Chapter 13
By the time Robbie stepped out onto the porch, JJ was already down to his socks and boxers.
Robbie waited until JJ draped them over the porch railing with his jeans and sweatshirt before dropping his own towel.
JJ took off down the path leading away from the cabin, and Robbie followed, his feet feeling as if they weight about eighty pounds each.
But he knew from yesterday that this would help.
It didn’t take long either. The morning was cloudy and crisp.
Had he not been burning up, he might have even said it was probably cold.
They ran to the lake and then around to the far side before JJ pulled up to stop.
Both Robbie and JJ panted lightly. JJ leaned against a large boulder on the shore of the lake. Robbie leaned next to him.
“So,” JJ said, rolling his shoulders until they audibly crackled.
“So,” Robbie answered.
“Your mate was pretty shaken up about you this morning.”
“She’s not my mate.” Robbie’s stomach swooped, nausea rolling in like a wave. It felt wrong to say that, even if it was correct.
JJ clicked his tongue chidingly. “I know it’s just us and the birds right here, but you need to be careful about saying that. She’s your mate, remember?”
“Yeah. It’s just… new. Her being my mate.”
The word “mate” rolled off the tongue. He heard how it sounded different in JJ’s accent than his own. “Mate” versus “mahyte,” the a long and drawn out like a kiss.
They were quiet for a time, listening to the birds. The lake water lapped at the shore, the surface ruffling in the breeze.
“Won’t they know? That she’s not—”
JJ raised an eyebrow sky high. “That she’s not what?”
“You know.”
JJ looked out across the lake. He had a roughness about him that reminded Robbie of Hank. But a protectiveness, too. Something that also reminded him of Hank.
“How much do you know about mates?” JJ asked.
“I’ve known people who were mated. It seemed like a ‘’til death a long time from now do us part’ sort of thing.”
JJ sighed.
“Sometimes it is. That’s the hope, anyway.
If it’s a good one. But there’s mating, and then there’s mating.
Anyone can pick a mate. You hope you picked the right one.
You hope they’re kind to you, that they help, that they don’t go out of the way to make your life harder.
You hope they’re stable and take care of themselves, that they want to take care of you.
You hope they’re good and generous and caring and every other thing a person might be in a perfect world. ”
Robbie could hear the “but” as loud as his own heartbeat in his ears.
“But it doesn’t always work out that way.”
Robbie waited patiently.
“Sometimes you choose wrong. And you get burned. That’s how almost everybody ended up here. Not all of them, mind you, but a lot.”
“Did you get burned?”
JJ looked at his feet and crossed his arms over his chest. Robbie felt a momentary urge to giggle at the fact that they were having such a serious conversation buck naked. But he pushed it down. He didn’t really want to laugh.
“No, not like that anyway. But I wanted to take care of people who had.”
Robbie wanted to ask more but kept his mouth shut.
“But then there’s the kind of mates everyone dreams about,” JJ went on, turning to look at Robbie now.
“The kind that exists on a whole different level. Every single thing about them is meant just for you. You’re like those puzzle blocks that slot together perfectly.
You shore up each other’s weak spots and shine light on the strong spots.
You are perfect for one another on a cellular level. ”
“So it’s fate? Fated mates?”
“My grandma used to call them that. But I don’t like the term because it makes it seem inevitable. Like you don’t have a choice when, really, you have every choice in the world. Nothing bad will happen to you if you don’t choose them. Hell, you may never even meet them.”
Something about that made Robbie feel sad, like the real trick of fate was making someone so perfect, so molecularly significant, and then living your whole life without ever even knowing they existed.
“How do you know?” Robbie asked.
JJ shrugged. “I’ve never met mine. So I don’t know.”
“But if you had to guess?”
“If I had to guess, I would say that it’s probably like porn.”
Robbie snorted a laugh. “What the hell, man?”
“You know. Porn is impossible to define, but you know it when you see it. I imagine it’s a lot like that. Impossible to describe the feeling of finding that person, but you know it when you do.”
Robbie decided right then that he liked JJ, who lifted himself off the boulder and took off back down the path to finish circling the lake.
They ran full speed all the way back, pulling up to walk when they reached the scatter of cabins farthest away from the mess hall, with the word pack still rattling around Robbie’s thoughts.
He wanted to ask JJ what it meant to become pack, what it would mean for Nadja.
He wanted to ask him how JJ knew Nadja in the first place.
He wanted to learn everything about this place, but before he could ask, he and JJ were greeted by a lanky teenager jogging up the path toward them.
“We need your help down at the mess, boss,” they said.
“Not your boss, Frank,” JJ said.
“Whatever,” Frank huffed. “We still need your help. They can’t get the vent hood to work, and Rose tells me without the vent, they can’t light the stove, and without the stove, there isn’t gonna be dinner tonight.”
Robbie’s ears pricked up at that. He’d worked in kitchens off and on since he was a teenager. No matter what else he tried, he always came back to it, unable to resist the allure of the energy, the rhythm.
Before JJ could answer, Robbie said, “I know a bit about hoods.”
Both JJ and Frank blinked at him.
“Do we have time for me to go put some pants on?”
JJ clapped a hand on his shoulder and laughed loudly enough to startle the birds in the trees overhead.
When Robbie entered the cabin, he saw that the bathroom door was closed with the shower running.
If they were really mates, he would have knocked on the door before cracking it open and telling her that he’d be back soon.
