by Selena Scott
They laughed.
“No,” Raph said. “No, I don’t feel weird about that. I’m just off right now. Can’t explain it.”
“Who’s the girl? Anyone I know?”
“It’s more the absence of a girl is my problem,” Raph answered carefully, telling himself that it was technically the truth. It wasn’t Natalie that was his problem, it was the fact that he wanted more from her than she wanted to give.
“All right,” Seth answered, cocking his head to one side like he didn’t really pick up what Raphael was laying down. He shrugged and looked around at the spread mulch. “I’d offer to help you but… I don’t want to.”
They laughed again. “Wanna feed me instead?”
“That’s what I actually came here for. I made enchiladas. Come over and hang with me and Sarah.”
Raphael nodded and the two of them packed up his truck. Enchiladas and some time with his family sounded perfect to Raphael right then. But he couldn’t deny that the second he was behind the wheel of his truck he had to fight the urge to drive right to Natalie’s house.
***
As Bauer stomped off the dirt from his hiking boots off the edge of Elizabeth’s back porch, he heard her car pull into the driveway. A surge of happiness ran through him, making everything feel kind of tight. He frowned.
That had been happening a lot lately and he wasn’t getting used to it. Not in the least. If anything, he was becoming more and more uncomfortable with his happiness. He wasn’t a man who’d known a lot of happiness in his life. It sat uncomfortably on his body, like a Halloween costume that he loved, but was certain wasn’t something he could wear in his everyday life.
He took off his shoes in the mudroom and the hunting vest that Elizabeth made him wear if he was going to be out on the mountain. For obvious reasons, he’d stopped shifting during the days, even though that was something he used to do almost every day of his life. It meant that he bore a sort of soul-deep restlessness that he attempted to quell with long days on the mountain.
He stepped into the kitchen and was just washing his hands when she breezed in, a grocery bag in one hand and a set of shopping bags in the other.
“Hi!” she said brightly. “Just got back from a hike? Here.” She hefted the grocery bag into his arms. “There’s some of that juice you like in there if you’re thirsty. You mind unpacking the groceries while I put my purchases away?”
He blinked down at the grocery bag for a moment and then did as she asked. When she came back a few minutes later, the silence threatened to swamp him.
“You went shopping?” he asked, for the sake of conversation.
“Yes,” and for some odd reason, she blushed. She immediately began to take out some sandwich fixings from the fridge and began to put together a sandwich for each of them.
“What’d you buy?” he asked, sipping the grapefruit juice she’d made sure to buy for him.
She turned, handed him one of the turkey sandwiches on a plate and started toward the dining room. “You care what I bought?”
He followed after her, sitting down kitty-corner from her at the table. “I care why you’re blushing.”
She pulled a face at him but ended up chuckling. “I’m blushing because I’m an old fool.”
He waited for her to elaborate and eventually she sighed.
“Nat and Kaya and I went shopping and they made me buy a bunch of clothes that I have no reason to wear, that’s all.”
“No reason to wear? Like… athletic gear?”
She raised her eyebrows at him. “Are you saying I don’t work out?”
He raised his eyebrows back at her. “You hike. You don’t work out.”
Again, she broke the tension with a little chuckle. “I guess you’re right.”
“Why won’t you wear the clothes?”
“They’re fancy. For dates.”
That statement plunked down on him like a weighted blanket. Bauer had next to no idea what to say to that. Dating was something he’d never done in his life. And he suddenly felt inexplicably foolish for assuming that it was something Elizabeth never did either. Just because she was single, just because he hadn’t witnessed her going on any dates in the year he’d been her boarder, well, that didn’t mean that she didn’t date. He frowned again.
The silence stretched out.
“They want me to use this dating app,” Elizabeth supplied, setting her sandwich back on her plate and pulling her phone out of her pocket.
“There’s apps for dating?” Bauer hadn’t ever touched a cell phone until he’d come to live with Elizabeth and the modern world of technology was almost a complete mystery to him. He thought Google maps was interesting and quite useful, but beyond that, he failed to see the point of it all.
“Oh, yeah. About a thousand of them. But they made me a profile on this one. And now they’re trying to convince me to go on a date.”
“What do you mean a profile?”
“It’s got my picture and some information about me and then if a man wants to meet up with me, he sends me a message and I look at his picture and information and decide if I want to meet him.”
Bauer finished his sandwich, polished off the juice in his glass and leaned back in his chair, frown still securely in place. “Can I see it?”
“See what?”
“Your profile.”
Her face immediately pulled away. “No! Of course not!”
“Why not?
“It’s private!”
“Not to all the men on the app, right? You let them see it. Let me see it.”
Elizabeth pursed her lips at him. “Why would you want to see it?”
“Call it curiosity.”
“You’ve never been curious a day in your life. You’re the king of ‘not my business.’”
Well, that was certainly true. Being tracked down, registered, and thrown into a shifter camp by the government would do that to a man. Bauer never stuck his nose in other people’s business because he didn’t want anyone sticking their noses in his. It was a long-fought habit.
