The Good Boys Club (Mythical Mishaps #2)

8. Mutts About You

Mutts About You

Present Day

Cian

“Gideon’s on the night shift tonight,” I said as I buzzed us into the Howl building at eleven thirty.

“Naw, I love that little moth guy,” Mash said.

We climbed into the lifts and travelled to the tenth floor. Everything was dark, quiet, eerily still. Shadowy offices lay beyond reflective window panes. Standby LEDs blinked on lonely routers and machines.

“Pretty sure Giddy hates you. Try not to offend him today.”

Gideon Cinnabar was one of the very few people on this planet who seemed entirely impervious to Mash’s charms. I suspected because the werewolf was simply too loud for him, and Giddy was the reserved, quiet, moping emo sort. A goth moth.

“Evening, Giddy,” I called out as we entered the open-plan workspace. It felt right to give him a heads-up before Mash came barrelling in like a bowling ball and shattered his peace.

Gideon squeaked and began panic-shutting down his desktop tabs. I didn’t get to see what he was looking at, but I’d hazard a guess at antique lamps on eFae again.

“Watching porn at work, aye? Love a bit of mothperson porn,” Mash boomed. He gave an affected tsk. “Alright, Giddy?”

Gideon didn’t bother to answer. Instead, he looked up towards the heavens. “What have I done now?”

“Nothing wrong with watching porn at work, so long as no one’s around to see you bash one out,” Mash said. “I used to do that all the time too.”

“Used to?” I scoffed. I pulled a chair from a nearby desk for Mash, and placed myself between the werewolf and the mothperson as a buffer. “What changed? You suddenly develop a work ethic?”

Mash’s eyes momentarily grew big. “Nothing! Nothing’s changed. I still wank at work, whatever. Sonny’s not there any more. Got the whole fucking lab to myself.”

I turned to Giddy. “I’m so sorry about this. We won’t be long. At least I hope we won’t be long. Go back to looking at your lamps.”

Gideon’s elbow slipped from the desktop. “Uh . . . um . . .” he spluttered.

“Mash and I are not technically following protocol here.” No, we were literally about to break the law. “And I’m not about to say anything to James if you want to bid on some antique oil lamp.”

He stared at me . . . for so long I thought he wasn’t going to respond. “It’s an art deco, chromium-plated table lamp on a porcelain base with a reeded column and hand-painted, cut-glass globe.”

I smothered my snort of laughter with my palm and turned away from the mothman.

Luckily, Mash came to my rescue. “How much longer has the auction got left?”

“An hour,” Giddy responded.

“Well, you’d better get bidding on that fucker, then.” Mash winked at me, and Gideon turned back to his screen.

I connected my laptop to the multi-monitor setup I had. Switched it on.

“So, Giddy, if James asks, neither of us were doing what we ought not to be.”

Not that James would ask, or care for that matter. If anything, he’d probably be in favour of Mash and me sneaking in and using people’s personal data nefariously, so long as it led to true love—which he’d no doubt convince himself was an inevitability.

I brought up the Howl databases. “Right, now, before I start, I’m only accessing the publicly available data, okay? So, no phone numbers, no addresses, nothing these women aren’t happy sharing voluntarily with users. If you want to message any of them, I will remove the ban on your account, and you can do it that way. You’re my best friend, but no way in hell am I going to gaol because you’re an idiot and lied to your alpha.”

“Ouch,” Mash said. “But fair. Continue, please.”

“So, you’re looking for a werewolf woman? Any other stipulations?”

Gideon turned to look at us but said nothing, turning back to his desktop a second later.

“She should live in Remy, or like five minutes from Remy so I can meet up with her beforehand . . . see if she’s gonna be cool about it,” Mash said.

“Sure.” I typed Remy into the location search field. “Anything else? Age limit?”

“Lower age limit of twenty-five.”

“Upper age limit?”

“Of course not.”

“Anything else? Smoker, non-smoker, hobbies, looks, body type?”

“She should be funny. I can’t spend two months with her if she’s boring as fuck.” Mash shot a look towards Giddy. “I don’t care what she looks like, whether she’s skinny or fat or in the middle. I like ’em all. You know I like ’em all.”

I sighed. “Yes, I do.”

