Xander's Mate

by Abigail Raines

  I swear she’s more beautiful than she was before. She’s also wearing that same attempt at a business’ outfit that she was wearing when she first met with me and it doesn’t seem like her. She looks a little bit like she’s wearing a costume.

  “Hi,” she says, blinking up at me with owl eyes. She’s trying to read something on her phone while she eats a burger but she puts her phone down now and says, “Fancy seeing you here.”

  “I love burger day,” I say, shrugging. “How’s the job going?”

  “I like it,” she says, grinning. “So far anyway. I’ve talked to two senators already and I didn’t even have to pester them for a year first.”

  “Ya know, I read something very interesting online,” I say, as if I’m talking about any given new story. “Seems I punched out that foreman in Chile?”

  “Ah…”

  “I’m trying to figure out why you’d leak that…You don’t seem like somebody would care about making me look good? Also, my actual PR people weren’t too happy about that....”

  “Don’t worry about that,” she says, waving a hand. “I’ve talked to them. Besides I didn’t do it to make you look good.”

  “No?”

  “No way!” Olivia says, her eyes bright and sharp as stars. “I did it to trap you. I’m trying to give you a reputation as a do-gooder CEO. Sort of a Tony Stark kind of thing. I do that, people will expect you to keep acting that way. They’ll hold you accountable.” She grins triumphantly.

  My heart is swelling. She’s amazing. If I was human, I might propose right now.

  “I really like you keeping me on my toes,” I say fondly.

  “I think you should live on your toes,” she says. “It’ll only make you taller.”

  “Can’t tell if that’s clever or just nonsense.”

  “It’s clever,” she whispers, like it’s a secret. “Anyway. How are you doing then? Other than having to fend off bloodthirsty shareholders?”

  “Trust me,” I say, winking. “I’m more bloodthirsty than any shareholder.” I prove my point by taking a particularly vicious bite of my burger.

  Olivia giggles at that. I haven’t heard her really giggle before and it’s strikingly adorable. “Oh, yes. A wolf shifter. Of course, of course. Well, how are things on that front, alpha man?”

  My heart leaps a little, and I feel weak.

  Olivia Hathaway has already shown that she would challenge me in the best way at every turn. She’s funny and brilliant and passionate and… I find myself smiling sadly as I look at her, taking in her scent and faint gloss of her coral pink lips. I try to buck myself up. It’s hard when she’s flirting and I know it can’t go anywhere.

  On the other hand, it’s a sort of epiphany that I can talk about shifter business with somebody who’s not in my family. There’s something liberating about it.

  “Ah…” I rub my chin. “Yeah, I have to go down to the Mulligan, there’s a guy on probation-”

  “The Mulligan?” Olivia says, frowning. “What is the Mulligan?”

  “Oh, it’s like wolf shifter prison for Washington state. It has no official name. We just call it Mulligan because it’s on Mulligan Street. And it’s overflowing since we took down the Hardwidge pack, though I imagine some of those men will be released soon. I have to look over their cases since I helped take them down.” The very thought is exhausting. There’s been a lot of talk about the degree of complicity Dax’s men have in what happened with Hardwidge. The only ones I’m sure won’t be getting out any time soon are Alice’s brother and his accomplice since they kidnapped her and held her hostage. I’m just glad we were able to keep Jason locked up at all. He escaped twice last time. We had to build a special cell just to hold his slippery ass.

  “Oh okay,” Olivia says. “I’ve heard of shifter prisons before. But it was a different state.”

  She’s alluding to her mysterious past again. Trust a Tremblay to go catching feelings for a beautiful woman with a mysterious past. We sure know how to make our own lives difficult via romantic means.

  I scarf down most of my burger and some fries and then sit back in my chair, just enjoying Olivia’s company. Or what of it I can afford to hold onto, I guess.

  “There’s no formal leader of the Washington clan,” I say, shrugging. “But if there was… Well…”

  “You’d be it,” Olivia supplies.

