Twenty-one
Waking up this way—crushed beneath Mason’s furnace of a body because it was the only way we could fit in one bunk, so tangled in the sheets I could barely move my legs—was good enough to hurt.
We still had another morning to wake up like this, but I was already mourning the loss.
Mason was no help. The first to stir, he woke me up with drowsy kisses along my cheek. I missed him like he was miles away.
“G’morning, Sunshine,” he drawled in a quiet singsong when I shifted underneath him. His voice in the morning was made of sin. I grunted in response. Mason kissed my cheek again. “Mm, radiant as ever, I see.”
Just because I don’t need sleep doesn’t mean I don’t love it.
“We overslept,” said Mason. “Breakfast starts in . . . two minutes ago.”
“Pass,” I grumbled.
“Fair enough.” Mason sat up. I blindly grappled for any part of him, latching onto his pajama pants. “Still gotta eat,” he reminded me.
“Breakfast isn’t going anywhere,” I said, finally blinking my eyes open.
My bite marks on his neck made my stomach burn.
Mason saw me looking and touched them lightly.
“I raise you this: it would be a waste not to make the most of all your resourceful packing. And I still haven’t had my turn with you. ”
I tried to disguise the rest behind lewd eyes and a suggestive smile, but my fingers in his pants gave me away, curled just this side of too tight.
After last night, after feeling so close to him, the thought of him leaving made me want to grasp, anchor, plant roots.
The lines of us had gotten knotted; letting go of him felt like being cut away.
It was mortifying, feeling so needy.
“God,” said Mason, swallowing visibly. “If you’re gonna put it like that . . .”
His stomach growled wrathfully. The noise burst through my stupid clingy bubble. I reluctantly released his pants.
“Never mind, go eat.” I rolled my eyes to cover up debilitating fondness.
“Wait, no, that wasn’t even—”
I had to shoo him out the door.
Mason’s borrowed tent was bagged in the corner, covered by the piles of snapdragons I had stubbornly retrieved from the forest floor, and the bouquet was in his gigantic water bottle.
Sometime around three, right after we’d crept back into the room, Mason had noticed a text from Blake announcing that Mason owed him.
We’d nearly been caught when the gym teacher came around at lights-out, knocking on doors and taking roll.
Blake had covered for Mason (and, by extension, me): something about us being dead-tired from the competitions and the heaviest sleepers he’d ever met.
It had definitely only worked because the gym teacher coached Blake’s youth football team and because of whatever odd charm made Blake so good at lying to teachers. He wasn’t so bad for a prime jock.
I crouched at my duffel for clean clothes and toiletries. With Mason gone, the night before caught up to me. Mates. I hadn’t had time to really think about it.
Now I did, but I still couldn’t figure out how to feel.
I had the impulse to be upset in some way—not at Mason, except maybe for keeping it from me, but mostly at fate or God or the stars or whoever had plucked my heart out of my chest, crisscrossed my veins, and put it back rewired without my input.
But I kept going back to what Mason had said. I would have missed so much.
I hugged his pillow, resting my cheek over its fading warmth. His dirty socks were on the floor. A bag of jerky peeked out of his backpack. I could feel him all over my body, and his blood inside me was still electric, hours later.
When Mason got nervous, like he had last night, his face turned boyish, young and big-eyed. But he never made himself smaller. He might fear, but he’d never cower.
I would have missed so much.
Grateful, he’d said.
Yeah. That was a good word for it.
The day was cloudy again, like every other northwestern day after September. I shoved my cap and sunglasses further into my bag. I was digging in a side pocket for socks when my fingers grabbed something solid and out of place. In the palm of my hand was a pocketknife.
I dropped it as if it had burned me. The handle was black wood. The blade, when I flipped it, was bright and reflective. I willed it to disappear. It didn’t.
The stealth Cedric would have had to move with to sneak it into my bag made me feel cold in the only way I could: from the inside out.
I jumped to my feet. Stashing the knife in my sleeve, I shuffled out into the common room. It was empty, everyone at breakfast. I crossed to the trash bin in two long strides.
I stood with my foot on the pedal for a long time, my closed fist raised over the open bin, paralyzed. Cedric had said tonight was a full moon. I used my other arm, the only part of my body that seemed able to move, to look it up. He was right.
Fuck. “Fuck.”