“She should be a bit . . .” He looked around the dark office as though trying to find the right word. “She should be bossy, like . . . stand up for herself. Knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to defend herself.”

“Defend herself?” I asked.

“Against my pack.”

“Lord.” I began typing keywords into the search bar. “Okay, so we’ve got a woman, twenty-five and older, lives within a five-mile radius of Remy, good sense of humour, confident. Anything else?”

Mash shook his head. I hit enter.

“Thirty-six matches.”

“Sweet!” Mash said.

I brought the first match up. The picture showed a very pretty, smiling woman with a glass of wine in her hand. She had white skin and chestnut-brown hair tumbling over her shoulders. “This is Lola, she’s thirty—”

“Nope!” he shouted, interrupting me. “Not her. Fucked her. Didn’t call her back.”

“Okay.” I moved to the next one. This one was blonde, more tanned than the previous woman. “Isla, thirty-six, originally from—”

“Nope, fucked her too.”

A redhead holding a puppy. “Emily. She’s—”

“And her.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Mash, for the love of everything holy, is there a single woman in Remy you haven’t fucked?”

“Uh . . .” He furrowed his brow, sucked at his teeth, looked over at the blinking lights of sleeping computers. “I’ll make us all coffee. This might be a long night. Giddy?”

“Giddy takes his coffee the same way I do.”

Mash disappeared into the kitchenette and I filled Giddy in on Mash’s predicament. He returned a moment later holding a tray bearing three mugs and two packets of chocolate chip cookies.

“Where did you find the biscuits?” I asked. I’d worked in this building since we moved here and I’d never stumbled across biscuits before.

“In the cupboard marked Julie’s Personal Stash .” Trust Mash to sniff out the sugar.

“Julie’s gonna be livid,” Giddy said without a trace of emotion. He took one of the black coffees from the tray, and I took the other.

“I’ll make it up to her.” Mash set the tray down on the empty desk to the right of mine, and sat back down. “Hey, is Julie single and free for the next two and a half months?”

“She’s human.”

“Damn,” he huffed. “Well, I could still make it up to her.”

“Mash, fucking focus will you?”

He shook his head. Physically shook it, like he was stepping out of a lake and ridding his fur of the water. “Sorry, who’s next?”

I clicked on the next profile. “Phoebe.”

“Yes, I mean, no. She was . . .” He brought his fingers to his lips and did a chef’s kiss gesture. “Almost made me break my ‘no repeats’ rule.”

“Gods, Mash, stop objectifying women like that, it’s . . . gross,” I said.

“Pfft, I’m not objectifying any of these women. They know what they’re getting into when we get together. I make it abundantly clear it’s a hook-up and nothing else, and I make sure they’re okay with that before we go back to mine. They want the one-night stand just as much as I do. Maybe you’re in the wrong. Assuming that all women want a relationship is sexist, no?”

“What? I . . . how did this get turned back to me?” My face was heating. I looked at Gideon for . . . I didn’t know . . . help? Backup?

He shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I have no idea what women want. Or men. Though I think it’s fair to assume not all women want to mate and have cubs. Probably a decent number like messing around with a tall, handsome werewolf who’s not going to harass them for more.”

Well, damn, that told me.

“But Mash is being a little gross with the . . .” Gideon copied Mash’s chef’s-kiss gesture.

“Noted. I won’t do that again,” Mash said.

“Okay, moving on. What about Freya? She’s forty, manages a construction company.”

Mash bit his thumbnail. “Fucked her too.”

I gathered up all the breath in my lungs, resisted the urge to name-call Mash, and puffed it out. This was going to be a long fucking night. “Elsie?”

“Nope.”

“Sarah?”

“Nope.”

“Harper?”

“No.”

“Tilly? Aria? Charlotte?”

“Yeah, none of those.”

“Sofia? Evie? Milly? Jess? Margot? Layla? Harriet?”

“I . . . don’t know what to tell you,” was all Mash could say in response.

“Well, we’re back to Lola again. You want me to widen the search?” I said, after we scrolled through the rest of the matches.

Gideon paused his lamp ogling. “Does this mean you’ve shagged every single were woman in Remy?”

Mash winked at Giddy and shot him a finger gun.

