Chapter Text
Your pelt is not the same as Johnny’s.
Its greys are subtler than his paint-splash riot; nearly a solid dove, sparsely freckled with dots of charcoal. It’s lighter in your hands than you think a second skin should be—sometimes it feels so gauzy, so filmy, that you fear to tear it simply by wrapping it around your waist.
(Where it belongs.)
You can’t bear to part with it. You must be touching it at all times, fingers idly rolling a few soft strands of fur, palms smoothing out the wrinkles over your lap. Sometimes you find yourself staring at it, never knowing how long you have been until you come out of the trance with a jolt, neck aching and stomach growling.
You have no idea how Johnny went without his for even a day—the thought of ever putting yours down feels like abandoning a days-old infant.
Truly, though, the real infant is you.
The world touches your senses as if they are brand-new. Every sound is sharper. Every color is brighter. The world has come into focus in such a way that you are surprised you ever thought you could see it clearly before—nothing blurs in the periphery anymore.
It’s as if you have been completely reset. Every nerve ending tuned toward decadence. Everywhere you look, you find something that captivates you.
It makes you dizzy with rapture.
He is terribly amused by it, Johnny. He’s amused by all of it. As you settle into your new self, he watches you quiver and shake on new, coltish legs, and grins amiably at your frustration, quick to smooth over your frustration with his mouth on yours.
He’s been through it, after all. More than once, even—he has two resurrections, to your one.
And you’re quick to accept the appeasement he offers. Your appetites now yawn wide for anything you can fit inside of them, and you are voracious. You bite at him when he kisses you, which only makes him laugh more, and then he drags you down to the floor to rut like he knows you need to.
“I’m going to kill you someday,” you snarl at him, more than once, held against him back to front. “You did this to me, you fucking asshole.”
He grinds his cock deeper into you every time, touching some hidden nerve that has you clenching desperately around him, writhing with every limb as he laughs into your ear. “I could always pull out, bonnie, y’want me to do that?”
You claw at his naked hips behind you with the sharp tips of your nails, digging trails into the sheen of sweat coating his skin. “I’ll fucking kill you if you do.”
You’ve hissed and spat for too long to remember how to speak gently to him, but Johnny takes it in stride. He fits his teeth around your neck and cups the soft parts of your body with hands that can’t seem to get enough of the way your flesh spills between his fingers; when you spasm around him, howling your climax, he wrenches you against him with an iron grip and finishes deep inside of you moments later with a torn moan, thighs and hips hot and flush along your backside.
You threaten to castrate him if he pulls out anytime soon after. He kisses the indentations of his teeth and smooths his spread hand over your belly.
You end up with him, like this, more often than not. He always chuckles at your antics, your clenched teeth, the red lines and half-moons you leave on his back and thighs. Less with amusement than satisfaction—because these days, you don’t walk around without the bruises of his grasp painting your flanks, or the arch of his bite etched into your neck.
He’s been alone, too. He was alone from the start. All of a sudden awake to the world, unsteady with awareness, and so hungry all the time it must have felt like he could never be full—
And he hadn’t had anyone, not like you have him, to hold him in the throes of it.
You catch a look in his eyes, every now and again, and see the echoes of that time. It glints like a shard of sea glass catching rare sun beneath a wave. Dulled edges—he can think of it without hurting anymore. He can remember the craving without succumbing to its dissatisfaction, without falling into the gall welling in his stomach at the injustice of it. This was not always the case, but watching you, now, balms the ache in a way nothing before ever had.
You know this without his needing to explain, and you know it like scenting petrichor in the air. All you have to do is meet his gaze, and you know.
And he knows, too. Everything. You cannot see him without him seeing you, and he’s been looking at you with the kind of eyes you now possess for much, much longer. There is no depth within yourself that you can hide from him in.
He can look at you and know you’re hungry. He can watch the way you wave one hand and know you’re antsy. You can begin a sentence, and he knows the end of it without you having to finish.
It can only flay you to the bone. You are known. From the best to the worst parts of you, Johnny knows them like he knows the creases in the palms of his own hands. He knows the yawning chasm in you that near-overflows with your want, and he does not hesitate once at the precipice on his way to diving into it.
It pulls your jaw tight. You can only shudder with fever at the exposure, and reach for him. Again and again. Swallowing his laughter down like medicine.
John Price, when he finds out, heaves an enormous sigh of relief even your newly-heightened senses couldn’t see coming.
Your new vision peels back the gruffness. The gaze he has fixed on you, this whole time, has not been the apprehensive criticism of a lover’s apathetic friend. Instead, it is the concerned look of a stranger, one who gives a damn about what happens to a woman all alone on a side of the world to which she, until very recently, did not belong.
It had been invisible to you before; a wavelength of color your old eyes were unable to perceive. Now, you see so much of him that you wonder how you could have possibly missed it.
You see his exhaustion. His own loneliness, in self-imposed exile, one eye always on a man he fears will find a convenient cliff to jump off of in a fit of despair. You see sleepless nights, and notice for the first time a gold band on his ring finger, scuffed, in need of a good polish—if only he would take it off long enough to clean it.
“I’m sorry,” you say to him, out of nowhere, meeting the cool blue of his gaze. He doesn’t seem surprised at your understanding. He only nods.
“Ain’t been easy,” he allows.
But now you’re here. He’s not the only one Johnny has anymore. You can see the weight lift from him the moment you tell him you’re staying.
He goes to his office at the back of the pub with a lightened stride and returns, a little while later, with a stack of papers in his hand that he drops on the bar in front of you.
“Take care of the place,” he tells you with a heavy pat to your shoulder. “And don’t let Soap off easy. I’m going home.”
