17
Logan
Most of the day is gone already, by the time I get to the brewery.
Thankfully none of Aconite Ale’s employees run into me, barefoot and barely dressed, as I duck inside and round the corner to go down into the basement. Aiden’s got the glass from the broken window cleaned up, a wooden board already fitted over the opening.
With a moment of privacy, I pull the drawer from a bureau open and step into a spare pair of jeans. On a less fraught day, I might be annoyed that I haven’t remembered to restock clean underwear or socks in the basement, but with my mind still churning with thoughts of Ava, it hardly registers.
I have to figure out how to return her sweatpants, I realize, as I start to fold them back up.
There’s a twist of pain when my heart leaps at the thought of seeing her again, however briefly.
I have to figure out what to do now that I know my mate lives five minutes away, horribly, horribly within reach and yet just outside it.
I’m trying not to think about all the places in town I’ll bump into her.
I can’t leave Mystic Falls. My family needs me here. But with so many places I might run into Ava, there seems only a handful where I might avoid her.
Then again, much more pressing, was the issue of how I will contain my wolf during tonight’s full moon.
I don’t know where to go. Not home, never home. Home has never been the place to ride out my darkest moments. That has always been here, kenneled away under the brewery, but now it isn’t enough to contain me, especially not with the window broken. I don’t know where else is better.
Looking around the brewery basement for other clothes I can wear, I notice a few of my dad’s old coats hanging up. For the last couple years, they’ve been there, untouched. A layer of dust accumulated on his favorite leather one, a set of keys still in the pocket.
I’m rifling through the closet when my hand knocks something hard and cold.
A chain hangs from one of the wall hooks, at the very end. The links are too thick and heavy to thread through door handles, I think, before I find the collar on the end. It’s the metal sort with prongs that protrude into the neck when the leash is yanked on.
Somehow it was just a little less dignified than the brewery’s cells, no better than an animal.
The weighty padlock hanging on the last link is open, the numbers on the little wheels on the underside the same as the month and date of Shawn’s birthday.
My breath catches in my throat, and I swallow against the tightening sensation in my chest. I hadn’t thought the old man capable of such sentimentality.
I’d never known how our father spent the full moon while his children clawed at basement walls, but perhaps this was his method. There was dirt and splinters of bark still fused with many of the rusted links.
There was a thought. I could stay in the woods.
The woods would take me, keep me. I could chain myself to something immoveable like an old tree with vast, deep roots. From the basement window, the sky is turning pink, and something about it reminds me that I had a couple emails that needed answering on a tight deadline.
Something heavier than the chain settles in my soul as I lift it from the wall hook and drape it over my shoulder, and head upstairs to my office.
There’s a number of notes from calls and meetings I’ve missed today waiting on my desk, my laptop screen’s dim glow illuminating them. It’s hard to care about any of it, but I sigh and settle into my office chair, starting to rifle through them.
I can’t, of course.
It only lasts a few minutes before I give up on trying to focus. I find myself rereading the same email a dozen times, absorbing nothing, only able to keep ruminating on the last conversation I had with my mate.
Opening Ava’s mail was an overstep, maybe.
I had wanted to wait for her, to tell her everything she deserved to know, to give her the closure she was owed. I wasn’t about to sit all day in the cage naked, however. I wanted to pick up some of the mess I’d made in her cabin, though I wasn’t sure how much had already been there.
A tension knits between my shoulders as a familiar pattern of footfalls bounds up the stairs from the warehouse.
Instantly, I know it’s Shawn. Although I’d rather avoid him, I’m too drained from the last few days to bother trying. Instead, I sink back in my chair with a long, slow sigh.
Shawn’s footsteps thud down the hall and his shadow passes by the frosted glass of my office door, before he backtracks and barges in gracelessly. He’s so ready to dismiss this room as being empty, that he’s nearly back out of the room before he realizes he saw me in here.
He skids and stumbles a second before he ducks back inside my office, panting, “Finally! Christ on a cracker, dude. Aiden, Laura, and me have been looking for you everywhere all day, and you haven’t been picking up.”
“Oh. Well, I’ve been working,” I lie. I’ve mostly just been sitting at my desk for the couple hours I’ve been here.
“You were not. This was like the second place we checked.”
“I must have stepped out while you were here.”
