Just look my way

It was her! Stolas would have recognized that midnight slate fur speckled with dark spots like a jaguar anywhere. The gold markings around her face simply sealed the deal. She was alive. She was alive and she had grown up. The fae that turned to face him was all woman, built of slender yet powerful planes of muscle hidden beneath her fur, lithe and graceful yet far from fragile or delicate. Her eyes met his with a wide-eyed surprised look, and the moment his gray optics locked with her gleaming silver jewels, it was like he was being transported back in time. Stolas stood frozen, equally as dumbfounded to see her as she was to see him. Time seemed to stand still around them. Even the noise of the summer forest seemed to ebb away into oblivion, leaving just him and the phantom from his past. Was she as surprised by his glow up too? No longer the scrawny star-loving boy she'd known, Stolas had grown into a man. The brute was trim and toned, his coat clinging to powerful muscles. His fur around his face and neck was just a little scruffy from his time away from home, just the right amount of disheveled and mussy.

She spoke his name, the sound a breathy sigh of air close to a moan, and then she shifted her position. Stolas' eyes followed the movement of her paw, realizing with a flush of heat that it had been nestled snugly between her thighs. He'd caught her in the middle of satisfying her own urges. Stolas' mouth hung open, stuck somewhere between the reflexive notion to apologize and the instinctive urge to go over to her and offer his own paw instead. Her heat pheromones were slowly intoxicating his brain like a miasma filling the air; Widow was deep into her season. But despite his body's primal drives, Stolas' mind still had unresolved emotions and issues it needed to address first.

The way she purred her words to him as calmly and casually as if she hadn't just disappeared from his life for three years stoked an anger in his heart. Dark eyes narrowed and he leered at Widow from where he stood, staring at her in disbelief, half expecting her to disappear again like a ghost in the moonlight. "Is that really all you have to say to me? After all these years, that's it?" His voice was spoken softly, but with an edge of anguish he'd never forgotten. Stolas took a couple bold steps closer to her, now fully emerging from the tree line into the clearing and heading towards her at the pond's edge, his starry fur glistening in the moonlight. "Do you have any idea how worried I was when I never saw you again? I thought something terrible had happened to you! I thought you'd died when your mother told me you were sick and wouldn't let me see you!" Stolas' anger turned to anguish on his face, expression contorting through rage and into sorrow and heartbreak. "I thought I'd done something to make you hate me. I thought I'd never see you again."

Stolas' advance stopped a few paces away from Widow, staring at her with a confusing mix of emotional distress and rising carnality. Gods, her scent was getting stronger the closer he got to her! It didn't help that his breathing was picking up too, each labored breath pulling more of her pheromones into his nares, straight into his brain. "Where were you all this time?" he asked, his temper subsiding enough after his outburst to speak calmly again—even though his mind was already racing back in time to a night long ago inside a silent crypt with her...

"Stolas"