10
Shawn
I wasn’t going to kiss her. I wasn’t. That would have crossed a line.
Ok, I can’t pretend annoying her isn’t one of my favorite things to do and that hasn’t been my primary motivation, but I can handle being normal around Elise, I think. I can hold still and say very little, and pass for a normal person around my ex-wife, if I really, really need to.
I just don’t know that I can juggle that and the knowledge that I’ve somehow just met my mate.
And, obviously, I won’t try to kiss Elise if I have a mate, somewhere. In fact, I’m sure all my complicated lingering feelings about my ex-wife will probably dissolve the minute I actually find said mate again, right?
God, I fucking hope so.
Still, maybe I’m not any more ready for a mate now. Not when I’m still jerking off to the thought of my ex-wife’s thighs.
I drag a hand over my face. This is going to be a long week.
This damn house. There’s no living here, no avoiding everyone. I don’t know why I even came back here. I know for damn certain there’s no peace to be found.
I’m working in Dad’s old study when my mom steps inside and closes the door behind me. I half-wonder if Elise complained about me to her.
“I’m headed to St. Mary’s,” Mom says, shrugging into a cardigan. I blink. It’s not a Sunday, but I remember my grandparents attended mass even during the weekdays after they retired. I haven’t been in nearly a decade.
“Do you . . .” she starts to say, but then shakes her head a little and backs out of the question. “You wouldn’t want to come with me.”
“No, thanks anyway.”
She doesn’t leave, though, and I have a familiar sinking sensation in my stomach that I’ve felt before most lectures.
Mom closes the door and puts her hands on her hips like I’m about to be grounded. “I saw you and Elise talking together earlier.”
“We were catching up.”
She hums, a note that indicates both that she heard me, but that she’s not sure she believes that was all.
I’ve been a functioning adult for over a decade now, and, somehow, I still feel like a teenager when she does that. All of a sudden, it’s like I never actually grew up and moved out and figured life out for myself; I’m just a kid she needs to teach how to behave in the world.
I save and close out of the editing program so I can give her my full attention, taking in a deep, not calming enough breath. I want to have a conversation like rational adults that can respect each other. I’m not going to treat her like a tyrant who wants to micromanage me, and hopefully my mother will pretend she thinks I’m a functioning adult.
“Look, out of respect for Elise and the uncomfortable position we’ve put her in, I don’t want to keep talking about this.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not about that. I just . . . you know you shouldn’t get close to her. Especially not so close to the full moon. Your brothers understand this, I don’t know why you have such a hard time with the notion.”
I think my mother just implied I’m a slut, but that’s somehow not what I have a bone to pick with.
I try not to roll my eyes. “What are you afraid of? That I’ll run away with another human? Ruin Logan’s wedding with my drama?”
“Coyotes,” she answers coolly, holding me in her gaze. “People getting hurt, you included. Hard as that may be for you to believe.”
She doesn’t want to see me go feral. I know that means she’s concerned for my safety, my sanity, my well-being. But it’s hard to feel the warmth in that sentiment. I know how easily it becomes a tool of control.
I meet her eye as I shut the laptop. “Except, I’ve been out in the world, far from my pack. I’ve lived years without one. I haven’t gone feral.”
“Would you even know? There weren’t any animal attacks here until you showed up again,” she says, her voice terribly quiet and full of emotion.
Her words strike a little fear in me, and I try to conceal it.
“You do have a number of other coyotes running around, you know. While it’s a lot of fun being the disappointment child, I think maybe you could let someone else have the honors for a bit,” I reply, fighting against the urge to snarl and snap.
“Your brothers, Laura, they have all stayed here. They use the brewery’s basement during the full moon instead of leaving it to chance. The pack bonds keep them safe.”
Her stare is hard. She’s so convinced this is the only way to look out for her children.
I sigh, and step back. This is the same conversation we had ten years ago, when she begged me not to move away, and then a couple years later, when she wouldn’t hear of me bringing home the girl I’d met and wanted to introduce to everyone. The conversation we had a million more times when I married Elise.
I wish I was surprised that time hasn’t altered even a little of her position on this.
I chew on my lip. I’m sure she would be overjoyed to learn that I’ve found my mate somewhere in this town. But I’m not exactly ready to provide how I know that either, until I’ve figured out exactly who it is.
Telling her would be giving in. I’ve held this stubborn position that I know what’s best for me for years, and I’ve paid the price of exile for it. Giving her the satisfaction of being right isn’t something I’m ready to do.
