6 #2
I fully believe he would commit all aforesaid egregious acts without a good reason to do so, but possibly for the first time, I wonder if he might have had one.
“When you call Elise your mate, do you mean it figuratively, or . . . ”
I deliberately don’t finish that sentence. I’m not asking my brother about his dick.
Shawn frowns derisively at me, like I’ve insulted him. He looks me up and down for a long moment, and while I can see the gears turning in his head he opts to just answer with a tone that implies I’m an idiot, his idea of being the mature older brother.
“Why would it be figuratively? That seems like it’d be a confusing thing to do.”
I don’t reply, and Shawn continues doing whatever he came down here to do, topping his yogurt monstrosity with cereal.
I . . . honestly just thought he was trying to be sweet to her. I didn’t think he meant mate like werewolf mysticism about soul-bound mates and knotting and actually that’s way more than I want to think about my brother and his wife.
The other thing I’m not going to do is ask my brother about how knotting works.
I mean it wasn’t that many days ago that he asked me if I knew, so really, how much could Shawn know? It wouldn’t be worth it. I don’t trust that he could gain any knowledge about how things worked that I couldn’t figure out on my own.
Shawn seems to have sensed that I’m mentally disparaging him, because he frowns a little deeper every few seconds and looks at me again. Just as I finish pouring coffee into my Thermos, he throws a Cheerio at me.
“No, no. Come back here. You think I call her that just for the hell of it?”
“According to the video Aiden took, ‘let’s do this for the hell of it,’ was pretty much the entirety of your vows.”
A second Cheerio hits me square in the forehead, landing in my coffee before I can cap the thermos. Fucking hell.
“I don’t know, man,” I sigh. Out front, Aiden’s Jeep honks a couple times, and I wince at how loud it is. “You do everything spur of the moment. You don’t take anything seriously. Now you’re gonna tell me you’re surprised when people don’t take you seriously?”
“Not people, just my brother.”
I fish the coffee-soaked Cheerio out and flick it back at him. “You’re a clown.”
I suppose it’s a testament to how different we are that Shawn doesn’t flinch at what would insult me.
He peels the wet Cheerio off his shirt and places it on the tip of his nose and then has the gall to look impressed with himself when it stays there. “And don’t you forget it.”
I almost smile despite how annoyed I am. The most aggravating thing about Shawn remains that you can’t stay mad at him for long.
Regardless of whether or not I thought he and Elise were actually mates, I was not actually that surprised that Elise and Shawn had been married and divorced once already. Clown behavior begets other clownish antics. If you marry this idiot once, might as well do it twice.
They deserve each other, if nothing else.
Aiden leans on the horn, and I take my cue to leave.
My younger brother gives me a brief nod when I slide into the passenger seat, wordlessly offering me one of his earbuds as he usually does.
I shake my head. “I need to catch up on some emails.”
“I don’t know how you do it,” he says with a glance to my phone as I open a thread. “I’d take sweating in the warehouse over emails any day.”
I bite back a response that he does technically have emails he’s supposed to be answering and let the topic die. Aiden puts his other earbud back in. He knows I’m not very chatty in the mornings. His attention is quickly reabsorbed in whatever podcast he’s got on.
In the last few years, this is the most time we spend together. We haven’t been all that close since Dad died and I essentially became his boss.
Aiden’s working the warehouse part of the brewery, and like most days I catch a ride from him.
It’s only a few minutes from the house to work, and we take the service road that connects the properties through a field.
A tick of panic touches my heart when I glance around and recognize these woods from last night, and I spot a set of tire tracks in the mud.
Having roamed the woods that stretched between the Hayes House and the brewery pretty often, I thought I knew them better than anyone. Apparently not as well as I thought, if I’d missed this popular make out point.
Aiden drops me off at the front of the building and drives around to the back.
I’m barely halfway to my intended destination when a scent catches me off guard, and I find myself avoiding my office, heading to the renovated part of the building.
There’s a small but functional industrial kitchen back there, as well as my new sister-in-law.
The ovens are on, and she’s pulling trays in and out of them; the ones coming out are filled with steaming bite-sized snacks that look intriguing and tasty. No idea what they are, though.
