6
Logan
My mate doesn’t want anything serious.
I keep finding myself pacing in this circle. I have a mate. It’s just some girl I met at a bar. I barely know her. But I knotted for Ava. With her, in her, whatever.
I haven’t done a ton of dating, and really, none of it was serious. Maybe I don’t know how it normally works. But I distinctly remember that Ava’s the one who came onto me. She was the one who put her hand down my pants within the hour that we introduced ourselves.
But Ava doesn’t want anything serious.
I didn’t think I’d ever find a mate. Like an actual mate that my wolf responds to, not just a formality between packs. I’ve just never been much of a believer that it was a real thing and not just an urban legend our cousins would tell us.
The moment that I’d been willing to believe in all sorts of things I’d never allowed myself to—love at first sight, destiny, having a mate, heaven even—was all too short.
Even as she’s getting dressed, I’m trying not to hold onto it, trying not to revisit it when I close my eyes—the sight of her relaxing and sinking into her pile of blankets, my cock easing out of her.
An unfamiliar, possessive need rises in me, the urge to kiss her neck, to hold her through the afterglow, to toy my fingers against the crux of her legs and see her come again.
To make sure my seed doesn’t spill out of her, while I sink my teeth into her skin and claim her for my wolf.
It’s not a real feeling, I insist to myself. I don’t know her, not really. It’s just my body reacting to her. As much as I want to lie back down with her and put my arm around her, I can’t.
She’s my mate. And I don’t know anything about her, except that she’s human, and she doesn’t want me.
These two facts are precariously balanced against each other. Maybe there isn’t actually a problem, if these two things effectively cancel each other out.
Besides, it’s probably for the better. I can’t bring a human home.
Not after the shit Shawn just pulled. My mom will have an aneurysm.
The only reason she’s being even remotely ok with Shawn and Elise being remarried to each other is because she already liked Elise.
It’s a rare thing to impress my mom. I can’t imagine Ava even meeting my family, much less being liked by my mom.
Celine and I weren’t perfect, but I’d always thought we were pretty damn close. Celine made sense for me, we had such similar dispositions, tempers. I wasn’t sure what Ava and I could have in common besides whatever raw animal attraction had caused her to push me up against her truck.
Besides, it’s just a knot. She’s not my mate yet, technically, not if I haven’t bitten her.
My head’s in such a dumbfounded fog, I make the way home entirely out of rote memory. I barely sleep what’s left of tonight. I stare at my bedroom ceiling, a little in denial. The quarter moon mocks me from my window.
This isn’t happening. There’s no way a random hookup is my mate.
I didn’t really have time to process any of it when I was with her.
It was a lot to take in and not enough time to really make any kind of well-informed decision.
If this is my knot, then she must be my mate.
But . . . she’s human. I don’t know that I’m entirely convinced yet that a mate can be human, despite last week’s drama.
It’s . . . fine. It’s fine. We don’t have to be anything to each other. I’m just going to forget about her, and deal with this the way I deal with everything: ignore it.
There’s nothing else to be done, really. I fold up the shirt I was wearing when Ava kissed me, shut the lingering scent of her away in a drawer. I refuse to obsess over this all day.
I resist the urge to take it out again and inhale heavily, greedily, for any trace of her scent, and congratulate myself on maintaining my willpower. Small victories.
The house is mostly quiet, as I make my way down the hall. The light is on in my mother’s room.
“. . . giving him the space he needs,” my mother says quietly, likely one of her phone calls with our Aunt Jenny. I know instantly she’s talking about me.
I take care to walk past the slightly ajar door quickly, but a creaky floorboard betrays me.
Her voice stops me at the top of the stairs. “Logan?”
My mother leans out of her bedroom doorway before I can disappear down the stairs. She’s already dressed for the day, fastening one of her earrings on as she catches my eye.
“I’ve been holding off on the interrogation,” she begins diplomatically, and though she might mean it ironically, it still feels a little too fraught. We haven’t had a full conversation about what happened at the wedding yet, and hopefully we never will.
My grip on the banister tightens, even as I try to steel myself against the way my pulse picks up, readying for the conversation we’ve both been avoiding all week.
Every conversation with my mother after Shawn had left had that awful tiptoe nature, her fear palpable that she might say the wrong thing and lose me as well. I hate that we’re back to this again.
