Chapter 5 Reid
Reid
Istopped outside my front door and patted down my pockets. Fuck. Where had I put my keys this time?
Before the panic set in, my door swung open. Amused blue eyes swept over me. “You’re supposed to welcome guests into your home, not the other way around.”
I scowled at Bryce. “It’s not my fault you’re early.”
His full lips twitched. “It’s seven forty-five, Reid.”
“Bollocks.” I sighed. “Well, you can blame Tesco.”
Bryce stepped back to let me past, shrugging his slender shoulders. “I mean, I blame Tesco for many things. Price hikes, killing off the high street, encouraging conformity…Never blamed them for making me an hour late home from work.”
I knew he was only teasing. All of my friends knew I couldn’t help it. Didn’t stop them giving me shit for it sometimes. I gave as good as I got though. “Maybe it would if you actually had a job.”
Bryce clamped a hand over his chest dramatically. “Wounded. Dying on the ground.”
Mac appeared around the corner, immediately taking the bags out of my hands. He raised one of his thick blond eyebrows. “Are ye picking on Bryce again?”
“He started it,” I said, rising on my toes to peck Mac’s cheek in thanks. “Bloody freeloading earl.”
“Technically I’m the heir to an earl,” Bryce reminded us for the thousandth time. “Daddy dearest has to kick the bucket before I take the helm. Let’s hope the fucker takes his time.”
The three of us shuddered in unison. Bryce’s dad could give mine a run for his money.
Old school didn’t begin to cover it when it came to the Earl of Kilmarnock.
He was determined to see Bryce married off to someone of ‘good breeding.’ A person who could add to the already ridiculous sum of money Bryce’s family sat on.
Someone who was female. Of course. Homosexuality wasn’t something that existed in the earl’s mind.
Cunt.
His behaviour proved that shifters and humans weren’t all that different. Obsessed with keeping lines ‘pure’ and marrying ‘for the good of the family.’ Substitute family with clan and it all amounted to the same thing: a load of bullshit that I wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.
Bryce felt the same way. It was what had drawn us to each other.
We’d met at a club after several too many test-tube shots.
He’d been half slumped on a stool, yammering at a bored looking bartender.
I’d watched him for half a minute before deciding that, if he was that upset, he at least deserved an audience who’d be interested.
I’d taken the stool beside him and demanded to hear his story. When Bryce was done, I’d known three things.
One—his dad was a cunt.
Two—Bryce deserved a better life than the one that’d been planned for him before he was even born.
Three—he was going to be my best friend.
Four years later, I’d added many things to the list, but those initial three had never changed. Bryce and I might give each other shit, but that didn’t mean anyone else was allowed to do the same.
Well, no one other than Mac and Cole.
The final person in our little group was sprawled on my sofa, my PS3 controller in his hands. He grunted at my arrival, too focused on Demon Hunters to offer a better greeting.
“Aim for the wings,” I threw over my shoulder as I followed Mac through to the kitchen. Bryce dropped onto the floor in front of the sofa, settling in to watch Cole game. “Right at the apex.”
Cole’s only acknowledgement was another grunt, but the sounds from the TV told me he’d taken my advice.
I didn’t take his lack of words personally.
I’d known Cole long enough to know that sometimes he got overstimulated—especially if he’d had a bad day at work.
His job as a carpenter meant he usually got to work alone.
Some jobs though, such as the one he’d been on for the past two weeks, required him to work onsite with a bunch of other contractors.
The combination of noise alongside having to be ‘on’ all the time took its toll on Cole.
It had taken years before he was able to unmask around us. He and Mac were friends from childhood, and even Mac hadn’t seen this side of Cole until I’d come along.
Growing up, I hadn’t even realised that what I was doing was masking.
It wasn’t even about my ADHD so much as my humanity.
I’d tried to hide who and what I was for so long.
The instant I’d stepped outside of the clan’s borders, I’d decided no more.
No more hiding. No more forcing myself to be someone I wasn’t.
I was me. Just me. And anyone who couldn’t handle that could jog the fuck on.
Don’t get me wrong, fuck loads of people had chosen that option, including all my employers before Chester.
But Bryce, Mac, and Cole? They’d stayed. None of us were perfect, but we didn’t hold it against each other. We embraced it.
The way true friends should.
Mac was already unloading things into my cupboards. “Reid, why is the pasta in with the tins?”
