Twenty-two
Mason and Blake earned three days of detention after their so-called grand finale on our last morning at the campsite. They had climbed onto the roof of our cabin, somehow, and taken a running leap onto the girls’ roof.
Cella was sick for two whole weeks after the field trip, and when she recovered, she fell into such a frenzy writing and rewriting her personal essays that I was pretty sure our guidance counselor saw her more than I did.
December brought with it icier rain, college application-related hysteria, and enough holiday cheer to make any pessimistically minded boy feel like the only sane person in the world.
I swore the Christmas music got more aggressive every year.
It hadn’t been two weeks since Thanksgiving, and I was already sick of the sound of bells.
Mason hung a mistletoe right in the doorway of the shed and looked severely smug when I noticed it, as if he needed any excuse to kiss me.
(He shielded our mouths with his hands when I tried to slip a little tongue and said, “Not in front of the children,” pointing toward our three-inch-tall poppy sprouts. “They’ve seen worse,” I said, “like this,” and demonstrated.)
December also brought sheep.
Crossing the fence into the Kane pack’s pasture was like entering a sky dotted with clouds—if clouds were itchy, noisy, and constantly bumping into each other, and the sky smelled like shit.
For the most part, the sheep gave me a wide berth, skittish at any sudden movements.
Mason’s favorite—a dark brown, three-month-old lamb that was nearly as big as some ewes—didn’t have any such reservations.
He was happy so long as Mason kept scratching at the base of his ears.
Mason guided my hand under Godzilla’s jaw, and when the lamb didn’t flinch away, I tried giving him a scratch.
Godzilla’s whole butt shimmied as he wiggled his tail.
“That means he likes it,” said Mason.
Getting me here had taken some convincing.
Mason had refused to let it go after I mentioned once, offhandedly, that I wished I could see his animals outside of the pictures he sent.
But to avoid running into any pack members around the farm, we would have to go late at night, and I was still paranoid about Cedric.
Mason’s winning logic was that if I never went home after school, I couldn’t be followed.
Mostly, I had gotten tired of his pestering.
The Carrington Otters were blowing through the playoffs, and this week’s semifinal game was on Saturday, so Mason’s Friday evening was free. We had met at the shed right after class and stayed until nearly eleven. He’d introduced me to the chickens first, and now: sheep.
“He doesn’t even know he’s going to be your dinner someday,” I said in morbid awe.
“Come again?” said Mason, appalled. “We don’t eat them!”
“At the meeting, your mom said—”
“My mom just likes to sound tough. We farm wool and milk. Jesus.” Mason covered Godzilla’s ears.
“We only eat them if they die of other causes. And that’s less about sustenance and more, like, honoring the flesh?
I was destroyed when we sold the farm back home.
We could only bring a few animals with us, obviously.
Like Godzilla and his mom—he was only a few weeks old when we moved.
” He pointed out a white ewe with a black face, bigger than the rest, and cooed at her. “Looking good, Goliath!”
I didn’t have to ask whether he’d chosen her name too. “You really care about them,” I said.
“Of course! I’m gonna be real sad when I have to leave.”
“Have to?”
“Bunch of alpha’s kids under one roof doesn’t really work, you know?
” Mason laughed it off, but he sounded sad.
“Once we come of age, we all start wanting to be in charge, but there can only be one heir. It can get nasty. My big sisters are at each other’s throats every day over the smallest things.
Lia will have to move out soon, start her own pack; oldest gets first dibs.
In a few years, I’m next. Sometimes I like to imagine Godzilla gets me since he’ll have to be separated from the ladies he’s grown up with soon. Why are you looking at me like that?”
It felt momentous, this moment, standing beneath the stars and finally finding the missing piece. I got it now, that deep-seated loneliness that showed through whenever Mason wavered.
He hadn’t meant it as a confession, but I felt the need to offer up something of my own, anyway.
“It’s the opposite for us. We’re safest staying in our clan. Staying isolated, staying fed—our secret’s the kind that’s easier to keep the more of us are involved.”
“Aren’t you applying to schools, though?”
“So I get away to college for a while. I’ll just get a couple of degrees so I can come back and take over my dad’s practice. That’s how it works. I’m . . .” Stuck, I didn’t say. Moving in circles, going nowhere.
Mason seemed to understand.
“Practice?” he asked. He also understood when I wanted a change of subject. It was one of the things I loved about him.
