15
Shawn
It turns out I don’t actually remember where any of the plates should go. And I’m not sure which of the pretty wood panels in the lower-shelf units conceals the dishwasher, so I opt for handwashing the plates and propping them up to dry on a dish towel.
I used to really hate doing the dishes, but right now it seems like the only thing I can do that doesn’t start more shit. I keep thinking things can’t get any worse, but that bar keeps being pushed, all too often by my own family.
Of course, my mom is quick to find me after dinner, showing up in the kitchen doorway when I’m halfway through my task.
I gnash my teeth together. I’d like to just ignore her for the rest of tonight, maybe tomorrow too. Instead, I glance at her, working against the muscles in my jaw to find what I can even say to her.
“You had no right to tell Elise about my ring.”
“So, you hadn’t told her,” my mom observes, like she has everything figured out, and I resist the mighty urge to roll my eyes. No, I didn’t tell my ex-wife I kept both our wedding bands out of sentimentality. I wonder if she’d have done that if she knew who Elise really was.
I feel my hackles rise in response, when I catch sight of the waxing moon in the window, pale blue in the early evening, inching its way to full. Its influence on our blood is the last thing we need right now.
There’s something so repellent about this conversation, something almost physically nauseating. We’ve had this fight before, with and without my dad present, a hundred times. Ever since I met Elise and was naive enough to tell my mom about the girl I’d been smitten with.
“I just don’t think it’s smart to spend so much time with her. She’s busy prepping for the wedding, and you . . .” she trails off, but I feel like I know the next words by heart. They’ve been carved into my chest.
“You shouldn’t get involved with her, Shawn.”
“That’s—” I bite down on the words before I can say them. She’s not my wife anymore.
My claws puncture the soapy sponge clenched in my first. Anger burns up through my veins, I can feel my transformation threatening to unravel my rationality with feverish, raw, unmitigated fury.
I step back, shutting the water off in the sink and putting the unfinished dishes aside. I take a long, deep breath through my nose.
It’s not nearly as calming as I would like it to be.
“I can’t deal with this right now,” I tell my mom, expecting resistance. “I’m tabling this for tomorrow, ok?”
“Shawn, we need to talk—”
“I am not fucking able to have a rational conversation right now,” I snarl, unable to contain myself, my every nerve a live wire.
It breaks my heart to see the genuine surprise on her face. For all our fights, there are so few times I’ve actually yelled at my own mother.
“I need a breather. Tomorrow, ok?”
She glances at the window, and slowly nods. With that, I leave the room, the house, the property.
It’s too early in the evening to shift, but I feel the need to go running in the woods and burn off the anxious, angry energy thrumming through my veins. If I’m dead tired, at least I won’t start more shit. I hope.
There’s a wolf going feral in Mystic Falls, and I’m terrified it might be me.
I don’t know for sure what was left of that deer behind the bar was my wolf’s doing, but I can’t rule myself out. Every night closer to the full moon, I lose a little more of myself to it. I don’t always remember why I have to pick little clumps of fur out of my teeth.
There was one time in my memory that our dad killed a coyote just before a full moon. He’d been pretty unpleasant to be around during the day in that period, there had been some issues with the brewery that he’d been stressing over.
As glad as I am that he’s gone, some part of me wishes he was here so I could ask him questions about it. The wiser part of me knows I’d never really been able to ask him anything.
This last week, it’s been getting harder to control my wolf than it usually is near the full moon. The aconite ale hasn’t been doing enough to keep my wolf at bay since I got here. Just going for runs until I was too exhausted to do anything except collapse in my bed wasn’t helping the way it usually did either.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been avoiding finding my mate. There’s only a couple of things that will drive a wolf feral: losing one’s pack, and being kept from one’s mate. Well, I’ve lived without a pack for a while, it can’t be that.
I don’t know how to begin looking for my mate. I could try to follow a scent, but I’d need to pick it up first. While my knot may be the main evidence I have that she exists in Mystic Falls right now, it’s not exactly something I can search dick-first with.
