5. Chapter 5 #2
“You’re sure you don’t want to offer her your protection? This mess should give her grounds for a divorce.”
He keeps grabbing the wrong end of the stick. Or is he testing me? Waiting for me to say women do nothing for me? I looked over at him and still couldn’t tell.
I needed to talk to Micah. Really talk. Even if it ended our friendship. I didn’t want to have that conversation in my house, though. Not if harsh words he might say would linger, poisoning my safe refuge. Where, then? I kept my eyes on the road, thinking hard.
The old Woodright place, maybe. We weren’t far away. Five minutes’ silent drive and I turned off the main road onto a narrow gravel track.
The lane ended at the long-collapsed hulk of a small house with poplars growing through the remains of its roof.
Kids came here to make out sometimes, but the high schoolers would still be in class, and anyone older was working.
Plus the approach road was long enough to hear a car coming.
I turned off the engine and got out without looking at Micah, gathering my nerve.
“Was it something I said?” Micah followed me a few paces onto a patch of weedy grass.
I turned to face him. “There’s something I need to say, and I want to do it here, where we have space.”
“Space for what?”
For me to run if you take this the wrong way. If you’re more hidebound and pack-bound than I’m hoping. “You remember that night we got drunk off our gourds together?” I held my breath.
“Nah, not so much,” Micah replied easily. “Bits and pieces.” The unbothered tone of his voice suggested that was true.
I blinked. “Really?” What the hell?
“I remember the whiskey, laughing, the world getting fuzzy. Not much else.”
I swallowed hard. Micah wasn’t keeping my secret back then. He didn’t remember. The realization shook my world and drew a strangled sound from my throat.
Micah tilted his head. “Did I say something stupid to you that night? Something… you hated? In my defense, I was drunker than any werewolf in the history of alcohol.” He smiled that crooked grin that I’d kept safe in my heart through some of the worst moments of my life.
He doesn’t remember.
A bunch of stuff from my last year with our pack rearranged in my head, like a kaleidoscope given a savage twist. Top of the list was the thought that he didn’t run off and court Janet to escape what we’d done together. He really wanted her. Just her.
And he didn’t keep his mouth shut for my sake, to protect me. Would he still have said nothing to his father the Alpha, if he’d actually remembered?
Those felt like two blows to the gut, one after the other. I wrapped my arms across my stomach to keep from doubling over.
I’d always reassured myself that no matter how unnatural being a queer wolf was, one man— one wonderful man— had thought I was worth more than who I wanted to take to bed, worth protecting from any pack-dictated fallout.
I’d imagined that the year we spent as packmates after that fateful night, a full year when he didn’t betray me and treated me almost the same as ever, meant he saw worth in the homosexual wolf at his side.
Plus, I’d clung to the hope that Micah’s rapid engagement to Janet was in part a denial of the attraction he’d felt to me, that something between us lingered and still drove him— even if in a direction I hated— long after that night. That she was a pretense for Micah. A rebound.
Nope. Neither of those.
My chest tightened till I could barely draw breath. I thought I might vomit, right there on the clean grass, and my vision sparkled around the edges.
“Okaaaay,” Micah said. “You smell really upset. It’s been twenty-five years. I think I can handle the embarrassment of whatever it was. Tell me what I did wrong.”
I shook my head silently.
“Oh yes, I must’ve. Because after that night, there was a new distance between us that hadn’t been there before. Then you ran, and I never heard from you again.” He waited, as if I might have some response, some excuse, but he wasn’t wrong.
When I still stood frozen, Micah sighed. “The best thing that’s happened to me in two decades has been finding my best friend again. Tell me how to not wreck our friendship this time.”
Heart pounding, I stared at him, my mind a blank.
I could tell him the truth. But that was a huge risk, with my twenty-five-year shield of confidence in him ripped away. He hadn’t kept my secret, hadn’t protected me. Maybe he would think the queer wolf should die.
I could lie. Make something up. Perhaps tell him that I’d liked Janet too and been jealous, and he’d teased me for it. Something normal, heterosexual. Untrue.
Or I could pretend not to know what he was talking about and return to the banal, ask him when he wanted to go to Yellowstone to fetch his own car.
Ask if he might come visit now and then on his travels.
Make my concern about the future, not the past. A bleak future where I’ll go on lying to him with every breath.
To hell with it. The truth happens now and let the fur fly where it will.
I cleared my tight throat. “It’s not about what you said. It’s about what I did. And yeah, maybe what you said.”
“Go on.”
I couldn’t look him in the face, couldn’t stand still. I paced, staring at the trees that surrounded us. “Getting drunk was your idea. Testing the limits of how fast we could metabolize alcohol.”
“That I remember. Although you didn’t protest too hard.”
I’d been both terrified and excited at the idea of being around a drunk Micah, letting down our guards with the booze as an excuse. No, I hadn’t protested. “We went to the abandoned cabin, our safe spot. Much like this one.”
“Except it had a roof.”
“Brought a bunch of blankets to make a bed, because you figured we might need to sleep it off.”
“Yes.” Micah spoke softly. Maybe he could recognize I was circling the truth to screw my courage to the sticking point.
Memories flooded me of a night I’d replayed a thousand times in my head. “Six bottles of whiskey. We started sipping, and then we tried to chug it, but neither of us could manage. You coughed and sprayed booze in my face.”
“You laughed.” His voice slowed. “And told me to lick it off.”
“You remember that part?”
“I wasn’t that drunk yet. Although… I’m pretty sure I did lick it.”
His tongue on my skin had been like a flame, setting me on fire.
I’d burned for him. “You did. We drank some more. Got silly, and sloppy. You spilled a bunch down your front…” I took a long breath.
Last one before I told him my truth. “I said, ‘Let me get that for you.’ I stripped off your soaked shirt and opened your shorts.”
Micah’s sharp breath echoed in my ears, but he said nothing.