“No, it doesn’t,” I said, feeling defensive for some reason. “Only the were women who are signed up with Howl. I expect there are other were women in Remy who are not on our app . . . like mated ones.”

“I guess you could widen the area, include Bordalis maybe,” Mash said.

Bordalis was the capitol city of Borderlands. It was bigger than Remy, both in hectares and population, yet it yielded fewer matches. Hey, and guess what? Mash had fucked all of those women as well.

“Urgh, shit,” he whined, crumpling the empty biscuit wrapper in his hand and tossing it towards the wastepaper bin. It missed. Mash made no attempt to fetch it.

“What about if we lowered the age limit?” I suggested.

“No, my pack would never go for that. Twenty-five is the age you’re considered adult enough to settle down and build a family. Before then, you need to be sowing your oats. I mean, you don’t have to, but it’s like technically illegal to mate someone under twenty-five.”

“Why? That’s so odd.”

Mash shrugged. “They’ll tell you it’s because before that age how can you possibly know who you want to spend the rest of your life with, but really it’s because once you reach twenty-five the pack elders don’t feel guilty for haranguing you about your love life.”

I nodded . . . didn’t articulate my thoughts because I knew at nineteen who I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. That hadn’t changed.

“So, your only option is to message one of the women you’ve slept with. Like, you’ve already hooked up with them, you should have some idea who’d be up for faking it and who wouldn’t.”

Mash puffed out a breath and leant back in his chair. He pouted as he mulled this over. I resisted the urge to stare at those lips of his.

“Or . . .” Gideon said, scare-jumping both of us. “Change the search to include shifters.”

“She has to be were. His pack wouldn’t accept a shifter, it’s . . . I dunno, a cultural thing,” I said.

“Yeah, I know,” he said with a well-duh edge to his voice. “I’ve worked here long enough to understand were and shifter norms. But I’ve seen you partially shift to resemble a were. What if she pretended to be werewolf.”

“Ooh!” Mash sat forward again.

“I dunno. That’s a big ask,” I said. “It took me ages to figure out a partial shift, and it’s exhausting to keep it up for any longer than a few minutes. We’d be asking this girl to hold a partial shift for hours at a time, over a two-month period. It’s . . .” I trailed off.

“Yeah, that doesn’t seem fair, I suppose. Fuck.” Mash jumped to his feet, scrubbed both his hands through his hair. He began pacing, grunting and knocking his fist against his head.

I kept quiet. I was out of ideas. If Mash turned up to his pack’s event without a mate, they’d force him to mate with Dee-Dee. He’d move away from me, and I’d never get to see him again—or at least not nearly as often as I’d like.

And he’d be unhappy. I needed to stop thinking about myself in this situation. Mash would be unhappy. Wouldn’t he?

“What about if we could somehow convince the dean to call your alpha and explain how important it is you don’t miss the start of term?”

Mash’s face dropped in an instant. “Yeah, that’s not going to work.”

“What if I called your nana and pretended to be the dean?”

“She’s spoken to Agnes before. When she tried to get me to come last year . . . and the year before. She knows what she sounds like.”

“Damn,” Gideon said from beside me, apparently invested now.

All three of us sighed.

“Okay, bathroom break,” I said, getting to my feet. I needed some more thinking time.

“I’ll make some more coffee,” Mash said.

When I got back from the bathroom, Mash was sitting with his feet up on the desk, eating yet another packet of Julie’s biscuits. He offered a cookie to Giddy. Giddy accepted happily. His antennae quivered.

“I have an idea,” I said, sitting between them again. “You might not like it, but it’s the only thing I can think of that doesn’t involve messaging one of these women and begging.”

Mash paused his biscuit-wielding hand halfway to his mouth.

“You said it’s not necessary for you to fuck them, right? That there are other ways to prove the existence of a mate bond?”

“Yeah?” he said. His smile slowly morphed into a grimace.

“What if you changed the search to include men?”

He sat forward in his chair, taking his feet off my desk. “Dudes? Really?”

“Yes. I’m being serious. It would be transactional only. I know your pack wouldn’t care if you mated a guy. Your brother did. I came to his mating ceremony as your plus one, remember?”

“But my pack would expect me and this guy to like cuddle and hold hands and maybe even kiss. Like, it’d be weird if we were supposedly pre-mated and we never did any of those things.”

