18
Ava
Logan is still himself by the time I come across him, thank fuck. The sunset is fading behind the hills; we don’t have much time.
“Ava, go back. You can’t be out here with me,” the guy who’s broken up with me twice in the last few days tells me as I hop out of my truck.
“Hold the fuck up, actually. I handled myself pretty well with the whole werewolf thing. Gracefully, even, I might add,” I rebut with a breathless indignation, climbing over a fallen log.
I don’t need to see Logan’s frown to know it’s there in the dark. I’ve seen it before, all stern, broody disapproval. I roll my eyes. I already made it this far. I’m not turning around now just ’cause he said so. I’m on a fucking mission here.
The bulk of my attention is on navigating down a steep drop-off where the soil has eroded into a creek. I splash through the little stream between us without a care to meet him on this side.
“Ava—”
“Also, someone had a chain-link fence put up. Lucky for you though, I had a set of bolt cutters in my truck. They’re really good for roots and things when I’m landscaping,” I ramble, mostly not to give him a chance to argue with me again.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? It took me like half an hour to cut a line down the middle of two posts so I could drive my truck through. Don’t worry, no one saw me, though.”
The surprise and disbelief is utterly unmasked in Logan’s face. He goes through a range of emotions that might honestly be a record for him.
“I . . . ok, we’ll come back to that later. You need to listen to me.”
“No, you listen to me! You . . . ” I shine my phone flashlight at him in the dark of the fucking woods, and it takes a moment to put together what I’m looking at. I’ve found him, like, chained to a tree? What on earth?
“The fuck are you doing?”
“Chaining myself to a tree.”
My frown increases, and I shine the flashlight up at his face just to be able to see him because it’s already so dark out here. Logan squints back at me, and I lower the light.
“Yeah, I see that part. Is there, like, a good reason? Actually, skip it. We don’t have time.
Ugh, I’ll go get the bolt cutters.” I groan, and start back down to cut across the stream, up that steep bit, and over the log again.
Didn’t know I’d need to be doing fucking parkour today; I would have stretched.
Whatever, I don’t even know what’s weird anymore, the “werewolves are real” thing is still seriously messing with me. I think I gotta call out of work tomorrow, I have not had enough sleep in the last twenty-four hours.
Logan’s been pleading with me to just leave the whole time, but I’ve been ignoring him. My journey back from the truck is halted a few steps from the tree he’s bound himself to, when Logan grabs me and says, “Ava, stop. I did this on purpose.”
“Then undo it!”
“It’s for you!”
“That—” I yank out of his grip with a flare of irritation. “I didn’t ask for you to do that!”
“I want you to be safe.”
“I—Ugh! You!” I huff, language starting to fail me in my frustration. I wave the bolt cutters and flashlight frantically. “What about you? There’s a Massachusetts Wildlife and Whatever Ranger looking for you.”
“What?”
“I mean, he’s looking for a feral animal, but what if he finds you instead?” I tell him breathlessly, the mere words tightening my throat. “I don’t know how much clearer I can be. Your tax dollars are at work trying to stick a blow dart in your ass. The situation is dire. We gotta go.”
Logan stays utterly still, unmoved by my plea.
I don’t know how to convince him. I can’t think of a reason that he should come with me that I believe would work. Not a good one, anyways.
“C’mon, you can stay at my cabin with me.” I swallow back the lump in my throat, before I nod back to my truck. The words are out of my mouth before I realize I still have the dented crate I put Logan in waiting in the truck bed. “C’mon. Don’t you wanna have angsty soulmate breakup sex?”
Worse than silence, I’m met with a sigh, the most disappointed of exhales.
“Ava . . . ”
“It—no, that was a joke,” I say, quick to cover up my exposed ego. I wince at myself. Even as a joke, I feel like it reveals too nakedly that the only thing I could think of to try to get him to leave with me was to offer my body up.
Unwilling to linger in the moment, I shake my head and start to shine my flashlight along the base of the tree, looking for where the chain is secured.
I bring the bolt-cutters to it; the blades barely fit around the thick, heavy links.
Giving it my best effort doesn’t do much but carve a little nick into the metal.
