Fan Service

Chapter 23

23

Alex woke with a start to a terrible growl.

Devin crouched over her with claws, fangs, and silver eyes—the whole shebang—his attention fixed on the closed door to her loft.

“Uhh…Al.” Her dad’s voice carried through the plywood. “Did you bring home a dog again?”

The mortifying reality of the situation rained down on her. She’d asked Devin Ashwood to lie in bed with her, fully clothed, because her body had begun its monthly betrayal and his presence had become a source of comfort.

“Just, uh, give me a second.” She had to raise her voice to be heard over the menacing rumble radiating from Devin’s chest.

“Hey.” She put her hand on his nape, her voice soft but firm. “Stop that.”

The wolf’s growling halted, but he stayed in the crouch, looking back and forth between her and the door with his nose in the air, sniffing.

Devin might have gotten much better at controlling the impulse to shift, but it appeared they’d stumbled upon a vulnerability. Judging by the setting sun, they both must have fallen asleep in her bed. That meant the wolf had awoken in a strange place, to the sound of a potential threat intruding. This close to the full moon, his instincts must be particularly powerful.

“It’s my dad.” Alex petted along the strained tendons of his neck. “You know him.”

Every time she saw Devin in the shift, Alex was taken aback by the way she didn’t fear him. Even without all the lethal trappings, her body should have recognized the threat in his posture, in the snarl of his lip. But he felt familiar to her in every form, even this one. She didn’t believe in soulmates, but she’d grown up around the idea of Devin Ashwood; his shape and voice were spliced into her memories.

He once said she smelled like she was made for him; maybe in some small way that was true. The way a tree grew around stone.

“It’s okay,” Alex said, low and even, keeping his eyes on her, trusting him to trust her. “We’re safe.”

Devin seemed to force his way back from the shift following the sound of her voice. He shook his head, his eyes returning to their normal green as he blinked in awareness of his position over her. He sheepishly bear-crawled off the bed to a standing position.

“Sorry about that,” he said, shoving his hands in his jean pockets. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

After hastily pulling on some pajama pants and smoothing her hair, Alex finally opened her door.

“Hey, Dad,” she said, trying to strike a casual pose against the doorframe that somehow also blocked Devin from view. “What’s up?”

“What’s up,” he repeated, holding two brown paper bags with the logo of their favorite Thai takeout place. “So we’re just gonna ignore all the growling?”

“Oh that?” Alex gave a flippant little wave. “That was just the TV. You know I’ve been watching TAF reruns.”

Isaac frowned. “Sounded awful loud.”

“Was it? I didn’t notice. I was napping.” She yawned massively in illustration.

“Uh-huh,” her dad said, using his superior height to peer around her. “Hey, Devin.”

Alex turned to see him pink-cheeked and incriminatingly bed-headed.

“Hello, sir.”

Isaac shook his head. “Well, I’m gonna take this food down into the kitchen. You’re welcome to join me if you two are done ‘napping.’?”

Once the humiliation had sufficiently passed, she and Devin made themselves presentable and went over to the other side of the house for food. After they all ate, her dad took Devin into his office to “give him some new research around wolves” and probably also some vague “don’t hurt my daughter” warning.

He came out with an armful of textbooks, looking slightly poleaxed.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” Alex said, once Devin had made a break for the safety of the loft. She leaned down to kiss her dad’s cheek as he sank into his favorite armchair and reached for the remote.

“I always worry about you,” Isaac said, uncharacteristically grave. “You’ve already given up so much to take care of me—leaving school, sticking around this town when I know it hasn’t been easy. I just want to make sure you don’t jump into putting someone else’s needs above your own again.”

Alex’s heart flopped around like a fish caught on a line. “What do you mean?”

He turned to look over his shoulder. “I mean you had that poster of him hanging on your wall for a long time. You sure you know what you’re doing here—heartwise?”

Right. Alex used to be The Arcane Files ’ ultimate fangirl, and now here she was with Devin Ashwood in her bed.

When they met, she thought that meant she had this odd, uncomfortable advantage—knowing so much more about him than he knew about her. But having spent all this time with Devin now, Alex realized those surface-level details didn’t matter. His birthday and his favorite food. They were nothing more than the parts of himself he’d been forced to sell.

No. It was much more intimate to let someone see your faded striped sheets. To have them eat dinner with your dad. To show them where you worked. To let them talk to the people in your life who both loved and despised you. Alex had given Devin back the advantage. Or at least they’d evened the playing field.

“I can see him a lot more clearly now.” Alex could admit she’d miscalculated, underestimating Devin’s capacity for tenderness. Realizing that he was—underneath all that handsome—surprisingly sweet rendered her weak. Weaker than she’d ever meant to get for him again.

