Chapter 12
Chapter
Twelve
“Mr. Charles Dickens was serializing his novel Oliver Twist; Mr. Draper had just taken the first photograph of the moon, freezing her pale face on cold paper; Mr. Morse had recently announced a way of transmitting messages down metal wires. Had you mentioned magic or Faerie to any of them, they would have smiled at you disdainfully, except, perhaps for Mr. Dickens, at the time a young man, and beardless. He would have looked at you wistfully.”
— NEIL GAIMAN, STARDUST
A ll of Moonlight Valley was talking about my date with Sonnet.
What they didn’t know, they made up.
Depending on who told the story, I’d wined her, dined her, sexed her up, bamboozled her about my bad-boy past, seduced her with the same past, given her a puppy, bought her a ring, and threatened to throw myself off the mountain if she didn’t reciprocate my feelings.
The wolves also brought up the fact that Sonnet was no wolf and that interspecies dating ended poorly.
None of this eased the anger and agitation that I felt. I’d had hopes, and those hopes had been dashed. Being disappointed in love and more than a little upset, I could have done with less curiosity and more compassion.
How do you think our Sonnet is taking it?
My wolf wasn’t ready to give up. He kept suggesting that we go back and have another conversation. He’d also suggested, Kiss and make up , and, Boning some sense into both of you .
Then he’d offered to go away.
In case she’s not into wolves , he’d suggested. You could be happy.
It wasn’t possible to de-wolf myself, although I guess I appreciated the offer. Was that how the glamour worked for Sonnet? Had I even asked or had I just made it all about me and how her wearing some kind of supernatural mask made me feel?
I hoped it was not my wolfishness that was standing between us.
I replayed the scene in my truck, second-guessing myself.
Had I asked the right questions? Had I respected her feelings and her boundaries?
Could I come to terms with her constant glamour, or would I always feel like I was on the outside of someplace really special, somewhere I was not welcome?
Too late now . Too fucking late, man.
I hated that my wolf was right.
By the time I made it to church, a few days after Sonnet and I had ended things in the front seat of my truck, there was no one in town who had not heard the news that, regardless of the exact sequence of date-night events, we were also through.
During the service, people looked at me sidelong. They whispered and nodded to each other.
When we sang “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” I received more looks than the highway patrol officer parked under the underpass, waiting for speeders.
I was just as unpopular, too.
Even Reverend Harris felt the need to share his observations with me when I shook his hand on my way out of the church. He was Team Sonnet all the way.
“Does she look like she does on her TV show?” he asked. “Because she just glows like an angel in front of the camera.”
“She seems so sweet,” his wife added, popping up by his side. “Maeve over at Biscuits Ranger had made us a seating chart to “optimize the available space,” although mostly we just gave him shit about it.
“I thought they were supposed to be Christians,” I protested.
This earned me a look from Atticus.
“Well, sure, but they’re also human,” he said. Then added the proviso, “More or less.”
“Only Alice is a cat,” I grumbled. Her shifting ability had caught us all by surprise and had taken some getting used to.
Like Sonnet’s glamour?
I couldn’t think about that anymore. I was a wobbly rocking chair on the front porch.
Instead, I went on the defensive. “Everyone else can stay out of my business.”
Atticus pulled out of the lot, tooting the horn at a couple of passersby who had waved, and I ignored the smug smile lurking underneath his red beard. “But we’re your brothers,” he said. What he meant was: so, we’re not everybody . “You should tell us what’s going on.”
“Alice said she and Ford were stopping by the store on the way home. He needs to pick up the fixings for chicken and waffles,” Ranger answered, as though Atticus’s concern had been directed toward him and his grocery list. He was piled into the backseat alongside Rebel, who was not at all concerned about our present lack of chicken and waffles. “I hope they have that soy chicken. Sometimes that fake-meat truck doesn’t come on Saturdays.”
“I was not talking about waffles, Ranger. I was talking about Maverick’s girl.” Atticus parked in front of our house in his usual spot, alongside Mack’s truck; she and Rue had beat us home alright. I got out quickly, hoping to avoid further brotherly inquisition.
My luck was shit in that regard. Atticus hopped out almost as fast and followed me. “Mav, we’re all dying to hear the truth about your relationship with Ms. Ruiz.”