Price leaves you there with the deed to the pub and a casual wave over his shoulder. You do not see him again—though he’s left his phone number in one of the margins.
“Oh, aye?” Johnny says when you tell him, later that night as he’s boiling lobsters for dinner.
He doesn’t respond for a laden moment. You watch your report pass over him like a gentle wave; you see where it could build, where it could swirl up into something bigger, harder, angrier—but it doesn’t.
His back tightens, and then loosens, and he turns to grin at you over his shoulder.
“Barry, there’s a wall in there I’ve been dyin’ to knock down, and he wouldnae let me. Place is too claustrophobic, ask me.”
You arrange the silverware, letting his placidity wash over you.
About a week later, you drive Johnny’s truck somewhere with cell service, and call your mother.
The landscape of her emotions changes as rapidly as an ocean storm; elation and relief, to finally hear your voice. Hope when she asks you when you’re coming home. Confusion—when you tell her you aren’t.
Johnny explained it.
“We canna go far from the ocean, hen. Not for long. It won’t feel…right. I’ve tried. You get an itch, ken? You can ignore it at the start. But it willna go away, and it willna be denied, either. It’ll drive you mad if you don’t go back. So you canna stay away.”
And you’d known immediately what he’d meant—
You can feel it on the edge of the periphery. A lodestone in your belly points in its direction, always. You could close your eyes, start walking, and find yourself on the shore, pelt already in your hands. Sometimes, you find yourself waking in the middle of the night with the sound in your ears, legs twitching restlessly. You feel too hot and too cold at the same time, and thirsty, all over your body rather than just in your throat.
Any thought of moving further inland inspires an existential panic you can’t explain. The notion of a fifteen-hour flight, and landing somewhere that hasn’t seen an ocean for at least a million years, makes your skin feel so tight around your bones that you have to run to the nearest shoreline just to make sure the sea is still there.
You’re on a jetty right now, in fact, watching the water lap against the stones. It was the only thing you could think of that would give you the strength to make the call.
You cannot go home. You know now that somehow, you’d always expected to, deep down. You’d return to the house you grew up in, pet the old family dog. Meet for brunch at the same hole in the wall you’ve gone to for years.
Sometimes the price you pay to become something more does not reveal itself until it’s too late.
So you cry with your mother over the phone, when you explain that it’s best if you stay. You tell her that coming back would only hurt you if you tried, and this time, you aren’t even lying to her.
You don’t know if she’s actually comforted by the conciliatory offer you make of your new job tending bar—she doesn’t need to know you own the place yet—but she sniffles, and puts a brave face on it.
“You always did want to live somewhere else,” she offers, watery—but glad, you hear, that you’re alive.
You bite your lip.
From her, there will be no begging for you to come home. No entreaties of love or need.
When you say goodbye to her, you cry some more—but it isn’t the storm that used to claim you. You wrap your arms around yourself and squeeze, pinch the soft fur of your pelt and roll it between your fingers as you allow yourself to shake and weep, and when you catch your breath, you dry your face and drive back to the cottage, where Johnny is making lunch.
That night in bed, he holds you gently in his arms, rocking his hips into you as you cling to him with your fingernails.
“Don’t leave me,” you whisper in his ear.
He kisses the corners of your eyes before new tears can fall, and tightens his arms around you.
Each day you go to the sea.
It tugs at you, like a child tugging the hem of your shirt. Like a current pulling you outward. You wake every morning thinking not of breakfast, or the day ahead, but of that swaying world, slow and vast, hugging the edges of the land to coax it, eternally, back into the depths.
There is no serenity, now, like the serenity of the water. To enter the ocean is also to let it inside you; the barriers between yourself and the rest of the world thin out. You give some of yourself away, and receive something new to settle in the empty spaces left behind.
You think you understand now why Johnny is always smiling.
The cold no longer stings when you bare your skin to it, down in the cove. The salt-wind of the incoming tide is soft against you as you fold your clothes, beckoning as you tuck them beneath a large rock.
Johnny strips beside you, less careful, balling everything up in an untidy mass, until you glare at him. The intended admonishment falls flat as your glare turns into something sweeter, as the dark hairs on his chest lift with goosebumps.
He grins at you, seeing the shift. “Here, hen?” he teases as he obediently tidies his shirt and kilt. “Out in the open?”
Out in the open.
You draw him to you, dragging him down into the sand; the joining is quick and hard, spurred by the burgeoning need to go under. You cage his ribs with your knees as you ride him, breasts against his chest as you take his mouth without art or finesse. Johnny digs his fingers into the meat of your ass and helps you along with quick, forceful thrusts, and your orgasm prompts his own, inner muscles pulling him deeper as you pant and moan.
Primal. Without artifice. You exchange hot breaths through open mouths as you speak with your eyes, the ocean-blue of his gaze pulling you in. You grind together even after finishing, prolonging it, displacing a little longer the moment that your bodies must separate.
You have him every day, too. Often more than once. He is as essential a need as the sea, and he gives as freely and as frequently as you ask.
After, you both rise, and help to dust the sand away from each other’s bare skin.
Suddenly, you wonder aloud, “If I get pregnant—what’s it going to be?”
Johnny goes still, the hand on your shin stopping mid-sweep. Then, eyes crinkling, he barks a laugh. He kisses your knee and, as he rises, kisses your mons, then your navel, your sternum—
Then the reluctantly smiling curve of your mouth.
“Wouldnae mind findin’ out,” he says, stepping away from you, and walking backward toward the ocean.
His gaze does not leave you once it rises to meet him. It crests around him, embracing him, vibrant and alive and rushing toward you.
You draw your pelt over your head, and follow Johnny into the waves.