23
Elise
It’s the morning of the wedding, and I keep looking for Shawn every time I get a few spare seconds. When I got to the Hayes House, Deanna answered the door, and said they would be back soon.
It’s kind of getting on my nerves that Shawn is actually doing a good job of avoiding me, or at least better than the rest of his family. I’ve barely seen him.
And, like, I guess he wouldn’t want to see me after he just kind of abruptly left last night. But I need to talk to him.
I’ve been over the order of things I have to put in the oven a dozen times. I have everything I need prepped, but I feel like I need to just stare at the trays and agonize. It’s too quiet.
A couple days ago, I had planned to tell Deanna I was going to move after all this was over and figure out an end date for our contract. The plan was to go back to packing up my things after all the dishes were done. The money that would have been a down payment on my cottage would be a cushion while I rented and looked for new contacts. One of my cooking school friends actually replied to my message and knew a restaurant that needed a new sous chef. It wouldn’t be working for myself, but it would be a good opportunity.
No more Shawn, no more Hayes family, no more werewolves.
No more anyone.
The thought isn’t reassuring the way it was supposed to be. I don’t have a family here; these people are not my friends. They’re the same people who would have rejected me before.
Laura’s always good company, I think as I wander upstairs, but it sinks my heart a little, knowing that I won’t be able to hang out with her after I leave. Maybe we could keep in touch, but texting every now and then just won’t be the same as hanging out on her terrible couch with a pint of melted ice cream.
In one of the guest rooms, I catch sight of Ava—Laura’s friend—and what I’m assuming is the back of Laura’s head. Ava has a couple flowers pinched by the stems in one hand, and a couple of hairpins in the other. She’s decorated Laura’s braided updo with a variety of little buds.
Leftovers from the flower arch, I realize as I get closer.
Ava has been here today about as long as I have. Laura stopped in earlier to introduce her florist friend to me, before showing her the backyard. Every time I glanced out the window, the clearing before the woods was a little more fairytale-like. Ava waved at me through the kitchen door every time she passed by with another box of flowers, and I kept wondering where she was going to find more places to stick them.
“Someone actually got attacked and chased by a wolf a couple nights ago,” Ava says when I walk in the door, the smell of flowers greeting me. Her eyes are wide and genuinely worried. “It’s so scary what’s happening.”
“Oh! Those hikers, right? I heard they just saw something they thought was a wolf,” Laura says, waving me in. Apparently, Deanna’s rule that they weren’t to encourage the rumors didn’t apply to her.
“My high school best friend,” Ava continues in a hushed voice. “I had just lent her my coat the day before it happened. She sent me a picture of what was left of it when she got away.”
“Oh, shit,” Laura murmurs, looking genuinely bothered for a moment, before she throws me a half-hearted smile. I ache to comfort her, but that would mean telling her that I know everything when I’m not supposed to. Maybe it would be too much of a shock during an already difficult moment.
At that, Ava puts down the handful of little flower stems, and takes out her phone, swiping through to find the message and show us. “Terrifying. I can’t imagine what I’d do if that happened to me.”
The photo on her screen was bone chilling.
I could barely tell that it was a coat, just a shredded pile of fabric and zipper. Half of it looked like it had been torn off, maybe left on the trail with the wolf. It couldn’t have been Shawn that chased the hiker, could it?
I swallowed, reluctant to even think about it, with the emotions that mixed uncomfortably in my stomach: fear for the hiker’s safety, worry about just how much control Shawn had as a beast, and I cringed at myself to admit that I felt the tiniest bit jealous. It was completely irrational. If he didn’t have control over himself as a wolf, I couldn’t exactly get mad that he was sniffing other girls, right? And there wasn’t even proof that it was him, for all I knew it could be any of the others.
“Oh, have either of you seen Logan?” Deanna sighs, sweeping into the room with her usual exasperation with the people around her.
She catches sight of Ava’s phone screen, and her mouth immediately becomes a hard line.
Laura, for once, looks guilty. “Sorry, Aunt Dea.”
“Girls, let’s not bring today down with . . . just put it away,” she says, and it’s hard to miss the way her skin blanches.
I have to wonder, then, about her. Shawn said this was his family’s curse. If it includes everyone, even his mother, how long has it been going? And if his mom is also a werewolf, then that story about his aunt . . . what really happened with her? He said something about a wolf being seen in the area before she disappeared.
She had been the wolf. And she’d been so alone.
I swallow, thinking about the way Shawn had struggled against the beastly transformation last night.
Deanna sighs and says to Laura, “Do me a favor, if you see him, will you get him to do something with his hair? He’s always been difficult about that.”
“What, like a bun? French twist? High ponytail?”
