"Last two days were nice, pappi, but today I've gots to work." She smelled spicy and exotic as she kissed him -- something about the soap she'd brought to use in the shower, but he liked it. It was like cinnamon and bay leaves -- both warm and sharp, just like her.

"You have a good day, Katy," he mumbled, and she surprised him by keeping her face close and regarding him with warm brown eyes.

"Last time I told you to sleep in, Teague, you didn't. You got all hurt and then went on a run and then you and Jacky, you almost got killed, and then we had to sit on you to make you sleep in. I know you've got to meet werewolves and be all functional today, but... could you, just for me pappi, let me think of you tucked in here with Jacky for an hour? Don't get into no fights, don't get all hurt on your inside. Just sleep. Make love. Try a do-over, okay?"

Teague blinked. "Maybe I'm just not designed for sleeping in. You ever think about that, Katy?"

She shook her head and swore softly in Spanish. "I think you got some time to go before your heart's all better, that's what I think. I think you might kill us first while it's mending. 'Bye..."

"Katy..." He'd hurt her, and he didn't know how, and she scowled at him and gave him a flipped wrist with an open palm. Talk to the palm, Teague, I'm done talking to you

"Fine, damn it!" he snapped, before she could slam the door. "I'm staying here in bed. Are you happy?"

She looked over her shoulder as she got to the door, and he couldn't help but think that even the sulky thrust of her lower lip was charming. "You gonna get laid?" she asked, considering.

Teague risked a look at Jacky, who squinted one eye at him and went back to feigning sleep to keep out of the argument.

"No," he said punitively, and as Jack sat up in bed and protested, "NO?" Katy let out a musical laugh and slid gracefully out the door.

Teague grunted, a reluctant smile twitching his usually compressed mouth. "Serves you right," he grumbled, and then hauled the comforter over his shoulder and retreated to the corner of the bed where he usually slept when he was by himself.

Jack scooted next to him and grabbed him around the waist in spite of his startled squawk, and then Teague found himself hauled up back-to-front with his lover.

"What in the..."

"Humor me," Jack murmured, and then he... fondled Teague, for lack of a better word.

"I thought we were supposed to be sleeping," Teague muttered, but he wasn't protesting very hard. God, Jack's touch, Katy's touch -- it really had become his drug, hadn't it?

Jack's hand slid across Teague's chest, rubbing deliberately against Teague's sensitive nipples and down his stomach, and Teague arched into it, appreciating the pure touch of skin on skin.

"You go ahead and sleep all you want," Jack murmured into the sensitive hollow of his ear, "just let me touch you while you sleep."

Teague bit back on a half-strangled sound. It might have been "please" before he killed it.

"Please?" Jacky asked plaintively, and then Teague felt like a coward for not saying the word first.

"I really do need to run today," he protested half-heartedly. "That's not just bull...sh...eeeet..."

"Bullsheet?" Jack chuckled, but he had just wrapped his arm over Teague's shoulders and framed Teague's throat with his long-fingered hand. It was an intimate position, a vulnerable position -- especially when the hand was large and it was attached to a tall, strong man. Teague's vulnerability slammed into his chest, and it occurred to him that he literally gave Jack his safety, his life, just with that one gesture.

He wanted to run, and his shoulders quivered with the urge to push himself out of bed and go heading for the cross-country track. It took all of his will to simply lie passive under Jack's seductive touch.

Jack seemed to sense this -- carefully, he stroked down from Teague's throat and whispered, "Shhhhh... take it easy, big man," into his ear.

Teague swallowed. "I wasn't kid..."

"I know." Sometimes these exchanges got heated, sharp -- Teague's driving need to run coming up against Jack's possessive need to keep him in their bed. But not this time. Maybe it was the enforced intimacy of the day before, or maybe Jack just knew what he needed, but this time Jack's voice only grew gentler.

"Here, beloved," he whispered, and Teague blushed under the endearment at the same time he blushed under Jack's hands. "Here, I'll make you a deal."

"Yeah?" Teague hated the note of pleading in his voice, but his insides were still raw. The day before he'd had an emotional pain dump of epic proportions, a 9.9 on the Richter scale of internal cataclysms -- he couldn't have another argument right now. He wouldn't do it. He needed something easy... God help him, he needed to give in. But he was stubborn. He would negotiate. He wouldn't go too far into the debt of touching... he couldn't. That was his code. It had kept him sane for thirty soulless years. Yes, whispered his traitorous body, but those years were before Jacky. He told the voice to shut up -- Jack was offering him a way out.