Out of the Woods

by Sophie Stern

  “A few years,” Dale finally said.

  “Did you build this place yourself?” I had to know.

  “Nope.”

  “Looks like you did.”

  “I assisted a little bit,” he chuckled.

  “What made you decide to move all the way out here?”

  “So many questions from such a sweet human,” Dale flashed me a grin that made me go weak at the knees.

  “Is that okay?”

  “Come inside. We’ll talk more in there.”

  “What about Cole?”

  I couldn’t see him anymore. He had run around to the back of the house.

  “There’s nothing out here that can hurt him.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  We weren’t in the city anymore, I realized. Things were different out here. My kid – our kid – could spend his time running around and frolicking in the sunshine if he wanted to.

  Besides, with winter coming, he needed to make the most of the time he had in the sun. Soon there was going to be snow and snowstorms and maybe even a blizzard. Soon it would be Christmas, and we’d be huddled up inside around a Christmas tree, drinking cocoa and opening gifts.

  Soon.

  But not today.

  I followed Dale into the cabin. I left all of my stuff in the car, feeling comfortable with the fact that I’d be able to get it later.

  “Look,” Dale walked straight through the cabin to the back. The entire back wall was made of glass, and sure enough, Cole was sitting out there at a little picnic table.

  “This is why you said it was okay for a four-year-old to play outside,” I murmured.

  “He’s not going to be unsupervised,” Dale said. “But the yard is surrounded with trees, and Dale might be four years old, but he’s a shifter.”

  “So, he can be outside.”

  “He can be outside,” Dale nodded. “It’s common for shifter kids to want to be outside on their own at this age.”

  “It is?”

  “When I was a kid, my mom started letting me roam around outside in my bear form.”

  “You were an early shifter, too?”

  Dale smiled.

  “I was.”

  “I thought most shifters didn’t come into their powers until later in life.”

  “That’s usually how it works, yes.”

  “So, exactly how common is it that someone might get their powers early?”

  “Not that common,” Dale admitted.

  Apparently, my kid was something special. Dale and I stood at the window, and we watched Cole sitting at the picnic table. He was looking at the scenery, and he seemed so damn happy. I wasn’t so sure that him playing outside alone was something that would happen a lot, but we’d play things by ear.

  Maybe Dale was right.

  Maybe shifter kids really were something else.

  “Have a seat,” Dale gestured to the couch in front of the window. We sat down, side-by-side, and we watched our son patiently looking at the trees around him.

  “Are there animals out there?”

  “We’re in the forest, love. There are animals.”

  “Big ones?”

  I was nervous. I hated how nervous I was.

  “No,” he told me.

  “Bears?”

  “The only bear you need to worry about is me,” he told me.

  I looked over at Dale, and for what seemed like the millionth time, I wondered how we’d lost touch with each other. How had we fallen apart? One great night had been just that: one incredible evening. I should have clung to him, though. I shouldn’t have walked away or tried to live wildly.

  “Do you ever wish that we had started dating?” I asked him quietly. I was embarrassed at my own question, but I wanted to know.

  “All the time.”

  “Why didn’t we?” I whispered quietly.

  “Aside from the fact that you kept a very big secret,” Dale’s eyes swung toward Cole, “probably just the fact that we were in two very different life stages at that point.”

  “You were busy with your career,” I admitted.

  “And you were busy finding yourself, love.”

  I wanted to ask him about now.

  What about now?

  What if we made a go of things now?

  Only, I didn’t think that was a good idea. That kiss the other day had been fucking fire. I had touched myself so many times to the thought of that kiss that it was driving me crazy.

  He was driving me crazy.

  Yet there I was. I was in the mountains, with Dale, with our kid, in a cabin. I was far away from civilization and I wasn’t even scared. Maybe I should be. The truth was that Dale and I didn’t know each other very well. Maybe he was a serial killer. Maybe he was a jerk. Maybe I had built up this incredible idea that he was wonderful, but he wasn’t.

  “Calm down, love,” he murmured.

  “What?”

  “Your heart is racing,” he pointed out.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Honestly?”

  “I think that would be best.”

  “I can hear it,” he said.

  “You can hear it?”

  I placed my hand on my chest. Sure enough, my heart was racing. I was panicking a little bit. I wasn’t sure if I’d made the right choice or a good choice or a horrifying terrible choice. How was I supposed to know?

  How was I going to get an answer to this?

  No, I couldn’t calm down. I couldn’t get myself to relax. This was so big, and so overwhelming, and it was like suddenly, everything hit me all at once. I felt lost. I had so much to learn, and I didn’t know if I’d ever be able to.

  “I can hear it,” Dale confirmed. “I can hear your heart beating. I can tell that it’s racing, which means that you’re upset or worried or scared.”

  “How?” I swallowed hard. “How can you tell all of that just from my heartbeat?”

  “You don’t know a lot about shifters, darling,” he told me carefully.

  “I don’t think that’s a surprise.”

