Chapter 28
28
SETH MAYS
They fired me.
My phone immediately started buzzing. I picked it up and thumbed the green button.
“They fired you? For what ?” It was Elliot.
“So that I could take the time I need to recover.” I repeated what the HR manager had said to me as I sat in her corporate-style office with its nauseating pseudo-inspirational posters.
“That’s bullshit,” Elliot fumed. It helped a little that he was outraged on my behalf. Well, it helped my emotional state. It definitely wasn’t going to help my financial state, which had already been barely holding itself together and was now going to very quickly go into the toilet.
“Yeah,” I agreed. I felt too empty to even get riled up at this point. When she’d said it— We really feel that it’s in your best interest to stop working and take the time you need to recover —I had just stared at her. What the hell do you even say to that? Add to it the fact that the whole room smelled sharp- sour and my ears sent stabbing pain through my head with every tap of her lacquered fingernails on her desk, and I had just felt so utterly lost. Overwhelmed.
Was I in a good place mentally and physically to work? No, of course not. My skin itched half the time, I had a nearly constant low-grade headache, I couldn’t stand being around most people because of the combination of BO and excessive perfume, and I felt constantly pumped full of nervous energy and exhaustion simultaneously.
But working at least helped me to focus on something that wasn’t my own rebellious physiology.
And now I didn’t have that.
I don’t know if I made a noise or if I failed to respond to something he’d said, but he sounded worried when he spoke again. “Seth, are you okay?”
“N-no.” I cringed at how pathetic I sounded. I mean, yeah, okay, it really bloody sucked, and I was okay acknowledging that, but I hadn’t expected to go all weepy on him. I didn’t want to be that kind of needy… whatever I was to him. Friend-with-benefits-but-not-really-because-he-lives-a-thousand-miles-away.
“Talk to me,” he said, in that perfectly calm, reasonable, Elliot way. The way that I really wanted to be talked to, but couldn’t get anywhere else but Elliot.
Damn.
Nothing like a major life crisis to make you realize you’ve fallen for your friend-with-benefits-but-not-really-because-he-lives-a-thousand-miles-away. Who had made it clear that he wasn’t in this for a relationship.
Clearly I make terrible decisions.
I told him about the whole conversation. About the way she sucked her teeth, making this high-pitched squeaking sound I hated , the way her perfume felt like a personal assault, but still didn’t block her sour-sharp smell, the way her nails clicked and the way the furniture polish in the room made me want to sneeze.
“She was afraid of you, you know,” he said, then.
“What?”
“That sour-sharp smell. A little like body odor, but rancid and a little burnt. It’s fear.”
“Oh.”
“My poor baby shifter.” He sounded amused, although not in an unkind way.
“I hate it,” I whined.
“I remember,” he replied.
“You remember me hating it?”
That got me a barked laugh. “No, baby. I remember what it was like.”
Right. Because he was a shifter, too.
“Isn’t your brother also a shifter?” Elliot asked me.
“Yeah, but he’s at work right now.”
He was quiet for a moment. “But you could talk to him?”
I sighed. “I could,” I agreed, but the way I said it obviously made it clear that I hadn’t talked to him. Not about these sorts of things, anyway.
“But…?” Elliot prodded. He was clearly curious, but there was a lot less judgment in his tone than I’d been expecting.
“I don’t want to dump this on him, too,” I mumbled.
“Too?”
“He’s taken care of me. Took time off work, has made me food, driven me around… He doesn’t need my psychological shit, too,” I explained.
“I get that?” Elliot asked me, and I could hear just a teasing edge in the question.
I felt my neck and cheeks flame. “Sorry,” I mumbled .
“Seth—please don’t apologize.” He sounded… I wasn’t sure. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I—I shouldn’t be making you deal with my shit,” I muttered.
“It’s okay, baby,” he said gently.
Don’t think I hadn’t noticed how it had started as baby shifter and become just baby . I liked it. Of course I did. It let my brain and my heart pretend that I meant more to him than I almost certainly did—that I meant something different to him than what we’d agreed. Rule Two.
