by Selena Scott
He pursed his lips and glared at her. She damn well knew the difference. It wasn’t like he’d ever minded her long, sweet stories about the minutiae of her life. In fact, he’d begun to sort of look forward to her long, chatty monologues. She’d been so deathly quiet in the first weeks of getting to know her that he eventually felt kind of honored to be the recipient of that much of Dawn’s formerly elusive internal monologue. But for god’s sake, she couldn’t have managed to mention this mysterious friend even once somewhere in between telling him about her new socks and the gas prices at her favorite gas station?
“Oh, fine,” she said in response to his glare. She threw her hands up in the air. “Fine. Yes. For a little while, he was kind of my boyfriend, I guess. In the loosest sense of the word.”
Quill’s brain sort of shorted out for a second.
“Welcome to Idaho”, a snazzy blue and white sign winked at them as they whizzed down the highway. They were over halfway to Salt Lake City. He hadn’t thought about staying the night there. It was only about twelve hours from Portland. He’d planned to push their drive a little further, maybe make it a little ways into Wyoming before he found a truck stop to pull over at and pass out for a few hours. But apparently they were making a pitstop in Salt Lake City to meet up with someone whom Dawn had once considered her boyfriend. In the loosest terms.
“You’ve had a boyfriend?”
He heard his own tone of voice and knew he sounded like an asshole, making it seem like he couldn’t conceive of anyone wanting to be her boyfriend. But really, it was just that he’d gotten so used to the idea that she’d never had any dudes sniffing around. Well, he’d seen randos sniff around her whenever they were out in public. She was cute. And that voice. Jesus. Anyone who heard her speak even a word or two was instantly drawn in to that husky, sexy tone of hers.
Of course she’d had a boyfriend at some point. Duh.
He suddenly felt unaccountably stupid for ever assuming otherwise. She hadn’t told him. But he’d never asked either.
“Yes. I have.” She turned away toward the window, her posture stiff.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. Well. This was fun.
A sign for a sandwich shop at the next exit blinked in the sunlight. He pulled off. He was starving anyways and the car was suddenly feeling suffocatingly small.
It took 49 hours of driving time to get where they were going. It seemed torturous.
She followed him wordlessly into the sandwich shop. When the kid slapped her freshly made sandwich into her hand over the counter, Quill watched as she turned and surveyed the seating arrangements. There was almost no one else in the shop and considering the ornery, insulted look on her face, he wasn’t altogether surprised when she didn’t choose to sit with him. Instead, she sat in the booth directly behind him.
He didn’t bother pointing out that she would have been farther from him had she chosen to sit at his booth, across the table. As it was, her back was lined up with his and she was close enough for him to smell her shampoo. He thought, inexplicably, of that blue bra strap underneath her neat white T-shirt and his hand crumpled the paper wrapping on his sandwich.
“How’d you meet him?” Quill asked over his shoulder, taking a long drink of his soda.
He could feel Dawn’s glare at the back of his head and for a moment, he didn’t think she was going to answer him. Then finally, there was a long sigh. “My family met his family when we were kids. They’re shifters too. They used to come up to our stretch of the woods every year for about a month in the summer. They’d tell everyone they were camping, but really they were just using the excuse to shift in peace.”
“So. You and he were together when you were kids?”
“Mmm. I was fifteen. We broke up when I was seventeen.”
“You were together for two years?” Seriously. How the hell had she withheld this from him?
“No. Not really. We were together for two or three weeks a few summers in a row. It wasn’t…” she trailed off. “My brothers didn’t know…”
“What didn’t they know?”
“They knew that he and his family would come around every summer. And they liked him. He was the only other person we’d ever really see. But they didn’t know we were fooling around. They thought we were just friends. I just told them recently that we were talking online and they were both glad about it. I’m not sure they would have been if they’d known all the details. But yeah. There you have it.”
Quill grunted.
Fooling around. She’d said it so casually. Like it wasn’t even a big deal. And he supposed that for two teenagers messing around in the woods a few weeks a year, maybe it wouldn’t have been.