“Yeesh, you again,” I scoff, but there’s no malice to it. We say this every time we bump into each other at the brewery. “What’s Shawn doing at the house? Is the cottage honeymoon over already?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
“He threw Cheerios at me. I need to know if there’s more of that in my future.”
“Fine, have it your way, I need a new mattress, a new bedframe, and possibly a new couch because it’s not comfortable enough to keep sleeping on.” Elise sighs, and I wince, wishing I’d believed her the first time. She glances in my direction, making a quick, sweeping assessment. “You look awful.”
“Sounds about right. I’ve got a lot of calls I have to make today.
I need to talk to someone about a fence and a permit and a .
. . property line,” I tell her, rubbing the heel of my hand into my eye.
I don’t have power over Ava having her hookups necessarily, but I don’t have to let them keep happening on my goddamn family property.
“Did you even go home last night?” Elise rolls her eyes, opening the fridge to take out a full piping bag. I’ve spent enough late nights at the brewery to avoid coming home that she’s caught me leaving for a change of clothes on her way in.
“Eventually.”
She pulls one of the trays full of bite-sized, evenly spaced goodness toward her, and leans over it, piping little swirls of whatever onto each piece. “I heard Celine was here the other day. Didn’t stay long enough for us to meet her.”
“She’s just got a busy schedule.”
“Oh, so we will meet her?”
I can’t help but hear the second question tucked under the first. Are things back on?
I hedge. Although Celine had just dumped me, she hadn’t said that door was completely closed. “It might be a while.”
Elise rolls her eyes. “You’re not worried about the Carringtons getting annoyed that you’re putting them off?”
I know she doesn’t approve of the way Celine and I arranged things. As the only human in the family, of course she wouldn’t understand how things work between werewolf packs. There’s a certain style of politicking that is expected. Forgoing it would be just as rude.
“I’m seeing them Sunday. Celine and I talked about it, we’re going to take some time to get on the same page,” I say a little too quickly, and her round face pinches in sympathy.
“Oh, you poor thing. You were dumped?” Elise says a little too genuinely, and for some reason that makes it hurt more.
I let a sigh loose. “Yeah . . .” I can’t blame Celine for maybe not wanting to go through with things after what happened at the wedding.
Elise spears a flare of tension through me by all but reading my thoughts. “So, that’s an end to all the drama?”
Some buried, hopeful part of me agrees it could be a good thing, that it could mean I was free to be with my mate, before I remind myself Ava isn’t interested. There’s an almost physical response to the thought of that, an internal sense of defensiveness that rears its head.
I don’t believe the mating means what my brother thinks it means.
Shawn’s all too eager to find a profound depth in the mundane, that there’s a spiritual element at work when your body decides you’ve found a mate.
And I can see why he would, he married his college sweetheart and even though they divorced, they found their way back to each other.
Of course he would believe a hand of destiny was at work.
And of course, destiny is only kind to exactly that sort of idiot.
I don’t have it in me to wildly and recklessly place hope in something like that. To go off of utterly nothing and have faith that everything will work itself out because it’s all cosmically tied together. Our lives are too small and meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
I can’t just cut all contact with the Carringtons because I want to believe I’ve found my true mate.
“It’s . . . there’s a lot of ego involved, when you deal with families.
It’s important to let the offended party decide how they want to proceed,” I tell her.
It’s hard to put into words, because it’s not something I’ve been directly taught, only observed over the years.
I think if anyone ever bothered to distill the unspoken rules of etiquette into an actual list, it might reveal how precarious and ridiculous it all was.
Elise raises an eyebrow to that, like she doesn’t quite believe that it could be such a complicated, delicate situation.
I think briefly about telling her just how tangled things are, but refrain. I’ve never been one for sharing the sordid details, and I just don’t know how I would avoid recounting them.
Then again, I hadn’t known she’d already been married to my brother once before. Having secrets is how this family operates. I can’t imagine telling any of them anything personal about myself.
My phone buzzes in my back pocket, and I take it out automatically, half-expecting it to be one of the delivery drivers calling out from work.
But it’s a message from Ava.