Lone Wolf

by Anna Martin

  His name was important. Such a big deal, Leo was actively trying not to think about it. The implications of the whole situation were huge; it would affect his parents, his friends, his job. He’d seen enough of the world to know there was still prejudice against werewolves, even though it wasn’t considered polite to air those opinions in public anymore. Living with a werewolf as his roommate would have been extremely taboo even thirty years ago; now Leo had to deal with the implications of being one’s soul mate.

  Leo knew werewolves considered their soul mates almost sacred; it was one of the most pure and intimate connections they could form. But what that actually entailed? What would be expected of him? Leo didn’t have a clue.

  He was pretty sure he was going to fuck it up.

  Mitch looked over and studied Leo hard. “Do you think he’ll call?”

  Leo shrugged. Because wasn’t that just the crux of it? What happened if he didn’t call?

  HE DIDN’T call. He turned up.

  Leo pulled into his assigned spot in the hospital parking lot—because yeah, his job didn’t come with very many perks, but his own parking spot was one of them—and the guy was waiting by the door to the staff entrance. The staff entrance wasn’t easy to find if you didn’t know where to look, which meant maybe his wolf was a doctor. Or someone else who worked at the hospital.

  Though Leo was desperate to check his face in the rearview mirror before going out there, he resisted. He’d spent all night googling the phenomenon of human-werewolf mates, and it had been a long and dark rabbit hole to fall down. He was sure the exhaustion was written all over his face.

  From health class in high school, Leo had been vaguely aware it was a possibility, but wolves almost always mated with other wolves, if they mated at all. It wasn’t a given. The more he learned, the more Leo was intimidated by the possibility of being thrown into their world. Especially when he would almost certainly be treated as an anomaly.

  He grabbed his backpack from the passenger seat and carefully locked the Prius as he walked over.

  “Hey,” he said softly. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  He looked cold, Leo thought. It was a cold morning, crisp and bright, and he was only wearing jeans and a dark red hoodie. He looked good, though. Leo thought he’d be an idiot not to find a man who looked like that attractive.

  “Hey.”

  Leo stopped a few feet away, not wanting to crowd him. He had dark bags under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept well.

  Well, Leo hadn’t exactly slept like a baby either.

  “So, uh, I don’t even know your name,” Leo said, choosing to focus on his beat-up Adidas rather than his wolf’s very conflicted facial expressions.

  “Jackson. Jackson Lewis.”

  “Nice to meet you, Jackson,” Leo said, keeping his voice carefully even. “I’m Leo.”

  He looked up then, and found whiskey-brown eyes that looked tired and tormented.

  “You’re my soul mate,” Jackson—thank God, Leo had his name now—said, his voice rough.

  “It seems so…. Yeah.”

  His words didn’t appear to make Jackson feel any better. If anything, he looked sick.

  “Look,” Leo said, stepping forward and gently squeezing Jackson’s arm. He ignored the little thrill of touching him. He could dwell on that later. “I get that this probably isn’t what you expected. That’s okay. Before we make any decisions about anything, I’d like to get to know you better, if that’s okay with you? I have a lot of questions,” he finished with a soft laugh.

  Jackson ran his hand over his face roughly, effectively dislodging Leo’s grip.

  “Can I… can I have a few days to think about it? I’ll call you, I promise, I just need… I need some time. I have your card.”

  “Okay.” Leo ignored the discomfort churning through him now and tried to make his expression calm. Nonthreatening. “Please do call, though.”

  “I will. I’m sorry for ambushing you at work like this.”

  “It’s okay. I have some time before my shift starts.”

  Jackson nodded and stepped away.

  “I’m sorry, Leo.” Leo looked at him blankly, and Jackson shook his head. “You deserve better than this.”

  Before Leo could ask what that meant, Jackson had turned on his heel and rushed away.

  Chapter Three

  JACKSON PICKED a nondescript Starbucks downtown, not too far from the cluster of bars he often worked for. After making a decision and sending Leo a text, he freaked out.

  Because Starbucks, really? In this area there were at least half a dozen independent coffee shops.

  And what if one of his clients saw him? On what could be a date?

  And why was he freaking out about possibly being seen on a date with another man? He was a modern, liberal-thinking person. He voted for Hillary. There wasn’t anything wrong with being—

  But he wasn’t.

  He never had been.

  The universe was playing a very cruel trick on him.

  Jackson sat in his truck for almost fifteen minutes, making himself very late while he tried to calm down and rationalize a decision he hadn’t yet made. Then he straightened up, reminded himself his parents had raised a man, not a spineless bigot, and stepped out of the vehicle.

  As he was crossing the lot, he noticed Leo walking out the front door. Jackson picked up his pace and jogged over, not wanting Leo to slip away.

  “Hey,” he said as he caught up. Leo looked… he looked good, in jeans and a gray button-down shirt. It set off his rusty brown hair, cut short and neat to frame his face, and bright blue eyes that were ethereally beautiful.

  Leo was a few inches shorter than Jackson, with narrow shoulders and long limbs. Freckles lay over his nose and cheeks, almost invisible at this time of year. Jackson thought in the summer they might get darker.

  “Hey,” Leo said softly.

  “Sorry. I was running late.”