“I can fishtail braid,” Ava offers brightly.
Deanna waves a hand, checking her phone briefly. She says over her shoulder as she leaves us, “As long as it looks presentable.”
“Ooh, what if we do a bun, but we stick some flowers in it,” Ava whispers to Laura, eyes lighting up with her idea. Her hand dips into the box of flower bits preemptively.
Laura snorts. “Good luck with that.”
“Ok, maybe no flowers. But there’s ribbon, and who would say no to that?”
I think she may be the only person in this house having a fun time with the preparations. I envy her for a moment.
She might also be the only other human in the house right now, until my waitstaff get here for the reception. My plan is to prep them while the guests arrive and are being seated, and then at least catch the end of the ceremony from the back row.
“Well, until then . . . Elise, I’ve got plenty of rosebuds,” she offers, wiggling her eyebrows. I can see her planning how she’s going to pin them around my bun already.
I smile and give my head a little shake. “I’m going to be in the kitchen all day, I can’t. I don’t want anything falling into the food while I’m working.”
“Oh, yeah, I guess,” she admits, and the thought does seem to deflate her enthusiasm for a moment.
“But I will say yes to the ribbon.”
That seems to satisfy her. Ava jogs across the room and ducks into the little ensuite bathroom where Laura’s fold-out makeup case has been spread out across the vanity, looking for the roll of ribbon.
I glimpse some movement out in the hall, and my heartbeat picks up for a moment hoping it’s Shawn. It’s not. Still, I call out, “Logan!”
I swear I can see the thought of just ignoring me tense up in his shoulders. He stops and turns around reluctantly.
“What do you want?” he says, instead of a greeting, and it’s oddly cold from him.
“Your mom said you’d be coming back with Shawn?” I start to ask, but the words become quieter as he glares at me. It’s the same sort of pinched look he normally reserves for Shawn.
“What could you possibly need from him right now?”
Ok, the attitude isn’t cute. I’m about to tattle to his mom in a second if he keeps this up.
“Never mind. Just get in here.” I roll my eyes and wave him into the room, and he begrudgingly follows in. “Laura, he’s all yours.”
He looks tired, more than usual, dark circles under eyes, his long hair loose and untamed. He’s barely made an effort to get dressed for the event, just wearing formal black pants and a mostly buttoned white shirt. You’d have thought he was a waiter instead of the groom.
“And what do you want?” The question is directed at Laura with his usual tired exasperation, and she is clearly used to it enough to not take offense.
“There’s some time before the lady of the hour gets here, so I was told to do your hair. Since clearly you weren’t going to,” she says, with just a hint of a fiendish smile.
“Hm. Yeah, no. See ya,” he says, as monosyllabic in his word choice as he usually is.
“Get back here,” Laura grumbles, lunging quickly enough that she can put a hand across the doorway before he can walk back out, but he ducks under her arm fluidly. Laura only succeeds in catching him because she takes a dive and catches her arms around his neck.
I know now that they’re both werewolves, but watching the way they move and interact, I’m surprised that I never suspected anything before. It’s not unsubtle.
Eventually Laura tugs him back into the room and he sits in the chair, leaning back slowly, like he’s expecting torture. “Put the scissors away.”
“Relax, I’m just going to braid it.”
“What’s that for,” Logan asks through gritted teeth, when she plucks up the pre-heated hair iron from the nearby table.
“A straightener. You’ve got those weird ponytail crimps in here,” she says, as she starts to drag it through his hair. “I keep telling you not to do that when it’s wet. Like, have you ever used a blow dryer? A diffuser?”
“Every day, obviously,” he sighs, slumping defeatedly in the chair.
Something about the cadence and efficiency they bicker with makes me wonder if they’ve been having this conversation ever since they were kids.
“Ava, can you bring me some ribbon too? And grab my concealer. Jeez, what’s wrong with your face, dude?”
I hear the sound of Ava rummaging around through Laura’s makeup case, while Logan grumbles something back to Laura, but he falls silent as soon as she slips out of the guest bathroom.
“Which concealer?” she asks, her brow furrowing. She glances over her shoulder where Laura points. “You have like three different kinds, and they all look ancient.”
“Oh, never mind. I’ll grab it.” Laura tosses the straightener aside on the vanity, and heads toward the bathroom. “Logan, stay there. I’m not letting you go out there with bags under your eyes.”
Several moments pass, a small quiet falling over the messy guest room. I wonder if Laura can’t find the specific concealer she’s looking for either. I watch Ava drift back to the box full of flowers, glancing between Logan and anything else in the room. Every so often I glance back out the window with half-hearted hope that I’ll spot Shawn. He’s gotta get here sooner or later.