  “I mean...yes. Probably.”

  I’m not being egotistical. It’s just true.

  Not that I’m not often egotistical.

  “Guess there’s a lot of responsibility in that,” Olivia says. “On top of being a CEO? Damn.”

  “Yeah, no wonder I don’t have a mate,” I mutter, and then wince. Olivia frowns as she absorbs that but she rallies and we pretend it didn’t mean anything at all.

  It makes me wonder if she does feel something for me. It would be nice to know that she does. Even if this relationship truly is impossible.

  “Anyway…” I fidget with my straw. I’m not, by nature, a fidgety person at all. I swear Olivia just brings this stuff out of me. I find myself as close to nervous as I can get around her. Which is only about one degree nervous. But it’s more than I’m used to. “I just have to make sure the other alphas don’t fuck up and release of Jack Didion. Not after what he did to my sister-in-law and my brother.”

  Olivia looks up with a start at that and I see her go eerily white all at once.

  “Jack Didion?” She says slowly. “What…”

  “You know him?” That doesn’t make any sense. Even if she does know shifters, it’s hard to imagine what connection she could have to this old alpha from Seattle.

  “Um...no.” She rallies. She’s obviously trying to cover for something, but there’s definitely something there. “I don’t know him, I just um...the name sounded familiar to me.”

  “Oh…”

  “What did he do to your sister-in-law and your brother?” She leans forward, staring at me hard.

  She must know Jack Didion. If she’s human though, I can’t imagine how much their paths have crossed. Didion is independently wealthy from old money and he keeps to himself and his pack for the most part, as far as I know. Though I do believe he has some financial ties to Quinton and spends some amount of time here. Or anyway, he did before he went to Mulligan.

  “Oh, um…” I stroke my chin, a little bit of that exhaustion from my long night wearing me down. “He was trying to catalyse the shifter gene. Figure out how he could use it to make more shifters. He attacked my sister-in-law because of it. She was pregnant too.”

  Olivia seems struck by that. I would even say she looks like she’s panicking. She stands up and clears her tray of food, even though she hasn’t finished eating. She looks like she’s seen a ghost.

  “I should get back to it,” she says, smiling tightly. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Olivia!” I say, getting to my feet. She turns back around and I see her trying way too hard to look like things are normal.

  “You sure you don’t know Jack Didion? It’s okay… I mean you can tell me if-”

  “I just thought the name was familiar,” she says sternly, before all but running from the commissary.

  Huh.

  Chapter Six: Olivia

  Jack Didion.

  I haven’t heard anyone speak that name out loud in front of me for years. I haven’t heard it mentioned or heard him mentioned at all in so long, that I might have forgotten what he did to me. In some way, I almost have been able to forget my crazy, horrible childhood at the hands of a monster. But suddenly it all comes rushing back to me. It seems a cruel twist of fate that the first person to so casually talk about him in front of me would be this man who I’ve begun to develop feeling for.

  When Xander says the same Jack Didion aloud everything starts to sort of blur around me. There’s no accounting for just how upset I am as Xander stares at me, confused. But I feel nauseated. In fact, I ran out of there because I thought I might throw up just hearin
g about him. That pisses me off too. I hate the idea that anyone could have that kind of power over me after so many years.

  When I leave the commissary, I go running to the bathroom. I’m not used to wearing heels, even these low ones, and I nearly fall a couple times in my rush to get out of there, shoving past people in nicer clothes looking at me funny as Xander sits at his table, probably befuddled. I’m sure I only made him more suspicious. It’s obvious I was bothered and if Xander is as chronically curious as I make him out to be, he’s probably going to ask me about it.

  If nothing else, we seem to be friends. As complicated as that might be.

  In the bathroom I hunch over the sink and splash some water on my face. I stare in the mirror and I see a little girl, her face a mask of fear.

  See, Jack Didion is my father.

  But I haven’t seen him since I was about seventeen-years-old.