The issue here was that Quill had always been certain that Dawn had never so much as been kissed. And now he was not sure. And it was… unexpectedly uncomfortable.
Dawn’s hand appeared out of nowhere. “Keys, please.”
He looked up to see that she was standing next to his booth, one hand outstretched for the car keys.
“I’ll wait out there while you finish eating,” she said, wiggling her fingers to get him to pass over the goods.
He did and watched her leave the sandwich shop. He caught the sandwich maker’s eye and realized that he hadn’t been the only man in the shop to watch Dawn leave. Frowning even more now, Quill finished his sandwich in two great bites and walked back up to the counter.
He ordered two more sandwiches and two more drinks. They could eat dinner in the car.
It occurred to him that if they got a move on, there would be no need to spend the night in Salt Lake City. If they dawdled, they’d be forced to.
He did not, for any reason, want to spend the night in Salt Lake City.
As usual, the fates conspired against him and seventy-five miles outside of Salt Lake, they hit a squalling, vicious rainstorm that tossed sheets of rain onto the car and slowed down traffic for an hour and a half.
The car was silent except for the rain against the roof. Quill’s leg jumped with impatience as they pulled into the city at eight p.m. They found a public library that hadn’t closed for the night yet and Dawn used the computer to pull up her emails with this guy. He’d given her his address a few months ago so that she could send him a copy of her favorite manga that she’d been reading.
They got back in the car and followed her printed-out directions to his place. Considering the guy was Dawn’s age, early twenties, he assumed they were headed to an apartment complex of some kind. One step up from college dorms. He frowned when he realized that they were driving through a rather cute neighborhood. There were rows of single-story homes with flowering bushes crowding out their picture windows. The streets were wide and lazy, the sky was wide, and honestly, it looked like a nice place to live.
Quill hated it.
They parked on the street and walked side by side up to the small house that matched the address this dude had given her. Dawn rang the doorbell and bounced on the balls of her feet.
Quill chanced a look at her face and was extremely irritated to see her looking both excited and nervous as they waited for someone to answer the door.
A voice called out from inside the house and there were footsteps approaching. Who was the man on the other side of the door? What kind of person was Dawn attracted to? She was small and bookish and equal parts quiet and chatty. Quill pictured an appropriate counterpart for her. Someone she would have fooled around with in her sexually experimental teen years. His imagination conjured a skinny skater type. He’d probably worn Slayer concert Ts and talked to her about anarchy being the only true logic in between make-out sessions.
A moment later, the door came unlatched and swung open.
“You’re not the pizza delivery guy,” said the wide-shouldered, extremely tall blond man who stood on the other side of the threshold, blinking at them. His dark eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “…Dawn?”
“Sasha!” Dawn shrieked and tossed herself bodily ont
o the man in question.
Quill’s Dungeons and Dragons nerd he’d conjured just sort of wafted away as he took in the all-American meathead standing in front of him. This was… not who he’d pictured Dawn being into.
“What are you doing here?!” The guy’s arms clasped hard around Dawn’s midsection as he lifted her clear off the ground.
“It’s kind of a long story. Can we come in?”
“Sure, sure. I have some friends from out of town staying with me, but please come in.” He waved them inside with a big, dopey smile. Maybe it was his exorbitant size, or the pleasantly dull expression on his face, but Quill was getting the distinct impression that this guy was kind of an oaf.
The oaf closed the door behind them and then stood blinking at Dawn as if he couldn’t believe she was there. After a second, his dark eyes slid over to Quill and his expression pulled down. “Sorry. I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Sasha.”
Smiling, he held out a tremendously large mitt for Quill to shake.
“Oh, right. Sorry!” Dawn trilled. “Sasha, meet Quill. Quill, meet Sasha. Quill is my… ride.”
Quill’s jaw clenched in response to that tepid descriptor, but what really could he have expected her to define him as? He’d obviously been downgraded from friend. And she wasn’t going to introduce him as her enemy. But “ride”? It sounded like he was some guy she’d found on Craigslist.
