22
Shawn
I’m fucking losing it.
I can barely think. Even turning my head a few degrees feels like the world is spinning, tilting on a new axis as my bones try to shift, to complete the wreckage of myself. Holding it back is like holding my breath for too long. The pain and discomfort, pressure and itching in my bones is dizzying.
I can feel it in my jaw as palpably as I can feel hunger or exhaustion. The need to close my teeth around her soft, yielding flesh overwhelms me. Some terrible part of my mind is telling me that I could shift and catch up to her in seconds. Just thinking about her makes me salivate, and I hate to imagine why.
I don’t want to chase Elise. I can’t. I won’t.
I rarely draw out the shift for so long, but I have to. I need to hold it off as long as I can, to get myself into the brewery cellars so that Elise will be safe.
I’m finally coming to grips that everything I’ve ever done with Elise was a mistake. It was a mistake to involve her, to put her safety so immediately in the path of danger. Every moment I have ever loved her has been selfish. All it’s done is hurt her.
I rinse her blood off at the outside spigot at the brewery, a tap meant for watering the shrubs that line the perimeter. It’s not enough to get rid of the smell completely, but it helps calm me down some. I feel less like a monster I can’t get away from.
I’ve never voluntarily locked myself in the brewery’s cellar, at least not since becoming an adult. It wasn’t really our choice when we were younger.
I’m starting to feel like it might be the only good idea I’ve had in weeks.
I should have never let her near me. I should have said no when she’d started kissing me, should have pushed her away. I knew it was a bad idea, but I let my desire to hold her, to breathe her in and spend every second I could with her outweigh her safety.
Her knowing what I am didn’t solve problems the way I thought it would. Every problem we ever had comes back to what I am, the nature of my monstrosity. Perhaps things were better when I’d been able to keep it from her, and the worst I’d ever done was break her heart.
But her blood on my hands . . . I tore up her arm without even realizing. All I wanted was to hold her, and I couldn’t manage that much.
Despite being nine p.m., the brewery hasn’t yet locked up for the weekend, and I spot why as soon as I enter the brick building.
My mother raises an eyebrow at my partial shift. She hasn’t even started to shift yet, a testament to the control she’s mastered in her age. I know she has her flask of aconite tincture in her purse, and I’m sure she’ll have a quieter night than I’m in for.
“Shawn, what are you—” she starts to say, surprised to see me here. Her brows narrow and pinch together as she spots the blood on my shirt, and she doesn’t bother to finish her question. “Are you alright?”
I shake my head a little. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why this full moon is so much harder to bear than any other has been. I’d been a fool to think I knew what control was, that I had enough, when the shift could be this bad.
I take another step inside, shutting the door beside me.
She frowns. “You smell like Elise.”
I’m not about to tell my mother I just left Elise alone in a field with my cum drying on her neck and gouges in her arm. Running away from her is simultaneously the most dickish and smartest thing I’ve done.
My mother sighs, glancing away from me. “That’s disappointing. Even after she knew you were married.”
The last time she started this conversation on a similar note, I’d been ready to snarl at the slightest provocation. Tonight, I’m just defeated. I don’t have it in me to respond with any ire.
“I’ve been divorced for years, Mom. She knows that.”
Deanna looks at me, her glare suddenly much sharper than before.
I can’t help but scoff, rolling my eyes. I can’t do anything right in her view. First, I marry the wrong sort of girl, then I commit the terrible act of divorce when it doesn’t work out.
“But your ring—”
“Yeah, I have hers too. I carry my regrets around on me.”
It’s been tucked into my wallet long enough that it’s imprinted into the leather.
I can’t even meet her eyes. I glance around the lobby of the brewery entrance, the way the furniture has changed since I was last here, and fall into a seat along the wall, no will for any of it anymore. The need to shift fully still sickens me, like my wolf is trying to lunge its way out of my throat.
I really am going feral. I wonder if my Aunt Danielle felt like this. Too bad I can’t ask her. Then again, I probably wouldn’t exist if she were alive.
I double over, hunched against my knees almost instantly. I swallow, clasping my hands together behind my head, taking in a few shallow breaths.
“She left me. All my bullshit was hurting her, and what we had wasn’t worth the pain I caused her. I wish I’d been able to see that when I needed to. You were right, in the end.”
Even as I admit it, I’m still not ready to hear I told you so.
I expect my mom to bring up the sanctity of the pack, but the lectures I could repeat in my sleep never come.
For many moments, there’s utter silence, and I can only hear the creak of my bones pushing against each other. My mother’s heels click against the tile floor as she crosses to the bench. It creaks as she sits down beside me.
“Oh, my baby. I’m sorry.”
Her long nails comb through my hair. Her elbow rests against my back as she continues the motion, and I find myself leaning into her side.
I close my eyes, too raw to find healing in it. If I’m going feral, being with my pack should keep me safe, even if it doesn’t feel like it.