Besides, I wasn’t really sure I wanted to look for my mate. When I thought of my parents’ union, any bond resembling that didn’t feel like something worth wanting.
What would be a mate outside the ideas I was raised with? Hell, what was even a healthy marriage?
I never wanted to be like my father, having the final, unquestionable word on everything. That I couldn’t bring any concerns I had to him without expecting it to result in a lecture and feeling like I was in the wrong no matter what. Growing up with it was bad enough, but I couldn’t imagine having that in a life-long partner. Even my failed marriage seemed better than that. I couldn’t count how many times Elise had pointed out flaws in my thinking, how often I had been relieved that there was someone who I could be wrong out loud to, and not feel shame or guilt about it.
No one ever said it explicitly, but a lot of what I learned from church was that if it felt good it was probably a sin. Guilt as a lifestyle had been inescapable until her.
It had always been safe with her to be incorrect or have weird little shortcomings. I smile, remembering a lazy Saturday she had handed me her phone and I’d passed her my laptop. I called her dentist to make her an appointment because phone calls still flustered her, and she went through my email draft to a client to word it a little more professionally.
And then we got up to make dinner together. She hated touching raw chicken, so I always did that part, carefully trimming the lines of fat off the edges. In that little apartment, we had a gas stove that I absolutely hated. Perhaps I had been spoiled by growing up with a sleek glass electric range in my mom’s house, that didn’t seem quite as dangerous as sparks, gas, and open flames. I’d hand Elise the ingredients as she asked for them and scratch her back while she stirred them around in the pan; at least until she started piling up dirty dishes for me to wash.
I miss the home I used to have with her, the evenings with my hands becoming pruney under endless dish soap and hot water while we planned out our week. Perhaps a mate wasn’t grand or romantic or even mystical at all.
No sacraments, no rites or rituals. Just someone who made the mundanity of life feel wondrous.
Of course, it took me a couple minutes before I even realized I started filling in the idea of a mate with just her. I need to stop doing that. I sigh as I take another wandering turn down another street.
There’re a few leftover summer fireflies floating out of the grass, especially the taller, wilder areas that bleed into the woods. The meandering jog is just starting to make me feel better. The winding hills are steep and more difficult than I was used to in the Boston suburbs, I’m halfway to town when a sound stops me.
There’s no mistaking it. The sniffles are coming from a nearby house, all too familiar.
I stop and sigh when I can see her from the street. Elise.
I don’t know what instincts led me here, since I wasn’t really paying attention where I headed on the jog, but from the front of the house I can smell Laura’s car freshener still faintly hanging in the air. I can assume my cousin dropped Elise off after that train wreck of an evening.
More than that, I can smell her. I feel like I could find it and follow it from across the country.
I scrub a hand across my face. Don’t go in there. Don’t make things worse than they already are. Especially after the incident at the bar. Especially not now, when the moon is rising.
But it’s Elise. I can’t ignore her when she’s crying.
The door is wide open to the cool autumn air, and I tug open the screen door to stand on the threshold, giving a quick knock.
Elise looks up from where she’s sitting at the little dinette, immediately inside the front door. The place has the same charm as her old apartment. I recognize a lot of her things from when we used to live together, plants and quilts and endless goofy oven mitts stacked everywhere.
She spares a glance to me, before her face crumples further and she buries it in her hands.
I pad my way into the room on bare feet, just loud enough that she can hear me. I pull out the chair next to her and sit down, facing her.
“Hey. Hey, shh. Tell me what it is,” I murmur, the words as quiet as I can manage. The sound of her crying is maddening, like I need to run out and claw through something to make things right for her. I can’t tell how much of that is how I feel and how much of that is the moon.
I scoot closer, and thread my arms around her waist, wherever it is in that big sweater, and rest my chin on her shoulder. She doesn’t pull away, but slumps against me.
“I hate it here,” she mumbles.
I nod. That’s fair. I kinda do too.
She doesn’t ask what I’m doing here, or how I found her address.
Her phone is still open on the table to her most recent calls, and there’s at least ten calls to her mother; it doesn’t look like any of them have been answered. My heart pinches at that, my hand curling into a fistful of her sweater. I have to force myself to release it.
