19. Ben
NINETEEN
BEN
It Takes a Village
I hadn’t been surrounded by so many shifters all at once since I’d massacred Charles and his gang, so it was definitely doing a number on me.
Not enough to give me a panic attack, but I was suddenly far too cognizant of myself and my body, which made me hyperaware of everything, including my breathing.
I was tempted to go steal Giselle back, as her presence was always a balm to my soul, but that would be selfish. Besides, I didn’t feel like I was about to be overwhelmed or swallowed up by the abyss. I was just a little… uncomfortable.
And like my therapist said, being uncomfortable wasn’t harmful most of the time. All I needed to do was breathe and stay in the moment.
“Hey, Daddy, do you wanna play frisbee with some of us?” Benny asked, popping up beside me quietly. Not quiet enough to startle me, but it came close.
“Who’s us?” I asked, like there was any situation where I would say no.
“Mostly us kids, but a couple of grownups in their wolf forms.” He gave me a hopeful sort of look. “Would you want to be a wolf?”
Hah, my son wasn’t quite as slick as he thought.
As far as he knew, I hadn’t shifted since I’d come back from my vengeance quest. I could have told him about Melton and the fight that had exposed Giselle to the shifter world, but I hadn’t.
My son was healing, thriving even, and I didn’t want to disrupt that by reintroducing boogeymen to his world.
Especially since Melton wasn’t going to be an issue again.
Supposedly.
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Benny said quickly, and I realized I had gone quiet again.
I hadn’t realized how much my social skills had lapsed—not that they’d ever been that amazing to start with.
While I had been alpha of my pack, I’d navigated diplomatic situations fairly capably, but when it came to the everyday, nitty-gritty stuff, I’d followed Millia’s lead. After she was gone…
Well, eighteen months of pretty much total isolation outside of my two children and Natalie had certainly done its number on me.
“No, I want to,” I said as I stood. “Let me just text Giselle so if she comes back while I’m gone, she won’t be concerned.”
“Where is she? Did she go to the bathroom?”
“No, she’s off socializing with Mrs. Hayashi.”
“Who’s that?”
“You remember her. She’s one of the matriarchs of the shifters who live in the city. A kitsune.”
“Kit… kit… wait, the fox lady?”
“ Kitsune, ” I corrected gently. “It’s important to use the proper terms.”
“Why?” Benny asked. While some parents might view that as him challenging me, I could tell he was genuinely curious. Besides, if I couldn’t explain a rule in a way my kids could understand, then it probably wasn’t a rule worth making.
“Throughout history, shifters haven’t always been able to be ourselves, it just wasn’t safe.
Even now, we have to pretend to be human more often than not.
So, when we’re together, we respect each other by recognizing each other’s identities exactly as they are.
It’s why we call kitsune, kitsune . Why we call selkies, selkies, and why other non-pack shifters still recognize me as an alpha. ”
“So, it’s a respect thing?”
“Yeah, it’s a respect thing.”
“I think I get it. It’s like me wanting to be called Benny instead of Junior. Junior isn’t wrong, but it’s not right, either.”
Was I this smart as a kid? I didn’t feel like it. For all that people complained about the coming generation being socially inept, I was pretty sure my son had a high EQ.
“Yes, exactly like that.”
“Cool. So… frisbee?”
I laughed as I sent the text and pocketed my phone. High EQ or not, Benny was still a kid with a frisbee. “Lead the way.”
The clearing he took me to was somewhat at the midway point of the campgrounds, which made sense considering that everyone liked to keep their kids close by, enhanced senses or not.
While it was highly improbable that anyone would beset our event to abscond with a kid while surrounded by shifters, it wasn’t impossible, so it was best to take at least some precautions.
“Here we are,” Benny said, hands on his hips as he gave the scene a nod. A dozen or so kids were running around, as well as two wolves, a bear, and two tiny foxes.
I frowned. From what I knew, kitsune were nearly the same size as wolf shifters, had many tails, and often glowed slightly even during the day. But then I belatedly remembered that they earned their size and tails as they aged, and that kids could shift as early as five.