  “You probably know more than you think, though. After all, you’ve been living with one for a few years now, haven’t you?”

  He pointed to Cole, who was now sitting in the grass and rolling around. He was having so much fun. I’d never seen him look so free and calm like this. Then again, we’d never had a real yard before. Our rental home had been located on a busy street, so when Cole wanted to play outside, we’d always just gone to a park.

  “I guess that’s true.”

  I took a deep breath. Okay, maybe I could calm down after all. I could just take some deep breaths, and everything was going to be totally, absolutely fine.

  “Cole probably has some habits that you pass off as being because he’s a kid. The truth is probably that those habits have more to do with the fact that he’s a shifter child.”

  I thought about that for a moment. Maybe he was right. There were a lot of weird, quirky things about Cole. He always seemed to know when I was upset or stressed, for one thing.

  Was it because he could hear my heart beat the way Dale had?

  That was a little unnerving, but not horrible. It was kind of cool that they had these incredible senses.

  “Is there anything else I should know?” I asked.

  “You should know that I’m glad you’re both here,” he told me. “Truly.”

  “I’m glad, too,” I told him. When I looked over at Dale, he was smiling at me. He was handsome as hell. Somehow, he’d gotten only better looking with age. “I like the hair,” I told him.

  “Do you?” Dale brushed it gently over his shoulders, moving his head dramatically in what I could only assume was his “model” pose.

  “Yes,” I laughed.

  “It’s quite nice,” he agreed.

  “I’m guessing that you got tired of keeping it short while you were in the military.”

  “I got tired of a lot of things.”

&nb
sp; “Like what?”

  “That’s a very personal question,” he said.

  It was.

  I probably didn’t have the right to ask him something like that, but I had. The only thing I could think of to do was to even the score.

  “What if I let you ask me something personal?” I suggested.

  “Deal.”

  “Woah, you didn’t even have to think about it.”

  “A question for a question seems more than fair.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination or not, but suddenly, the room seemed like it got a little bit hotter. I fanned myself, wondering if I was being nuts or not. I wasn’t, right?

  I wasn’t.

  “Okay,” I said. “You first.”

  “I got tired of a lot of things in the military,” he repeated, “but mostly, I got tired of being without Matt.”

  His friend.

  His friend and roommate and the guy I’d named our kid after without his permission.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. I knew it wasn’t going to help, but I didn’t know what else to say. That was one of the biggest problems with death, wasn’t it? Nobody ever knew what to say when someone you loved passed on.

  We all understood that it hurt, and we all wanted a way to make the pain go away, but there was never anything we could really do.

  Dale just sighed.

  “You know,” he told me, “the funny thing is that everyone always has this idea that talking about someone who died is going to make the pain worse.”

  “It doesn’t though,” I whispered.

  “No.”

  We sat there for a moment, and I don’t really know what came over me, but I reached for his hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Careful, darling.”

  “What?”

  “You might give a bear shifter the wrong idea about your intentions.”

  “It’s just holding hands.”

  “No,” Dale looked at me carefully, and he reached out. He brushed a piece of my hair back and tucked it behind my ear. Then he leaned down and pressed his lips to my forehead. “It’s never just holding hands.”

  7

  Dale

  I WANTED TO KISS HER, but I had to control myself.

  A girl like Ruby deserved more than just a spur-of-the-moment kiss.

  She deserved...everything.

  Patience.

  Kindness.

  Adoration.

  “You promised me a question,” I finally said, desperate to change the mood of the moment. Thinking about Matt always made me sad, but it made me hopeful, too. Matt had been a good person, and it brought me hope that there was going to be more goodness in the world.

  “A question,” she nodded. We were still holding hands. I wasn’t going to be the one to let go first.

  “When was the last time you kissed someone?”

  “Before the other day?”

  We’d kissed at her house. It had only been the once, and we hadn’t kissed again. We both knew, rationally, that we should try to live together without romance, at least for now.

  I knew that wasn’t going to work in the long-term, but it had to work for now. I needed to get to know my son, and I needed to get to know Ruby. Sex and kissing...well, that was going to complicate things.

  Like, a lot.

  I knew that if we walked through that doorway again, we wouldn’t come back out. I had been younger the last time we’d slept together, and I’d been more willing to promise myself a single night. Now? Well, now I wanted more than just one night. I wasn’t going to lie to myself or to her about that.

  “Yes.”

  “It was with a girl I went on a date with,” she told me.

  “Was it...someone special?”

  “Are you asking if we went steady?” Ruby raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes, pretty much.”

  “That counts as two questions.”

  “No way,” I laughed, shaking my head. “No way.”

  “It does!”

  “You barely answered. That counts as one question.”

  “Fine,” she sighed, giving in easily. “No, it wasn’t anyone special. Well, she was special. I won’t say she wasn’t. We just didn’t have that spark, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Not like...”

  “Not like us?”

