Chapter 11
ELEVEN
BLAKE
“Blake! Breakfast is up!"
I groaned and rolled over in bed. Uncle Ian had a thing about us eating breakfast together most days. He went on constantly about it being the most important meal of the day like he was sixty-five years old instead of his actual age of thirty-five.
I grabbed for my phone on the nightstand. It was 8:30 in the morning. On a Saturday.
Too fucking early.
I slid out of bed and pulled on some sweatpants I found laying on the floor of my small bedroom.
It had been Uncle Ian's guest room/office until my parents dumped me on him a few weeks ago.
To his credit, he'd rolled with the punches on this like a champ. His wife left him several years ago, so I guessed he’d been kind of lonely, and he seemed happy enough to have me around.
I wandered out into the open main area of the loft condo Ian owned, which sat on the top floor of a revitalized warehouse building in the downtown business district of Shreveport. The place had a cool modern vibe with a ton of exposed brick and industrial finishes.
It was all up-and-coming over in this area of the city, with craft breweries, food trucks, and fancy apartments lining the street, and new ones were popping up every week.
We were just a few miles from the historic district where both Blackstone Academy and Centenary College were located.
Ian had been a professor of medieval history at the college for several years now.
"Ian, it's too fucking early," I complained as I dropped onto a barstool set at the large island in the open kitchen.
"Never too early for pancakes, buddy," he grinned at me from behind the stove.
He was always so fucking cheerful. His dark hair, similar to mine, was a little shaggy but still well kept.
He had on sweatpants and a New Orleans Saints T-shirt, and he was wearing a black apron covered in flour and old stains from who knew what.
He was a few inches shorter than me and leaner, but he kept in decent shape biking to work and swimming at the Y when he had the time.
He slid a giant stack of pancakes in front of me, which I promptly drowned in syrup and inhaled.
"See."
"Fine, I appreciate you feeding me."
"How was the party? I didn't hear you come in."
Ugh. How was the party? Fucking amazing and then also pretty fucking awful?
"It was alright," I replied, keeping it simple. "You know, prep school parties are pretty much the same wherever you are. Same old shit as back home."
He nodded. He'd pry a little bit with me but usually knew when to quit. He was cool like that.
My parents decided that I should spend my senior year in Shreveport with Uncle Ian when it became clear to them that I needed a more "specialized education" than they were able or willing to provide me.
Dad worked long hours as a lobbyist for environmental groups in Washington, DC, and once I grew older and became self-sufficient, Mom had gone back to working longer hours at her long-time career at an environmental policy think tank.
Our extended family's business had a vested interest in a healthy Earth and a stable climate, so my parents spent most of their adult lives working in that industry.
Working in government and living in DC, though, had allowed them to lead separate lives that were fairly disconnected from the rest of the family, who were mostly living in New Orleans.
My parents preferred it this way, but they didn't exactly count on their young teenage son showing a special knack for the type of skills coveted in our family.
We all ignored it for awhile, and I enjoyed my privileged life as a DC prep school kid living with my parents in a fancy rowhouse on Capitol Hill. I had a few good friends, and I enjoyed playing soccer for both the school and local club teams.
I'd had a girlfriend from the beginning of my freshman year through the end of my sophomore year with whom I fumbled through all of my firsts, and I’d honed my skills with the female body as much as a sixteen-year-old could.
But we’d broken up the summer before my junior year.
She'd been a sweet girl when we started dating, but by the end she'd become the kind of a stuck-up mean girl that could manifest from money, good looks, and popularity.
I extracted myself from that relationship, then kept to random hookups at the occasional party after that if I felt the need to scratch the itch.
I also continued to bury my head in the sand regarding who I was, until I couldn't ignore it anymore.
After a few incidents last year, my parents made the executive decision to send me to live with Ian, who would start training me.
He was also tasked with bringing me to larger family gatherings in New Orleans.
I'd been pretty pissed about it at first. I loved living in DC, and I didn't give a fuck about what the rest of the family thought about me or what I did with myself.
I'd finally relented when Ian called me himself and explained what he thought we could learn together.
So, in July, my parents flew down to Shreveport with me to meet up with Ian, who I hadn't seen since I was a young kid, and to let me get a feel for the place before I had to move there permanently.
I had not been very taken with the town at first. It was admittedly a culture shock to go from somewhere as cosmopolitan as DC to a place like Shreveport, Louisiana, so I'd developed some second thoughts once we got down here and shit became real to me.
Of course it followed that I'd had a blowout fight with my parents in the middle of Ian's condo.
I'd borrowed his car and left to drive around to cool off, and then I happened into Marilynn's bar and saw her.
One of the things Ian had explained I would need to get used to when living here was that the town was crawling with wolf shifters.
I'd met the occasional shifter growing up, but they didn't tend to congregate in super urban places like DC, which had very little in the way of woods and privacy for them to shift and run around or whatever it is wolves do.
But apparently Shreveport was home to one of the largest wolf packs in the entire South, so Ian had informed me I'd be seeing them around a lot, including at school.
Because of this, I’d been given an unnecessary lecture by both Ian and my parents about playing the part of the clueless human.
Of course, humans, as a rule, were not aware of shifters and the supernatural in general.
There have always been some human families who were "read into" shifter existence and culture since sometimes wolves married humans and the knowledge was passed down to any human children they had. That sort of thing was rare but normal.
What was not normal was my ability to spot a shifter, similar to the way they could smell each other and recognize another wolf. Everyone in my family could do it, and absolutely no one in the NWLA Pack needed to know that.
So there I was that random July night, driving around Shreveport pissed off, when I decided to use my fake ID to get a beer and just be alone with my thoughts for a while.
I'd seen the sign for Marilynn's and decided to check it out. I’d felt bad when I first walked in the door since there wasn't anyone else in the bar and it looked like they were about to close.
But then, holy fuck, I caught sight of Mave behind the bar and decided there was no way I was leaving.
She was stunning, with her long, toned legs on full display in her tiny cut-off denim shorts.
Her plain black tank top was just fitted enough to give a glimpse of her tight body and perky tits, and her long, honey blonde ponytail had fallen over her shoulder as she was wiping down the counters and putting away glasses.
When she looked at me with her gorgeous hazel eyes, I could see her checking me out as much as I was doing the same to her.
But it wasn't just that she was smoking hot that caught my attention. I could tell immediately that she was a wolf, but what really struck me when I sat down at the bar was that I could tell she was a powerful wolf.
I wasn’t able to just take a reading of what the wolves called "Alpha power" in any random wolf, but those who were especially strong with that power exuded a certain aura that I could pick up.
Admittedly I hadn't met that many wolf shifters, but I'd never been around one that gave off the kind of energy Mave did.
She'd served me my beer, and we'd exchanged mildly flirty pleasantries, and I'd started toying with the idea of asking her out, even though I thought she was older, and even though I was still mid-tantrum about moving here.
But as I'd sipped my beer and started looking at my phone, all of the texts from my parents and Ian started popping up, wondering where I was, chastising me for my outburst, assuring me I’d grow to like it here, etc.
, which all just made me feel angry and guilty.
I'd paid my tab and left, deciding that I'd swing back by the bar again sometime to see Wolf Girl if I ended up having to move here after all.
I did move, of course, and then, lo and behold, Wolf Girl was in my very first class at Blackstone Academy.
I thought it must be fate, if you believed in that kind of thing, and she looked just as pleasantly surprised to see me as I was her.
I'd immediately filed the vision of her in her school uniform (just legs for days under that skirt) in my spank bank, right next to my memory of her from the bar.