The thing is, I couldn’t care less about going out and finding my true mate right now. Not when Elise is in the house.
Turning away, her words are aimed at my back. “Having a wolf mate would keep you safe—”
“Mom. Stop it. We’re just going in circles on this.”
She steps back and lets me leave, but says quietly, “I’ll put in a word with St. Michael for you.”
My teeth gnash together, but I don’t say anything. That was how all our old arguments used to end, before I stopped talking to my family almost completely for a while. She was always lighting candles in my name at her parish and letting me know. Maybe it was her way of saying she still cared, but it felt just as much like a barb.
I don’t believe in the church anymore, the teachings, any of it. It was hard to separate the ways it tangled with my wolf, the net I was ensnared in.
I’ve sat through many masses, but there wasn’t ever any specific sermon about what a mate was. Sure, the church made a specific point to emphasize the sacrament of marriage, the importance of having children within that marriage, and raising them in the teachings of the church. I don’t know how it took me twenty-five years to realize how culty that sounds.
At home, the conversation connected our wolfish halves with its messages, impressing on us the need for a strong pack.
But I’d been working through the frayed edges of its web for years now. I knew reciting Hail Mary’s didn’t relieve the excess anxiousness the full moon brought on, but running did. Perhaps what a mate was didn’t exist only in the context of God and religion. Maybe it could exist separately.
Like I’m going to just find the meaning of what a mate is to me out in the woods, I scoff to myself.
My feet carry me automatically back toward my old room, a muscle memory about as old as I am. The hallway is dark upstairs; it feels musty and uninhabited as I make my way through it and nearly jump out of my skin when I realize Elise is there, standing in the shadows.
Is no room in this house safe from her? I’m not going to survive this.
“Holy shit,” she squeaks, jolting back a step, clutching an armful of plates to her chest. They rattle together, but louder still somehow is her heart rate, picking up dangerously fast.
It makes my pulse quicken as well. It’s not that I haven’t been able to hear hers before, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as keenly tuned into it. It’s always just been in the background.
My every sense feels more precise around her. In the same way I can hear enthusiasm in my brothers’ footsteps when they stomp down the stairs, or annoyance in the quiet, steady gait my mother walks with, I know what sort of mood Elise is in just by breathing. She has an intoxicating sort of heat to her, the sort of warmth you feel in the back of your throat after a sip of whisky.
Right now, I can smell the sting of anxiety on her. It reminds me of trying a spoonful of vanilla extract and discovering its taste is purely alcohol. It rebuffs the warmth of its essence.
Clearly the kitchen incident is still on her mind as well. Her cheeks flush as her eyes meet mine, and she quickly looks at the ground again. “You startled me.”
“Sorry about that. I didn’t think anyone would be up here.” I sigh, ready to just leave and forget all this. I feel like I need to keep apologizing. “Um, before, in the kitchen—”
“We don’t need to talk about that,” she cuts me off quickly. I nod and jam my hands in my pockets. Right.
I glance to the faint moon starting to rise in the evening sky, feeling its presence start to heat my blood, waking the wolf. I swallow and take a step back from her.
“Do you maybe want a light on?” I ask, glancing around for one. My hand finds the antique switch plate. The wall sconces don’t turn on when I flip them.
“I tried it earlier. I think these lightbulbs burned out a while ago,” she sighs, before her eyes fall back on the wall where she was staring before.
The wall is full of family photos, and unlike downstairs, there are a few that still include me with my brothers. We’re all baby-faced and in various states of childish gangly-ness and endless grass-stained knees.
The frames are all heavy with dust, set up to trace the family lineage the further down the hall they go. Photos of Mom and Dad become younger, the photos of my brothers and me playing in the dirt become each of us as babies in her arms, to the one of her and Dad on the steps of a church, leaving their wedding.
I get to the place Elise has been standing, staring. There’s a number of pictures of my mom, barely nineteen, standing with her older sister in front of a number of suitcases. The strong resemblance between them remains even with the shaking disposable camera it was taken with.
I can only imagine what is going through Elise’s mind. She’d been an only child and her parents had quickly gotten divorced. Looking at our pictures, she probably sees the sort of big happy family she always wanted for herself.
“The nice thing about weddings is they get to be little family reunions, I guess,” Elise says, nodding to them with a wistful sigh and a face full of misplaced nostalgia, “What’s Deanna’s sister like?”