“I’m…” he fought through his thoughts, trying to find the right way to explain this. “Trying to be a little more human these days. And a little less coyote.”
She considered him for a long minute. She, more than anyone, had witnessed his life over the last year. What it had been like for him to go from being almost a full-time coyote in hiding, to being an almost full-time human in hiding.
“I suppose,” she said after a minute, “there’s barely anything more human than a dating app.”
She sighed and picked up her phone, flicking through a few things and then handing it over. She cleared their plates the second the phone hit his hand, as if she couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him as he got acquainted with her dating profile.
At his first sight of the picture of her that was tacked onto the top of the profile, Bauer found he couldn’t stay sitting at the dining room table any longer. He’d only taken one quick, jolting glance of the photo and then he was up, on his feet, and ambling into the living room.
He plopped down onto his favorite end of the couch, nearest the fireplace, and crossed his feet at the ankle. Then he took another look at the photo.
There were pictures of Elizabeth up all over the house, but none from this decade, really. There were pictures of her pushing her toddler boys on the swings, her wrestling Jackson down while he held a football out of her reach as a lanky middle schooler. Pictures of her with her brother, pictures of her with her best friend from high school, who had been Jackson’s birth mother.
But there were no pictures of her with her fashionable swing of salt and pepper hair. No pictures of her with that shade of lipstick on, with her feet out on the coffee table while she sat in her favorite chair, her head leaning on one hand.
One of the girls must have taken the photo, he thought, as she’d sat in her favorite armchair. Right there. He squinted over at the armchair. It was what he’d come to think of as he
r paperback armchair. Because that was where she read her mystery novels and the newspaper under the lamplight.
It was strange to him that the armchair was in the picture. He didn’t like the idea of strange men being able to look at her paperback armchair. It was too personal. A part of her private home.
“Why are you frowning?” she asked as she came into the room with a cup of tea for him and a cup of coffee for her, which had become something of a cocktail hour routine for them over the year. “Is it really that bad?”
“Haven’t gotten much farther than the picture. And it’s not bad. It’s a good picture.”
She seemed surprised by his compliment but didn’t say anything more as she plunked down on the couch next to him. Usually she’d sit far down on the other end or in her armchair, but today, she apparently wanted to see what he saw as he checked out her profile.
“I look like an old woman in that picture.”
“You are an old woman.”
He laughed when a couch pillow caught him full in the face. He fought her off.
“What? It’s the truth. Not an insult.”
“I’ll have you know that I’m not even sixty yet. I refuse to be called old.”
“I’m not even sixty yet and I’m old as hell.”
To make his point, he creakily laid his heels up on the coffee table and both of his knees cracked.
“Well,” she said, leaning forward and putting the couch pillow in her hand under his heels. “That’s different. You’ve lived hard for a long time. That’s gonna take its toll on a person’s body.”
It was true. The last decade had been especially hard on Bauer. First the shifter camp, then the fire that had allowed him to escape unnoticed. And then the years and years of living in his coyote form, always terrified that the feds were around every tree, just waiting to lock him up again. It was too many nights in the cold, too many days spent terrified, too few people to trust.
“Well, now I’m living the good life.” And that was true, too. A warm bed. Three square meals a day. Three good boys to work with, train, help their lives get better. And Elizabeth to talk to at the end of every day as he drifted off in front of the fire. If that wasn’t the good life, he didn’t know what was.
“True, true.” She reached out for her phone, to put it away.
He held it out of her reach. “I’m not done looking.”
“Well, hurry up already. It’s starting to get embarrassing.”
From the pink on her cheeks, it had long since passed embarrassing for her, but Bauer didn’t comment on that. He merely scrolled through her page. All of her information was true enough, but vague, as if she didn’t want to tell strangers about her life, which was good. She was a mother, she was single, she liked gardening, hiking, volunteering, she was a retired accountant but she still had a few clients around tax time, which were all things that Bauer already knew.
It soothed him that there was nothing in her profile that was news to him. He didn’t like the idea that any stooge with an internet connection could know her better than he did after a year of living with her and talking to her every dang night of the week.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a heart icon at the corner of the page that had a dancing number 37 in the middle of it.
She leaned in. “Oh, that’s the number of men who have messaged me.”
“Thirty-seven?”
“Apparently I’m a catch.” Her words were dry but she lunged out for the phone again, trying to snatch it back.
Again, he held it out of her reach. “When did you put this profile up?”
“I told you. The girls did it today while we were shopping. Kaya took that picture a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t know why until we were in the middle of Ann Taylor today.”
“Who is Ann Taylor?”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Never mind. Give me back my phone!”
Her voice meant business and he had no desire to push her farther than she wanted to go, so he immediately handed it back over.
“Well,” he said after a moment of silence. “Let’s have a look at ‘em.”
“At what?”
“At your suitors.”