Sasha’s eyes narrowed in a bit of confusion, but he didn’t say anything about the strange way of introducing the other man. They shook hands.
“Nice to meet you,” Sasha said heartily.
Quill said nothing.
“So, are you two just passing through Salt Lake or are you staying awhile?” Sasha asked, with what seemed to be a hopeful look in his eye.
“Just for the night,” Dawn answered before Quill could mention that, in fact, they were leaving about ten seconds after she used his phone to call her damn brothers.
“You want to stay here?” Sasha asked, looking back and forth between them. “My friends are in one of the guest rooms, but you could have the other.”
“We wouldn’t want to put you out, Sash,” Dawn said with a worried look on her face. Quill guessed that it had more to do with the idea of sharing a room with him than it did with putting Sasha out.
“The more the merrier!” He glanced at Quill and then leaned down to whisper something in Dawn’s ear.
She immediately shook her head.
“Quill, I wish I could offer you a room as well, but I have to say, the pull-out couch in the living room is very comfortable.”
Quill grunted in response.
“Sasha, is there a chance that I could use your phone to tell my brothers that I got here safely? Mine is… broken.”
“Sure, sure. Let me grab it. Come on in and meet the others.”
Quill would rather have taken a minute alone with Dawn so that he could remind her that they needed to get the hell back on the road, but she’d already looped her arm through Sasha’s and was allowing herself to be led away.
All those tense, silent hours in the car mocked him. Why hadn’t they talked about what the plan was going to be once they found Sasha?
Quill bounced on his heels for a second, fighting the urge to charge into the kitchen and drag Dawn out of the dang house and back into the car. It wasn’t necessarily that he wanted to be barreling toward the Director with Dawn by his side. And it wasn’t that he thought the two of them would be found here by anyone the Director might send. It was just that his car was a known entity. He himself was a known entity. Quill didn’t know this Sasha from Adam, he didn’t know the layout of the house, he barely knew Salt Lake City. He was in unknown territory and he absolutely hated being in unknown territory.
Sasha waited until Quill entered the brightly lit kitchen before he introduced everybody, one arm slung familiarly around Dawn’s shoulders as he pointed out the newcomers. “Raph, Nat, this is my old friend Dawn and her friend Quill. Guys, these are my good friends Raphael and Natalie.”
Raphael was light-haired and lazily leaning forward on the kitchen counter with his elbows. Standing in between those elbows was a small, dark-haired woman who didn’t seem to mind having her hair nuzzled by Raphael. Apparently they were a couple.
“Nice to meet you,” Dawn said shyly, canting her body halfway behind Sasha’s. She was reverting back to the quiet, shy version of herself that Quill had become so familiar with back in the beginning of their relationship. It made him feel unexpectedly nostalgic for that time. He didn’t like it.
“Raph is my friend that I go skiing with in the wintertime, remember?” Sasha prompted Dawn.
“Oh. Right. You met on the mountain when you were kids?”
“Right,” Raphael responded, an easygoing smile on his handsome face. “We were in the same ski class for a while. But he kept kicking my ass down the mountain so I had to switch to snowboarding so I wouldn’t be in direct comparison to him anymore.”
Dawn laughed. “That sounds like Sasha. He’s good at everything he tries. Isn’t it annoying?”
Everyone but Quill laughed, like it was a joke. Quill, for his part, simply agreed with the statement. Yes. Sasha was very annoying.
“Forgive me, Raphael,” Dawn said after a second. “But you’re a shifter, right?”
Raphael’s eyes widened as he shifted his attention to Sasha. “You told her?”
“No.” Dawn shook her head. “Sorry. I have a very acute sense of smell. I can tell. You’re a wolf shifter. Like me.”
Raphael’s eyes widened. “You can tell I’m a wolf shifter just from my scent? That’s… totally badass.”
Quill tightened uncomfortably. Now he hated this even more. He hadn’t realized they were walking into a house full of shifters. He felt his bear wake up inside of him. Quill was extremely controlled. He hadn’t shifted unwillingly since he was a child. But in moments of unease, he always felt his animal a bit closer to the surface than normal.