“I don’t know.”
Her brow pinches as she looks at me. I hate to disillusion her of her fantasy, that a family can be the sum of its happy snapshots. Maybe that happy families can exist.
“That’s not Laura’s mom?”
“No, Laura’s mom is Aunt Jenny, she’s from my dad’s side of the family. You might see her at the wedding. In the picture is my Aunt Danielle. She died before I was born,” I say. “We don’t talk about it much.”
The crease between her brows deepens. “Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s ok. You couldn’t have known.”
I can tell she wants the full story but isn’t willing to ask.
It’s just one of the many things I can’t tell her the whole truth behind, even the pieces that I do have. I’ve gathered some details from other family members, little pieces that fall to the side that were somehow the most important.
Maybe it’s the root of everything we were supposed to keep secret. Elise never understood why I couldn’t bring her home to my family, and what we were afraid of happening.
“It doesn’t sound half so scandalous now, I suppose. Danielle wasn’t supposed to have a boyfriend, but she did, and they were caught fooling around. Teenagers in the seventies, I mean, who would have guessed? There was some fear she’d get pregnant, and it would ruin both their futures. Their parents agreed to separate them.”
For most wolf packs, going feral is at most an urban legend. And that legend is always about a wolf becoming estranged from their pack, or losing their mate, who in turn loses the will to turn back, often becoming mad with unchecked bloodlust.
It largely depends on who tells the story.
“She was pretty heartbroken. At the time, there were a lot of reports about a wolf being seen in the area, attacking farm animals, pets, you name it. Danielle started hiking all the trails alone. One day she didn’t come back, and they filed a missing person’s report.”
The way my mom tells it, there was another werewolf family her parents had been trying to arrange a match for Danielle with, even though she had insisted she’d found her mate. They hadn’t believed her.
“There are some dots there you could probably connect if you wanted to. Mom’s never cared to speculate, though.”
Mom never had to say it for us to know that she blamed herself for keeping her sister’s secret as long as she did. I know she blames me for leaving when I should have known better.
“Sometimes it’s just easiest to say that my mom likes to keep her family close.” I sigh. “I don’t mean to resurrect old arguments, but . . . there are a lot of answers you deserved, that I still don’t know how to give you.”
I know exactly the words to use, but my jaw welds shut on them. My mom’s every parenting decision is entirely influenced by her sister’s death.
It’s too crass, too unfeeling, too rough to do justice for what my mom went through, even if it’s the simplest of truths.
Maybe it’s easiest to just say no one in my family has ever been to therapy.
I expect to see her eyes harden, the way they always did when this topic came up. Elise had never said how much she resented my family for coming between us in our marriage. She didn’t have to, I still knew. It was hurting her, but I couldn’t just take her side. Not when I knew turning feral could just as easily happen to one of my brothers. Or to me.
But there’s a softness almost like understanding in her face that makes me feel like I should just tell her everything. If only it were that easy.
I press on, gesturing to happier photos, further down the wall. “A little while after that, she got married.”
It’s not really important to the story that she married the same man her parents had been trying to set her sister up with. That a connection to a respectable werewolf family was more important than her feelings on the matter.
For a few more moments, we stand there, staring at the photos. She’s smiling in her town hall photo with her arm around my dad, but I’ve always thought she looked uneasy, the undercurrent of desperation one might not know to look for. So terrified that what happened to her sister would happen to her that she did whatever her parents wanted.
I sigh and shift my weight from one foot to another. I don’t know how I can make Elise understand the fears that were in play then, the same ones that have come back to haunt us now.
“Do you need a hand with that?” I gesture at the stack of plates probably growing heavy in Elise’s arms, raising a brow, maybe too abrupt a change in conversation. I don’t know how long she’s been standing here, staring at my family photos, but we probably shouldn’t linger here too much longer.
She starts to shake her head, and then reconsiders and hands them over, wincing at each fragile noise they make as they shift against each other. “I thought I’d get these out of storage now and give them all a rinse, so they’ll be ready for the reception. Deanna said there were also some tablecloths up here. I was going to put them in the wash.”
“I can show you where we keep those.” I nod, taking the stack of plates and internally roll my eyes at myself. Really, I should be making a point of helping literally anyone else with anything else. But I can’t help the fact I just gravitate toward her.
I lead her down the hallway to the linen closet, opening the doors to show her the way it’s organized.