My hands had started to tremble. The coolness of the wood bit into my skin like I was holding the blade itself. Mason would never hurt me. Mason loved me.
But I could hear it. That sound, so deep it had seemed to come from the gutters of the lone wolf’s soul. A snarl that shook the branches in the trees. It had gone past animalistic. Animals could not be wicked.
Sometimes monsters lose control. That’s what makes them monsters.
My dad had never let me or Cedric see Mom’s body before they’d burned it. It had been that bad. I hadn’t wanted to, but Cedric had begged until he was crying. It was the only time I could remember hearing my dad truly yell, just one word, no. He’d looked like he’d been crying too.
Mason would never hurt me, but I couldn’t speak for that other thing inside of him. The beast. And I couldn’t be sure which of the two I would be sleeping next to that night.
I went back to our room and sank onto the bed with the knife still in my sleeve. Arms wrapped around a pillow—the one that smelled like Mason, no longer warm—I lay there until the trembling subsided.
***
The second day’s activities were cut short. Cella and I were just returning from a late-afternoon hike led by Miss Jenkins, clumped together at the back of the group, when the sky finally opened up and it rained.
All around the campsite, students shrieked and abandoned what they were doing to run for cover.
One girl slipped on the rapidly forming mud and came up looking like Annalisa after a face mask.
Everywhere, umbrellas ballooned open. Neither Cella nor I had come that prepared, and she latched on to my side like I was somehow supposed to fill the role.
I held one hand flat over her head. She looked at me unimpressed as her hair flattened to her skull, making her roots show.
Soon enough, she was laughing, water dripping from her chin.
Cella loved the rain. So did I. It was another reason we worked.
She enjoyed the rain in a whimsical, worm-catching, umbrella-dancing kind of way.
I liked the rain because, nine times out of ten, it meant I could stand directly under the sky for as long as I wanted without so much as a tingle.
Cella used to say we were frogs, her hopping from puddle to puddle, me emerging from the earth to soak up water through my skin.
That was the thought process behind the painting I’d gifted Cella for her tenth birthday, which haunts me to this day.
It was an awful first attempt at watercolor, and she refused to take it off her fridge where her whole family could see.
While students and chaperones beelined for the pavilion, Cella pointed at the sky and said, “Look there, that treetop.”
One tree, taller than its neighbors, just so happened to stand in a break in the storm cloud. The latter looked like it had burst it open, a needle to a balloon. At least, that was definitely what Cella was thinking.
Someone shouted our names, followed by a string of impassioned Portuguese. Lara came running, holding a tote bag over her head. I caught the word loucos. She threw her arms around Cella, fussing loudly over Cella catching a cold.
“One more minute!” Cella cackled. Lara looked at her like she was seeing her for the first time. “Go, go, get dry!”
But Lara only said, “You’d better make us soup when we’re both sick, then.”
“No one’s getting sick.”
It was Blake, jogging over, holding an umbrella over himself and Mason. Mason yelled when Blake edged him out to hold it over the girls. Cella immediately abandoned my side to attach herself to his instead. But Mason was smiling. And Blake was smiling. Why was everyone smiling?
Lara shouted, “This is why you don’t camp in fucking November!”
Why was I smiling?
Mason shrugged at me, resigned. His big grin chattered, but he would be fine.
It didn’t last the full minute. Cella and Lara caved after a sharp breeze and sprinted for the pavilion with Blake, cackling when Carrington’s star quarterback slipped in the mud and bruised his ass.
I followed closely behind until we neared the pavilion, where Mason pulled me another way.
The area was in chaos, chaperones trying to wrangle the group, so nobody noticed us slipping behind the building.
I checked my surroundings and yanked him against me for a short, damp kiss. There was something ferocious about knowing that this was something only we could do. We could soak to our bones, and we wouldn’t get sick.
“You’re freezing,” I said, hand on his cold cheek. I thought wildly, We match.
“You know what always warms me up?” said Mason. I prepared for something lewd. “A race.”
He took off into the trees. I stared after him. I was actually dating a child.
I ran hard, ecstatic that someone could keep up.
Everything had gotten very real, very fast between us. I got dizzy just thinking about it. I got dizzy all the time nowadays—looking at Mason, hearing him, thinking about him and that word: mate. It all seemed so breakneck, the kind of thing that should leave any normal person paralyzed.