Huh, so I was quite literally looking at baby shifters. How fascinating that their biology and shifting process varied so much from wolf shifters. As far as I knew, horse and bear shifters also didn’t get their animal forms until puberty, so maybe it was influenced by environment.
Who knew? Certainly not me. But that was fine because I had plenty of other important things to occupy my mind. Like playing frisbee with my son, for example.
“You ready to shift?” Benny asked, still sounding a bit cautious. While I loved that he was trying to help me be comfortable in my wolf form again, I hated that he felt like he had to walk on eggshells about it.
“That I am,” I said, trying to sound like a hip and happy dad. “Hope you’re ready to throw.”
“I was born ready.”
“That’s funny, I thought you were born Benny.”
“ Boo , cringe!”
“You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means,” I shot back, then wondered if I’d ever showed him the movie that quote was from. If not, I needed to get on that. Maybe between episodes of the mini-series Giselle’s father had given him.
“Oh yeah?” my son countered, and I had a pretty good idea about what he was going to do. “Well, I think you should think fast!”
And then he threw the frisbee. Pretty far for his size and age, I might add. But I was already falling forward into a shift.
It wasn’t a rapid one, as those tended to hurt—especially when one was as rusty as I was—but it was fairly quick.
My joints groaned and my bones snapped as fur settled over my body in a cooling blanket, the layers of my coat designed to dispel heat.
I managed to land on the ground on all fours without face-planting and took off after the flying disc.
It wasn’t a challenge to catch up with it and grab it in my teeth before it hit the ground, but I had to be careful so my large canines didn’t sink through it completely. But when I landed on the ground and turned to my son, his excited cheer was worth any discomfort that came from shifting.
“Yeah! Good catch, Dad!”
I was all set to trot to him so we could play a very different game of catch than a human son and father might, when I heard a whistle to my side. Craning my head, I saw a young man, maybe a couple of years older than Benny, trot up.
“Here, I can throw it for you,” he said. “My mama had to take a break!”
I followed his pointed finger to see a smaller, gray wolf flopped over at the edge of the clearing, two small children running in circles around her. Yeah, that tracked. If I had three little ones, I’d be exhausted too.
I dropped the frisbee at his feet in response and he happily took it, not even commenting on the wolf spittle. With a whoop, he threw it in the general direction of my son.
So naturally, I ran after it.
Bit by bit, more kids began to join us. And while my lungs were burning at the sudden spike in exercise, my wolf was loving it.
Although I was kind of taking a back seat to his natural instincts, I could feel how much he’d missed having a community, and how much he desired being surrounded by other shifters.
Other wolf pups. It was his job as an alpha to nurture them.
Protect them. So, although it wasn’t the same as having our pack and all the souls he’d sworn himself to, it was still a lovely respite.
Time got away from me, and I didn’t realize how long I’d pushed myself until Natalie appeared at the edge of the clearing with Veronica on her hip.
“She wants Daddy,” she called. “I can take over this disc game from here.”
“It’s called frisbee!” Benny panted as I trotted over to her, a bit embarrassed that I needed to catch my breath in order to shift back to human.
“Yes, that’s what I said.”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Dabbah!” Veronica squealed as I approached, and that pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks.
Did she recognize me as a wolf? How ? The only time she could have possibly seen me in my wolf form was when her original parents were alive, so she would have been younger than nine months. Surely that wasn’t possible!
I returned to my human form a bit faster than I should have, already reaching for Veronica as I straightened. Veronica reached for me too, not even blinking that I’d suddenly changed from an animal to a man.
She knew. Somehow, she knew.
“Dabbah!”
“Hey there,” I said, taking her from Natalie. She walked forward and shifted. It was quite a different process than mine, considering how much taller her horse form was. I turned my eyes back to Veronica.
Sometimes I felt that not only was I failing her as a father, but also that I was hardly a father to her at all. But the way she was looking at me now, cheeks pink and her lips stained green—no doubt from a popsicle—made me feel far more secure in what I meant to her.