“Are you in the wedding party?” she asks, and goes for one of the smaller boxes, full of little pre-made miniature bouquets of purple and white flowers, tied with a lace bow. They all have pins on their backs. I realize as she selects one, that Laura has one pinned on her dress as well.
I’m surprised that Logan full-on glares at her, withering her friendliness on the spot. I’m almost ready to chide him for that, the way all the cheeriness she brought with her vanishes. I know he’s having a hard time with the whole wedding thing, but he still needs to be nice to people.
“Yeah,” Logan mutters after a long moment, his mouth a hard line, his stare set dead ahead, unseeing. He has such a talent for making a single syllable sound barbed.
“I’m supposed to pin these on everyone who is,” she tells him, offering a friendly, if shy, smile. I almost feel the need to warn her that he’s been about as cuddly as a porcupine all of last week. She holds out the little bouquet for him to see.
He doesn’t answer, eyeing the flowers like he expects them to bite him. He doesn’t nod, but he tilts his head to the side a little, allowing her to step closer.
An awkward few seconds filter through, and Ava decides to just go ahead and do her job. She takes half a step toward him and slips a hand delicately under the collar of his shirt, tugging a pinch of fabric taught to guide the pin through.
I watch a muscle tense in his jaw, his nostrils flare with his breath.
I don’t see it happen, but maybe she accidentally pricks him with the sharp end because he grabs her wrist suddenly, snatching it away from him, pin and all. They lock eyes for a moment, and time seems to stop. It’s hard not to stare, though the two of them are so agitated by whatever just passed between them that they don’t notice my rudeness.
Ava’s the first of us to break away from it.
“I guess you can re-do it later if you want, um,” she mumbles, glancing from his hand on her wrist to him.
He lets go of her and stands, brushes out of the room in a couple long strides.
Ava glances at me and mouths, what the fuck, and I give her a sympathetic shrug and equally wide-eyed expression. She looks a little upset but tries to shrug it off, pinning it to her sleeve instead.
“Whatever, I worked hard on these, and I don’t want him to have one anyway,” she mutters, waving her hand a little to admire her work. “Fuck that guy.”
“Yeah, I don’t know what’s eating him.” I nod, when I hear Shawn’s voice downstairs that moment and honestly take that as my cue to leave. I say apologetically to her, “I’m going to be right back.”
I step out into the hall, but it’s empty.
Ok, now I’m getting a bit pissed off at Shawn, I can feel it heating up my skin. I know he’s upset, but he can’t just avoid me forever, can he? Like, that’s got to be the only reason I’m feeling warm under the collar every time I look at him.
When I get to the top of the stairs, I can see the front door wide open and a few guests in their formal clothes stepping through, being greeted by Deanna. Some of them receive warmer greetings than others. I watch as one woman, tall and skinny with gray hair and fun looking earrings stops short of embracing Deanna and gives her a semi-pleasant smile.
“This is Elise,” Deanna introduces me as I’m halfway down the stairs, and I put on my customer service smile to conceal my disappointment at getting swept up into something else. She raises her eyebrows at me. “Darling, I have some fires to put out, would you show Laura’s mom to the patio?”
I’m not going to be right back, and I’m not going to find Shawn, it seems.
“Jenny Brandford,” the woman tells me when I reach the bottom of the stairs, offering a hand and a much bigger smile to me.
“Oh, Laura’s one of my favorite people,” I tell her, shaking her hand briefly. “Laura’s upstairs, if you’re looking for her—”
“She’ll find me if she wants. I live in town, and I see her maybe twice a year as it is,” Jenny laughs, dropping that tidbit and moving on without a second thought. “How long have you been with the family, dear?”
Jeez, does anyone have a good relationship with their mom?
“Four years,” I answer without really thinking. It was the sort of question I got a lot earlier in my career when I was a private chef. “This is my first wedding, though.”
Jenny pauses, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, then raises her brows. “You sure smell like one of the family.”
I . . . don’t know how to feel about that.
She links her arm through mine, and I lead her towards the back doors.
“You’re in for a treat. It’s delightfully pagan, the excessive drinking, seeing the couple disappear into the woods, the chase, the mating bite . . . god, it reminds me of my youth,” she tells me, with drama in her voice that is plenty reminiscent of the way Laura tells stories.
She pauses to lift the edge of her sleeve, revealing a smattering of scarring near her elbow.
It takes me a moment to realize what I’m seeing is a pattern of teeth.
“Oh, wow,” is all I can think to say. What am I supposed to do here, hike up my skirt to show her my knee and say, I got this one falling out of a tree at seven? Or do I ooh and ahh over her bite mark like it’s got fourteen-karats?