I hopped up onto the counter, swinging my legs. “I made spaghetti Bolognese.”
Mac blinked at me. I bit back my smirk as he tried to follow my logic and failed. “And…?”
“And I needed chopped tomatoes,” I said, as if it were obvious. I mean, it was to me, but not everyone’s brain was as awesome as mine. “So the pasta went back in the cupboard when the tomatoes came out.”
Mac chuckled as he shook his head. “Okay.”
We exchanged idle chitchat as Mac put away the rest of my shopping.
I knew better than to interfere. It stressed Mac out to have things in the ‘wrong’ place.
How he determined what the ‘right’ place was was something I’d never learned.
But what I had learned was that it was easier to just let him get on with things.
It made Mac happy and was no skin off my nose.
If anything, I appreciated how organised my kitchen was.
Even if I could never remember exactly where to put things, it didn’t matter. Mac just relocated them on his next visit.
Mac folded my bags for life and somehow fitted them in the cupboard under the sink.
I watched with a wince, wondering if I’d hit a hundred bags yet.
It wasn’t my fault I forgot them every time I went shopping.
Bryce often said that if they were bags for life, I better hope I’d live to be a thousand years old.
It was the one joke I had to force a laugh for.
My friends knew everything about me…except that I was born a human to a clan of shifters.
It wasn’t the secrecy surrounding supes that had me holding my tongue.
I trusted them all with my life. It wasn’t them not believing me, either.
Sure, it might take them a while to wrap their heads around it, but they were all open-minded blokes.
It was easy to explain when you knew where to look for evidence.
Given my understanding of how compulsion nets worked, I knew I could find enough to convince them.
My silence was born of fear. Fear that they too might see me as an anomaly. That they’d side with my clan. That they’d judge me for being born a human when I should’ve been born a shifter.
It was a baseless fear. Mac, Cole, and Bryce had accepted me for who I was. They loved me as fiercely as I loved them. They were the family I’d chosen for myself.
But fear wasn’t rational. It couldn’t be reasoned away.
Not when it ran this deep.
It was too difficult to laugh when Bryce teased me about needing to be immortal, because that was what I should’ve been.
I should’ve been born strong.
Fast.
Supernatural.
But I hadn’t.
It didn’t matter that I had no control or say in being human.
It didn’t matter that I understood that.
Nothing could stop me feeling like a failure.
Brains were funny that way. Neural pathways took years to be written.
The ones that were formed during your early years were particularly difficult to change.
Most of the time, it didn’t bother me. But then there’d be something stupid, like the bags for life, and I’d be back in the clan. In my father’s office. His voice ringing in my ears.
“Useless.”
“Weak.”
“Abomination.”
“A waste.”
“Right.” Mac clapped his hands together, dragging me back to the present. “Let’s go discuss your SOS. Are we talking nuclear level meltdown? Or ‘lost your keys’ level?”
I shook off the lingering ghosts of the past and hopped off the counter. “Nuclear. Although I have lost my keys too.”
“They’re here.” Bryce tossed them to me as I entered the living room. “Found them in the bathroom sink.”
I frowned down at them, walking through my morning to try and figure out how I’d left them there. Nope. It was too long ago to remember.
“Reid,” Mac barked. “What are you doing?”
I froze, hand half in my pocket. “Um, putting my keys away?”
Mac gave a long-suffering sigh before plucking them from my fingers. “They live on the hook, babe. We’ve been through this.”
I shoved Cole’s feet off the sofa and plopped down where they’d been. “I don’t know why he bothers. We all know I’ll forget.”
Bryce patted my knee. “It makes him feel better.”
Cole paused the game and turned to smile at me. “Alright?”
I grinned back at him. “Aye. How’s the game?”
“Rigged, I swear.”
He said the same thing every time. “It helped though?”
Cole nodded, his ruddy brown hair bobbing with the movement. “Yeah. Brain’s quieter now.”
I squeezed his ankle in understanding. Sometimes the world was too much, and that was okay. We all needed to silence the noise occasionally.
Mac reappeared with two beers in each hand. He waited until we’d each taken a sip before fixing me with a serious look. “Okay, Reid, you’ve got the floor.”
I scratched at the label on the bottle. How the fuck was I meant to explain without going into all the shifter stuff?
“I saw someone today,” I said eventually. “Someone from my past that I wasn’t expecting to see.”
Bryce’s already pale face went lighter. “From your family?”