Eyes Like Whiskey
Gwen is an outcast. People keep their distance because she calls a pack of wolves family - except for the hunters who come way too close! When someone new moves to town, she hopes to finally make a connection. Will he accept her for who she is?
Her old grandfather clock chimed a third time as they broke from each other, satiated and damp with sweat.
“Damn, Gwen. You’re gonna [unalive] me before long,” he panted.
“But you’ll [expire] with a smile on your face,” she teased, draping a slim leg over his.
“That I will. That I will.” He mindlessly caressed her thigh, finding again the long scabby strip he had been too preoccupied to ask about earlier. “What happened here?”
“Oh that? Just a scrape.”
She tried to move her leg away, but Mike wouldn’t let go. “A deep one by the feel of it. Turn on the light.”
“Mike, it’s nothing.”
“Turn on the light, Gwen.”
“Fine!” She reached over to the lamp and pulled the chain with a jerk. “Happy?”
He most certainly was not. He had seen wounds like this before. “What happened?” he demanded.
“I told you. It’s a scrape.”
“Gwen, I’m a cop. I know what a bullet graze looks like. What. Happened.”
She got up and stormed out of the room. “Leave it alone, Mike.”
Growling in frustration, he stalked after her. “You know I can’t!”
Turning to face him, she had the same liquid heat in her eyes as the first time he saw her. “You can and you will! But right now, you can go the hell home!”
Nuka appeared out of the shadows and sat at her feet, one fang exposed in silent warning. Shaking his head, he stared at the two of them. Heedless of her nudity and radiant with anger, he admitted to fearing her wrath more than the wolf’s.
Author’s Note:
I think most everyone can relate to feeling rejected. It is the rare person who has never (at some point in their lives) felt ostracized, or at the very least, unpopular. As a writer, I often think my brain is wired differently from those I share my life with, which can lead to similar feelings of exclusion - even if unwarranted. It was this type of “otherness” that inspired my character, Gwen.