The patio doors close behind us as she boasts, “I had a true mate, rare as it is. Unlike my brother and Deanna. I always knew they were wrong for each other, but it was hard to explain. I think it might have been easier if he’d known what it was like.”
“How did you know?” I ask before I can stop myself, and she gives me a smile that feels, honestly, a little patronizing, as if there was no way I could know what she was talking about either.
Still, the urge to impart her wisdom wins out.
“I felt my mate’s presence linger with me, that we were linked together even beyond this Earth. I dreamed his wolf was stalking me, marking his territory,” she says wistfully, and I feel there’s a real beauty to what she’s talking about.
A little girl with a fluffy tulle dress bounces to Aunt Jenny’s side and grabs her hand, scrunching her nose. “Uncle Rob peed on you in your dreams?”
Aunt Jenny lets loose a rather canine-sounding growl and the little girl runs off before I can get her name. It’s ferocious enough that it makes the hair on my arms stand straight up, and it’s all I can do to stop myself from running off too.
“Children,” Jenny scoffs, “do their parents teach them no respect?”
I chew on my lower lip, and I suspect I’m not going to learn the answer to that hit-and-run style question. Which is really too bad because I am now dying to know as well. I haven’t had anyone mark their territory in my dreams but . . . I swallow, and my cheeks heat a little at the memories.
I have come to know a side of Shawn I didn’t before. I just didn’t recognize him at first because he hadn’t shared all of himself with me.
Jenny glances over her shoulder then asks me in an undertone, “Have you met the Carringtons, yet?”
“No, but I’m excited to see the bride. I’m sure she’s gorgeous.”
Aunt Jenny scoffs. “Sanctimonious bunch. But it’s about time someone restored a bit of decorum to the Hayes family name.”
She says it with so much venom, I can’t imagine she means anyone but Shawn, how he took on being disowned for me. I feel my insides pinch a little. I had no idea they were like this. “I think Deanna’s sons have plenty to be proud of. They’re all great.”
“No, her sister. Went feral in the woods. I can’t imagine doing that. So incredibly selfish. And then Dea had the nerve to beg Father Martin to allow her to be buried in the family plot,” Jenny says with a derisive noise, waving me off as if this is something I should have known.
I blink, because what am I supposed to reply to that? “Square up, Aunt Jenny?”
“If someone else in this family goes feral, it’ll ruin the Carringtons as well, to be connected to us,” she continues on, and it makes a few more things make sense about Shawn’s family, if all werewolves are weird and puritanical like this.
That’s such a bummer, too. Werewolves exist and they kinda suck.
“I mean, there’s always divorce,” I say, because it feels kind of obvious. It’s weird to demand people to stay in a relationship just because.
Aunt Jenny’s demeanor shifts rapidly away from warm and inviting, and she gives me a withering look. “This generation, I swear. We don’t divorce.”
“Because . . . wolves mate for life?” I try, stabbing in the dark, wincing internally at myself because some Discovery Channel-esque, and probably outdated, factoid cannot be it.
Jenny rolls her eyes. “It’s a sin, darling.”
I blink two or three more times. I keep forgetting that people can still be that intensity of Catholic. I don’t really know what to reply, because I’m still technically at work right now and it wouldn’t be good to express actual thoughts on the clock.
I’m chewing on my lip as I lead her to the table that has her little name card sitting on the bread plate, as she continues, “Besides, there’s nothing left to divorce in a feral wolf. They can’t change back. They’re gone.”
One day she didn’t come back, I remember Shawn saying.
I hear his voice nearby and let go of Aunt Jenny’s arm. I flash her the briefest of parting smiles and depart with an incoherent muttering about being needed somewhere, something like that.
Have I ever seen Shawn fully? In a way where all the inconsistencies and contradictions meet back together, not just a guy who wanted to make me his world, not just a wolf ready to sink his teeth in.
I can see everything that was missing before, the way I was a part of this equation. Our vulnerabilities, the ways we mirrored each other were the things that brought us together initially, and the reasons we pulled back.
I always felt like being married to him was too good to be true, that he couldn’t truly love me. That he was out of my league, and I couldn’t ever hope to really have him, that I’d have to settle for getting my heart broken bit by bit every month or so. That I was so starved for love of any kind, that I would put up with that.
Every month or so. God. The werewolf thing really does clear up most of my questions, now that I think about it. Not that it changes anything about how his family treated me . . . I mean, maybe it does. I don’t know. Maybe we all need one big therapy session.
My heart is thundering in my chest as I return to the kitchen. My head is spinning with my emotions, but I know one thing for certain, I need to find Shawn and talk to him.