I start drawing shapes across her back over the top of her sweater. She always enjoyed that. “I’m sorry about tonight. I don’t know what they said to you but . . .”
She shakes her head. “Not me.”
I wait for her to explain, as she wipes at her eyes with her wrists, more tears coming regardless. Eventually her breathing moves from sobs to shudders. She leans into me the slightest bit more.
“I guess it should be obvious. I’ve been here a few years; you haven’t been here. And when you chose me, you chose . . .”
Her lip quivers. She can’t bring herself to say it.
“Wrong?” I finish quietly for her, and she nods.
“And they never let you live it down,” she blubbers, all red faced and tear streaked. It’s oddly endearing.
All I can do is agree. “Not yet, at least.”
“Did no one reach out . . .?” she starts to ask.
I don’t know that I can deal with the thought of her worrying about me. God, I can’t have her crying about feeling alone and thinking about me being alone.
I drop my gaze to the floor. I nod a little. “Aiden did a couple times. Logan, once. It hasn’t been that lonely.”
“Three times in eight years?”
“Well, when you put it like that,” I say, and attempt a smile, but her face starts to crumple a little more. She scrubs at her face with her sleeves, uselessly.
“I’m sorry you had to choose between us. I’m sorry I let you choose me,” she cries, sniffling into my shoulder, her tears and whatnot seeping through my T-shirt.
It cracks my chest open, and I’m doing everything I can to hold it closed. There’s too much about her that I’ve buried, and this week has been digging it all up.
I don’t have an answer. It shouldn’t have been a choice at all. And this whole facade we’re putting on is just more evidence that we could have had everything, if only she’d been allowed to know the family’s secrets. Or even just exist with the same level of knowledge as she does now. My mother’s insistence on keeping only werewolves within the family has always seemed overblown to me, but now more than ever.
Instead, I busy myself finding that spot under her bra line that always itches, that she can never reach right. My palm flattens against her back and my thumb strokes against the spot, and she lets out a little noise of contentment stretched out on a sigh.
Her sniffles start to abate, fewer and further between. It feels all too natural to have her in my arms.
If I do nothing at all, maybe this moment will last forever.
Her bra straps relax around her shoulders, and she realizes then that I unhooked it.
“Shawn,” she warns, but the way she says my name, it sounds like she wants more.
“Elise,” I breathe, as my hand returns to the spot that her bra has dug lines into her skin, scratching much easier with it out of the way. “Anywhere else?”
She shakes her head, and I can tell she’s trying not to sound too satisfied by my answering touch. But she’s never really been able to hide how much she likes it.
My fingers slide down her back, and she arches into my hands, her qualms about the bra slipping away with the tension in her muscles. Her head tilts up with a soft little moan.
Here she is, in my arms, the moment I never dreamed I would find again, and again I freeze.
I glance around, before leaning in and pressing my mouth to hers, not closing my eyes until I’m sure my mouth is next to hers—for a sudden and irrational moment, I fear I’ll be clumsy and miss.
I’ve done this before, of course I know how it works. But I’m also sure there’s no chance I can do this right. It needs to be perfect for her.
Her mouth is as soft as a sigh, and a tension I didn’t know I’d been carrying with me eases as she presses into it, a hum of pleasure caught between us as she snags my lower lip with her teeth.
When she pulls away from the kiss, our gazes linger a little too long. One of us needs to blink or breathe or step away. I don’t think I’ll be able to, and my heart might break if she does first.
“Stay,” she whispers, and that word alone sunders any possible protest I could make. She touches my cheek as she tilts her head to kiss me again, her mouth impossibly sweet.
Her caress is slow but firm, until I close my eyes and settle a little closer to her. The kiss was a careful, gentle sway, soft and sensual, with no pattern but the pull and slight retreat, the back and forth that rolled between our mouths against each other.
“You don’t want me here,” I remind her, because one of us is going to have to find the strength to walk away from this.
“I want to feel good for a minute, I don’t care what it takes,” she says, and I believe her.