  Ruby nodded, licking her lips. Then she looked away. Her eyes went to the window where Cole was playing in the grass. That kid really liked getting dirty. He was scooping up dirt, tearing up grass, and dumping it all over his head.

  Yeah, it was safe to say my mini-me was going to need a serious bath.

  “We definitely had a spark,” I admitted.

  “We still do.”

  “We still do,” I agreed. I could feel it, and apparently, she could, too.

  “Remind me...why can’t we date again?” Ruby’s eyes swung toward me.

  “We have a child together.”

  “Lots of couples have a child together.”

  “He’s a shifter. So am I.”

  “That complicates things, I agree,” Ruby nodded. “I don’t care, though. I don’t care that you’re a shifter.”

  “You don’t care?” I was surprised to hear her say that. For most humans, choosing to date a shifter was quite a bit deal. In general, people didn’t seem to like dating someone who was so wildly different from what they were used to.

  “Does that upset you?”

  “No.”

  “Have you dated a human before?”

  “Also no.”

  “Why not?”

  Apparently, we’d given up on the idea of a fair exchange when it came to questions since Ruby was just asking anything she wanted to. That was fine. We could turn our little game into a real discussion.

  Why hadn’t I dated humans before? That was a hard question. She definitely wasn’t holding back when it came to asking things I might not want to talk about.

  The truth was that I didn’t really have an easy answer. The one I did have was kind of intense. I’d tried dating other people, but after being with Ruby, I’d made the mistake of comparing people. I’d tried to replace her and to find someone who was like her, but nobody was like her.

  Nobody could replace her.

  “Honesty, Ruby, because they weren’t you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve tried to get over you. I have. Every time I’ve tried to date someone, I’ve hoped beyond all hope that somehow, they’ll remind me of you. I’ve hoped that they’ll be like you. They never are, though.”

  “You didn’t even know my name.”

  “Not your real name, no. I’ve always thought of you as Elizabeth.”

  “Did you try to find me?”

  “I asked Matt about you,” I told her. “I asked about Jake.”

  “They were so on-again, off-again,” Ruby whispered, “he probably didn’t want to tell you.”

  “True. He didn’t tell me anything.”

  Matt had been very private about many things in his life. He’d kept the details of his relationships to himself, and that hadn’t bothered me too much. I’d been okay with accepting that sometimes, people had secrets. Sometimes, people had things they needed to keep to themselves.

  “How is Jake?” If I remembered correctly, Ruby and Jake had been roommates long ago.

  “Good,” she nodded. “He got married last year. We were all shocked. Met the man of his dreams, though. He moved to Alaska.”

  “Alaska?”

  “Yep. We still keep it touch, though,” Ruby pointed to her phone. “That handy little device makes all the difference in the world.”

  “I bet it does.”

  She leaned her shoulder on me, obviously worn out from all of the talking. We still had a lot of things to do. We had to haul in all of her stuff. We had to unpack. At some point, we needed to have her mail forwarded here. I’d need to talk with my boss and let her know I needed to take a couple of personal days. Ruby might w
ant to tell her sister she’d moved.

  There was a lot to do. There were a lot of chores and things that required our attention, but I didn’t care about those things. What I wanted right now, more than anything else, was to just hold her.

  So, I reached for Ruby, and I tugged her into my arms. She didn’t resist or fight me. She didn’t tell me how improper we were being. She just let me take her, holding her close, and she looked up at me.

  “Dale...”

  “Ruby.”

  “It’s a bad idea,” she whispered.

  “It’s a bad idea,” I agreed.

  Then she kissed me.

  Ruby kissed me fast and sweet and easy. She kissed me with a certain tenderness I hadn’t felt in a long time: possibly ever. I deepened the kiss, tugging her closer to my body. Arousal flooded my nostrils. Yeah, my girl wanted me.

  Needed me.

  Bringing her here had been a damn good idea, and I wasn’t going to waste it.

  “Dale, I missed you.”

  “I missed you more.”

  It was the truth.

  She wrapped her arms around my neck, pulling me closer to herself, and then...

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  We both turned to the back door, which was just to the side of the windows. The door was a heavy oak one, designed to give privacy. Although the glass windows that overlooked the forest were clear, I had heavy curtains that I could tug closed for further privacy.

  “Hello?” Cole’s tiny voice called out. “Is anyone in there?”

  “Welcome to parenting,” Ruby shrugged. She pressed a kiss to my nose and got up. Then she went to the door, tugged it open, and looked down at our son.

  “I want cookies,” Cole said.

  Ruby turned to me.

  I smiled.

  “Then let’s make cookies.”

  We headed into the kitchen, and as soon as we reached the room, Cole stopped.

  “What’s that?”

  “What’s what?” I asked him, looking around. I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. I had normal kitchen appliances and aside from a few dirty dishes, I didn’t really notice anything out of place.

  “What’s that?” Cole whispered this time, and he pointed to a big pile of fluff that was sprawled out on the kitchen table.