“You wanna go see how Giselle is doing?” I asked, feeling a bit guilty at having left Giselle on her own for so long. Well, technically not entirely on her own.
“Ah! Bababa guu!”
“Bababa guu,” I agreed, heading back to where our chairs had been. Giselle wasn’t there, but I pushed down my concern. I could follow her scent. It wasn’t exactly overpowering considering it was outside, but her combination of shampoo and perfume was pretty unique.
“Come on, Veronica, we’re on the hunt.”
Veronica clapped her hands. Her very sticky hands. So, I swung by the car to get a wet wipe.
Once my daughter was an appropriate level of sticky, we headed off to find Giselle.
I didn’t really have a good idea of where she would have ended up, but thankfully, it only took me a few minutes to find her in a circle of chairs around a small campfire grill. I grinned when I saw her, contentment bubbling up inside of me. She looked so completely natural in this space.
She had surprised me by not wearing a wig today, instead piling her soft, delicate hair on her head in a messy bun.
I understood why she covered her hair so often.
It was an aesthetic, and also a comfort, the same way a bright lip emboldened some women, or a new beard oil made some men feel all shiny and new.
I preferred it if it was something she liked to do for fun rather than something she felt she had to do, so the fact that she was out and about in all her glory was a great sign.
God, she really was stunning. She was leaning towards a woman sitting across from her, long, elegant neck tilted slightly, her pianist fingers supporting her chin as she beamed.
Even in profile, I knew her eyes were twinkling mischievously like they did whenever she felt she was being particularly clever.
I stood there, drinking her in. I couldn’t believe she was still happy to date me.
I was going glacially slow, but she never seemed to mind.
At the beginning of our arrangement, I braced myself each day for her to tell me to man up and stop acting like a virginal teenager.
But she never did. As a week turned into weeks, and weeks turned into more than a month, I began to fear that less and less.
And with less fear in me, there was room for other things to bloom.
I was relentlessly attracted to the woman—I always had been, but now the temptation to act on that attraction was growing stronger.
I hadn’t kissed her nearly enough, and I wondered what it would be like to pull her into my lap, my fingers bunching in her long skirt as I gripped her hips, encouraging her to grind against me.
How it would feel to wrap my hand in that fine, silken hair of hers and pulling it just right so that perfect mouth of hers opened in a gasp.
Mostly, I wondered what her face would look like if I got her to that pinnacle of pleasure. Would she scream? Cover her hand with her mouth? Bite down on her lip? Or would she be quiet, lips parted in silent ecstasy?
No heads turned toward me, which didn’t make sense with how clearly aroused I smelled, but a quick sniff of the situation told me the entire group in front of me was actually human.
Huh. I hadn’t expected that.
Shaking my head, I quickly got my libido in check. And just in time, because Veronica spotted Giselle and let out a happy shriek, chubby arms reaching out like I was chopped liver in the presence of the teacher.
Honestly, I couldn’t blame my daughter. Given the choice between me and her, I’d choose Giselle every time too.
“Hey there, pretty lady,” Giselle said, already rising to her feet. Maybe I was getting a bit confused from my own overpowering scent, but she smelled a bit… excited? And by excited, I meant aroused.
But no, I had to be imagining it. So, I focused on calming my body and my pheromones as I handed Veronica off to my date. And God, did it feel so right seeing Giselle with my daughter on her hip.
Is this a sign, Millia? Are you trying to give me your blessing?
How was I supposed to know?
I didn’t. Some part of me whispered that I shouldn’t be looking for permission from someone who had died, and the fact that I was doing so, meant I still wasn’t ready.
But I wanted to be. God, did I want to be.
“You okay?” Giselle asked, her curious eyes on me.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said, resolving not to get locked in my head. “Wanna get something to eat?”
Giselle’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Wait, is it time for that yet?”
“Almost,” I said, offering her my extended hand. Giselle took it, and even after the weeks that we had been dating, her touch was still electric. “I can smell things are getting close to being done. We can go get you an Ensure and have you drink that before getting in line.”
The smile she shot me could have abolished a level-five hurricane. “Yeah, I’d like that.”
“I’d like that too.”