“He’s a vet. Large animal.”
“How have you not told me that?” he said, gesturing out at his field of large animals.
“I don’t make it a point to talk about my dad to the person I’m making out with.”
“We aren’t always making out,” Mason said, with a wistful huff like he wished we were. “Man, I’d love to meet him again.”
“Mason . . .”
“I know. I know we can’t tell anyone.” He squatted in front of Godzilla. “I can tell you, though, big guy. That gorgeous moody kid? That’s my boyfriend. And I can’t even let the whole world know. Ain’t that a shame?”
Godzilla said, “Bahhhhhh.”
“The whole world is definitely a no-go,” I said. Hesitated. “But . . . what about the school?”
Mason stood comically fast. “Do you mean that?”
“I’m tired of watching you get hit on all day.”
“Says you!”
“Girls don’t talk to me.”
“ ’Cause your resting face is fucking scary. They sure look, though.”
“How offensive of them.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“So . . . you would want to?”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “I’ve been dying to show you off. But won’t your family be an issue?”
“They don’t exactly have access to high school gossip,” I said. Secluded as they were, my clan had rarely ever made contact with my teachers, let alone anyone else at school. “It would never get back to them.”
And I wanted to hold his hand.
I wanted to be caught staring.
Mason wasn’t like me—he wasn’t meant to be hidden.
“Mine neither,” he said. He was vibrating with new energy.
“But I’ll tell them myself. If you’re okay with it, I mean.
They won’t be thrilled, but there’s fuck all they can say once they know we’re mates.
They have no choice but to be happy for me.
Anyone talks shit, I’ll rub it in their faces, parade you all over the house and hang your picture on the fridge. ”
“Rein it in,” I said. “One step at a time.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding vigorously. “Okay, let’s do it. The big coming out. Let’s do it right now. With fireworks. And rose petals. And a swimming pool.”
“It’s midnight on a Friday. How about this: you win the championship, and we can do it whenever, however you want.”
Mason pumped his fist and would have whooped if I hadn’t shushed him. “No shouting” was, like, the number one rule of trysting on werewolf territory. Mason forgot this often. I loved that about him too.
“I’m going to win so hard,” he whispered with the well-earned confidence of someone who’d already been contacted by college recruiters. “I want strobe lights and dancers with tiny skirts. And live music. Are you sure we can’t do this right now?”
“Who’s going to wear the skirts? The sheep?” I started to laugh but stopped short, sobering quickly. “And, anyway. There’s someone I have to tell first.”
The bright light in him flickered. “Look, you don’t have to. We can forget it.”
“No,” I said. Since California, things had been good.
Better than good. Something had been crushed between us during the field trip when I drank from him and slept beside him beneath the full moon.
Mason’s eyes had gotten brighter after midnight, his claws and teeth sharper, but I had curled against him anyway, his blood in my veins.
I had never seen so much or felt so seen.
But that still left the bars surrounding us, caging us in.
Sneaking around had lost its rush, and playing enemies was getting old.
“I’m sick of lying,” I said, hovering a hand over my belly. “Sometimes I actually feel sick, Mason.”
He shushed me, hugging me at the edge of the pasture, mumbling, “I know,” and, “I’m sorry.”
There was no deadline on him, or me, or her, or any of this. But I was starting to feel like I was running out of time.
Keeping it from her longer wasn’t going to make it any less of a betrayal.
***
It wasn’t until I was back in my car that it dawned on me how easily I had thought about loving him.
I walked inside in such a daze, I couldn’t find the wit to retort when Cedric walked past me in the kitchen, sniffed, and said, “Were you rolling around with the human girl’s dog again? Go shower; you reek.”
He said human girl with his usual disdain. Cella’s dog had died a year ago, but I couldn’t be bothered to correct him. I was in love.
***
Turns out, being in love doesn’t make it any easier to willingly drive to your best friend’s house knowing she might not be your best friend when you leave.
I turned around twice. That was four total U-turns: one at the end of my street when I chickened out; the next a minute later when I steeled my nerve; the third at the entrance to Cella’s neighborhood when I lost said nerve; and a fourth that landed me here, sitting in her driveway, squeezing the steering wheel so hard I could see the veins in the backs of my hands.
It was an appropriately gloomy Sunday. I might have sat there in my car all day if not for Cella opening up her bedroom window and holding up a piece of paper with the word CREEPY written in Sharpie.