by TJ Klune
Ox said, “We’ll keep in touch. Every day, by phone. You’ll hear our voices. I swear it.”
“You better,” Rico said. “If you don’t, I’ll kick your ass. I’m a pretty great wolf, in case you couldn’t tell.”
“And I’ll help him,” Bambi said, glaring down at the men gathered before us. “I’ve got Rico’s guns now. You heal, but it’ll still hurt. I’ll make sure of it.”
“I love you so much,” Rico said fiercely. “You don’t even know.”
“Oh, I know. You’re welcome.”
“Straight people are so weird,” Kelly whispered to Robbie.
Ox said, “Stay together. No one goes off alone, even in town. Carter, make sure Green Creek’s ready, just in case.”
“I will.”
And then he turned around, heading for the SUV. Gordo looked at Mark once more before following Ox, grabbing Robbie by the arm and pulling him along. Kelly and Joe were about to do the same but stopped when I called to them.
They looked at me.
“A phone call away,” I said. “No matter what. You hear me?”
They both nodded.
“Good. Go on. The sooner you leave, the sooner you can come back home.”
Joe took Kelly’s hand in his and pulled him toward the SUV. “Carter,” he called over his shoulder. “Kelly and I left something for you on your bed. Take a look, okay?”
“I will.”
They waved as they climbed inside the SUV. Mark held Mom close, her head on his shoulder. Rico whispered to his son, and Bambi smiled at the both of them. Jessie stood behind Dominique, leaning against her. I looked down when I felt someone grab my hand. Gavin. He was holding on tight. I didn’t try to pull away.
Ox honked the horn once, twice as he backed up, turning the SUV around before pointing it down the dirt road. There was something in my head and chest, something that felt like lightning, that sounded like thunder.
It was the bonds that stretched between us all.
Vibrant and wild.
They whispered pack and pack and pack.
And if I listened hard enough, if I really dug in and pulled the threads apart, there was a quiet voice buried underneath.
I looked at Gavin.
He was watching me.
I heard him.
He said, i think i think i think i’m home.
I WAS CURIOUS about what my brothers had left for me. After making sure Gavin was okay in the kitchen with Mom, I took the stairs two at a time, heart thudding in my chest. I hoped it wasn’t anything big. It would feel too much like they thought they weren’t coming back. I hated it.
I shouldn’t have worried.
In fact, when I saw what it was, I hoped they’d never come back.
Those fucking assholes.
A flat square sat on my bed, wrapped in shiny paper with Christmas trees on it. It was heavier than I expected when I picked it up. It was either a framed photograph or a—
A book.
It was a book wrapped in tissue paper.
I pulled it out.
A sticky note stuck to the top of the tissue paper. It said, Hope this helps! It’s from the seventies (??), but it’s pretty much on point. Ignore the hair. Study hard! (Really hard.) Love, Kelly + Joe.
I smiled, confused. Ignore the hair? What the hell were they talking about?
That smile faded as I set the tissue paper aside.
There, on the cover, were five words that I never wanted to see again for as long as I lived.
The Joy of Gay Sex.
I said, “What,” to the empty room.
Little colored tabs stuck out from the side. Not believing what I was seeing, I opened to one of the pages with an orange tab. Inside was another sticky note, this time written by Joe.
This move is a little more practiced. Make sure to stretch before trying. Like, stretch everywhere. Trust me on that. My gaze fell to the page underneath the note to see a man with an ecstatic look on his face as another man who apparently had shrubbery instead of a bush shoved his dick in—
“No,” I said. “No, no, no.”
The entire fucking book was annotated with dozens of tabs.
I dropped it back on the bed as if scalded. I was going to end them. No. Worse. I was going to ask Gordo if there was a resurrection spell he knew, and then I was going to murder them, bring them back to life, and then murder them again. They would know my wrath. I would destroy them.
“Never,” I swore. “I will never pick up that book again. What the fuck.”