“No one is dying.” Rebel pried himself out of the Pontiac. He groaned as he straightened up. “We’re just about to have a conniption fit.”
“You should do yoga with me.” Ranger climbed out on Atticus’s side. “It’s excellent for your joints.”
It was possible there was some truth to that, seeing as how he’d gotten out so much faster than our youngest brother, but none of us was dumb enough to tell Ranger that he was right. Then he’d never shut up.
“I’m more worried about our chicken replacement than your joints,” Ranger added. “Seeing as how we still haven’t had breakfast.”
“Would you forget about the chicken?” Atticus hissed.
I spotted Alice’s car kicking up dust as she sped up our drive. She did not like to drive slowly, and Ford liked to indulge her. Ignoring Atticus, I shut my door and laid in a course for the porch.
“I am equally concerned about our not-chicken.” It was always a good idea to rankle Atticus.
Fortunately for our breakfast plans, and even more fortunately for the chicken population of Moonlight Valley, Alice parked next to Atticus’s vintage Pontiac, and Ford held up a green-and-yellow box of soy chicken patties as he got out of her fancy car. We were vegetarian werewolves, as oxymoronic as it sounded.
“Chickens of the world, rejoice!” Ford intoned. “We have a replacement sacrifice.”
“Thank you, baby Jesus.” Ranger grabbed his chest and took a dramatic step backward. “You should have shared your location with me so I could track you on my phone. I was near to having one of my spells.”
Imma spell him . My wolf sounded groggy. Except for a few unwelcome asides, he’d been napping most of the service and then in the car. He was the heathen kind of wolf.
Atticus followed me up the steps, close enough to step on my heels. I considered stopping short, but that would have just led to us tussling. “You realize you went out with a woman on the ‘Top 50 Sexiest Ladies in America’ list?”
“They make a list for that?” I wasn’t sure how I felt about these list-making people eying up Sonnet and giving her a rank order. It felt like it might be ignoring all sorts of other qualities that she possessed, like being smart and sassy.
Plus, I didn’t like other people—including my brother—judging her attractiveness.
She’s number one. The best.
“They do,” Atticus affirmed. He was an accountant, and he loved lists. “Sonnet is real pretty, and I think everyone can agree on that. But she has some other attributes that push her to the top spot on that list in my opinion.”
Too bad we have to kill him. I can make some suggestions.
All 640 muscles in my body tightened, and I realized my canines were lengthening as Atticus explained his position on list making. He shouldn’t feel so free to discuss Sonnet as if she were an ice-cream flavor or a playlist of popular songs. Of course, this kind of list making seemed to be the new hobby of just about everybody in town. Naturally, Atticus wasn’t any different.
“It’s like playing fantasy football,” Atticus offered. “Where you pick your dream team. We’re just dream dating, that’s all.”
“I would be careful, Atticus. I don’t think Mav wants you dream dating his girl,” Rebel warned, then winked at me. “Plus, sexual objectification is never acceptable behavior. Our momma would be disappointed in you.”
Atticus frowned, but he shut up. Thank God and baby Jesus because I didn’t feel much like explaining to him that he should keep his intimate thoughts and dreams away from my girl.
I was tired. And, if I were being honest with myself, I was down about the lack of Sonnet in my real life even though I’d been so quick to push her away.
But Atticus had inadvertently raised a fair point.
If Sonnet and I had stepped out together, I would have had to deal with a townful of Atticuses with their objectifying, unacceptable sexy fantasy lists. I’d also have had to deal with cities, states, and probably an entire world too.
Sonnet was beautiful, and people obviously liked looking at her. She’d been cast in a popular TV show, for crying out loud. All those people watching her felt like they knew her, just a little, and were entitled to a piece of her.
I held the front door for everyone, ignoring Atticus’s searching glare and Ranger’s frown of concern as they filed past me. I wasn’t ready to go in myself, however. I stood out there, listening to the happy hubbub, and my stomach clenched.
My family would have more questions.
Questions I didn’t want to answer, plus more I likely couldn’t. Truth was, I didn’t much feel like Sunday chicken and waffles.
Run?