“Are you a shifter too?” Quill asked Natalie.
She smiled at him good-naturedly, though something in his tone had Raphael banding an arm across her collarbones and pulling her into his chest. “Nope. I’m just a boring old human,” she replied.
Quill could feel Raphael and Sasha’s eyes on him. Great. As usual, his sparkling personality had ruffled the feathers of the other males in the room.
“Sash,” Dawn turned to him. “Your phone?”
“Right.” He grabbed it off the counter and handed it to her.
Immediately, Dawn left the room. Quill fought the irrational urge to go with her. It wasn’t like she needed support for a phone call with her brothers. And even if she did, he was the last person on earth she’d ask for it from.
An awkward silence stretched out in the kitchen after Dawn left the room.
Sasha was the one to break it. “Beer? Water? We’ve got pizza on the way. I think I’ve got some juice I could offer you too.”
“Beer would be great. Dawn’ll want the juice.” He wasn’t sure why he said the last part. Maybe because the moniker of “ride” was still clanging around his brain, making him uncomfortable. He wanted to prove to them, or maybe himself, that he knew her in some small way. Even if it was just her beverage preferences.
“Right.”
A moment later, he found himself with an ice-cold beer in his hand.
“So…” Raphael broke the silence. “This is probably rude or something, but you’re a shifter too, right?”
Quill’s lips quirked up in a half-smile. “How could you tell?”
Natalie gave him a speaking look. “Come on. You know you’ve got that tall, dark, and feral thing going on.”
His smile turned from a half to a whole. It felt strange on his face. “No one has ever put it that way before.” He took a long pull from his beer. “Yeah. I’m a bear shifter.”
“I’m a jaguar,” Sasha offered.
Quill couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows. “Really. I would
n’t have guessed that.”
“What would you have guessed?”
“Oh, sweetie,” Natalie cut in. “You know you’ve got that golden retriever vibe on lock.”
Everyone laughed, this time even Quill.
“So, Quill,” Sasha said after a minute. “Dawn said you were her ride, but she didn’t say to where.”
Damn. He had no idea what to say. None of this charade really mattered to him, because he was headed to the Director, and to his probable doom. But he was determined that Dawn was going to have a good life after this was all over and he didn’t want her to have to explain a bunch of lies to the people she loved.
Luckily, the doorbell rang and Sasha galloped off to get the pizza.
A few moments later, Dawn came back, a little white-faced, her eyes drawn down. Sasha brought the pizzas in and pulled down plates for everybody. He handed Dawn a glass of juice and she lit up.
“Thanks, Sash! You always know what would make me feel better.”
Sasha gave her a stilted smile. “Actually, Quill recommended juice for you.”
“Oh.”
Her “oh” plunked into the kitchen like a rock into a pile of flour. It couldn’t have been more clear that Dawn thought he was scum and that he and his opinions on her juice intake could go to hell. They should have told everyone that he was her ex-boyfriend and she hated him. That might explain the weird energy between them a little more than the idea that he was just some rando giving her a ride.
Oh well. Quill ate his pizza quickly and then decided to spare everyone his presence. “Sasha, man, you mind if I get set up on the couch? I’m beat and we have an early morning tomorrow.”
“Sure, sure. No problem.” Sasha led him to the living room and even pulled down some pillows and blankets from a closet. He waved goodnight at Quill and left him in the darkened living room.
Quill scratched at the back of his head and kicked off his shoes. He had to admit that Sasha was a nice guy. An annoyingly nice guy.
He lay back and watched the passing headlights of cars dance across the ceiling. A memory, unbidden, surfaced from the murky depths of his mind.
He’d been a kid, maybe eight or nine years old, and he and his family had been visiting an old friend of his father’s. Quill and his younger brother had had to sleep in a living room much like this one. Quill hadn’t been able to sleep because every twenty seconds or so, a car passed by and the headlights flashed in his eyes.