I STARTLED WHEN I HEARD Jessie say, “There you are. You’ve been up here for almost an hour. Your mom is showing Gavin how to—”
I threw the book against the wall. “I’m not doing anything weird!”
Jessie blinked, looking between me and the book that fell to the floor on the opposite side of my room. “Uh. Okay. You don’t have to shout at me.” Her eyes narrowed. “But now I think you’re doing something weird.”
The first thing I realized was that my face was on fire.
This was followed by the fact that I was very, very sweaty.
And possibly a little aroused.
Much to my dismay and horror.
I couldn’t have been more thankful that Jessie wasn’t a wolf. My room must have smelled like a brothel. I tried to act nonchalant. I started to lean back on my bed but slipped off the edge and fell to the floor, almost biting my tongue clean in half.
Jessie stared at me. “What the fuck.”
“What are you doing in my room!”
“Your door was open,” she said slowly. “Why are you yelling?” She glanced at the book on the floor. Thankfully, it’d fallen with the cover facedown. So long as she didn’t try to pick it up, she probably wouldn’t be able to tell what it was.
Which meant, of course, that she immediately went toward the book.
I stood quickly, tripping over my own feet as I surged toward the book, trying to beat her there. I should have won. She was a human. I was a wolf. I was a killing machine capable of great power with my fangs and claws. Yes, she was deadly, but I was a creature of the night. I was the monster in the dark. I was—
Falling face-first onto the floor.
I grabbed her ankle, trying to stop her from getting to the book.
“Oh no,” she said, pulling her foot away from my sweat-slick palm. “Now I have to see what this is about.”
“It’s nothing!” I cried. “Don’t look!”
She crouched down above the book. “What? Jesus, Carter. It’s probably nothing I haven’t seen before. I’m surrounded by men. Nothing you do will surprise—oh my god.”
I rolled over onto my back and closed my eyes, praying for death.
God must not have heard me, because I was still alive when Jessie said, “There are so many notes. How the hell did they—holy shit. That’s something men can do together? I didn’t think that was possible. How do you fit that in—oh. Oh. I see. Huh. I wonder if that works on women too.”
I covered my face with my hands and moaned. I could hear her flipping through the pages. I blamed Chris for bringing her to Green Creek all those years before. Granted, their mother had just died and she was a teenager with nowhere else to go, but still. He could have put her up for adoption.
“Joe and Kelly were very thorough,” she said.
I sighed as I dropped my hands to the floor. “I hate you.”
She laughed. “Man up, Bennett. You’re gonna need to, especially if you’re thinking about attempting some of the stuff in this book.” She came over to me and sat down next to me, her back against the bed. She still held the book in her hands. Once she gave it back, I was going to have to burn it.
Maybe.
She nudged my shoulder with her foot. I glared at her. She smiled sweetly. I flashed my eyes at her in warning. Her smile widened.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
She shrugged. “Okay.”
“Really?” That was easier than I thought it would be.<
br />
“Really. Don’t worry about it.”
“Yeah. Because that’s easy to do.”
“Why are you so freaked out about this?”
I looked back at the ceiling. “I… have no idea.”
“Is it because Gavin’s a guy?”
“No. Yes.” Then, “No.”
She snorted. “Succinct as usual. I don’t know why I expected anything else.”
“It’s not funny.”
“It is,” she assured me. “And one day you’ll laugh about it. I promise.” She hesitated for a long moment. I knew she was building up to something. What, I didn’t know, but it probably wasn’t anything good. “Is it such a bad thing?”
“No,” I said. And it was true. “I just don’t have any idea what I’m doing.”
“Do we ever?”
“We say we do.”
She nudged my shoulder again. “We’re also full of shit half the time.”
“It’s stupid,” I muttered. “Worrying about stuff like this with everything else going on.”
“Nah. We always seem to have some sort of death and destruction hanging over our heads. You get used to it after a while.”
