Chapter 22 Andrea
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Andrea
“I want to see your wolf again,” I said. “The real one.”
We were in the library. Book on my knee, tea going cold on the side table, the usual. I tried to sound casual about it, like I was asking about the weather and not requesting that the man I was sleeping with turn into a massive predator in front of me.
He looked up from his laptop. “Any particular reason?”
“I’ve only seen it once, and I was busy having a nervous breakdown at the time. I’d like to actually enjoy the experience without the hyperventilating and the existential crisis, if that’s okay with you.”
He closed the laptop and looked at me like he was deciding whether I was serious. “Tonight. After dinner.”
He took me to the forest behind the estate at dusk.
The trees were tall and close, the air smelling like pine and damp earth, the last of the daylight filtering gold through the canopy.
I was wearing completely the wrong shoes for hiking, flats that were already sinking into the soft ground, but I didn’t care.
He pulled his shirt off and I watched because I was going to watch every damn time he took his shirt off for the rest of my life, wolf form or not.
The muscles in his back moved in the fading light, the stubble on his jaw catching shadow, and I should have been focusing on the wolf thing but the shirtless thing was right there and I was only human.
“Stop staring,” he said without turning around.
“Stop being shirtless.”
“I have to be shirtless. I’m about to shift.”
“Convenient excuse.”
The shift took a few seconds. His body rearranged, stretched, fur spreading across his skin in a wave of dark color, bones reshaping under the surface with sounds I tried not to think too hard about. Then the wolf was standing in front of me.
I’d never seen this form. On the porch I’d seen Fin become Finneas, wolf shrinking into man.
I’d never seen it go the other direction, never seen his real size.
Fin the husky came up to my thigh. This wolf’s head was level with my chest, coal-black, paws bigger than my hands, amber eyes that caught the last of the sunset.
He was still, watching me, and every instinct I had should have been screaming to back away from the massive predator standing three feet in front of me.
My heart was hammering, not from fear exactly, but from the sheer size of him, the power radiating off his body, the knowledge that this was what he actually was underneath the suits and the desk and the grunts. This was the real thing.
I walked up to him anyway. My legs were shaking slightly and I didn’t care. I scratched behind his ears. “There you are, you big dramatic bastard.”
He nuzzled me so hard I stumbled backward, grabbing onto his fur to keep from falling. I laughed, and he licked my face. A full wet stripe from chin to forehead. I shrieked and shoved his enormous head sideways.
“I will never get used to that. Ever.”
He did it again.
“Finneas, I swear to God, if you lick my face one more time I’m going to...”
He licked my face.
“You’re disgusting. You’re a disgusting wolf and I’m filing a complaint.”
We walked through the forest together, my hand on his back, the heat of him constant under my palm.
His fur was coarser than Fin’s husky form, thicker, muscle shifting underneath with every step.
He was enormous next to me, his shoulder at my waist, his stride covering three of mine.
He kept slowing down to match my pace, which was both sweet and slightly humiliating.
“You know, when I pictured romantic walks in the woods, my date was usually on two legs,” I said. “Just for the record.”
He looked at me sideways. Even as a wolf he had that expression, tolerating my comment without dignifying it with a response.
“Also taller. And less furry. And not capable of eating me if the date went badly.”
He huffed, which I chose to interpret as amusement.
Something rustled in the bushes to our left and I flinched, my hand tightening in his fur.
He didn’t react, just kept walking, calm, unbothered, and I realized nothing in this forest was going to mess with us because the biggest predator here was the one I was holding onto.
That was a hell of a feeling. Terrifying and safe at the same time, which pretty much summed up my entire relationship with this man.
“I bet you love this,” I said. “Big scary wolf, little helpless human clinging to your fur. This is your fantasy, isn’t it? The whole damsel-in-the-woods thing.”
He bumped his head against my hip, gentle this time, and I scratched behind his ears without thinking about it.
It was muscle memory at this point, my hand finding the same spot behind his left ear that made his eyes close, the same spot I used to scratch on the porch when he was Fin and I was lonely and neither of us knew what this was going to become.
My shoe caught a root and I stumbled. His body was under me before I hit the ground, solid as a wall, and I grabbed two fistfuls of fur and hauled myself upright.
“Okay, I should have worn different shoes. I acknowledge this. Don’t look at me like that.”
He was absolutely looking at me like that. Wolves shouldn’t be able to look smug but this one had mastered it.
“Wipe that expression off your face. Can wolves even make expressions? You’re making an expression. Stop it.”
His tail wagged once. The bastard.
“You know what’s weird?” I said, once I had my footing back. “Nothing about this is weird to me anymore. A year ago I would have lost my fucking mind. Now I’m holding onto a wolf in a forest worrying about my shoes. That’s where my life is at.”
He bumped my hip with his shoulder, which nearly knocked me sideways again.
“Was that agreement or an attempt on my life?”
By the time we made it back to the estate, the sky had gone from blue to purple to black at the edges, stars coming out one at a time like someone was turning on lights.
I grabbed a blanket from inside, spread it on the grass in the garden, and settled against his side.
He was still in wolf form, his body a wall of fur and warmth against the cool night air.
I leaned my head back against his shoulder, felt the rumble of his breathing through my whole body.
“You’re like a giant heated blanket,” I told him. “If this King thing doesn’t work out you’ve got a real future in furniture.”
He nosed the side of my head, warm breath in my hair, and I swatted him away laughing. “Gross, your nose is wet. Boundaries, Finneas.”
I opened the book.
“One more time,” I said. “For the original audience.”
I read aloud. The accent, the voices, the full performance.
He huffed at the hero’s love declarations and I poked his side.
“Don’t be a snob. This man is fighting for her.
He’s doing his best.” Another huff. “Oh, you think you could do better? You communicated through grunts for two years. You have no room to judge fictional heroes.”