“I appreciate that,” I tell her.
She nods, and the moment draws out too long. Something in her expression shifts as she watches me, and I guess she changes her mind from the way she crosses her arms.
“I would just like to offer my help with . . . the situation with the Carringtons,” she finishes, fighting back a grimace over the mere mention of it.
I can only imagine what she’s heard said about me from her side of the family, her friends, and anyone else who was present for the scandal of the season.
There isn’t anything for her to do. Celine made the choice I’d been circling for weeks, unable to broach. My throat tightens a little at the thought of telling my mother it’s already over.
I’m sure the outcome she’d hoped for was that the wedding would be rescheduled, that everything would be put back together, and the whole first attempt would be something we all laughed about in a decade.
That’s not the way it’s going to go. There isn’t any saving face, only isolating until enough time has passed that it moves to the back of people’s minds.
The least I can do is not make things worse by bringing another human into our home.
My teeth snap together, the tension in my jaw winding up immediately. I shake my head. “No, I’ve got it, thanks. I’ll handle it.”
“You’ve always been independent. Even as a baby you didn’t want any help doing anything.” She sighs, leaning back against her bedroom doorjamb. She’s said that a number of times throughout my life.
I nod and take the pause in conversation as my chance for escape, heading down the stairs before she can continue her anecdote, but she calls after me, “Oh, darling, one more thing.”
I pause halfway down the stairs, turning back the smallest amount I can get away with. “Hm?”
“I hate to keep bringing up the wedding, but one of my friends from St. Mary’s was just so taken with the flowers, she asked that I pass on the name of our florist—”
“Yeah, of course. I’ll forward you their email.” I nod and finally escape.
Downstairs, Shawn’s in the kitchen, doctoring a tub of Greek yogurt with what looks like a half dozen packets of Sweet’N Low. Gross. He looks up when I come in.
“Oh good, I was starting to think you’d moved permanently into the catacombs.”
“I would, if only to try to get some peace and quiet.”
“Whatever you’re doing, try something else. It honestly looks like it was rough on you,” Shawn says around a spoonful of yogurt, and then grimaces at the taste.
“Thanks for your honesty,” I mutter, and stifle a yawn. I had a hard time getting any rest last night, regardless of finally sleeping in my own bed. All I could think about was Ava, Ava, Ava, and wish I knew anything else about her.
I rub some of the sleep from my eyes, and pause, staring at Shawn.
Maybe there’s some kind of protocol for when you encounter your once-estranged brother walking around in your mom’s kitchen wearing just your new sister-in-law’s lacey robe and bunny slippers, but I don’t have any on hand.
All I can manage before coffee is to give him a good long stare, and hope he feels adequately judged, so that next time he’ll wear something a little less obviously lingerie in a shared living space.
Shawn opens his mouth, beginning to gesture to the silky ivory robe, but I cut him off. “How’d therapy with Mom go?”
“Oh, she hates it. Hates the therapist. But he did make it weird, like, right off the bat.”
I hate to say that I suspected that it would go that way. I was surprised she had been willing at all to air her dirty laundry to a stranger, as she had dismissed it so many times before. I supposed it must have been worth trying at least to work on her relationship with Shawn.
“What’d he say?”
“He insinuated that I might have bit Mom as a baby during breastfeeding—yeah I think I made the same face when he said that—anyway, this could have led to her holding a grudge ever since. Yeah, I know, we didn’t even get to tell him about Aunt Danielle.
He did a lot more of the talking than I thought he was gonna,” Shawn goes on, and sighs heavily, “Now I gotta convince her that not all therapists are gonna be like that.”
He grumbles as I brush past and open the dishwasher, pulling the top rack out.
I take out the pieces of my Thermos. I’ve tried bringing good coffee to brew at the office, but someone always ends up leaving the pot on the burner and it ends up tasting bitter.
The last thing I need is more bitterness.
I haven’t been on the best terms with Shawn, especially since the fight at the wedding.
When my brother stopped coming home for eight years because he’d broken pack rules by marrying a human, only to come home and re-marry his then ex-wife, my wedding’s caterer, it was hard to view it as anything but a pair of middle fingers, waved inches from my face.
If anything, I have been generous by chalking this up to Shawn being Shawn and getting away with murder because he’s everyone’s favorite.