“There’s so much wedding prep left to do.” Elise sighs as she follows behind me. “I kinda feel bad. Logan could be having a grand wedding, extensively planned out. But everything feels so rushed right now. If we had more time, I could do more.”
“They wouldn’t push it back. I think his future in-laws are worried about him getting cold feet.”
“If he’s getting cold feet, that’s all the more reason to delay it. I’d hate for him to get married and then have to go through”—she dares a brief glance at me—“well, what we did.”
I feel like I’m supposed to agree with her, say something about how messy and painful divorces are, that we would know, how I hope my little brother never has to experience that.
But it feels disingenuous, and I can’t bring myself to say any of that. Not when I don’t regret any of it.
I hum back a non-answer. She’s painfully close to the way everything connects, but maybe too close to see how. That line of conversation dies as she continues down the hall, taking it in.
“I haven’t fully explored upstairs. I mean, I haven’t really been at the house much here except when Aiden and Laura want to have a movie marathon because Laura’s TV is really small—oh.”
She falls silent, and when I turn around, she’s not looking at the linen closet, but across from it.
The door still has a handful of stickers unevenly applied, spelling out my name on my old room.
She doesn’t pause or ask or anything, just puts her hand on the doorknob and steps inside, the hinges creaking as the door swings open.
I set the armful of plates down on a shelf in the linen closet and follow her.
Elise stands in the center of the room, slowly turning around, taking everything in. The faded blue walls, the little action figures lined up on the shelves, old clothes still folded in a laundry basket, never put away.
It hasn’t changed at all.
Nothing’s been touched, since I’ve been staying in a guest room downstairs. In a way it reminds me of how my dad’s office was left after he passed, the door simply closed, and everything left alone. It feels like a memorial to a much younger version of myself, someone who never left home and didn’t question his parents out loud.
I don’t even realize how lost I am in staring at all of it, pieces of myself I left behind without even thinking. The jar full of sharpie markers, a stack of VHS tapes, some still left out of their faded cardboard cases, a sheet of temporary tattoos half picked clean, a stack of CD cases, a number of them open and spread across the top of the dresser, because none of the disks were in the right case, and half of the plastic hinges were broken.
“This was your old bed?” Elise asks, and her voice pulls me from ten, twenty years ago. I blink and feel like I’ve been three separate people in my life, the person I was with my family, who I was when I was just with her, and the person I’ve been while alone.
I look up at her, the way she turns and sits down on the edge of it. “Yeah, Batman sheets and everything.”
“My god. I never knew what a dork you were,” she teases, wrinkling her nose with a smile in a way that breaks my heart all over again. I didn’t think we would ever have a moment like this, and now I don’t know what to do with it.
I nearly sit on the edge of the bed beside Elise, but manage to stop just in front of her. “Well, I couldn’t let you know just how out of my league you were.”
She rolls her eyes at my self-deprecating smile, but this moment has a hold on me that tightens with every breath I take.
“You have got to stop flirting with me,” she scoffs, but she’s smiling so wide, I doubt she believes it.
Elise is staring at me with her big brown eyes. I’m both terrified of what’s going on behind them, what she’s thinking, and desperate to know. She left me, I don’t want her to know about the bits of her I’ve been holding onto. I can’t tell if I’m trying to find a hint of hope in her eyes about what that means.
God, I don’t even know what it means.
Maybe it’s the way the afternoon sun streams in, cutting the same faded path on the carpet and furniture, bringing out a warm red in her hair. Maybe it’s the way Elise and my home are worlds that were never meant to collide. But here they are and if I don’t leave this room, this moment, maybe they can exist together perfectly, fitting together seamlessly without disturbing a thing.
Maybe I could tell her I don’t regret a thing about getting married to her.
I ache to. The words almost tumble out of me at the same time I feel the urge to just bury my face in her shoulder and take a deep breath. There’s something about the way she smells. It makes the pounding in my head stop, the clawing in my chest cease. All I need for the rest of my life is to just breathe it in.
But I would always want more.
And maybe that’s why we have to go our separate ways. I wouldn’t be able to just leave her alone, to let her live her own life, when I daydream about putting my chin on her shoulder and my hands in her back pockets.
“I’m going to take those plates downstairs,” I say instead of anything else, and with that sliver of reality, somehow talk myself into leaving the room.
She doesn’t follow me out to the linen closet again, and I’m glad for that much. I need to actually work on staying away from her, not just keep telling myself I’m going to.