16 #2
He seems a little off-kilter. There’s always dark circles under his eyes, but it’s clear he hasn’t slept. The way he moves is a little stiff; every exhale has an edge of a growl on it.
“Did you forget it’s like a federal crime or whatever?”
“Yeah, sorry, I had a really rough night.”
“Oh, you. YOU had a rough night.”
“Yeah, the dog crate isn’t fantastic.”
“And where did . . . ” I start to ask, glancing around the cabin again. I’m not sure how to begin to explain the monster from last night. I stop short, swallowing, as his words start to sink in.
I don’t like the answer he’s spelling out for me, actually. And I’m just kind of hoping if I squint it’ll say something else. My mouth moves to say words, but no sound comes out the first try.
“You were in the dog crate? Right, yeah, of course, you were,” I say weakly, at last. “Duh, I don’t know why I didn’t recognize you. It’s just that your evening look is radically different from your day wear.”
Logan doesn’t bat an eye. Instead, this motherfucker says completely unironically, “The full moon has that effect on us.”
“What, like werewolves?”
“. . . Something like that.”
I nod back at him slowly, uncomprehending.
“Oh, of course, that explains it all,” I say, because duh, Ava, why didn’t you understand that sooner?
It should have been so obvious, all along.
It was always werewolves. Anyone else would have seen THAT coming, I berate myself because it’s easier than reckoning with my new reality that apparently has included werewolves this entire time, and I had no idea.
The room feels suddenly unsteady, my sense of balance getting motion sick as my perception re-rights itself.
I put a hand on the counter to steady myself as Logan finds a pair of my baggier sweatpants in my laundry pile and trades the towel for them.
They’re too short on him and the fabric is thin enough that it doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination.
I watch as he kneels and cards through one of the laundry piles and finds the button-down shirt he once left in my truck that I’d kept on my bed for a few nights.
When he threads his arms through the sleeves, it tears something in me that he’s taking it back. I was going to pay an Etsy witch to burn it and put a curse on him, maybe, after I was done crying into it.
“Well, if you don’t need anything else from me, I’ll get going,” Logan says with a glance to me, running his hands through his hair to pull it out from the shirt’s collar.
“The fuck you are,” I murmur, and he pauses, halfway to stand.
I don’t know what gives me the courage to step between him and the front door, my hands balling into fists at my sides. “No, you’re staying here and explaining something to me.”
I don’t have a plan. In fact, I’m pretty much regretting every decision that led to this moment. Even if Logan isn’t currently a big, scary beast, I still only come up to his shoulders, and I’ve experienced the ease he can pick me up with. I’m hardly an obstacle in his path.
But I don’t want him to just leave again without telling me everything. The last couple days, feeling the absence of his affection gouged something awful in me. I need answers.
Even though he’s perfectly human in this moment, I see the way his features were in the creature’s face.
I knew it wasn’t a wolf. Not any kind of wolf I’d ever seen before. Maybe it had seemed like one when I’d been running from it, but curled up in the crate, I wasn’t entirely sure I could tell what it was. There had been something a little too human about it.
I’m still not really willing to believe it. It was him. He was here. He was that monster.
Those thoughts must be clear on my face, because Logan eyes me warily. “Are you sure you want me alone in the same room as you?”
Maybe this is a dumb plan. I don’t know that I have anything better, though, with the way my heart is racing. I’ve never had to deal with someone being a werewolf before; why would I?
The stare Logan gives me lasts for far too many heartbeats—he doesn’t move, doesn’t blink.
I meet it with a fierce glare, and just in case he thought I was kidding, I point at the ground near his feet. “Stay.”
Then there’s the slightest crease in Logan’s cheek, a tug in the corner of his mouth, as he sinks back down onto his knees, directly before me.
With a shake of his head, he tosses some of his wet hair over his shoulder, before his eyes sweep over me again, with just a hint of a heated look.
Even kneeling, there’s something regal about the way he holds himself.
Standing this close to him was a mistake, actually.
I can see he hasn’t shaved. I haven’t seen him with that suggestion of stubble before.
It’s one of those details that makes me ache for how much better I could know him, how many more little things I could have enjoyed learning about him, that I’m not sure if I’ll have a chance to.
His attention lingers on my face. “Did you have bangs before we broke up?”