Reckless, riding the high, I thought, It’s a good thing we’re not normal people.
***
There are two sides to every coin, and what goes up must come down, or whatever.
What happened was this: we didn’t run far, but we allowed ourselves to get lost.
What happened was this: the sun was setting earlier every day.
What happened was this: we sat among the roots beneath so much cloud and tree cover that I didn’t notice the sky darkening until the storm let up but the gloom didn’t.
At the first parting of the clouds, that inside-out cold feeling returned, and I said, “We should really head back.”
Reckless, I chided myself in my head. Reckless, reckless. It seemed louder each time.
“I told you, I’m fine,” said Mason. “I don’t even feel cold anymore.”
“Seriously.” I untangled myself from him and stood, tripping over the roots. I felt a crackling around my temples that I only later recognized as the beginnings of panic. “Come on. We can run back.”
Mason rose. “What’s wrong?” he asked, but I was already running, putting all of my focus into not slipping on wet leaves so I wouldn’t listen to his footsteps chasing me.
Chasing after me. Mason wasn’t chasing me; he was chasing after me.
But they sure sounded the same.
I gasped as I ran, feeling as though someone was squeezing my lungs. Breathing was a habit for me, another act for the sake of blending in, but for a minute it felt like a real need, and one I couldn’t sustain. My ribs had shrunk three sizes. I couldn’t manage a full breath in or out.
Mason grabbed my wrist, and something swelled unbidden in my throat, a scream. I forced it down. A strangled sound came out instead.
I turned on him, hair slapping my forehead. “We have to go.”
Mason took a startled step back. “What’s going on? Why are you acting so urgent?”
“Why aren’t you?” I snapped. “This isn’t fun anymore, okay? We need to get back before the moon comes out.”
“The moon? What are you . . . Oh.” Mason clicked his teeth. “Is that all? You could have just said something.”
“Mason, can we go?” I pleaded.
“Hey, relax.” He came closer as if to hug me, but I stumbled to keep the distance.
His expression morphed, creased with hurt, then with worry.
“Kieran. These things have rules, you know? No moonlight after midnight. That’s what we’re taught as kids.
The full moon can make us go a little crazy, yeah, but only after it reaches its highest point.
It’s never happened to me or anyone I know, because we’re careful.
We don’t want to hurt anybody. I know I can be an airhead, but .
. .” Mason trailed off. The hurt was back, fighting for space in his features.
That took me so long to process, Mason started leading me back toward the cabins himself. His hold on my wrist was loose, and he shot worried glances at me the longer I stayed silent, but he didn’t speak, bad as it looked like he wanted to.
Eventually, I whispered, “I’m sorry.”
Mason continued walking, his grip a little stronger now that I’d said something.
“Was that about your mom?”
I muttered a quiet affirmative.
“Don’t apologize,” he said. We had come to the backs of the cabins. He let go of me. “Just . . . you know. Ask, next time. Are you okay?”
Last night, he had accepted what I was—who I was—wholeheartedly and without hesitation. And now he was walking on eggshells because I hadn’t been able to do the same. Shamefaced, I said, “Fine.”
He let go of my wrist.
In our room, I asked him, “Can I have a minute?”
“I’ll go shower,” said Mason.
While he was gone, I closed the blinds and curtains, changed out of my wet clothes, stewed in white-hot humiliation, and reframed how I imagined my mother’s death, in that order.
The details were foggy, but we couldn’t have been out in the woods later than ten; Mom had always woken up early to tend her garden before going to work at the dance studio.
No moonlight after midnight. The man who had killed her hadn’t done so because he was a beast who’d lost control; he had done so because he was wicked.
I stood, dug the knife from the depths of my bag, went downstairs, and threw it in the trash.
Mason was back in the room when I returned, flushed from a hot shower. He sat on the bed and regarded me uncertainly, hand twitching like he wanted to reach out.
“Hey,” he said, with the same fear as last night, which I was beginning to recognize as fear of rejection. I felt like a colossal asshole, acting scared of him when he kept giving me reasons to trust him, and I kept giving him reasons to be afraid.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. I felt like a fucking kid. I was right in front of him, but he looked so lonely.
“Can I . . . ?” he said.
I climbed onto the bed next to him, draping my arms and legs around him from the side. Mason let out a long breath, twisted to hold me tightly, and leaned so we fell onto our sides.