I swallow, realizing that it’s going to take a lot of my best efforts to get even halfway through this.
I’m about to give it another try when Logan grabs me around the shoulders. His grip is strong, holding me to him as I struggle back.
“Ava, wait. I . . . I don’t want to have ‘angsty soulmate breakup sex’ with you,” Logan says slowly, sounding like he wouldn’t have chosen any of those words on his own.
I don’t want to hear him break up with me a third time in as many days. Not that we were back together in between. Not that we were ever together in the first place.
“Again, just joking,” I cut him off quickly, lying to preserve what’s left of my ego. “That wasn’t ever actually on the table. I mean, who would suggest that? Not me.”
A laugh escapes him, puncturing the tension of the moment.
It pulls a weak giggle from me in turn. Apparently I’m all replenished on tears, because I feel them prick the corners of my eyes, from the keen sting of how much I love the sound of his laugh. I haven’t heard it nearly enough. For a moment I can see the light at the end of this awful, grim night.
Logan’s grip remains firm on my arm, moving me to face him, looking at me intently. If we weren’t racing against the clock, I could just melt into him. I almost do, aching for the familiarity of his body against mine.
“No, Ava. I mean, I don’t have it in me anymore to be satisfied with just having a physical relationship with you. I know those were the terms we were always on, but I have feelings for you. I have always had feelings for you.”
My throat is too tight with hope to speak.
“I want you, but I can’t keep doing this. Every time I withhold the depths of my feelings from you, it takes something from me,” Logan says, releasing me. He paces a few steps again, turning away.
“I’ve held back because I know you’re scared, and I want everything that scares you,” Logan says, his voice a low growl that sends a shiver up my spine.
Stepping into the moonlight alters him, even if only barely. The hair on his arms grows thicker, claws curling from his fingertips. His eyes are that eerie gold, and when he opens his mouth it reveals the glint of sharper teeth. It’s not his full transformation, but it still quickens my heart.
I wonder if the shift pains him, how unpleasant it looks to experience. Sweat beads at his brow, and his breath draws ragged and animalistic. It should scare me back a step, but I move forward, stroke his hair back from his face, hoping to soothe.
There’s that stricken intensity in his dark eyes when the worst of it subsides, and Logan casts a rueful look at me.
“I know I can’t ask you, because I’m a monster,” he says, in case I missed that, somehow. “I can’t promise this is even the worst thing about me.”
“Did you hear me complaining?”
“I—what?”
“I mean you could have given me a heads-up about it, especially considering the whole soulmate thing. I mean, mate.”
I wince, waiting for my heart to just stop, or explode, or a giant piano to fall out of the sky and kill me Looney-Tunes style.
I can’t pretend the thought of actually calling this a relationship doesn’t scare me.
It makes the ground feel shaky and uncertain.
I wish I could make him understand how much I want to be his mate, even though my body tells me it’s a trap, run now, get out while I still can.
“What were you going to ask me?”
I can’t mask how potentially terrified I look of where he was going with this.
Somehow, even having been chased around by a werewolf, this is what frightens me most. My hands shake.
I am scared of this. I’m scared to get it wrong again, be so in love with him that I’m unwilling to tear my heart in half to save myself.
But I can see how my fear has been hurting him.
I’m doing the exact thing that annoyed me so much about seeing how his family treated him, being so loud that he couldn’t be heard.
I haven’t been giving him the space to express this, always shutting down, running every time it felt like he might ask.
I feel the urge to step back, but I stop myself. I chased a werewolf down in the woods at night. I already threw myself in the deep end with him. We can be in this together, I just need to hear him say it.
Clearing my throat, I ask him again, louder, “Logan, what do you want from me?”
“Ava, I . . . ”
He stills. A muscle ticks in his jaw, and his nostrils flare. His attention pulls away from me, out toward the darkness of the woods. A snarl curls his lip.
I see the flash of headlights creeping up over the hill before I hear the engine. The dreaded Massachusetts Fish and Wildlife Department van lurches into view, bouncing over the uneven ground.
My heart drops into my stomach when I realize we’re about to be chased by the ghost of my shitty love life.