She laughed. “Oh my God, you really are old. I hardly think these men qualify as suitors. All they’ve done is message me on an app.”
“Let’s have a look at ‘em,” he repeated. Something flickered in her eyes. “You know you’re curious.”
She growled, pushing her lips out and narrowing her eyes, and he knew he had her. “Oh, fine.”
She sat up straight and clicked on the heart icon. Bauer leaned in to look at the tiny screen.
“Too old,” he said immediately.
Elizabeth opened her mouth, as if it came naturally to argue with him, but then she cocked her head to one side and conceded his point. “I’m not sure we’d be able to do many of my favorite activities together.”
“Well,” he said, tipping his head to one side to peer down at her from where he sat. “You do love feeding people. With this guy you’d get to feed him every single bite.”
He fended off a new attack with a different couch pillow. “Don’t be rude!” she laughed.
Chuckling, they looked at the next guy’s profile. And the next and the next. According to Bauer there was something wrong with every single one. Too boring. Too straitlaced. Too dirty looking. Wearing a wedding ring.
When they got to the seventh profile and viewed the message he’d sent to her, Elizabeth immediately clicked out, a blush heating her cheeks.
“Was that—?”
“Yes,” she answered through clenched teeth. “Yes, it certainly was.”
“This man sent you a nudey?!?” Bauer scrabbled for the phone and this time she held it out of reach.
“I believe the young people call them ‘dick pics.’”
“I don’t care if they’ve got some clever name on the internet. That’s downright rude! And gross!” He reflected on the photo he’d only seen for about three seconds. “And underwhelming.”
Elizabeth burst into laughter and he was grateful. It seemed that her embarrassment and anger at the unexpected picture had mostly burned away.
“The girls warned me that this might happen. Even these classier dating sites can still attract pervs. I’ll report him to the website.”
“And that’s it? That’s all we can do?”
“What do you wanna do? Find his address and beat him up?”
“For starters,” Bauer said vehemently. “I mean, I’ve barely been a part of civilization since I was in my teens, but even I know that you don’t send a woman a picture of your johnson unless she asks for it.”
Elizabeth burst out laughing again. “Johnson?”
He frowned, and for the first time since this whole thing started, felt a lick of embarrassment in his gut. “You know what I mean,” he grumbled.
Still chuckling, they kept scrolling. They eliminated a bunch more of the ‘suitors’ until she got to one profile that she kind of hesitated on.
Intuition skittered up Bauer’s spine. Something told him that no matter what he said, she wasn’t going to find anything wrong with this particular man.
“Oh,” she said after a minute. “I actually know this guy.”
He didn’t say anything and she glanced up at him. There was a look in her eyes that he’d never seen before and Bauer just knew that when she said ‘know’, she meant know.
“Y’all two dated?” he asked, hopefully casually, stretching his legs out even further on the coffee table. But for some reason, he felt dumb asking, like he was going to end up making a fool of himself and there was no way to prevent it.
“In a manner of speaking,” she said after a minute. “He used to… keep me company.”
Something hot flopped over in Bauer’s gut. He wasn’t sure if it was hot with anger or jealousy or hot with something else entirely. All he knew was that his gut was hot and churning. “When was that?”
“W
hen the boys were young. He was a teacher at their elementary school.” She was still looking at his photo. “The boys never knew. He never came around when they were here. I made sure of that.”
She sighed, looking at his photo.
“I haven’t seen him in years. He’s aged well.”
Bauer couldn’t lie to himself and say that he hadn’t wondered if Elizabeth had had anyone to ‘keep her company’ over the years. He knew that she’d been technically single since before she’d become Jackson’s mother at age nineteen. No relationships. But he knew better than most that that didn’t necessarily mean no relations.
It shouldn’t surprise him so much. She was an attractive woman. And she’d always been attractive. He knew that just from the few photos of her scattered around the house. Of course there would have been callers for her. But callers were all it ever could have been, he knew. Because more than anything, her first priority had always been the safety of her boys. And for them, safety meant secrecy. She must have known from the first moment she found out that Jackson was a shifter that she’d never have a man in her life. Not a real relationship. Because she’d never risk her boys’ safety like that.
He wanted to ask her how it had started. How long it had gone on for. But a different question left his mouth. “How did it end?”
She paused for a long minute. “He… wanted more. And I understood that. How long can you really ask someone to be a secret? It’s not fair. We parted amicably enough, mostly just with sadness on either side. A year or so later he was married. With a baby not long after that. Apparently the marriage is over.”
She clicked out of the app and powered down her phone.
“I think that’s enough for one night,” she said briskly.
Bauer was hit with understanding. He suddenly wished that he hadn’t made so much fun of each of the men who’d reached out to her. Because the pursuit of companionship wasn't something to be scoffed at. She was lonely. In fact, her life had been, in many ways, defined by loneliness. Just like his. He wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy. And certainly not on Elizabeth, who was pretty much the opposite of his worst enemy.
