Chapter Thirty #2
I hadn’t planned to tell Lucas about it. Whenever possible, I didn’t talk about this at all. Just after changing, I’d had teary conversations with the rest of my pack to explain what had gone wrong. Every time they tried to talk about it after that, I shut them down.
I didn’t know how to talk about this with them. They couldn’t make it better. What was done was done; my change into a werewolf irreversible.
It wasn’t like Lucas had anything to offer that the rest of the pack didn’t, but all I’d wanted to do since Hamish’s eyes had narrowed and questions had visibly formed beneath his messy ginger hair was curl into Lucas’s arms and tell him the truth.
I couldn’t do the cuddling, but I could explain this deep hurting part of myself that I did my best to push away.
‘I thought you wore them because they’re soft and pretty.’ Scraping and shuffling filled the line, like Lucas was finding a spot in the hut unoccupied with goat dung to sit down. ‘They match the cosy jumpers you wear.’
‘Thank you.’ One thing Lucas offered that no one else could was that he would make me smile even when my ribs felt tight with crushing sadness. ‘They are soft and I do like how they look, but that’s not the only reason I wear them.’
Lucas huffed, and the line grew quiet. I imagined him tucked into a corner of a goat hut. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable place to sit, but knowing he was inside one and was safe was a balm against the memory of finding him half-dead amongst goats and straw.
We’d fallen into a pattern with these chats.
We didn’t talk about the storm or what came directly before.
Our avoidance was likely for differing reasons, but neither of us wanted to pick over exactly why Lucas had fled into the mountains instead of coming home, or how horribly close he’d come to no longer being here.
‘Why do you wear scarves?’ Lucas prompted. A question I’d dreaded and dodged, but it didn’t sound so dreadful coming from him.
That didn’t make starting any easier, even if it was something I wanted to talk about. I rubbed my cheek on the blanket and closed my eyes. ‘Do you remember that I told you I was unwell when I was baby?’
‘Yeah. You think it’s part of the reason you’re so snuggly.’ Clear affection warmed Lucas’s voice. I didn’t have to be near him to know his scent would be deepening, like a thick jumper I wished I could wrap myself in.
‘It also left me with something else.’ I pressed my tongue against the roof of my mouth, searching for the words to tell a story that made me feel hollow. ‘I was so premature that my lungs hadn’t developed properly. I had to have a tube inserted through my throat to help me breathe.’
‘God,’ Lucas whispered. ‘You must have been so small.’
He would have seen tiny creatures over his years as a vet. I wondered how my newborn self would have compared. Mum said she wasn’t allowed to hold me, but that I would easily have fit in the palm of her hand.
‘I was, but apparently I was also strong. It took a while, but gradually the machines used to keep me alive were taken away. I could eat and breathe and move on my own. I could go home.’
I was far too young to remember when Mum held me in her arms and carried me over our threshold, but there was a picture. My grandmother, who died when I was four, captured the moment when I came home for the first time. I was still incredibly small, a blurry bundle held tight Mum’s chest.
That wasn’t what drew my focus when I got my photo album out. Mum’s face was alight with pure love. She might have worked a lot as I grew up and have been ridiculously driven, but in that moment when I was helpless and small, she’d loved me just for me.
Sometimes it felt like I’d spent my whole life searching for someone who would look at me again with such wonder. Someone who would choose me over anything and anyone else.
‘The doctors were sure that the scars from the tubes would fade and disappear as I got older.’ I wormed a hand up under the blankets to press on the scarf covering the front of my throat. ‘But the scar where the tube had been inserted to help me breathe didn’t go away.’
It sat just above where my collar bones met, a pink indentation in my creamy skin.
‘I didn’t do it consciously, but I touched that scar a lot. Mum told me off, said I’d make it sore, but it was hard to stop when I didn’t even realise I was doing it. If I was stressed or nervous, which was too much of the time when I was at university, I pressed my fingers into the scar.’
I flattened my hand on my scarf, willing away the sharp ache in my chest. Lucas didn’t interrupt or dig for more details. His breathing was steady down the line.