  If anything, I should be pretty relieved. Didion was walking around a free man before. Not only does nobody know what it is he did to me for years in the name of “bringing the glory of shifters back to the world” but I don’t know that there would have been any consequences for him if people had known. That’s just the way things work in the shifter world. If anything, he would’ve been in trouble for having reproduced with a human and given birth to an abomination: a daughter who is the product of a human and a shifter...and is herself apparently fully human. Nothing could be more offensive to the old ways of shifters. Not as far as I know.

  But now Didion is in prison and he’s pissed off the most powerful wolf in his clan. If Xander doesn’t want Didion out on probation and walking free again, I have no doubt he’s going to stay locked up. I should be relieved. And yet...a large part of me has been hoping he was dead all this time. I had no reason to think he would be. I just hoped. I certainly wanted him dead for all the pain he caused me.

  I pat my face with some paper towels and make my way back out to the elevators, hoping I don’t run into Xander again. I know he’s going to ask me about it. Of course, I can just tell him it’s none of his business yet I find myself not wanting to. I want to be able to share things with him, because as hard headed and infuriating as he can be...I think we understand each other very well. And I’ve been holding onto my past for along time with no one to share it with.

  But I don’t want to think about any of that. So when I get to my office, I draw my blind and throw myself into my work. I’m only here for a couple more hours anyway, working part-time on my own chosen schedule like Xander promised.

  I’m actually pretty good at compartmentalizing it. I used to use it just to survive. Whenever I was in pain, I just disappeared inside my head and went somewhere else. I don’t know how I would have gotten by otherwise.

  Xander, just as I suspect he would, does email me a couple times. He doesn’t straight out ask me why I was (obviously) flipping out as soon as Didion’s name was mentioned. He just asks me if I’m alright. I’m curt with him and then I feel bad about it. I don’t think he does though. He texts me once to tell me he doesn’t believe that I’m okay and if I’d like to talk about it, he’s here.

  He doesn’t send anymore than that, instead leaving the door open for me.

  Goddamn Xander Tremblay, surprising me once again.

  When I go home, I throw myself into my second job. I have a long list of potions on order for a few regulars around the neighborhood. I’m thankful for that. I find potion brewing very therapeutic. I put some music on and go to work, my cats following me around my horrible messy apartment, meowing from time to time like they always do. I think they imagine I’m brewing potions just for them and they want to know what the potions are for exactly.

  I blast my way through three potions. I really do enjoy this work and I’m good at it. I didn’t start brewing and training to be a witch until I was almost eighteen (which is old if you’re really a witch) but I took to it quite well. I might be human, but I’m a decently magical one. I even enjoy scouring my cauldron as I swing my hips to some 70’s rock.

  It’s the next song that comes up on my Spotify that does me in. It’s a popular song; “Landslide” by Stevie Nicks. I haven’t heard it in a long time. But I can’t really listen to it and not think about… It was playing on the radio at a gas station. I’d just escaped. I had nothing but a little duffle bag and I looked like another homeless runaway which...I was. It was playing on the radio in the gas station a hundred miles from where I’d grown up in the strangest and most terrible of circumstances. I’d caught my reflection in the glass of a fridge in the gas station while I was reaching for a soda. I’d stolen a couple wallets to get by. I caught my reflection and...I didn’t recognize myself. I mean I literally didn’t recognize myself because somehow or other I hadn’t seen my own reflection in a long time. I thought, who’s that ugly, skinny girl who looks like a lonely ghost and it was me. And “Landslide” was playing. And then I’d realized just how alone I was. I don’t know why that memory is so visceral and painful, when it should have been good. After all, I’d escaped.

  But now as the music plays, I feel tears welling up and my hands starting to shake. It’s not just the song itself, it’s Xander having mentioned him. And suddenly I want to see Xander more than anything. I am, on occasion, pretty impulsive. Potentially, too impulsive. Most of the time I make plans and think things through before I do them. But sometimes I just do things without considering the consequences first. Which is what’s happening as my lizard brain demands to see Xander immediately and I find myself reaching for my phone.