Shawn doesn’t bother to disprove that one. “Fine, you couldn’t have answered your phone? I know it’s only like the second full moon in a row, but you cannot be giving us a heart attack every time, man.”
“I wasn’t, until someone came back and ruined everything,” I scoff, unwilling to sugar coat it.
“I . . . yeah. Ok, you can have that. Sorry.” There’s a hint of dismissiveness; it’s not the most satisfying apology. I’m not sure what would make it satisfying at this point, what I need from him to get past this. I’m still burning through my anger, even if I’m too tired to keep being angry.
With the full moon rising soon, I can only see that anger finding renewal by my wolf. I don’t know how I’ll retain control of myself when I lost it last time. The worst part is that I don’t know that I care enough to fight for it either.
All I know is I don’t want to deal with him and his bullshit on the heels of losing Ava.
Shawn sits down heavily in the chair opposite me. I remember when the two of us were small enough to fit in that chair together, fighting for the one guest seat across from our father’s desk.
His eyes narrow briefly. “Is that my sweatshirt? I’ve been looking for that for like a decade.”
My teeth settle back together. “Actually, it’s mine now. Everything you left here became mine.”
“All the shit in my room is yours now too?” he asks skeptically.
I nod. I’m not being petulant or difficult, merely factual. “Everything in the house. And the brewery. All the dust, every brick.”
The hard line of his mouth softens.
“I don’t think I realized everything was going to fall on you.”
“Of course it did,” I nearly growl, my claws starting to press out of my fingertips. Of course he hadn’t thought that far ahead. Ignorance, not malice. And yet, I couldn’t forgive him for the purity of his intangible intentions. Not when the material reality had wounded me.
He hadn’t been here for the reading of the will, the shock of my mom and Aiden finding out that Shawn had been entirely written out.
Provisions had been made for Mom and Aiden, but Dad had made me the primary beneficiary.
It had only taken a few years of Shawn being away for people to start referring to me as the oldest Hayes kid.
Shawn’s eyes track to the chain, but he doesn’t comment on it. I wonder if he ever remembers seeing Dad carry it.
His eyes meet mine again. “Oh, fuck. I’m so sorry.”
Too little too late, I fail to suppress an eyeroll. I start to shrug his apology off; the weight of the chain shifts and clinks. I hadn’t bothered to take it off, meaning only to sit down for a few moments.
“And it’s . . . a heavy burden,” I admit. Until he had left, I had looked forward to a life unconcerned with running a business, maintaining an old house, an estate. “And you coming back, well, it just makes this harder.”
I genuinely, truly, hate how little nudging it takes from Shawn to unearth everything I’d been burying. It hurts because I want to forgive him, to forget everything that ever happened. I wanted my best friend back.
Shawn nods, letting out a slow, careful breath. “I know you don’t want me here, but I see you’re going through it. And I see you going through all the same patterns our family had when Dad was alive. There’s gotta be something I can do to help.”
My teeth weld together at the invocation of our father. “You going to tell me I remind you of him, again?”
Shawn makes a face that suggests he did have something like that in mind. This fucking guy.
A snarl curls my lip, the hair on my arms bristles. The one thing Shawn can give me is that he doesn’t flinch in the face of my anger.
“I don’t want your help. You showed up, stole my wedding, and now you won’t get out of my face. It’s not always about you! I’m going through my own shit. I handled the funeral, the estate, the documents! And when Mom goes, I’ll be the one who packs away her things.”
“Dude, Mom’s not even sick. You’re already thinking about that?”
“Someone has to!”
“Not right now, you don’t!” Shawn says, looking bewildered. “It’s like you want to borrow misery from the future! Is that what you prefer? You keep picking your solitude, your duty, your depression, over and over again.”
My teeth grind together at his accusations. Of course, he would think that I chose this. He thinks there was a choice.
“I think the problem with you, Logan, is you don’t know what you really want. You’ve let other people dictate that for so long, you don’t even know how to identify it when it’s right in front of you. You think caging your thoughts, your wants, will make it better.”
“I pick my duty because you abandoned yours! I saw the fallout! I held Mom every time she cried because of you! And me?” My throat tightens over the admission, I cried alone. I shake my head, unable to wound him with that. “I can’t do to Aiden what you did to me.”