‘Doctors weren’t ever sure of the cause of it all, but I had a lot of health issues that never fully resolved as I was growing up.
While I was studying and after I moved here, I’d get these horrible migraines.
They’d last for days, where I had to lie as still as possible in bed and wait for them to pass.
Sometimes, I had to shut the bookshop until they passed.
Bonnie noticed.’ I swallowed hard against the lump rising in my throat.
‘She asked if I wanted to take the bite, make the pain go away.’
I’d been embarrassed when the island’s mayor strode into the shop after a particularly bad migraine that had left me pale and wobbly for days afterwards. She’d demanded to know exactly what was wrong. I’d stuttered replies while her thick eyebrows crowded dangerously close to her eyes.
She hadn’t offered the bite immediately.
I hadn’t realised at the time, but other members of the pack slowly got to know me.
It was an initiation of sorts; Louisa’s demands that I watch films and invitations to go out on Errol’s boat, mornings in the bakery with Joshua and Cob, long walks across the mountains with Callum.
They were feeling me out, making sure I would be a good fit.
Bonnie might have wanted to help me, but she also wanted to make sure I’d be an asset to the pack.
And that I wouldn’t turn into a murderous lunatic when they shared their true nature with me.
‘I might have read one too many fantasy novels, but the idea that I’d not only be consistently well but would also be strong and able to hear and smell really well seemed amazing.’
‘It is amazing,’ Lucas interjected. ‘I don’t think I would have said no if I’d had a choice.’
I took a deep breath, which felt far more difficult than it should have. At the time, I’d jumped to say yes. I’d been ready to run up to the mountains and have Callum bite me the next day. Bonnie had made me think about it for a week, to make sure I was certain.
I didn’t know what I’d say now I knew what the bite would take from me, but Lucas was right; since I’d been bitten I hadn’t had a single migraine.
Not even a bad headache. The lingering dread I’d carried that at any moment life could be interrupted by unignorable pain had been lifted. For that, I was eternally grateful.
I just wished there hadn’t been a cost. I should have known that what Bonnie was offering was too good to be true. Something so amazing couldn’t be given for free.
‘Have you told Aster that?’ I checked. He’d messaged me several times since Lucas had been bitten, rambling missives worrying about the huge decision he’d made for his best friend.
‘A thousand times,’ Lucas grumbled. I wasn’t sure I would have heard a hitch in his heartbeat.
He could be exaggerating, or he could literally have told his best friend that he was happy as a wolf that many times and still Aster was concerned.
Lucas’s voice was gentle when he asked, ‘What happened after you were bitten?’
He had to have ideas. I’d told him I’d cried for a long time after I became a wolf and he’d gone through the change himself. It was kind of him to let me tell the whole story.
‘I didn’t realise anything was wrong right after I changed.
I wasn’t hurt like you, so it only took a couple of days.
’ I didn’t remember much after Callum’s fangs sliced through my skin.
Becoming a wolf used a lot of energy. The days had been filled with alternate sleeping and gorging on Callum’s hearty stews.
‘When Callum and I were practicing how to block out unpleasant smells, I couldn’t get it right.
I was worried that I never would. I went to touch my scar.
’ I screwed my eyes shut. ‘It wasn’t there. ’
My panic in that moment had been absolute. I had probed my skin, desperately searching for what was no longer there. I didn’t realise I was screaming, that my fingers were tipped with elongated claws that tore at my throat until Callum clutched me in his arms.
It had taken a long time to find the words to tell him what was wrong.
Guilt, stringent and inescapable, had poured off him.
He’d meticulously explained the changes my body would undergo.
He’d told me that any tattoos would disappear, that sensitive spots in my teeth would heal, that my migraines would be no more.
I hadn’t mentioned my scar. I hadn’t been stressed when we’d talked about me becoming a wolf, so he hadn’t seen how it was a touchstone.
A reminder I was loved from the moment I’d been born. A remnant from the mother I’d lost. An imperfect part of myself I liked far more than the hair or lips or eyes everyone else commented on.
‘Oh, Kit,’ Lucas breathed. ‘I wish I could give you the biggest hug right now.’
