking him was such fun Emmett didn’t wanna stop. He had to get himself a second date.

He wrapped a towel around his hips and inspected the fingernail welts in the back of his neck in the steamed up mirror. There were downsides to dating a man with a manicure after all. Emmett yawned hugely and padded out into the living room.

“Sofa!” Zeke called, and Emmett sank gratefully onto the hastily tidied couch. His and Zeke clothes were piled up on an arm chair, and the television was on standby. He frowned. “Here,” Zeke knocked his knuckles with a chilled brown glass bottle, “I hope it’s not awful, I don’t drink beer.” Zeke settled into Emmett’s lap and snuggled in between his thighs, sipping from a martini glass as he turned on the television. Emmett sipped his beer and wrapped an arm around Zeke’s narrow waist.

“What are we watching?”

“I missed a project runaway episode,” Zeke craned to look up at him. “You don’t mind, right?”

“Nah,” Emmett smirked, pulling Zeke against his torso with a little thud, “I’m good.”

Emmett had never even heard of project runway, not as anything more than ‘a thing on TV’, and twenty minutes of bitchy-ness, cat-fights, glitter, sequins, and starving women bemoaning their fat thighs later, he wished he had remained in blissful ignorance. Zeke seemed completely enthralled, so once Emmett had finished his beer he simply snuggled more firmly into the corner of the sofa, got comfortable, and allowed his mind to wander while he dozed.

He should probably ask Zeke to be his boyfriend, though with the way they were both acting around each other, the point seemed moot. Emmett didn’t love him, though Zeke seemed like a nice enough guy, and talking together made him happy; but that would come in time. Or it wouldn’t. Emmett didn’t hold with his little brother’s belief that he had a true soul mate somewhere out there. After all, their father had never found the one person on the planet whose scent drove him crazy – it certainly hadn’t been Emmett’s mother.

He’d been six, holding little Logan’s chubby toddler hand with his father cuddling baby Tilda in his arms as they watched his mother leaving. She’d taken the ice road to Kashechewan, intent on getting on a plane and getting away from the ‘freezing cold wilderness.’ When Emmett had asked why she’d left them his father had replied:

“She didn’t want to live with a bunch of bears, son.”

From then on, Emmett’s mother hadn’t been a part of his life. There had been the odd phone call, a visit around his sixteenth birthday, another when he graduated from the university, but if Emmett was honest he hadn’t really missed her. Because the day his mother left, was the day the bears arrived. They had always been there: his father, his grandfather living three doors down, but now most nights his grandparents would come over: his grandmother would tell them legends while he and his brother were snuggled up in the snow white fur of their family. He played with his father out on the thick ice where no one would see them, watched his grandfather fish and ate salmon raw and warm from the frozen waters of the Bay. Emmett’s child mind had decided it was a good trade.

Napping on the sofa with Zeke in his arms was an alright sort of trade for watching awful television; but having lazy sex on the bed afterwards, Zeke on-top and straddling his crotch was way better. Emmett didn’t think he’s slept so well in years.

*

“So, what caused these geese to stay at their rest stop on the east coast while their flock-mates took off east and headed to England?”

“Elevated T-four?” one of the under grad students raised his hand as he spoke, and his classmates frowned at him.

“They hadn’t put on enough muscle mass,” a girl pitched in, “if they were the birds who trailed in their V-formation-”

“But the lead bird does the most work,” a third interrupted.

“And gains the most muscle,” the girl continued. “The trailing birds wouldn’t build up the same amount of breast muscle.” Emmett grinned, he loved it when the students bounced off each other to work out their theories. “They would need a longer rest before they continued onwards.”

“But if the flock rotated the lead bird then they’d all build up good muscle, wouldn’t they?”

“Ever stop to think they might just decide to stay there?” another gestured across the migration map, “the rest of the flock ended up in Northern Europe. Not all the geese make it that far.”

“Well done.” The class of a dozen undergrads looked at Emmett expectantly as he began to give out data packs. “Assignment time: you all have the tracker data from a dozen different Canada geese. Your task is to analyse your data and draw conclusions about the birds, their health and breeding success from the information you have. I expect maps.”

“You always want maps.”

“Maps are pretty, and they help you to visualise things much better,” Emmett tapped the desk, “I expect maps. First drafts by Friday please.”

There was a general sort of soft groaning. Even though Emmett was fairly certain his students enjoyed their assignments, there was always annoyance when deadlines were handed out. Emmett waved generally at the students to dismiss them and glanced at his phone. It had buzzed during the last part of his lecture, and Emmett grinned happily as he read Zeke’s name.

