Chapter 43

Squatch.

I took complete control of her bowels for two and a half weeks. I had no interest in doing it long-term, but I needed to do it long enough to make a point.

Once I thought the point had been made, I invited Frost over to help me install the enema nozzle in my shower. I could’ve done it without help, but it went faster with the two of us. He isn’t a plumber, but he understands the mechanics of it better than me.

My house already had a whole-house filter to remove the chlorine, otherwise it would’ve been a little more complicated. The kit I bought had everything we needed, so it didn’t take terribly long to put it together and install it.

The stainless-steel nozzle I chose looked more like a string of anal beads than a nozzle, and Frost grinned when he saw it. “Damn, brother. She’s gonna feel that a dozen times going in, and then another dozen coming out.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. That’s the idea. I have a butt plug shaped one, too. This one will be on most of the time, since she’ll be giving them to herself.”

“The kids don’t use our shower, but Nora’s in the bathroom with Cheyenne a lot, doing girl things. Hair and makeup. This is one of those things you can get away with before you have kids, but will have to rethink once they’re old enough to start asking questions you may not want to answer.”

“We’ve agreed to have the kid conversation next summer, but I don’t think either of us will be ready yet. She’ll have to go off birth control, which means no more going next door at work. And, once she’s pregnant, she’ll be finished as a stripper. She agrees with me, there. I asked her what age our baby should be when she should stop stripping, so our child never saw her as one — toddler, preschooler, elementary school? She didn’t have an answer, so she agreed she wouldn’t go back to dancing after giving birth.”

“I’m surprised you’re okay with it now.”

He walked out of the bathroom and headed down the steps. I followed.

“I’m really not. Well, the wolf isn’t, and the human mostly isn’t, but we’d lose her if we put our foot down and made demands. Mostly because she so prided herself on her independence after she left the ambush. If I tried to force her to stop, it’d be me taking away the part of her that survived. I can’t do that. It has to be her decision.”

Frost’s brows lifted. “The yeti understands emotions. Who knew?”

“I’ve always understood ’em. You’re the one we weren’t sure about whether to call a sociopath or a psychopath.” Still weren’t, truth be told, but we were happy he’d found someone to love.

He turned and shrugged as we stepped into the kitchen. “I hit high on the tests for both, but the only way to keep Cheyenne was to try to understand her.”

I grabbed four bottles of beer from the refrigerator, a tin of cashews, and a bag of chips, and led him into the den.

“Bullshit,” I told him once we were seated. “You’ve always understood emotions on a logical level, enough to fake it when you had to. If you only needed to understand her, none of us would’ve been surprised. You figured out how to actually feel emotions.”

He glared at me while I turned the television on and then the video game console.

“I’ve felt ’em before, asshole.” He blew out a breath. “I couldn’t go to the funerals. Our brothers, their ol’ladies. Their fucking kids. I was stuck behind motherfucking bars. Caged.” He met my gaze again, and this time he let me see his pain. “Still wish there was someone I could kill to get revenge, but ya’ll handled it all while I was inside.”

Uncle Frost. He’d been uncle to nearly every child who stepped foot inside our compound, and he’d spoiled them all silly. It was the one time we saw him express emotions, because fuck knows he never showed the least bit of affection or care for the sweet butts he fucked. Well, except Banshee, before she’d been Cheyenne. Even then, though he reached for her more than the others, he never showed affection.

Not until he lost her and then found her again.

“I’m looking forward to seeing our kids call you Uncle Frost.”

He looked away, and I knew he was going to change the subject before he did.

“She’ll have kids soon though, right? I mean, she won’t be raising them, but...”

I sighed. “Yeah. The scientists scheduled appointments to inseminate the surrogate mothers.” I looked at my hands. “Tomorrow.”

I’d wanted to be pissed that she didn’t let me take her for the egg extraction, but I understood why she didn’t. Nathan and Kirsten had taken her to Nashville in a Drake Security airplane, and then flown her back that evening. She asked me not to talk about it, and assured me she’d talked to Kirsten on the way there and back enough that she’d worked through her feelings.

I believed her, so I let it drop. Eventually, she’d need to lean on me, but for now, she was telling herself it didn’t concern me.

I didn’t point out that the children who’d be born would be my someday-children’s half siblings, and thus it most certainly concerned me. Also, that the woman I loved was dealing with the emotional bombshell of handing her babies over to someone else to raise.

“So, three or four months from now, they’ll be showing,” Frost said.

I nodded.

“And the two of you have agreed not to talk about her getting pregnant until well after that.”

“I hear you, brother, but she came up with the timing. If I think we need to talk about it before then, I’ll figure out a way to bring it up. Make her think it’s my problem.” Not that she’d actually believe me, but it’d get the conversation at least started. “I think she’s going to be okay, though. She’s talking to Kirsten, and she got to choose the mothers. It took away the guilt she’d felt about what she owed her species.”

The game finally loaded, and then we were engaged in a battle against zombies.