  I’m not okay, I text him. Is there any chance you could come over to talk? As a friend?

  I send it before I even think about it and once it’s been sent, I feel like a complete dumbass. I might have said “as a friend” but we’ve known each other such a short time and after what happened between us, there’s no way he’s not going to think I’m just calling him over to bang.

  Xander’s reply comes pretty quick.

  On my way.

  There’s something so sweet about it. He is, by far, the busiest person I know. It was incredibly presumptuous of me even to imagine he would be free to come over to my shitty apartment on the fly just because I heard a stupid song that sort of triggered me into panicking…

  Oh no…

  My shitty apartment.

  What was I thinking?

  I gasp and clap my hands to my mouth. I’m still on the verge of panic but now even more so. I’m not ashamed of where I live, not by any stretch. But it’s not just that my place is humble. It’s messy...and humble. There are piles of laundry and stacks of crusty old Mason jars and boxes full of obscure herbs and vials and file boxes full of articles and legal documents about all the companies I’ve investigated over the years. There are knickknacks upon knickknacks...just because I happen to like them and because sometimes I make little potions for people who can’t pay me with money so they give me strange things and I have to let them or they would be offended. That means that I have a wood vase with a goat etched into it, and a bunch of dead flowers sticking out of it because I haven’t gotten a bouquet of fresh wildflowers as payment in a while (but I will eventually). I have a harmonica, a collection of antique spoons, and a shoebox full of old coins. I have dolls made of corn husks and I have dozens of scapula’s hanging from little wooden figures, all from different people. All my furniture is old and falling apart. My walls are covered over with fading floral wallpaper and weird art prints from artist witches I’ve met over the years. There are a bunch of boxes half blocking the kitchen- those are potion supplies I bought in bulk because of a sale. And through all this mess walk three big, fluffy cats who aren’t usually very quiet.

  I’ve just invited Xander Tremblay over because even now my breath is short and I’m clenching my fists because my hands are shaking so badly.

  This is just great.

  In a flurry of panicked activity, I run around trying to tidy up the best I can. I pile all the laundry in a hamper in my
bedroom on faith that we are not going to get carried away and have sex again. I pick up all the cat toys and throw them in my bedroom and run around generally straightening and picking up and puttering. The place still seems absurdly scattered and not to mention unbearably cramped and all a shambles, at least for a person like Xander Tremblay, but I suppose that can’t be helped. I should have called Myra, one of my witch friends who knows my past even though I never talk about it. I just have this weird feeling of closeness with Xander which really makes no sense because since we had sex things have been only professional. Although I guess we did get slightly personal at lunch...even flirtatious. It’s hard not to respond to those dark, intense eyes. I get really flirtatious when I’m attracted to somebody at all and Xander...woof.

  The buzz at my intercom surprises me, my arms full of dirty dish towels and I run to my bedroom to drop them atop of the already overflowing hamper before running to the door. I buzz Xander in and then just stand there, waiting. I can’t decide if I’m happy he’s here or a little mortified. Then I realize just as Xander knocks and I open the door...

  I forgot to change my clothes.

  It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t care what Xander thinks of what I’m wearing or how I look because Xander is a shifter and I am human and I know that but…

  I really wish I wasn’t wearing overalls and a rainbow striped shirt about now. I don’t look like a serious professional person, I look like...well, a totally hippie witch is pretty much what I am.

  “Olivia?” Xander voice sounds concerned. I’m starting to feel really stupid that I ever thought he was just a selfish, alpha jackass CEO.

  Some paranoid part of me that wants to believe nobody means well in this world thinks he came here hoping for sex...but I don’t think so. I think he’s trying to avoid all of that and he came because he cares which...only makes him more appealing, of course.

  I throw open the door and it blows my mass of red curls around. “Hi,” I say, a little too breathlessly because I’ve been attempting (and failing) to change my entire apartment on the fly.