“Emmett?”

“Hmm?” Emmett didn’t look up for a moment, distracted by the rising excitement that flooded through him from head to crotch.

“A bunch of us are going for a drink after study period,” one of his students smiled hopefully, “you wanna come?”

“Thanks, but no. I have a lecture to prep for,” Emmett smiled, his students weren’t much younger than himself, most falling somewhere in the eighteen to twenty-four age gap, along with a few strays who were older than himself. “Have fun.”

He did have a lecture, a large one for a group of mixed first-years just started out the in bio-sciences. Because of the courses they had chosen, all of them would, at some point, be required to do cold-weather field work, and while conditions in the winter were not arctic, a lot of the students had travelled to them from much warmer climes where all one needed to survive the winter was a thick coat and decent boots. A night out on the ice in Georgian Bay, or three days in the wilderness in Killarney Park, was a completely different matter. But that didn’t mean, as he pulled up the slideshow and turned on the projector in order to display the items and equipment the students would need for their first expedition in two months’ time, that there wasn’t a free moment to text with Zeke.

Zeke: I’m filling in budget reports, and I’m bored, and thinking of you. Are you thinking of me?

Emmett felt his dick twitch as he read the words. He’d be teaching with a semi if he wasn’t careful.

Emmett: It’s hard to think of anything else now. You want to come over to mine tonight?

Zeke’s reply was immediate.

Zeke: Only if you buy wine. I’ll get take out.

Emmett grinned. It was about time he broke in his new bed properly. It was a very comfortable mattress, especially now that he had fitted it out with nice navy-blue cotton sheets and a thick goose-down comforter. The idea of having Zeke in his house made him happy. He texted his address to his lover along with a row of kisses the width of the screen.

The students began to file in for their lecture, and Emmett folded his arms over his immense chest to watch the group of skinny humans who he would have to teach to survive in the wild and cold. Emmett was very good at surviving in the wild, and he was exceptionally good at drilling the respect of the ice into the students without scaring them beyond all functionality. But he always started off the same way.

“Do as I say, not as I do,” he paused to let their attention and rustling stop, “I grew up here.” A silent click displayed a picture of Moosonee on the projection screen, Emmett’s little town locked into a hard winter. “I have lived with snow and ice all of my life. Most of you have not. You do as I say, even if it seems unnecessary, and I will keep you with all your fingers and toes intact.”

It had been the same way his father had started out his training, leaving Emmett’s younger siblings with their grandparents. They had driven along track roads together, out into the hard icy wilderness, and Emmett had wanted to copy his father, discard his thick boots and snow-proof furs and suck down the frozen air. His father had hugged him tight, told him to stay in his clothes, and had stood in the chill air, the snow clinging to white pale chest hair, and breathed as though he relished the frozen coldness all around them. Then he changed. Emmett always thought it magic when he was a child. Though he knew from his grandfather and their many shifter friends that it was a clearly genetic miracle, as simple and complex as having green eyes or blond hair, he still thought there was magic in the change. His father had become a polar bear, bundled Emmett up in his giant arms and together they had romped through the forest. Until you’d travelled on the back of a bear, you hadn’t really travelled in the snowy wilderness.

Emmett took his students through the list of things they would need. The university provided the tents and rented snowshoes from the park for them to use on their first mandatory trip, but everything else they would need themselves. Emmett covered everything with them, from the better sort of socks and thermal under-layers, to outer coats and gloves. He talked about not falling prey to anything that was too cheap to actually be functional or too bulky and thick to stop them from overheating. Several sneered at the mention of fur lined hoods, and Emmett told them such things were optional, but those with a collar of coyote or fox fur around their faces would fare better than those without. He talked about their bird-watching equipment, the necessity of good binoculars and a note pad, how to protect their digital cameras from the cold: the fact that they would need sunglasses to protect them from snow blindness and headaches. They spent a long time covering snacks, water bottles – which were worn on the inside of clothing, the importance of good hydration, communication and organisation. It was nowhere near as cold in Killarney Park as it was at home, and certainly not as cold as the arctic itself, but frostbite could still set in over a few hours and it only took an open jacket and a bad wind to give students hypothermia.

Emmett watched as his students shuffled out with their notebooks and laptops, full of questions and plans for shopping trips, and then remembered he had to go on a shopping expedition of his own to somewhere he never went: the wine section.

It took him twenty minutes of standing and staring blankly at the bottles before he picked two in the whitish-yellow colour, each with a different animal on the label, paid and headed back to the house. He’d only just gotten them in the fridge and started to get changed, pulling a thin worn-soft jumper over his bare chest before the doorbell went. Standing in the kitchen stirring his green tea in a rather meditative manner, Huan-Yu looked up with a frown.