That was chilling. “We shouldn’t have to.”
Her smile faded. “Worth it, though.”
“Is it?”
She kicked me harder. “Of course it is, you idiot. Stop being a little bitch. Sit up.”
“I’d rather die, thanks. It’s—would you stop kicking me!” I knocked her foot away as I sat up. She patted the carpet next to her. I looked longingly at the door, planning an escape. But this was Jessie Alexander. If I tried to run, she’d chase after me and kick my ass. I crawled toward her, sitting against my bed next to her. I refused to look at the book in her lap.
She said, “Gavin’s pretty great.”
“He’s all right, I guess.”
“Glad you think so. Want some advice?”
“If I say no, you’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you.”
“You know me so well. Say yes. After all, who else do you know who dated the opposite sex for a long time before going queer?”
“Ox,” I said promptly. “And didn’t Mark have a girlfriend or something at one point? And I think my mother had a bit of a crush on Ox’s mom. Chris and Tanner. Sort of. I have no idea what they’re actually doing.”
“No one does. But it works for them, so who cares. And none of those people are sitting next to you, so let’s pretend I’m the only one who can help you.”
I laid my head on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “I will pay you any amount of money to not have this conversation.”
“I’m a Bennett,” she said dryly. “I have more money than I know what to do with.”
I loved her. Even though she was currently pissing me off, I loved her. “Bennett, huh?”
“Yup. You’re overthinking this.”
“How can I not? Did you see page seventy-six?”
“No. Why? What’s on page seventy-six?” She opened the book again until she found the right page. “Wow. Okay. Holy crap. Don’t try that for at least six months. And make sure you drink plenty of water beforehand.”
I moaned again.
She closed the book and tossed it over her head. It landed on the bed out of sight. “You know how I don’t like bullshit?”
“You picked the wrong pack if that’s the case.”
She ignored me. “I prefer being blunt. Obfuscating is pointless. Say what you mean. Don’t dance around it. You care about him.”
I blinked. “Well, yeah. I wouldn’t have gone after him like I did. Is that it? Oh man, that was easier than I thought. Thanks. You can go—”
“You more than care about him. And remember what I said about bullshit.”
Goddammit. “Yeah. I… guess I do.”
She was quiet. Then, “Do you love him?”
“I think so,” I whispered. “I don’t know how it happened. Or why. Or even when.”
She pulled my hand into her lap and traced the lines on my palm with her fingernail. “I saw it, you know.”
“Saw what?”
“The look on your face in Caswell. When Gavin left with Livingstone. You were devastated.”
I tried hard not to think about that moment. How lost I was. How quickly my heart had been torn from my chest. It’d only taken minutes. “I didn’t know what was happening. He was a wolf. He was a man. Then he was gone.”
“It hurt.”
I grunted. “Yeah. It did.”
“We had our fun,” she said softly, “knowing something you didn’t. And looking back, I hate that we did that to you. It wasn’t fair.”
“I don’t blame you for that,” I told her. “Any of you.”
“I know you don’t,” she said. “You should, but that’s not who you are. I… okay. So, Dominique, right?”
“She’s pretty great.”
Jessie smiled. It was beautiful. “The greatest even. And I wasn’t looking for her. It just… happened. Sometimes these things do. One moment you’re sure about the order of the world. How things work. And then your ex-boyfriend turns out to be a human Alpha, and there are werewolves and witches and people who want to kill werewolves and witches. It makes you think.”
“About?”
She shrugged. “How much time we waste being stuck in our own heads. This life, it’s difficult. I’ve known more heartache than I ever thought possible. But I wouldn’t change that for anything in the world.”
“You wouldn’t?”
She shook her head. “I was scared coming back to Green Creek. We left when I was little. I didn’t know anyone here aside from Chris. And the idea of moving back to a little town in the middle of nowhere wasn’t exactly something a teenage girl looked forward to. But you know what I found?”