“Don’t say that. You think I make stupid choices.”
“Shawn. I just want you to be happy. I want the best for you. For all my children to stay safe and never let the world put you through the things I’ve seen.” She sighs, as I find the wherewithal to sit up a little more and turn enough to look at her. The crinkles around her eyes deepen as they become a little glassy. “But ever since you came back, I see a ghost every time I look at you.”
“Danielle.” I exhale. It hasn’t escaped me that I look more like my aunt than anyone else in my family.
My mother shakes her head. “My little boy.”
I search her warm, brown eyes, and she withdraws her gaze, clasping her hands in her lap. “Sometimes I wonder if I wanted too much for you. I put too much pressure on you and pushed you away.”
This might be the first calm, easy conversation we’ve had since I’ve gotten here. It’s a home I haven’t stepped in for years.
I swallow, taking that in. I haven’t felt like I had my mom in so long. My throat tightens as the emotion swells in my chest.
Her expression is soft, as she says, “I doubt you will believe me, but I’m proud of you in a lot of ways. You made it out in the world alone, something that terrified me.”
Those words don’t quite sink in, the way I thought they should. “You can be proud of me when I haven’t made the same choices as Logan?”
“You’re different people. I am proud of him for taking on the family business and making connections in a way I wasn’t prepared to teach him, after your father passed.”
“He’s just doing what he thinks Dad would have wanted him to do.”
A smile twitches at the corners of her mouth. “He’s downstairs. I imagine he can hear us.”
“Lovely. I’ll go talk shit to his face, then,” I grumble, forcing myself to stand. The night is getting darker, and I ought to remember why I came here in the first place.
Her hands tighten together in her lap as she looks at me, her brow pinching in concern. “You look unwell. Did something happen?”
I think for a moment of telling her everything. I think about all the times I wanted her to be there for me, to hold me and tell me everything was going to be alright. All the times I was too afraid of her disappointment to admit my flaws to her.
I give my head a little shake. “No.”
The stone steps down into the brewery’s basement feel too familiar as I descend, finding the dim lights already on.
We’d only ever used the basement for the nights of the full moon, when our curse was at its worst. The rooms are spaced far between, each with a heavy sliding door with a lock that requires opposable thumbs to open.
It had been a necessity in high school, when my wolf was especially hard to control. When I’d gone to college in another state, it had become necessary to figure out something else—running, aconite-laced drinks.
Eventually I got the hang of it, if only tenuously. I could be sure my wolf would run the hills of empty woods, maybe stalk a deer. It would stay instinctually away from people, I’d found. When I came back, I couldn’t stomach the thought of spending the night down here anymore. It was the first of many fights with my family.
There’s something about the cellars that reminds me too much of church. Maybe it’s the stone walls and floors, reminiscent of a cathedral. Not for its splendor, but for its coldness, its discomfort. It’s kind of hard to keep furniture in the cellar rooms, seeing as it gets wrecked and splintered every full moon.
Downstairs in the brewery’s basement, there is a plain-looking door that only my family carries the keys to—the scene of many a sleepless night.
The whole basement looks old, but there’s something about this dusty, vacant oratory that makes everything feel a little worse. I wonder if it was ever brought up to code. Maybe there’s radon down here.
Maybe it’s the gouges scratched into the walls.
The far wall is divided into four stalls, each separated by thick stone partitions. There are gapped sections of the masonry with iron bars crisscrossing through it, allowing us to glimpse one another. High up on the back wall, there’s the thinnest sliver of sky through frosted glass, confessionals to the moon.
It looks awful and medieval, but whatever. It’s necessary. I need to be sure I won’t be able to go after Elise.
God, just thinking about her hurts.
I don’t know what to think. What my mom said about Danielle being kept from her mate didn’t make sense. My circumstances aren’t the same, how could I be kept from a mate I’ve never met?
But what if I let myself entertain the thought that even if I never knotted in Elise before, that she could still be my mate? If I just ignore every reason it didn’t work out before?
The thought brings a sort of restlessness that lights up my nerves with energy it’s hard to place in my human body. I need to move, to express it, but it’s got this tail-wagging giddiness to it that shaking my hands out doesn’t quite reach.
My next thought makes all of it dissipate instantly. She left. She chose to leave. And even if I do buy into the idea that our souls are somehow cosmically intertwined, how cruel would that be to her? How can I tell her this is what I think, what I feel, without feeling like I am cornering her into being with me? That I am just manipulating a narrative to get what I want out of it?
And even if she feels the same, accepts all of it wholeheartedly, how can I be sure it won’t just end the same way it did the first time?
It doesn’t matter, then.
I go in and sit down with my back to the wall; I can see Logan is already locked in for the night.
“This is the sorriest stag night I’ve ever seen,” I tell him, but even as I say it, I think how much I would have wanted him there for me the night before I got married, instead of a bottle of beer.
