20
Elise
I have been simmering on this thought nonstop.
Shawn lied to me. Shawn fucking lied to me. We lived together for two years, and I never put two and two together. I feel so stupid.
It’s been a quiet day; guests will start arriving tomorrow. People have been in and out, decorating the place. I’ve been staying in the kitchen at the Hayes House pretty much entirely, trying to keep my hands busy.
If I keep working, maybe I won’t have time to think about anything. I won’t have to confront what I saw—the wolf, the transformation, Shawn standing out in the morning mist.
Maybe I could convince myself that it was a trick of the light, the way the dawn was scattered through all the trees, but the feeling of his claws on my skin, careful and precise, made me sure of what I had seen.
It cast all the dreams I’ve been having in a new light. A startlingly clear light. The full moon coming out from behind a heavy cloud and lighting up the night kind of clear.
The last of the preparations for the wedding are coming together, and everything that was just recipes and massive grocery shopping trips are suddenly food prep and an endless number of dishes to be washed and dirtied again.
For maybe the tenth time today, Aiden pops his head in the kitchen and raises his eyebrows at the batter I’m stirring and asks, “Can I have a taste? What if I use a clean spoon this time?”
“Logan, can you deal with your brother?” I huff, sidestepping one brother to call out to the other. Logan’s made himself pretty damn scarce lately, and I’ve taken to just demanding his time out loud in any direction. Eventually he shows up.
“She said we could taste test the first batch,” Aiden says before I can ask Logan to cart this annoyance out of here.
“I did not,” I snap, and catch myself. I’m getting way too prickly, and they don’t deserve it from me. We’re all stressed.
I pause and take a breath, pinching above the bridge of my nose like it’ll do anything to relieve the pressure mounting behind my eyes. Logan and Aiden watch, waiting for my next direction.
“You can each have one only, but only if you clean those trays first. I need them to start baking the next batch.”
That will get them out of my hair for a moment.
Despite the whirl of people coming and going, working in the kitchen feels both overwhelmed by company and desperately alone. I need someone to talk to about what I saw the other morning, but I can’t.
The Hayes brothers bicker over who washes and who dries the trays as I add the final few cups of flour to the batter and start to stir again.
And like all the other moments I’m not currently multiplying measurements, suddenly I have all the time to think.
For the last day or so, I have been struggling to keep my cool. Whatever appearance of calm I manage externally is out of sheer catatonic shock. How can it both be that there are really werewolves, and that the one that’s been showing up everywhere is my ex-husband?
Even when I talked to him in the boutique, it didn’t seem real enough. He was just Shawn. He looked the same as he always did. It didn’t seem real that he could be something else, perhaps even something truly dangerous.
I wanted to make sure I knew, that my brain hadn’t just malfunctioned that morning. Lack of sleep making me see things, maybe, I thought. Nope. I downloaded one of those sleep monitoring apps and propped it up against the window, recording the edge of the woods in the early hours of morning, and I’d seen it again.
If Shawn’s always been this kind of creature, was he telling the truth to his brothers?
Shit, his brothers. I hadn’t even thought about how they were a part of this. Are they all wolves?
All the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, and I stop stirring the batter. Slowly, I lift my eyes to the two brothers chatting in front of me.
Aiden is rambling, “. . . I could never move to a bigger town, man. It’s getting crowded enough with all the wedding guests coming here, I could barely find any parking this morning. And then Mom snapped at me for leaving out that newspaper talking about the wolf sightings—”
Logan rolls his eyes and sighs and flicks him with the damp dishtowel.
“I mean, coyote sightings,” Aiden corrects himself awkwardly. They both pause and glance at me, a moment more telling than anything else they’ve said.
Oh. My. God. They’re all werewolves.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, would I have even connected the dots? Or would their terrible attempts at keeping this a secret continue to fly over my head?
I drop my gaze quickly, and they go back to cleaning the last few trays. It’s really just a quick rinse with soap.
Shawn, ever a master of timing, picks that moment to duck into the kitchen, making a beeline for the coffee maker, where a half-full pot of coffee has long gone cold.
My teeth grind together as I glance at the three of them. These fucking assholes. They’ve just let me stay in the dark about this.
And all the dreams I’ve been having about meeting a wolf in the woods and letting it lick me to completion . . . my cheeks flare. If they’re all wolves, and we’re in supernatural territory, was there more meaning to my dreams? Maybe they weren’t just my subconscious stressing out about the wedding prep and Shawn showing up and expressing it through the coyote sightings?