I wasn’t sure what to say to him. There wasn’t a good way to thank someone for being your psychological life-line when they have absolutely no obligation to do so.
“What can I do?” he asked, then, and I broke down. Thick, heavy sobs that came up from the bottom of my stomach.
Elliot stayed on the phone with me for the three hours it took before Noah got home, his footsteps rushed because he knew I wasn’t supposed to be home before him. My brother is nobody’s fool.
I’d just put the warm phone down when Noah’s knock came at my door.
“Sethy?” He sounded worried, scared.
And I was only going to add to it. “Yeah, I’m here,” I answered him.
“Can I come in?” There was less worry this time—probably because I’d been capable of answering him, which meant I wasn’t violently ill or covered in fur.
“Yeah.”
The knob clicked as he turned it, then gently eased open the door. He leaned in the doorway, his shorter, more slender frame tense, blond hair messy, the same way mine always got when I let it grow too long. His brows, a brown that was darker than his hair—also like mine—drew together over eyes that were the same blue that looked back at me in the morning. About the only differences in our appearance besides height and build was the fact that my skin saw more sun than his, my cheeks, arms, and shoulders were usually lightly dusted with freckles, and I was now sporting a beard that Noah was insanely jealous of. He complained constantly that all he could manage was some peach fuzz, even with the T. I’d told him that I’d take not being able to grow a beard for his perfect vision, as mine was shit and he didn’t need glasses or contacts.
“What happened?” he asked softly. There was still worry there, but since I was in front of him and not any visibly more battered than when I’d left, it was less.
“They fired me,” I replied.
Noah’s blue eyes widened. “They what?! ”
“Fired. Me,” I repeated. “So I can recover.”
“That’s—” He was spluttering. “Jesus. That has to be illegal.”
“You know it isn’t,” I told him. Hands and Paws saw this happen pretty much every day. Yeah, they technically couldn’t fire me for being a shifter, but they could fire me for any number of other things that they would have ignored if I’d been human.
“But they can’t just fire you.”
“I think technically they let me go for health reasons, which means my file won’t say I was terminated. So they didn’t fire me. But they fired me.”
Noah snorted. “Bullshit.”
“That’s what Elliot said,” I told him .
“Elliot is right,” Noah snapped.
I shrugged, the gesture made deeply awkward by the fact that I was still lying on my back.
“No, not nhreeh.” He imitated my shrug with the noise. “Bullshit.” He frowned deeper. “Why aren’t you more angry about this?”
“I… don’t have it in me,” I admitted.
The anger on his face was immediately cut with worry. “Seth…”
I put my hands over my face. “I’m just so tired, Nono,” I said, half-swallowing the words, but I knew he could hear me anyway.
I heard him move, then felt the mattress sink a little as he sat beside me. A hand settled on my thigh. “Did you eat today?” he asked softly.
“Not since breakfast,” I answered glumly.
“Seth.”
I shot him a look that asked how he expected me to have the energy to make myself food after the rest of the day I’d had.
“Seth, seriously,” he said, sounding exasperated. “You have to remember to eat.”
“I know.”
“Hangry has a whole new level of meaning for shifters,” he informed me.
I blinked. “Oh.”
“So eat , okay?”
“Okay.”
“Tuna melts?” Although mine would be less melt, since vegan cheese doesn’t.
“Okay.”
He patted my leg, then got up. “At least now you can recover fully. ”
I snorted. “Until we run out of money because my food bill just tripled.”
“It should triple,” he retorted. “But it’s barely even doubled for you, which means that you need to eat more .”
“I’ve said I’ll eat,” I grumbled.
He sighed, then left the room, gently closing the door behind him.
“Shit,” I muttered under my breath.
I needed to be nicer to Noah. I needed to be more grateful, less whiny, and do more to actually take care of myself, as opposed to forcing him to wait on me hand and foot.
Tomorrow.