“Visitors for you?”

“Just one!” Emmett grinned hugely at his housemate and skidded in socked feet to the door. Zeke beamed at him, and held up two bags of take-out that smelt distinctly Indian. “Hey!”

“Well aren’t you full of beans?” Zeke stood on tiptoes to kiss him, “fun lecture?”

“Yeah, I scared the little ones. Be expedition season soon.” He turned to Huan-Yu, “Zeke, this is Huan-Yu. This is Zeke.”

“Ah, ‘the boyfriend’,” the panda arched an eyebrow, “you two have fun with your food. ‘Night Emmett.”

“Goodnight…” Emmett turned to Zeke with a slightly guilty expression, “he lives here too. I mean, it’s his house.”

But Zeke was smiling widely.

“You called me your boyfriend?”

“Umm…”

The next moment Zeke was hugging him hard around the neck, his pulse racing against Emmett’s skin.

“It’s awesome. C’mon, take-out and wine.”

Emmett got the glasses and found Zeke setting up the food on the glass coffee table. He’d bought a few dishes, but Emmett knew he could polish off the lot in ten minutes and still want to eat it all again. He’d had a half sized dinner the previous evening, which had given him enough energy to keep going for the day, but as he poured the wine, took his own beer and settled on the sofa, Emmett was suddenly self-conscious of the thin layer of fat spread over his well-ridged abdomen. He flicked the television on, the channel automatically set now to the sports update, and Zeke took a delicate bite of his chicken korma and sighed.

“Can we watch something else?”

“You don’t like ice hockey?”

“It’s so barbaric, someone always ends up bleeding.”

“Yeah,” Emmett grinned to himself and destroyed half a garlic naan bread. Usually players ended up injured and bleeding when they tried to tackle his brother. Ryley was a great hockey player, an excellent polar bear, and a decent young man who liked to do well. Emmett had always told his little brother that there was nothing wrong with being proud of himself and his skills. After all, if you’re not going to be proud of yourself, how can you expect anyone else to be?

“Can I switch?”

“Yeah, sure,” Emmett did not recognise what happened to the television, but suddenly there were wedding dresses and a hugely camp man called Randy on the flat screen. Emmett knew better than to say anything, but sat and ate his dinner and kissed the back of Zeke’s neck when his boyfriend snuggled into his lap. He could trade good television for a boyfriend, it wasn’t that bad: he would just catch up another day.

“You said it was expedition time? What does that mean?”

“We take all the first year students out to collect data in Killarney Park in November. They watch the birds and count them, and learn how to survive in the snow,” Emmett hugged him tight, “I got space in my tent, you wanna come with?”

“You wait to take them after it snows?” Zeke sounded horrified, “why not just throw them out into the wilderness to be eaten by bears…”

“So…”

“I don’t sleep in tents,” Zeke turned and kissed him, “you’ll have to go it alone big guy.”

Emmett was disappointed, but he wasn’t surprised. He ate his fill of the take-out, which was everything Zeke didn’t eat, and drank his beer.

He always liked the Killarney Park trip. There were a hundred types of breeding and nesting birds in the park, lots of owls and hawks in the winter, deer tracks and wolves. The trip always afforded him a late night or early morning to wander off, change into his fur and sit out in the wilderness under the stars and watch The Great Spirits dance across the sky. When Emmett had made the decision to move south, missing his view of the northern lights had been one of his and his father’s biggest worries. They came most nights, but Emmett knew he could never live anywhere they didn’t dance in the sky. Getting out into the wild in his fur in the snow was an excellent bonus to camping out in Killarney Park. If Zeke had wanted to come with him… Emmett tried to think of it as a blessing in disguise.

“So, where’s this enormous bed you’ve been telling me about?”

Emmett showed Zeke upstairs and the young man went for a shower, frowning slightly at the fact that Emmett didn’t have an in-suite. Emmett cleared up, threw away the take out containers and put the living room back the way it should have been before he headed upstairs. Zeke was kneeling on the edge of his bed, poking around in his bedside cabinet.

“Who’s the kid?” He sat on Emmett’s pillow, holding a photograph of Emmett with Rye, taken at Christmas.

“My little brother,” Emmett took the picture from him, smiled at his brother and hid the image away again. “For someone who just had a shower, you’re wearing a lot of clothes.”

“Only you would consider underwear to be too many clothes,” Zeke was grinning, holding a square foil packet between two fingers, “get on over here.”