You bet , I agreed. Then for the first time in a long time, I left my family and ran off on my own.
Vanity Fur Salon was closed on Sundays, but I’d checked my phone, and Sanye’s contact picture showed her to be at her business, so I eventually headed there after I’d run out on my family and shifted into my wolf. I’d loped around Moonlight Valley, trying to outrun questions and feelings.
I had not been successful.
Now, hours later, I’d shifted back and remembered my responsibilities. Sunday was my day to check on Sanye and help out with whatever she needed handled.
It was very pink inside her place of business, plus Sanye had added crystal chandeliers for reasons that escaped me. Sonnet would have loved them. They sparkled and were full of feminine energy.
At Sanye’s request, I’d picked up peanut butter. Not at her request, I’d driven all the way into Knoxville to do so, because if I’d gone into the Piggly Wiggly in Moonlight Valley, I would have faced an onslaught of questions about my (lack of a) dating life.
Sanye took one look at my morose face and assigned me to clean-up duty. Someone had brought in their husky after it had rolled in an entire pack of chewed-up bubblegum, and forty minutes later I was still working the peanut butter into its fur. It had been a jumbo-sized gum pack.
“Why are you here?”
I looked up from Mr. Muffin and gave her a small smile. “I’m here to spend time with my best girl.”
She rolled her eyes and grabbed the spray hose. “Do you ever dial it back, Mav? Don’t you get tired sometimes?”
“Tired of what?” I coaxed Mr. Muffin up into the doggy bath.
“I’ve known you for almost twenty-five years. You are always, always charming. You just say the nicest things.”
Sanye’s words—although positive on the surface—didn’t feel anywhere close to being a compliment.
I laid a restraining hand on Mr. Muffin just in case he balked at his bath. This wasn’t his first encounter with bubblegum, however, and he was clearly tired of smelling like strawberry Hubba Bubba, so he let Sanye wet him gently down.
“You’re never not charming,” Sanye accused. “You charm the pants off of everyone.”
I grinned at her. “Not everyone. There are a good many people I never, ever want to see pants-less.”
She rolled her eyes. “I am totally safe. This is a pants-on zone. And maybe that’s why we’re still friends now.”
“Because you won’t lose your pants for me?” I teased, before stopping to think about how that might sound.
Sanye took no shit from anyone, but I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable. Or make her think that I thought about her and sex.
We were the pants-firmly-on kind of friends, no matter how many of Wyatt’s romance novels people in Moonlight Valley had read where two best friends suddenly fall in love with each other.
“Don’t be stupid.” She sprayed me lightly with the hose and laughed. “It’s not that. Maybe we’re still friends because I don’t fall for your charm. Because you don’t have to worry about making me like you. I already like you as much as I can, and for who you are.” She ran a wide-tooth comb through Mr. Muffin’s fur, gently working a wad of gum out. “Don’t you ever want to just be yourself and not have to act so charming?”
As I set to work on another wad of gum, I almost wished there could have been something more than friendship with Sanye. She was a great person, and Evan had been a lucky man, right up until the war accident that killed him.
Settling down with Sanye would have been easy. She fit right in here in Moonlight Valley, and everyone loved her. We all wanted her to find her happy ending, even if it couldn’t be with Evan anymore. After Evan’s death and my reformation, a lot of folks had expected us to get together.
Sanye gave me a small smile. “Someday, I’m gonna move on. You’ll have to find something else to do with your Sundays.”
“I met someone,” I blurted out.
She grinned at me. “I heard.”
Mr. Muffin decided to shake, which was frustrating. It was not, however, as frustrating as Sanye having heard the gossip already.
“It’s over and done with.”
“Are you sure?”
I nodded reluctantly. I was.
My fierce attraction to Sonnet, however, was alive and well. I’d spent far too much personal time thinking about her and how amazing she’d felt in my arms. I’d mentally planned out a dozen ways to make her feel good. To kiss her and make love to her. Worse, when I wasn’t thinking about her naked, I was dreaming about introducing her to my momma. Momma would have liked her.
“She just wanted some quick fun,” I admitted. “A fling. She’s a firefly sparking in the night, a quick flash.”
Sanye gave me an assessing look. “And what do you want, Mr. Poetic?”