“What?”
“A home,” she said, and I laid my head on her shoulder. “People who would do anything for me because they knew I would do anything for them. And isn’t that what we’re fighting for? Fuck everything else. Fuck Caswell. Fuck Livingstone and Elijah and Michelle and Richard Collins. Hell, fuck all the other wolves and witches and everyone else. This, here. Us. This is what we’re all about.”
“Some might think that’s selfish.”
“I don’t care,” she said fiercely. “We’ve spent so long worrying about everyone else. It’s time we focus on ourselves and what makes us happy. I wasn’t looking for someone like Dominique. But now that I’ve found her, I’ll be damned if I’m going to let her go. It’s not about the fact that we’re queer. What matters is holding on to something that doesn’t belong to anyone else but us. We’ve earned that, Carter. After all this shit, we’re allowed to be happy. And fuck anyone who thinks otherwise. Does Gavin make you happy?”
“He drives me up the wall and makes me want to tear my hair out.”
She chuckled. “That’s how you know it’s good. Think, Carter. Think about all you’ve done to bring him back. To make him understand he has a place here with us. We all try to show him in our own ways, but he looks to you. Not your mother. Not the Alphas. You.”
“And Gordo.”
She nodded. “There’s blood between them. They’re the last they have, aside from their father. And Gordo knows that. He loves his brother. He doesn’t have to say it out loud for it to be true.”
“The shirt.”
She leaned her head on top of mine. “What?”
“The work shirt for the garage. Ox told me once that’s how he knew he belonged and Gordo loved him. He gave Ox a shirt with his name stitched on the front. I didn’t understand then. I thought it was such a little thing. But then Gordo did the same for Robbie. And now Gavin. He made his own pack.”
“Huh,” Jessie said, sounding amused. “I never thought about it that way. You’re right, though. He showed how he felt in his own way. Keep that in mind, okay? Because you’ve done the same for Gavin. And he’s done the same for you.”
“I don’t understand. All I d
id was—”
“When was the last time someone gave a damn about him enough to hunt him down? I don’t think he’s ever had that before in his life. Thomas….” She sighed. “Thomas dangled something in front of him and then took it away. I know he thought he was doing the right thing, telling him the truth, but I can’t help but think it was cruel.” She paused. “No offense.”
I hated that she was right. “I don’t know if he meant it like that. At least not outright.”
“Maybe. But Gavin has been running for a long time. And finally he has someone willing to chase after him. He sacrificed himself to save you. He didn’t know Gordo then. Not like he does now. But he knew you, even stuck as a wolf.”
“My shadow.”
“You’ve given more than anyone should have to. And you still gave more. It’s your turn, Carter. It’s your turn to finally be happy, to find something to hold on to in the middle of this storm. Gavin would do anything for you. I know you would do anything for him. If that’s not love, then I don’t know what is. Don’t worry about all the other shit. It’ll work itself out. You’d be surprised how quickly you can adapt. Trust me on that. I had no idea how to go down on a woman, but I learned really fast. And I’m pretty great at it now, if the look on Dominique’s face is—”
“Jesus fucking Christ. Why are you like this?”
She laughed again, clutching my hand. “He’s lucky to have you.”
And as if it were some great secret, I whispered, “I think I’m the lucky one.”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “You both are. All of us, really.” Then, “We’re going to win.”
“You think?”
She nodded. “I know. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it end after everything we’ve done. Fuck Robert Livingstone. Fuck the wolves who’ve gathered around him.” She grinned, razor-sharp. “We’re gonna make sure they regret every single moment of their miserable lives.”
GORDO TEXTED FIRST in the early afternoon.
Landed. We’ll let you know what we find.
Kelly texted a couple of hours later. In Maine. Made Robbie wear sunglasses on plane because his eyes wouldn’t stop glowing. Joe almost ate a flight attendant, but I stopped him. Love you.