Heat creeps up the back of my neck as I barricade myself against the urge to rake a hand through them, hide them somehow. “Yeah, yeah I did.”
Logan doesn’t look convinced. “Uh-huh.”
Of course he doesn’t, he probably saw the scissors still out on my bathroom sink, the clumps of trimmed hair everywhere.
The heat climbing my neck reaches my cheeks and ears when I glance toward the bathroom doorway and spot my bright pink vibrator on its charger, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Love that for me.
“Also, we didn’t break up. We weren’t together,” I huff, quick to assert that he didn’t dump me.
“I know,” Logan replies with a sigh, his dark brown eyes holding mine. There’s a tension in his shoulders that just sort melts out of him, leaving something solemn, distant and lonely in his face.
In those two small words, he seems to encapsulate how I’ve been keeping him at arm’s length. And yet here we are, utterly tangled up.
I feel too exposed with him being here in my space, my mess, the tides of laundry that usually swamp more of the floor, my muddy work boots by the door, the fact that I don’t open my mail regularly enough, according to Mr. Desk Job.
Just a few more reasons among the many why I didn’t ever bring him back here.
I don’t have a family business, or even much of a family to give me that kind of security.
I didn’t want to give him the chance to deem me unworthy because my circumstances were so different from his own, but he didn’t need it to discard me.
I try to shake the self-consciousness off. There wasn’t any point to feeling that way now, when we were done. “Let’s try this again, and you’ll tell me the truth this time. Why are you here?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were ok. You—look, you sounded upset,” he says, and there’s a concerned sincerity in his voice that nearly gets me, tugging painfully on my heart.
The laugh that escapes me is a short, bitter sound.
The way Logan’s frown deepens without moving a muscle is truly impressive. He’s got that nailed.
I set my jaw, eyeing him up and down. “You’ll ignore like twenty of my texts, but if I cry in your voicemail, you’ll come get me? That’s not a good precedent to set. Like, if you’re gonna ghost me, block my number.”
“I didn’t get any of your texts, I just heard the voicemail when you made it.”
Right, because that was him. I close my eyes, trying to withstand the floor-tilting way the werewolf thing has shifted things around in my world. Oh my god, that was him.
I meet his eyes again with that knowledge, him kneeling before me, and the psychic damage of that realization sends me pacing.
I need to take a lap. Last night he watched me panic for a solid hour, he let me feed him baloney, he tried to lick my pussy through the cage, and I had almost let him finish the job.
“It was you! My god, and you knew I was me, and you nearly let me rawdog a fucking strange—! What were you thinking?”
He blinks several times, looking absolutely lost. He raises his hands off his lap, placating. “Ok, let’s back up here. We weren’t going to . . . I would not have done that as a wolf.”
“No? Why not?”
“ . . . For the reasons you’re mad at me? For the same reasons I broke—didn’t break up with you,” he corrects himself with a half-hearted eyeroll.
“But we could’ve—” I cut myself off. My hangups about that still exist, though the reasons are different, now.
But I’m not the one on trial right now, so we’re not examining that.
I doubt they’re the same as his, though.
I wave a hand like I can erase my last thought from our conversation and push on, demanding, “I mean—and these reasons are?”
“The part where I chased you down as a rabid werewolf being the first of them,” he says flatly, and then this motherfucker has the audacity to give me one of those joyless smiles, like that should have been obvious.
Oh, duh. Yeah, actually. Maybe that’s a pretty good reason to end things.
“But the werewolf, I mean, you—you still chased me,” I return, a little pathetically. It’s a shot in the dark, half a thought that there might have been a reason.
Logan’s deep-set eyes darken, his gaze narrowing.
“It didn’t sound like your friend was doing his job,” he says, a possessive growl leaching into his voice.
I’m not ready for what that does to me, the wave of heat that rolls through my body.
Logan raises his chin, stating with an incontestable confidence, “I know what sounds you make when it’s done right. ”
Oh. My cheeks scald. It is very warm in here, under my clothes. I might actually be sweating a little.
I swallow, unable to respond but stare back, wide-eyed at Logan kneeling before me. He hasn’t taken his eyes off me once, wearing the same hungry look the wolf had watched me from the crate with.
“Every moment since I’ve met you, I’ve . . . ” His hands carefully trace up my legs, a slow, caressing touch. It’s sweet and reverent, the way he always is with me.