“There are a couple of guys on here who are actors,” I countered. I knew this because I had dated a few. Granted, Harvey wasn’t a great actor, but Mash couldn’t afford to be that fussy right now.

He scratched below his chin. Hmmed. “I don’t know. Like, I’d have to share a bedroom with him for two months. He’d have to go on shifts with the pack, get naked in front of me—” Mash jumped to his feet. “Oh my gods! You should do it!”

“What?!” I stood too.

“You should do it. You should come to Howling Pines with me and pretend to be my mate!”

My stomach swooped dangerously. It felt like the rug was being pulled from under my feet, and at the same time, like winning the lottery.

“I . . . I have work.” It was a feeble excuse.

James wouldn’t give two shits if I took a couple of months off for Harvest Fest celebrations. Mash knew this. It was the single most important holiday in the entire werewolf calendar. A period of time that spanned the Sturgeon’s Moon in August, the Harvest Moon in September, and the Hunter’s Moon in October.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

I couldn’t pretend to be in love with him in front of his pack, and then pretend not to be in love with him when it was only the two of us.

I couldn’t sleep on the bunk above him for ten weeks . . . breathe in the scent of him, listen to his voice, feel the heat from his gigantic werewolf body. It would be torture. Like sharing halls with him all over again.

“But you know me,” he continued, evidently unaware of the battle raging inside my thoughts. “You wouldn’t need to pretend to know me. They won’t try to trip you up because they know you know me. You’ve met them.”

“They know I’m a shifter, though—”

Mash waved me away. “It was ten years ago, they’ll never remember that.”

“But Mash . . .”

“Ci, I know this is a big ask, and I wouldn’t do it if I wasn’t desperate. It’s just . . .” Mash flopped back onto the chair. “I don’t wanna be pack—uh, I don’t want to mate, with Dee-Dee or anyone. Don’t wanna leave this life in Remy . . . get a new job in Howling Pines. And I’m pretty sure Dee would be pissed as well. Can’t imagine her up and leaving Bordalis and her bigwig company for the simple life. But neither of us would have a choice if our packs decided it would be best for us. They don’t care about Remy Uni or Byte Tech.”

I had to do a double take. I replayed Mash’s last words in my head just to be sure I’d heard him correctly. “Byte Tech? Did you just say Byte Tech?”

“Yeah, it’s Dee’s company, she’s the CEO. She makes a fuck-tonne of money—”

I held up my hand to stop Mash. I needed a second to think. “Dee-Dee. Is Dee-Dee a nickname?”

“Yeah,” Mash said. “It’s short for Dylan.”

“Dylan West?” The name was no louder than a huff.

“Holy shit, are you related to Dylan West?” Gideon chimed in.

“Yes, she’s like my cousin, but not really my cousin.”

“Is this Dee-Dee?” I pulled the magazine out of my desk drawer. The one James had given me.

“Yep, that’s her. Fuck, I always forget how gorgeous she is. That’s Riley beside her.” He tapped the glossy magazine page, as though I couldn’t work out who the only other person in the photo besides Dylan West was. “My other sort-of cousin. She’s twenty-four or something. She works with Dee.”

“I cannot believe you’ve been related to Dylan West this whole time, and I had no idea.”

“Technically, not related.”

“This whole time!”

“Why does this feel like I’m on trial?” Mash said. “I’ve spoken about Dee-Dee so much. I’ve told you everything I know about her. Didn’t realise you needed her full birth name. Anything else you want? Grandmother’s maiden name? First pet? International Wolf ID number?”

“You’re being a facetious dick,” I argued back. “If I’d known Dylan West was your cousin—”

“Technically not my cousin,” Mash interrupted.

I ignored him. “If I’d known who this infamous Dee-Dee was, I would have—”

This time I cut myself off. What would I have done? Applied for a position at Byte Tech sooner? Muscled in with his family in order to gain some kind of favouritism? Could I still do that? There was a big job going in her company, and like James had said, she chose her leadership roles based on vibes, not boxes ticked. What better opportunity to rub elbows with her than at her extended pack’s Harvest Fest celebrations, when everybody was fuelled by delicious food and family reunions and festive cheer?

“What would you have done?” Mash said, pulling me out of the moment. His voice was still sharp.

