16 #3
Once again I feel that almost palpable sense that he’s holding back the depth of his feelings, but they seep through his hands regardless. I feel the weight of it now.
I let him press his forehead against my stomach, my fingers sinking into his hair.
“Ava, I am and have been desperately and anxiously in love with you. I fell for you first, and I fell embarrassingly fast. I didn’t even have time to protect my heart; I was already gone.”
My cheeks color. I shift my weight from one hip to the other as I consider him. I try to muster the fact that I’m still pissed off at him for being an old-school Hollywood monster and not bothering to tell me and everything else that’s been happening lately.
But I can’t really be mad, not when there’s a whole host of flutterings in my chest. The really hot dork who’s a mean grump to everyone else but looks at me with the softest smiles just said he loves me. And he’s a werewolf who can rail me into next Tuesday.
“I’m all in on you, and I can’t take that back. You have my heart whether you want it or not,” Logan sighs, a little self-deprecatingly.
I cover his mouth with my hand, hushing him. I can’t stand to hear him say I don’t want him, it’s not true.
“Ava—” he starts to say from around my hand, and I spot how his teeth line up a little too well with the bitemark. I squint. That doesn’t mean anything. All teeth kind of line up the same, I think.
Still, I can’t let go of my suspicion. There’s been too many weird things to just keep discounting them.
My hand tightens on his jaw, and I tip his head back, pushing back his upper lip with my thumb to reveal his teeth.
I feel that world-tilting instability in my stomach when I spot the lack of a scarred puncture where his one tooth is chipped.
My stare darts between the scarring on my hand to his eyes, and I know he sees the moment I realize that he’s the creature that bit me that night a month ago, because he covers my hand with his.
“And this?” I breathe, more statement than question. Maybe I’m overlooking the werewolf thing as being less of a red flag than I should be.
“It means you’re important to me,” he says slowly. “In ways that are too much to ask of you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
For the first time in several minutes, I see him avoid my eyes. “It’s, um, kind of hard to articulate.”
“Is it? What’s it mean, Logan?”
I stare at the way his Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.
“Wolves mate for life.”
I nod, taking in the meaning of all this. I kinda thought getting a straight answer from him would involve more tooth-pulling, more prying his mouth open. “Your . . . werewolf wants to be my mate? For life?”
He seems kind of charmed by my repeating it, and I’m briefly so flustered I can’t think of how to respond. It pinches in my chest to see that flicker across his face, before he schools it away. “Yeah. That’s all.”
“That’s all?” I repeat, a hysterical laugh lining my words. “And you weren’t going to tell me that we were werewolf-engaged?”
“Ava, you wouldn’t even get coffee with me.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. I can’t believe the game of chicken we’ve been playing this whole time. “So, you were just going to wait until I ghosted you first?”
“I . . . yes. I was waiting for you to end things first. I was going to take as many days with you as I could have. I thought it would be worth it just to spend any time at all with you, even if there was no hope you’d ever feel the same way.”
All I can do is blink back at him. “This is a lot,” I say, my voice cracking a little on the words.
“I know,” he sighs, forehead pressing to my ribs.
I don’t know where I stand with Logan now. I liked him, I thought we were getting along pretty well. It had been more serious than I’d been with someone in a while, more than I thought we’d be. I had been coming around, tentatively, on the idea of something more with him.
“I don’t know where to even start with all this.”
“No, don’t. You don’t have to think about anything. It’s not fair to you if we continue,” he says, a touch that makes all the treacherous emotions that we’re discussing flood my chest. “You don’t return my feelings.”
I almost wince at that. How can I? I can’t conceal how freaked out by all this I am. I need like, five fucking minutes to absorb the gravity of how much this changes things. Or how it could have changed things. I don’t know.
“I think it’s unfair for you to bring my feelings into this. I was keeping them to myself,” I mumble.
“Me too,” Logan says quietly. There’s a ghost of a smile as he says it, some painful twist of irony. Of course we’re doing the same thing, that’s probably why we’re soulmates or whatever in the first place.
Soulmates who couldn’t make it work, I think, brushing my thumb over his cheek. Logan’s eyes close and he takes in a long, slow breath, savoring the small touch.
After too long, he seems to internally shrug. Then he sighs and stands. We’re back to him towering over me.
“So, we’re calling it quits?”
With his gaze wandering over me, I feel like I can see Logan actively picking apart the places our hearts have stitched together, before he nods. “We’ll save ourselves a lot of hurt in the long run if we just leave this here.”
My throat is impossibly tight. Watching Logan open the door, I feel the seconds slipping away from me to say something, anything.
His dark eyes flick to mine one last time, my heart in a riot. “We shouldn’t pretend this was real.”
And then he leaves.
I’m not sure how long I just stare at the closed door after him, or when the hot tears started slipping down my cheeks. I sink down onto my bed, thinking about the last time I cried into these sheets, wondering when that body-shaking sadness will sweep through me.
The room grows dark waiting for it, the day trickles by in hours each time I roll over in bed, closing my eyes for blinks of restless sleep.
Maybe it should feel better that I’m being dumped not because there’s something wrong with me, or because he lost interest in me, but I think this is actually worse.
He loves me. I fucking called it. I fucking knew that asshole was constantly on the precipice of blurting out that he was in love with me this whole time.
I’m incredibly endeared by the thought, but in the same heartbeat, torn apart by the swell of affection I feel.
It doesn’t matter that he’s in love with me.
We could be driving off into the sunset together, if not for the werewolf and my overwhelming baggage squeezing between us.
I don’t think I’m entirely convinced that’s a problem; the werewolf honestly seemed to like me. And traumatic after-dark chase aside, last night wasn’t the worst. I was still panicking at that point, but I think if I’d just known beforehand maybe I would have been more chill about it.
Whatever, I’m getting off focus. I don’t understand how he can just tell me he loves me and it doesn’t get to mean anything. We’re just going to go our separate ways?
And I never even said it back to him, I realize. He doesn’t know.
The thought makes me stand up. He doesn’t know. Oh my god, I never told him. My heart strains at the hope that if he knew he might change his mind.
I can’t stop to think or doubt. I whirl around and grab my keys off the counter, throwing the door open and letting it slam behind me.
Logan’s already long gone, but the familiar rattle of my ex’s van stops me on my front steps. It grows louder until I see it pass down the dirt road by my driveway. Jackson catches sight of me and slows down only marginally.
“Don’t you worry, Ava, I’mma take care of that coyote,” he calls out as he passes by with a well-meaning wave. He is gone just as quickly.
My throat tightens. I’m not the only one about to chase down a werewolf.