Chapter 20 #3
The sliding door is open. I walk through and find her in one of the patio chairs. My flannel is pulled around her shoulders, a beer bottle resting on her knee. The mountain wind is cold tonight, and her breath fogs faintly when she exhales.
“How’s the arm holding up?”
“It’s holding.” She lifts it a few inches off the armrest. “I stitched the deeper one tighter once I had better light.”
“How are you so calm about this?”
A small laugh comes out of her, tired and low. “Do I look calm to you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m not. I am freaking out inside, Grayson.
I am having an entire breakdown behind my face.
” She rolls the bottle between her palms. “But I’m not surprised.
A part of me always knew you weren’t human.
I’ve known since the night you walked into my ER with a wound that should have been pouring and wasn’t. ”
She is watching me back, her face tired but lovely and steady. There’s no fear in her eyes.
“You want to know what I am.”
She nods slowly. “Yes. I could look the other way before. But not now.”
I rest my forearms on my knees. “Will it change anything between us once you see my other form?”
“Form?” She blinks.
I nod.
A small smile pulls at the corner of her mouth after a moment. “It probably won’t. I’m sure you’ll be annoying in whatever form you take.”
A laugh shakes out of me before I can catch it, and my head drops between my shoulders.
When I lift it again, she is still smiling at me, and something inside my chest pulls hard at the sight. That only ever happens with her.
I slide off the chair and crouch in front of her. My hand goes to the armrest, framing her in. She doesn’t lean back.
“What if I told you I turn into a grotesque monster?”
She tilts her head, her eyes warm. “Then I am going to have to ask where you get all that ego from.”
I drop my forehead onto her knee, laughing low. Her hand comes up, fingers threading through the back of my hair, and I stay there with my eyes closed because I am not sure my chest can take this much at once.
When I lift my head, she is looking down at me with that same patient face.
“I’ll show you,” I murmur. “On one condition.”
Her brow arches at me. “Of course there’s a condition.”
“You kiss me first.”
“Why do I have to do that?” she splutters.
“Because.” My hand slides up her thigh through the flannel until my thumb is resting against her hip. “Because I don’t know if you’ll want me to touch you afterward.”
She makes a small, impatient sound at the back of her throat. Her hand curls around the back of my neck and pulls me in.
The kiss starts hesitantly and turns sweet. She tastes like beer, mint, and something underneath that is just her.
I deepen it before I can talk myself out of it.
My hand fists in the flannel at her hip as I take her mouth properly, and a small sound escapes her that goes through me like a current.
The other hand braces on the armrest by her shoulder, and I lean in, crowding her into the chair, the wolf in my chest stirring once before settling.
A sharp pinch lands on the underside of my arm.
I jerk back from her.
“I don’t think so, Wolfe.”
I give her a forlorn look. “You can’t keep bullying me like this.”
“Have you seen your size? Like I could bully you,” she scoffs.
Standing up, I pull my shirt off over my head.
The bottle stops moving in her hand.
“Why,” she manages slowly, “are you stripping?”
“Because clothes don’t survive the change.”
“The change,” she repeats.
“Just close your eyes for a minute.” I drop the shirt on the chair, and my hands go to my belt. “And don’t open them until I tell you to.”
“Grayson Wolfe, what are you doing?”
“Close them, Carver.”
She closes them reluctantly, with one eyebrow up.
I step off the porch onto the cold wet grass.
My wolf surges up to meet me before I’ve fully invited him in.
The shift comes hard and clean. My bones reset.
The world drops down to four feet, and the smells come up sharper.
Pine reaches me first, then wet stone, then the blood on her bandage, then her heart beating fast under her skin.
I walk back to the porch and stop in front of her chair.
The breath I exhale fogs in the cold, fur lifting in the breeze, gunmetal gray, the same color as my mother’s. My wolf wants her to look at us. He wants her to see what we are and decide.
I let out a low huff against the back of her hand.
Her eyes fly open.
The color drains out of her face in one slow wave, but this time, it is not horror. It is wonder undercut by an animal startle, and her mouth opens around a word that doesn’t come out.
She slides off the chair, landing on the porch on her knees. The bottle hits the wood and rolls without breaking. Her hand braces on the boards. The eyes she lifts to me are huge.
I lower my head until my muzzle is level with her face, moving slowly enough that any human could have backed away.
She doesn’t back away.
Her hand lifts up between us. It hovers there for a second. Then her fingers touch the fur at the side of my jaw, very lightly, and the wolf in me leans into her hand without my permission.
“Oh,” she whispers.
The smile that breaks across her face is small and shocked, the most beautiful thing I have seen in my life.
“Hi.”