His tail thumped once on the grass. I took that as concession.
I read another chapter. The heroine was telling the hero she was scared of loving him because everyone she’d loved had left, and my voice got quieter as I read it.
The words landed differently tonight, sitting in a garden with a wolf who was also a king who was also a man who’d lied to me and fought for me and carried me to bed when I fell asleep on his porch.
The heroine was scared. I understood that.
I’d been scared since the night I found out Fin was Finneas, since the peonies, since the first time he said my name like it was the only word he knew.
I stopped reading and put the book down on my chest, face up, the pages fluttering once in the breeze before settling.
“That’s enough for tonight,” I said.
The wolf shifted behind me, pressing closer. His big head came around and rested on my shoulder, heavy and warm. I put my hand on his muzzle and held it there. His fur was soft under my palm, his breath warm and even against my neck.
“I used to read to you on my porch,” I said, quieter. “It was my favorite part of the day because I felt less alone. Now I’m reading to you in your garden and I know who you are and it’s still my favorite part.” I scratched behind his ear. “For a wolf, you’re a pretty good reading buddy.”
His phone rang from inside the estate. I could hear it through the open garden doors, buzzing on the kitchen counter where he’d left it. The wolf’s ears swiveled toward the sound. His body tensed under my hand.
“Leave it,” I said.
He stayed for a second, pressed against me, ear tilted toward the buzzing. It stopped, then started again, persistent, and I felt his body tense with the decision before he made it.
The wolf pulled away from me and I felt the cold rush in where his body had been, sudden and sharp like stepping out of a warm house into winter.
He trotted to the garden door, disappeared inside, and I heard the shift, the rustle of him pulling on clothes, then his voice on the phone, low and clipped. I couldn’t make out the words.
I sat in the garden alone with the book on my chest and the stars overhead and the cold spot against my back where he’d been. A cricket started up somewhere in the hedge, filling the quiet he’d left behind.
This was it. This was loving someone who had a whole other world I couldn’t follow him into.
Phones that rang at night, calls he took in the other room, a pack and a council and a crown that would always pull him away.
I could hear his voice through the door, distant but present.
I couldn’t hear the words. I had to sit with that.
He came back five minutes later, human again, dressed, his jaw set tight in that way I’d learned meant the call hadn’t been good.
“Pack business. A dispute on the northern border, I need to make a few calls.”
“Go.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Go handle it.”
He kissed my forehead, quick and hard, and disappeared back inside.
I heard him on the phone again, his voice dropping into the low authoritative tone I recognized from the office when he was handling something serious.
Giving orders, making decisions, being the King while I lay in his garden with grass in my hair.
I looked up at the stars, the cold spot where his wolf had been beside me, the book still on my chest, his voice drifting from the kitchen.
Distant but present. I wasn’t upset. Wasn’t resentful.
Wasn’t wishing he’d come back and finish the chapter.
I was lying in a garden listening to a man run a kingdom from his kitchen, proud of him, wanting him to come back but not needing him to.
Okay in the gap. In the cold spot. In the waiting. Because I knew he’d come back.
Something shifted in my chest. Quiet, permanent. Like a lock clicking into place. I’d told him I was falling. That had been true, in the bathtub, in the steam, with his hands on my face. But falling implies motion, implies you haven’t stopped yet, implies you could still pull yourself back up.
I wasn’t falling anymore. I’d hit the ground. I was just lying here in the crater, looking at the stars, completely wrecked, and I didn’t want to climb out.
I fell asleep in the garden with the book on my chest, his voice still coming from the kitchen.
When I woke up I was in his bed with his arm around my waist, morning light through the curtains.
He’d carried me inside and I’d slept through the whole thing, which told me everything I needed to know about where I was with this man.
I was curled against his chest, still in last night’s clothes, grass stains on my knees, his arm tightening when I shifted like even in sleep he was keeping track of me.
I picked up my phone from the nightstand and texted Mary.
I think this might be it
She responded instantly: it being what
Him. All of it.
andrea grey are you telling me you’re in love
I looked at him beside me. Asleep, face relaxed, hair falling across his forehead, jaw soft without the tension that lived there during the day. He looked like someone who needed eight more hours of sleep and would never admit it.
yeah. I am.
DON’T JINX IT
that’s not how jinxing works mary
I SAID DON’T TEST ME. just be happy. be disgustingly happy.
you’re ridiculous
and you’re in love so which one of us is really the ridiculous one here
She had a point. Shit.
I put the phone down. I didn’t say it out loud, wasn’t ready to hand him that word yet because once I said it I couldn’t unsay it and my track record with keeping good things was not great. But I knew. Knowing filled me up until there wasn’t room for doubt.
His phone buzzed on the nightstand. He stirred, reached for it with his eyes still closed, checked the screen, and his jaw tightened even half-asleep.
“Pack stuff?” I asked.
“Yeah. Luca.”
He put the phone down and rolled toward me and pulled me against his chest.
“It can wait.”
“You said that last night too.”
“And it waited.”
“Until it didn’t.”
He was quiet. His face was pressed against my hair and I could feel him thinking, the tension in his body that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago. The King waking up inside the man, the crown settling back onto his head before his eyes were even fully open.
“You know I’m not going anywhere, right?” I said. “When the phone rings and you have to go deal with wolf stuff, I’m not going to disappear. I’ll be here. Or at my house. Or at the shelter stealing cats. But I’ll be here.”
His arm tightened around me. He didn’t say anything, just pressed his mouth against the top of my head and held me while his phone buzzed again on the nightstand.
Neither of us moved. Morning light through the curtains, warm on the sheets, his chest rising and falling under my cheek.
I pressed my face into him, breathed him in, held close what I knew. I wasn’t afraid of it anymore.