Her.
“All the time in the world,” I said, far more lightly than I felt. “I’m looking for forever with her and that worries me. I’m not such a good judge of character, so what if I’ve misread her?”
Sanye finished washing the gum out of Mr. Muffin while she chewed on that. “Darrell Boone was your father, Mav. It’s normal to love him, even to hero-worship him. You were just a kid, and you had your rose-colored glasses on.”
This was deeper than I cared to get on a nice Sunday afternoon. More importantly, I’d run out on my family to avoid this kind of serious discussion, so I directed an easy smile at her. “You sure didn’t idolize yours.”
“No, I did not.” Sanye’s face fell some, a shadow moving over it. “But my daddy is not charming. Not one bit. Yours, on the other hand, could give a master class in charm. He taught both you and Atticus to read people like a pro.”
“I know I can read people.” I grabbed a towel and set to work drying off Mr. Muffin. “They’re an open book. It’s downright easy—unless I need something genuine from them, some real emotion, something I can’t tease or trick them into. I still haven’t repaired the damage I did to my relationship with Knox. And I didn’t realize I’d screwed things up with Sonnet until it was too late. Once I get involved with someone, it’s like they’re a black box. I can’t read a goddamned thing about them.”
Water gurgled in a pipe. Mr. Muffin woofed, helpfully filling in the silence for us.
Sanye knew I was right. She was picking her next words like she picked through the windfall apples looking for salvageable fruit.
I washed my hands while she thought things through. My life might be a mess, but at least I could rinse off the remnants of gum, peanut butter, and doggy bathwater.
Finally, right as she seemed about to share her thoughts with me, my phone rang. Pulling it from my back pocket, I saw that it was Ranger. Giving Sanye an apologetic smile, I answered it.
“What?”
“I need your help.”
The shock of this statement about rocked me. Ranger never asked for help, so it took some time to recover. “Just tell me what.”
“They called All-Purpose Animal Services down to the set; they’ve got an animal issue, and they need a herpetologist, ergo I need you to come help me.”
I hesitated, both because his request was unusual—seeing as the twins were co-owners with Ranger in All-Purpose Animal Services and much better at general animal catching than I was—and because I might run into Sonnet if I visited the set.
“I sure can, Ranger. But why don’t you ask Atticus or Ford?”
“Ford and Alice are busy making us some nieces and nephews in the woods, and obviously I can’t take Atticus to the set. Plus, none of them is a bona fide snake expert.”
No obvious reason came to mind for excluding Atticus from this animal-catching expedition, but Ranger was almost always right. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d been wrong, in fact.
Still, I didn’t want to chance running into Sonnet. She was my fantasy girl, so keeping some distance between us was downright prudent.
We can be a second chance romance!
Or an angry fuck.
Call it whatever you want, but our mate is our mate.
“Come on, Mav. If we see Sonnet, I’ll hide you behind one of the traps.”
Ranger’s offer was irritating, seeing as how it just proved that he was—once again—right. He was also an expert manipulator. Even so, I capitulated. “Okay. Okay. Do you want me to stop by and get you?”
We’re gonna geeeeettttt the girl!
We so were not. Unlike Ranger, my wolf was plenty wrong on a regular basis.
“You finish up with Sanye and meet me on set later. Since you’ve given me your solemn word to assist, you should know that this is a weeklong project. That place is just riddled with critters.”
And now it’ll be full of wolves.
“Gee, thanks, Ranger.” I didn’t question how he knew that I’d ended up at Sanye’s after running off from our family breakfast date.
For reasons known only to him, Ranger had obviously decided to torture me. He did it to all of us on a regular basis. But as conniving as Ranger was, I was even better at staying out of sight.
I would not be noticeable on that set unless or until I chose to be.
“You are very welcome.” Ranger sounded far too smug; I would have to do my brotherly duty and take him down a peg. “Like I said, if Sonnet comes anywhere near us, you can shift into a wolf and I’ll hide you in that large dog crate we’ve got.”
I was nowhere near stupid enough to let Ranger shut me into an animal trap and so I told him. Some mild profanity might have colored that explanation.
Ranger sighed. “But you are gun-shy about the mounting.”