Emmett glanced between the condom, Zeke, and the thick headboard of his new bed. Ten minutes later, he had his boyfriend gripping the same headboard with white knuckles, biting his lip trying to stifle the scream, as Emmett ploughed into him. Zeke’s arse was smooth and pale and delightfully pert, and Emmett figured he could cope with bad television on date nights if Zeke was going to put out doggy-style.

*

Emmett had loved and adored Ryley from the moment his little brother had been born. Nothing the baby could do would make him unhappy; no amount of crying would annoy him. Emmett’s step-mom had been so incredibly surprised that her eldest step-child had been keen to learn to wash the baby, dress him, and change his diapers. Apart from going to school and spending time on the ice with his father and grandfather, Emmett rarely spent a moment away from his baby brother.

His father said he was a late bloomer, and he and Logan got their fur within six months of each other despite being born three years apart. Rye had been four, totally unafraid and completely in love with his brother. As soon as Emmett had learnt to control his changes, he’s spent as much ‘bear time’ as he could with his little brother. They played together, rolled around on the thick rugs in the front room, dashed about in the snow. Rye had once built a wall of snow around his bear shaped brother and when Emmett changed back, they had played in the polar bear shaped igloo until it got dark.

By the time Ryley was seven their father allowed the two of them to go on longer trips, out onto the ice and into the woods, as long as Rye promised to stay bundled up. It had surprised Emmett to find that, even when he was human, he didn’t feel the cold like he had before he’d got his fur. They had walked, hand in hand with Ryley wrapped up in layers of snow-suit and Emmett wandering along in boot and jeans, bare chested in the snow, along the edge of the Hudson Bay; far out of sight of anyone else. Emmett had changed into his fur, they’d played and rolled around until Rye had swung up onto his back and kicked his little heels, completely ineffectually, and cried:

“Onward!”

Emmett had run with him across the ice, big paws skidding slightly on the smooth surface. They had both shouted and cried in joy and pleasure. That night they had watched The Great Spirits dance across the sky, and Ryley told the legend of them in his small child voice, learnt by rote and said in the same words his grandmother used. He had been told the story like a bedtime fairy tale from the moment he was born, and though Emmett knew the tale backwards, he liked to listen to Ryley tell it.

It became their ritual: as Rye got older and taller and his voice got deeper, and Emmett got bigger in his polar shape, they continued to take trips together out into the wilderness and onto the ice so that Rye could lie on his brother’s thick fur and tell stories. He would start out the same, talk about their ancestors dancing in the northern lights, but as they lay together in the cold Ryley would tell his brother about school, about his friends, his homework, how he felt about his parents, how he so desperately wanted to be a bear too. Emmett told him it would come soon enough.

As soon as Rye was old enough to be trusted with an ice saw, Emmett took him fishing.

“Fishing is boring!” Rye stamped his feet on the ice, forcing blood flow back into his toes. Emmett took his own discarded over boots and handed them to his brother.

“Put those on, you shouldn’t be cold yet,” he frowned, “you gotta dress better Rye. You haven’t got your fur yet.”

“When am I gonna get it?”

“Could be any day: Logan got his when he was thirteen,” Emmett gestured to the pair of saws lying on the ice. “And you only think ice fishing is boring because you’ve only seen humans do it. Get sawing.”

They cut a roughly circular hole in the ice about four feet across, and Emmet cut up the section and stacked the pieces to make a nice seat for Ryley. He spread his fur coat over the ice block, and then discarded the rest of his clothes. It was cold, but Emmett felt a familiar prickling up his spine and the back of his skull in the chill which made him excited. This was what he was born for.

The polar bear looked across at his brother and snorted a cloud into the cold air.

“Hurmpt.”

“What now?”

Emmett snuffled at his brother, knocked him over onto the ice and dove into the nearly frozen waters.

Humans went ice fishing by virtue of cutting a small hole in the ice and sitting on a crate with a string on a stick. Polar bears went ice fishing in a rather different manner. Two minutes later, Emmett’s head appeared from the dark water and he dropped a thick meaty salmon at his brother’s feet. Then he vanished again.

That first trip they caught enough salmon for a week, a month later Emmett caught a harp seal and taught his little brother how to gut it. They ate the kidneys still-warm from the body and sliced bloody strips off the liver that stained Emmett’s fur and made him pink. After that, Emmett and Rye’s private hunting trips became just as much a part of their little ritual as Rye telling stories about The Great Spirits while lying in Emmett’s fur.

The city was nice, but Emmett hated to admit how much he missed home.