I huffed out a half laugh, half sob. I wanted that more than anything. ‘How’s it going with mastering your new abilities?’
‘Smell is sorted, so is the extra strength and not accidentally sprouting claws if someone pisses me off.’ Lucas had told me a couple of days ago how Aster had thrown his favourite pair of pyjamas on the fire.
He’d tackled his bestie and told him he was the worst, but had retained his essential humanity despite the bubbling rage.
‘It’s sound that’s still getting me. I jump at stuff happening a mile away. ’
‘You’ll get there,’ I reassured him.
‘As soon as I do, I’m racing down the mountains. You’re going to have to clear your schedule because a hug-fest is coming to town.’
I smiled wetly. ‘That sounds genuinely perfect.’
Shuffling on the line, which I hoped didn’t mean Lucas was embarrassed that he’d proclaimed his desire to hold me. I wasn’t lying that his arms around me were what I wanted more than anything else.
‘I’m sorry you lost your scar, Kit,’ he said. ‘That must have been hard.’
I sniffed, but there was no stopping the flood of tears. ‘Yeah.’
Becoming a werewolf had made my life better in so many ways, but it had taken something I’d thought would be part of me for my whole life.
My partners never seemed to want to stick around and Mum died and I’d ditched my law degree to take a chance on a bookshop on a tiny Scottish island, but that scar had remained.
It represented my tough beginning and the love and care it had taken to keep me alive.
‘Your scarves are beautiful,’ Lucas said.
A smile broke through my silent weeping. Lucas might think his compliments were weird and over the top, but I loved them. Other people so often focused on what was outwardly attractive and they didn’t look any deeper. From the first moment I’d met Lucas, he’d seen more.
It didn’t feel like he was simply saying my scarves were beautiful. The rest of the pack, at some point or another, had tried to talk to me about my unhealthy need to wear them. I didn’t think Lucas would do that.
‘I love them,’ I admitted. ‘Wearing them started as a way to cover my throat so that I wouldn’t accidentally touch where the scar had been or be shocked by my reflection, but now it’s like they’ve almost taken over the job my scar used to have. They ground me when my head is busy.’
The scarves weren’t quite the same, but they were something. I didn’t know if one day I would put them aside, but they were what I needed for now.
‘Thank you for telling me about this.’
‘I wanted to.’ I rubbed my face on a blanket, then blinked at the living room. The light had faded during our conversation. Under the den I’d created, my stomach rumbled.
Lucas laughed. ‘Heard that.’
I eased my feet from under Kat, provoking a piercing death stare but no sudden violence. ‘Want to chat while I make dinner?’
Previous evenings we’d talked for hours, but I didn’t want to assume Lucas would want to do the same tonight. What I’d laid on him was heavy. He might need time to himself to think it through.
‘Of course.’ The note of outrage in Lucas’s voice made me grin as I walked over to the fridge. ‘What are you making?’
The rest of the evening passed with his voice in my ear, mine rising to meet it. The sadness that had been awakened when my scarf caught on Hamish’s dragon wasn’t banished, but it was soothed.
I tried to stop the smile slipping from my face after we finally said goodbye. Lucas’s need to pee could no longer be ignored despite his desire to keep talking and avoid walking in on any kind of sex act between Callum and Aster.
Lucas had made it abundantly clear that he didn’t want to kiss me. He didn’t even want to talk about when I’d asked to kiss him. He seemed determined for our friendship to continue on without a hitch.
But there was one. Despite his unmistakable rejection, my feelings for him were growing. I’d not met anyone before who so effortlessly saw me, who chatting to was always a joy and never a chore, whose scent was wonderful and whose arms I wanted to shelter in on bad days.
I just had to take what I could get. Maybe it would be easier once Lucas was living here again.
Then I’d be able to see his desire to only be friends in action.
I’d figure out whatever that change to his scent was, since it clearly wasn’t attraction.
With my senses constantly battered with his platonic regard, surely my feelings would eventually fade.
I’d made a wonderful friend when Lucas came to the island. I wouldn’t allow myself to be sad that I could never have more.