And Aiden has teased me for believing in déjà vu and intuition. I’m going to smack him for making me think such things were silly and just too supernatural to exist in reality.
Flustered and trying to keep my sudden anger in check, I let out a breath that is a little too exasperated to be a sigh.
All of their eyes immediately snap to me, and their attention feels heavy on my skin. I take a deep breath through my nose. I glance at Shawn. I’ve been living here for years without werewolf wet dreams. Those didn’t start happening until he showed up.
He’s the only one I’m really mad at right now, and I want to see him squirm.
I meet each of their concerned gazes briefly, and shrug. “I don’t know why everyone keeps talking about the coyote sightings. They’re so . . . common.”
“They are?” Aiden asks, a little too much concern cracking his voice.
“Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever lived anywhere that there weren’t a lot of wolf sightings and animal attacks,” I say out loud, trying to sound as casual as possible. I glance between everyone else in the kitchen. “Lately there’s been a lot of scratch marks on my doors from wild animals. They just come right up to your house, it’s so weird.”
Shawn looks like all the blood drained out of his face as he concentrates on pretending to sip his mug of coffee, and, honestly, if I’ve taken a couple years off his life with that comment, I’m fine with that.
“That . . . that’s so scary,” Aiden fumbles to say when he fails to hide his horror.
“I just thought it was normal,” I insist, and then look pointedly at Shawn. “Don’t you remember? I would say it was pretty frequent in . . . college? I think we met when I was in college.”
“I didn’t really pay attention to the news back then,” he says weakly into his coffee.
Logan is glaring daggers at Shawn with more emotion than I’ve ever seen out of him. I’d just hoped to imply there were plenty of other werewolves out there, but it seems they got something else out of my comment. I wonder if they’ve noticed a wolf has clearly been stalking me these last few weeks.
With the ferocity in Logan’s expression, I think it’s safe to assume they’re all wolves. And if this is a family of werewolves . . . suddenly it makes a lot of sense why Shawn and I couldn’t be together.
Maybe we were a mistake from the beginning.
Shawn slinks out of the kitchen, a maybe-not-so-metaphorical tail between his legs. Aiden and Logan continue to try to communicate behind my back as I turn my attention back to the stove. I can see them mouthing and gesturing at each other in the reflection on the polished tile backsplash.
I don’t care if I’ve just kicked the hornet’s nest. Or a better metaphor involving a wolf den, whatever.
Unsurprisingly, I make it through the rest of the day with as little contact with any of them as I can, with no effort on my part. Aiden all but runs in the opposite direction whenever I step out into the hallway. Logan is somehow less reachable than usual.
And Shawn finally made good on his promise to leave me alone; of course, it’s when I actually want to talk to him and finally get some answers.
After a long day of rechecking that I have everything ready for the wedding tomorrow evening, I find myself staring out the back door of my little cottage, turning the same tangled web of thoughts over as I dunk a peppermint tea bag in a mug of hot water.
I want to sit down, just the two of us curled up in one another like we used to on Saturday mornings and talk through every little thought and worry I’ve got buzzing around in my head. I miss the way he would help me unspool my line of thinking and find all the frayed edges and help me wind it all back into a tidy little bundle.
I need to confront him about this, but I’m not sure how. He could just deny it, and I’m sure he would. If he wouldn’t tell me when our whole marriage was at stake, why would he just give in and tell me now?
The thought makes a hard, painful lump rise in my throat. I didn’t know that whole time. He managed to keep it so under wraps I never even suspected. Maybe our whole relationship was really a sham.
I stand at the doorway for so long, the mug grows cool in my hands.
There were many nights toward the end of college, the evenings I worked in my apartment, sitting at my desk by the window for hours to get my papers written, Shawn would come home to find me sitting in the dark. I’d hear his keys jangling in the door, the floor creaking underneath as he crossed to me, and found the light switch. Every single time, I’d never realized it had gotten so dark, until that moment he came home.
It’s not quite a full moon, but it lights up the night spectacularly. It doesn’t even really feel dark out. It looks so much like the not-yet-morning hours I’ve given up on jogging during.
A thought, barely more than an impulse, leads me to roll the back sliding door open and step outside.
Of all the times I’ve walked into the woods in my dreams, I haven’t had a purpose in mind. And sure, it’s only eight p.m., but who says it has to be three a.m. to run into your werewolf ex-husband in the woods?