Hell, if they were really mates, he probably would have knocked and then tried to sneak a peak of Nadja in the shower, wet and slippery like the girls in one of those carwash calendars his older cousin always had hanging on his bedroom wall when they were kids, suds and conditioner sluicing down her body in streams.
He shook his head to clear that very unhelpful image as he hopped into his jeans and pulled a T-shirt over his head, one from the bag of clothes JJ had dropped off before their run. It was from a fun run for a pediatric cancer nonprofit from what he could tell, but it was worn and soft.
He definitely did not think about Nadja combing her fingers through her soaking wet hair as he put on socks and laced his boots.
And he definitely did not think about her bending at the waist to dry her ankles, working the towel up her calves and knees and thighs toward her—he jumped to his feet, shaking his head again as if that would clear those crystal-clear mental images like an Etch-a-Sketch.
He went to the bathroom door to knock, to tell her through the door that he was heading out to the mess hall for a few minutes, that he’d be back in a jiffy.
But as he leaned toward the door, he heard her humming softly over the water running and pipes creaking.
It sounded like Fleetwood Mac, but he couldn’t tell for certain.
He stepped away from the door and walked to the exit, briefly amused by how strange it was not to check for his phone, wallet, or keys on his way out.
As it turned out, the hood was filthy, the filters completely clogged, which had overworked the fan.
He worked on cleaning the hood itself and the filters while another wolf, Whit, tinkered with the wiring on the fan’s motor.
They got the hood working again, but then Robbie noticed how the stove itself would benefit from a more thorough cleaning and disassembled the whole thing.
After he got the stove put back together, he found himself standing at the large stainless steel prep table in the middle of the kitchen, dicing onions and sautéing them with an unholy amount of ground beef that would become pasta sauce before Rose chased him out of the kitchen with a swat to his backside with a wooden spoon that was so reminiscent of his ma that he felt his throat tighten a little bit around his laugh as he trotted out of the kitchen’s side door and into the darkening early evening.
His heart was lighter than it had been in a long time as he took both steps onto the porch in one jump, throwing the door open, and shutting it behind him, talking as soon as he got inside.
“Hey, Doc,” he said, making his way across the living room in two strides and heading toward the bedroom, where the door was open. “Sorry I’m so late. I got caught helping with some equipment in the kitchen and then I—”
He stopped abruptly, frozen in his tracks, his tongue a lead weight in his mouth that had his jaw dropping low, at the sight of Nadja standing in nothing but a pair of panties, reaching behind her to fasten a bra, her elbows kicked out and back like wings, her chin dropped low and her fingers fumbling to get the last hook through its loop.
She gasped when she saw him and froze herself, clearly torn between covering herself, her nipples nearly visible over the drooping cups, the straps falling down her shoulders, and finishing the task at hand.
“Robbie,” she said breathily, and he watched as her stomach contracted on the exhale.
Before he could stop himself, he said, “Do you need some help?”
“No, I’ve got it. It’s just this clasp is bent. I should hook it first, but I—” she stopped and, for a moment, they just looked at each other.
“Let me help you,” he said, his voice low and soft, the way it sounded when he recorded his stories, not the way it sounded when he talked in his real life.
She turned, giving him her back and released the clasp, her hands shifting to her front.
He wasn’t that much taller than her, certainly not tall enough to see over her shoulder and down, but the way her elbows turned to sharp points made him think that she was clutching the bra over her breasts, holding them in.
Lord knew he felt like he needed something to hold himself in.
He reached out and took the two halves of the band in his hands. She gasped.
“Sorry,” he said quickly.
He tried to touch her skin as little as possible as he examined the hook, which had been bent down.
“Sit tight,” he said, dropping back and going to the cabin’s small kitchen, to the silverware drawer, retrieving a butterknife that had a floral pattern on the handle.
He came back to the bedroom and slipped the knife in between the hook and the fabric, prying it upward with gentle force, until it was the right shape again.
He put the knife in his back pocket and then, with both hands again, brought the band’s halves together, the hook slipping easily into the eye.
He resisted the urge to trail a fingertip down the divot of her spine from the bra’s clasp down to the lacy trim at the top of her panties.
But that was mate stuff. And as she had told him last night, this was a mating of convenience, nothing more.
A farce until he could shift and she could be on her way, as if they’d never met.
So instead, he coughed into his hand and took a step away from her.
“I fixed it.”
“Thank you,” she said, her voice just above a whisper. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I’m your mate,” he said, regretting the words as soon as they fell from his mouth, no matter how right they felt. But she smiled at him, a soft, shy smile, and he smiled back with all of his teeth. He liked making her smile. He liked fixing things for her.
He remembered what JJ said down by the lake, about how you hoped your mate would be kind and help you, that they would take care of themselves and want to take care of you.
And if that was all he could do, if all Nadja could take from him was fixing small things, making her life a little bit easier for as long as it took for his life to change forever and for her to go back to hers being exactly the same, he would do it.
He would do it, and it would have to be enough.
He cleared his throat. “It’s supper time at the mess,” he said.
“Will you come with me?” Nadja asked.
What he wanted to say was “Always.” What he wanted to say was “I’ll follow you anywhere you go.” But those were things you said to a mate, not to your therapist who was selflessly pretending to be your mate to save your skin.
He couldn’t explain it, but he did want to follow her everywhere. To fix her bras and change her oil and hold her every night until she smelled so much like him and he smelled so much like her that it would be as if they were together even when they were apart.
And so instead, he said, “Of course I will.”
Which was almost as good and yet nowhere near enough at the same time.