“I’ve always wanted to work for Byte Tech,” I said. “I guess I’m just a little annoyed you didn’t tell me. I could already be living my dream.”

The fight left him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Of course Mash never knew. I never told him. I had kept so much of myself from him.

Beside us, Gideon reached across my desk and swiped a cookie from the packet.

“Giddy, this can’t be repeated yet, but James is selling Howl. Byte Tech has a big job opening and I’m thinking of applying . . .”

“Oh my gods,” Mash said.

Gideon said nothing. He chewed his biscuit. The mastication seemed to echo throughout the empty office.

“I need to pee again,” I lied, and took myself out of the workspace.

I headed to the rooftop, not the bathroom. Took the lifts right to the top. The last time I was up here was seven and a half months ago for the annual Howl company Winter Fest do. The party was in the restaurant on the ground floor. It was crowded and loud and hot, and too much for me, so I did what I always did. I ran towards the fresh air.

Mash had followed me, and produced a joint from nowhere. I’d told him I didn’t want to smoke because I’d get the munchies and I didn’t want to go back downstairs to the party. I wanted to stay up here forever. Just me and him. At which point, he’d opened his jacket like an old-time watch salesman to show eight different chocolate bars duct taped to the lining.

“I raided the vending machine on the tenth floor.” He’d passed me the joint.

“I’m thinking about quitting,” I’d said, taking a drag.

“Weed or work?”

“Work. The job,” I’d confirmed.

“You say this every single year. Every Winter Fest you’re like, ‘I’m gonna leave in Jan, look for something else.’ But you’re still here.”

“It’s just . . . it’s safe and guaranteed. And the pay is great, and my boss is amazing, but it’s the job itself, it’s . . .”

“Slowly killing you from the inside out?”

I’d nodded. “I’ve just never found a good enough opportunity to leave it for. Got any Peanut Goobers in that jacket of yours?”

Now here I was, having a very similar crisis again. Only this time, my hand was being forced. Sort of. James would sell the company, and this was exactly the type of moment I’d been waiting for. Wasn’t it? A push in the right direction, and a chance to put my case forward for a dream job.

The risk-assessor part of my brain tried to think up reasons why pretending to be Mash’s mate was a terrible idea. And it was . . . a terrible idea. Awful.

So why couldn’t I pick out a single reason not to do it?

Sure, it would mean sleeping in the same room as Mash—the man I’d been in love with since we met fifteen years ago. In his childhood bedroom to be precise. I’d slept in there with him before. He had bunk beds. Mash took the top, even though his legs hung an entire foot off the end. It wasn’t like we’d be sharing a bed.

Sure, I’d have to lie to his pack, his family, but aside from the reality of our relationship, would I really be lying? I loved Mash. I was always happy to talk about him. Always happy to work him into conversation so that I could talk about him.

Sure, it would mean taking two months off work. Two months away from a sinking ship.

But the life raft might just be in Howling Pines—at least temporarily.

Instead of thinking up reasons not to be Mash’s fake boyfriend, my thoughts were overrun with Dylan West, Howl Ya Doing, Byte Tech . . . two months of not going into the office, two months of not catching the U-Rail, two-months of fresh air, and beautiful forestry, and that fucking ravine where Mash and I spent that one evening . . .

And two months of Mash. Of “pretending.” Of his almost undivided attention.

Two months where he couldn’t leave me at the bar, or party, to go back to some woman’s apartment.

I took the elevator down to the tenth floor.

Mash was crouched next to Gideon’s chair. “Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . . not yet . . . not yet . . . now! Bid now!”

Gideon smashed a button on his mouse, paused for one second, two seconds, then, “I won it!”

“Of course you did. You’re a goth boss.” Mash ruffled the fur on Giddy’s head.

Oh my gods, was Gideon Cinnabar actually smiling? “Thank you. I’ve wanted one of these lamps for years.”

“I’ll do it!” I said, interrupting their moment. “I’ll come with you to Howling Pines.”

“YES!” Mash shouted, jumping to his feet, running over to me and wrapping his enormous arms around me. “I fucking love you, Bangers. This is going to be epic!” He pulled away from the embrace but still held me. “It’s gonna be fun, right? We’re gonna have so much fun.”

I found myself smiling too. I guessed we would have fun.