All I can do is make things worse for you later, I want to tell her. But she takes my lower lip and worries her teeth into it. She threads a hand through my hair, the other hand tracing my jawline as she sucks harder on my lip. My hands pull her body closer to mine, and soon she’s out of her chair, straddling my lap.
“I know how to make you feel good,” I assure her, because I know I can manage that much. I can feel my cock hardening under her pillowy thigh, straining against my jeans. I trace the curve of her neck with my mouth down to her shoulder, inhaling her scent deeply. “I miss the way you taste. The scent of your underwear after you’ve been working all day.”
Elise whimpers in response, but I know what she likes to hear.
“Just this once,” Elise tells me as she kisses me again, because she knows this is a mistake as much as I do.
She invites my tongue into her mouth with a brush over my teeth from hers.
I pull her closer, my touches growing rougher, more desperate to feel what I can while it lasts.
I half-want this to be quick, to get it out of our systems so we can remind ourselves we were always a mistake, that chemistry fades. But in the next thought, I want to draw this out, to really witness every moment. To really take my time if we truly only had one more time.
I palm her breasts, finding a nipple with my thumb and rolling it to a tight peak as she gasps and presses further into my touch. She shifts her hips and grinds against the bulge in my jeans, the friction so good it nearly renders me breathless. I groan, wondering how I can make “just this once” last forever.
I cup her ass as I pull her nice and close, squeezing handfuls of it through her jean shorts. Then I find one of my favorite places to stroke, the little fold of space between the curve of her bottom and the fat of her thighs. It’s tantalizingly close to her center, already damp and needy. My claws start to press out of my fingertips just as I’m thinking of how to get her out of her shorts. The fabric of her underwear snags easily in my hands, and I think I might have just torn a slice through part of them by accident. Shit.
Touching her like this is making me overwarm, like a fever is building in my veins. My body is threatening to shift, my muscles burning to stretch into a form that feels more natural now.
I feel like a teenager again, about to come in my pants from barely a touch, all because the girl I’m obsessed with is straddling me. I wonder if she knows how easily she can reduce me to a pathetic puddle of want and need for her.
God, I really am about to come in my pants like some inexperienced whelp, because a new tightness swells against the seam of my jeans. Fuck, my knot.
“We can’t do this,” I pant, pulling back from her. Before I can even begin to offer maybe I’ll just lick her until she can’t take it anymore. My blood heats at the thought, and I know I wouldn’t be able to control myself and keep from shifting if we tried.
She pulls back, her chest heaving with her breath, confusion slowly crossing her face as she takes in my meaning. I close my eyes because I can’t look at her and hold my resolve. I know it’s a complete turnaround from what I just said, and that I can’t explain why I changed my mind.
“It’s not, we’re not getting back together. Shawn, I’m not asking anything like that. We wouldn’t do that,” she says, explaining it like I’ve misunderstood something.
“No, no we wouldn’t. But we can’t just do this for old time’s sake either.”
“You don’t want to?”
“It would be a mistake,” I lie through my teeth. Nothing about her could ever be a mistake, or the wrong choice. But we can’t do this. I can’t put her in that kind of danger. With my knot present and my wolf ready to seek my mate, I can’t know she would be safe if we went any further.
“You don’t want to.”
Her voice shakes just the slightest bit this time.
I can hear the question she really wants to ask embedded there. You don’t want me?
“No, no, I do. Believe me,” I plead, and grit my teeth as my knot strains against the edge of finishing against the perfect heat at the crux of her legs. “I just can’t do this knowing you might regret it tomorrow.”
She nods and slides out of my lap, but there’s hurt in her eyes she’s trying to hide. I get up, every movement unbalanced. I want nothing more than to pull her in close and kiss her again, and to tell her I’m sorry, among everything I’ve always wanted to tell her.
But I can’t. We don’t have that anymore.
So, I leave Elise’s cottage, not really knowing where else to go.
It’s never been like this before with her. But it can’t be Elise, it just plain can’t. I would have known. It would have happened when we were dating, or the year we were married for.
If I was going to knot in Elise it would have happened eight years ago.