One by one he’d dismantled her defenses. She could feel the heartbreak waiting like the promise of a bruise under her skin.

“He’s going back to LA in a few days. Whatever’s between us, it’s ending. There’s no future.” She’d cut herself off cold turkey from Devin Ashwood once. Maybe it was like riding a bike.

Her dad stared at her for a long moment. “Does he know that?”

Alex opened her mouth, but no words came. Had Devin somehow suggested otherwise?

“For the record, I like him,” her dad said. “He’s funny. Good at chores.” His face grew somber. “But I think you and I both know that sometimes you can really care for someone, really want to make it work, and still not be able to make your lives fit together.”

The parallel to her parents’ divorce sat between them, a dormant live wire. It was true, of course, that Alex had roots planted here and Devin would never willingly leave LA for Tompkins. But Alex wasn’t her father. She would never ask him.

When she got back to the loft, Devin was on her tiny two-seater couch, reading one of the books her dad had lent him. He’d arranged himself so casually, one leg crossed over the other, a deep furrow of concentration between his brows, that she almost wondered if he hadn’t overheard some of her dad’s well-meaning intervention.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.” He looked up at her over the pages. “I’ve been thinking. What if you came with me? To LA.”

Alex’s heart stopped. “What?”

“Just for the long weekend,” he rushed to clarify. As if Alex might think he was asking her to move in with him or something.

“You could come to the charity basketball game and stay for the full moon. My publicist texted that Brian Dempsey’s back in town and rumored to make an appearance. I thought maybe I could try to get time with him, introduce you. We’d have a little more time together at least, to talk about, well, everything.” He looked so transparently eager.

“You don’t really need me anymore,” Alex said, her brain still trying to process this conversation through the slight haze of her endo pain meds.

Was he trying to say that he wanted them to be something more? Was this a forty-two-year-old man’s soft-launch proposal of a long-distance relationship? Because Alex really didn’t think she had the self-esteem or stamina to pull off that kind of thing, especially with him.

“I don’t know about that. I think this evening proved I’m still working out the werewolf kinks.” Devin shoved back his hair. “I’m doing okay here in Florida, but that’s small potatoes compared to being back under the spotlight around all the industry people I care about impressing.”

Right. Because there was no one like that around here.

“If you came with me, you’d be a kind of…constant. Plus”—he smiled at her, one she recognized from the covers of Teen Beat —“that way I’ll know there’s at least one person in the stadium who doesn’t think I’m a huge joke.”

Alex saw the irony. No one in the world had made Devin Ashwood a punch line more times than she had. But he trusted her. He kept trusting her. In ways that felt precious and fragile and new.

“Come on.” He nudged her arm like they were locker room buddies. “I’ve got like a million airline miles, and we can stay at my place. It’s just one more weekend.”

Well, that was certainly a finite expiration point. It would be so easy to say yes. To indulge in the fantasy one more time.

“Are you sure you want to expose me to all those rich and famous Hollywood people? As you’ve experienced, I’m not great with small talk.” Alex didn’t want to embarrass him or herself. She had never been to a city bigger than Tampa. And LA was like…cool? Wasn’t everyone there engineered for Maximum Hotness? Did they even let losers like Alex cross city lines?

“Don’t be silly,” Devin said, all stalwart conviction and pretty eyelashes. “You learned from the master.”

Alex bit the inside of her cheek, deliberating. This was the part of the fairy tale that would be harder to reconcile. Devin was asking her to see his real life, all the glitz and glamour, and experience firsthand every way she didn’t fit.

But he looked so hopeful. And going to LA could be fun. At least she knew there would be plenty of stuff she could eat. They’d spent all these weeks training so that he could withstand the full shift without winding up on TMZ or in jail. Alex might as well see this werewolf stuff through to its natural conclusion on the full moon. Would the airline let her put the Taser in a checked bag?

She let out a big sigh. “Fine.”

Seth would cover her shifts if she asked him nicely, and she had all the extra money Devin had paid her, plenty to take a little more time off.

“Really?” Devin grinned so big.

It was impossible not to mirror him.

He picked her up around the thighs and swung her around in a circle.

It was horrible. She hated it.

(Mostly, she hated it.)

“Stop.” She whacked him on the shoulder. “I’m in a delicate condition.”

“Oops.” He lowered her carefully. But then, as if he couldn’t help it, he picked up her arm and raised it in the air, pantomiming like she was cheering. “Whooooo.”

“No whoos, please.” Where was his dignity? “Has anyone ever told you you’re easy to please?”

“Nope.” Devin popped the P .

He was painfully beautiful. His perfect teeth too big for his face.

Devin pulled her back into his arms, hugging her gently, and said into her hair, “Just you.”

Somehow, despite a lifetime of avidly consuming supernatural fiction, Alex didn’t see the edge of the cliff coming.