Even a full-moon night like this, laying on the ground with nothing to do but wait for it to be over. I have so many memories of sitting as close to each other’s doorways as we could, reaching under the gap to move the little plastic pieces around an old Battleship board, chatting aimlessly about everything and nothing for hours.
I’m about to ask him if he remembers playing Battleship with me, when he interrupts the silence.
“You know, I always thought the prodigal son story was bullshit.”
So, he’s still pissed at me.
Once upon a time, this asshole was my favorite brother. It kinda sucks that it’s just defaulted to Aiden.
“Yeah, you would. I figured it was just someone making up bullshit to make a point,” I evade. “Should have had a better point.”
The quiet is grating.
Logan is eerily calm for a full moon. Or maybe it’s really just me that can’t handle it tonight, for some reason.
The itching pressure in my bones is going to last until I shift fully, but it’s so overwhelming this time I don’t want to just lean into it the way I normally would. It feels like giving in.
I find myself staring at one of the only decorations in the cellar, an antique painting of Saint Patrick. I mean, I know it’s St. Paddy, but it does just look like a guy in a black cloak and bare feet carrying a baby deer away from its mother.
Our dad hung that there after Logan and I had gotten into some trouble. I don’t even remember what it was, just that Dad hung it there with the intent to make us think deeply on our Lycan condition. Given what it stands for, I’m honestly a little surprised no one bothered to take it down.
“Why are we supposed to venerate the guy who’s supposed to have cursed us?”
“Why are we taught to respect our parents?” Logan counters a little too quickly.
“Jeez. Ok, edgelord,” I sigh.
A few beats go by in the nothing, the quiet. I have to get up and pace rather than sit down in the corner.
It’s a fever, it will pass. I close my eyes and try to just endure it.
After several minutes, Logan interrupts the silence. “I’ve never really had it in me to believe.”
It’s not much of a confession. I think I’ve always known that about him.
I glance sidelong at him. Logan’s always moved fluidly through life, sidestepping what annoys him. A refusal to be second in command, to answer to a power higher than himself. The way to be more powerful than god is to be a nonbeliever.
I can see the way the wedding is frustrating him. It’s not something he can just dip out of. There’s a tension in his jaw that has been there since he was a kid. He must have some serious TMJ, I muse to myself, and roll my jaw in sympathy.
“You know what it’s like to be married, right?” Logan asks, as if his thoughts can’t help but wander in the same places as mine. The normally defiant edge in his voice is gone for something almost casual. “For however long it lasted.”
I sigh and put my back to the wall opposite the confessional window. “Two years, for the record.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Impressive.”
“Shut up.”
“You’re not going to tell me about it?”
“Getting divorced?”
“No, when you got married. Famously, I was not there.”
“Oh, you know. We went down to the courthouse in a couple of tie-dye T-shirts. There’s some terrible photobooth strips that are almost too dark to see anything, we got those from walking around the boardwalk after.”
That night was a new moon, I remember because I’d specifically planned that out. I vaguely remember some half-baked intent to keep her up all night and then waking up at noon, not sure when holding her close became sleep.
The memory makes me smile, and then wince as my claws push a little further out.
Through the latticed opening, Logan looks thoughtful. Then he asks, “How’d you do it, knowing you were making a mistake?”
Yeesh, rude.
“I didn’t think it was a mistake. It was the best day of my life. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
He doesn’t reply.
Maybe he just wants reassurance he’s making the right decision. It must feel like a big leap, and he’s too much of a cynic to believe in himself.
He always has been. I remember him being too frightened to bike without the training wheels. Also picking him up after he fell off my bike, putting Band-Aids on his knees while he sniffled and promised not to tell Mom.
“She had a lot of money to pay in taxes,” I tell him, weaving this little story for him. It makes me miss being a big brother. Just a little.
“It was uh . . . self-employment tax stuff. Anyway, she couldn’t cover it all, and I was already in love with her. It started out as a joke. Filing as a married couple would save her the difference in what she owed, and a marriage license was like, less than thirty bucks. We were already married by the time I told Mom about her.”
Maybe it’s going over fond memories, or that it feels like coming home for the first time in ages, even though I’ve been here all week.
He doesn’t add anything else for a long moment. I think he’s done talking to me at all when he says, “I hope the pain was worth it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Getting divorced.”
“You know, you’re so much fun to talk to. I don’t know why we didn’t catch up earlier.”
He rolls his eyes in response, like I’m the asshole for not accepting his condolences when they were presented with such careful and empathetic tact.
Whatever. I’m just going to keep ignoring his attitude. There’s not much else I can do while sitting penitent.
I put my head between my knees, my claws raking through my scalp. The shift feels oddly suffocating this time, like I can’t breathe in deeply enough.
“And then when Elise—ah, fuck.”
I look up, and there’s no mistaking it from his expression. He heard me say her name. Fucking tripping at the finish line. Great job, man.
Logan’s dark eyes hold mine, his brow furrows. I can hear his teeth grind together.