  “Jackson, you were sitting in your truck for almost twenty minutes. I saw you pull in.”

  Jackson felt his face heat with a combination of shame and embarrassment. “Sorry.”

  He’d apologized to Leo a lot already.

  “Come on,” Leo said softly, putting his hand on Jackson’s arm again to lead him inside.

  This was only their third interaction, and Jackson knew he was just fucking up at every turn. He wasn’t like this usually. It wasn’t like he was a ladies’ man or any hotshot Casanova, but he’d never felt so uncomfortable in his own skin before.

  And yet….

  And yet, the connection between him and Leo was undeniable. There was something fizzing in his veins, twisting up his stomach, pitching against a sense of settled security that didn’t make sense at all. Everything else felt like it was falling down around him, but Leo was a pillar, propping him back up again.

  “What do you want to drink?” Leo asked, startling Jackson out of his moping.

  “Oh. Just an Americano is fine. I’ll get them.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Leo stepped up to the counter and placed their order, stuffing a dollar in the tip jar even though he paid on his card. Jackson followed all of Leo’s moves, watching, studying.

  Leo was slim, but his forearms were toned, and he moved with an easy sort of grace. He smiled and chatted to the barista and laughed at something she said. Jackson hung back, waiting for Leo to catch his eye, then gestured at a free table near the window. Leo nodded, so Jackson went to claim it.

  The table was low, big comfy armchairs providing seats on either side, and Jackson fiddled with his phone, turning it over and over until Leo came back with a mug in each hand and a slice of chocolate cake balanced on top of one of the mugs.

  “If you don’t like chocolate cake, I’ll eat it,” he said, setting the mugs down on the table and the cake between them. “But you looked like you could use some cake.”

  Jackson smiled. “Split it with me?”

  “I was hop
ing you’d say that.”

  He pulled two forks out of his back pocket and stuck them unceremoniously into the cake.

  Jackson leaned in and split the cake down the middle, nudging the piece with the most frosting toward Leo. He liked frosting, but….

  “I don’t know anything about you,” Leo said, scooping up a piece of cake on his fork and raising an eyebrow at Jackson before popping it in his mouth.

  Jackson leaned back in his chair, bringing his mug to rest on the arm.

  “I own a microbrewery,” he said, deciding to start with what he considered the most interesting detail about himself. “The Lone Wolf Brewery.”

  “No shit? Really?”

  “Yeah,” Jackson said with a small laugh. “For a few years now. I supply some of the bars in this area. Not many, though. I’m trying hard to keep things small.”

  Naming the brewery Lone Wolf had been a risk, one that all sorts of people had tried talking Jackson out of. But he liked the name and the symbolism that came with it. He was a lone wolf, starting a business on his own. The fears of both his family and the brewery’s financial backers proved to be unfounded, though. Jackson couldn’t say he’d lost much business from his insistence on being so brazenly werewolf-owned. Stupid prejudiced people hadn’t brought him down.

  “Wow,” Leo said. “I don’t even know what that entails. How did you get into brewing?”

  Leo sat back in his chair, crossed his ankles, and looked at Jackson with open interest. He really was attractive. The thought made Jackson nervous.

  “Well, I did a degree in business.”

  He’d told this story plenty of times by now. How the business degree had been interesting enough, but his real passion had been brewing beer and making wine in the basement of his frat house. The fun part had been not getting caught, and that he didn’t need to be twenty-one to buy most of the equipment online. He’d stuck a lock on the basement door that none of his brothers had protested, and he’d been the illegal supplier of many a keg during his four years in Kappa Sigma.

  When he was interviewed by different brewing publications, he kept most of the sordid details to himself. He wasn’t sure if there was a statute of limitations on illegally making alcohol and distributing it to minors, and he wasn’t particularly interested in finding out.

  “After I graduated I drifted for a while, doing a few shitty corporate jobs that never really interested me. Then about five years ago my brother suggested I start brewing again as a hobby, since that was what excited me.” He sipped his coffee and shrugged. “It kind of expanded from there.”

  “How old are you?” Leo asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Thirty.”

  “Oh.”

  “You?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Oh.”

  They looked at each other for a moment, and then Leo cracked into laughter. “Well, that’s that, I suppose,” he said.

  “You work at the hospital,” Jackson said, hoping this would steer the conversation in a new direction.

  “I do.”

  “Your card said you’re a music therapist.”

  “Yeah. I guess we both chased our dreams.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Jackson said with a laugh. He realized after a moment he was flirting, with a man, and it didn’t feel weird. That in itself was weird. He quietly coached himself through not freaking out. “I chased my love of beer.”

  Leo grinned and shook his head.

  “I actually started out training to be a nurse,” Leo said. He picked up his fork and took another bite of cake. “It was good; it’s what I thought I wanted—to be a pediatric nurse. I was partway through my first year when I had something of an epiphany with one of my mentors.”

  Jackson watched as Leo washed the cake down with coffee. He had a freckle on his thumb. Jackson tried not to feel anything—not arousal or curiosity or discomfort. Not feeling anything was so much easier.

  “I was on a ward helping a child who had come out of surgery earlier in the day. He was in a lot of pain, and we were trying to help him with that, but his parents weren’t around to be with him. I ended up sitting with him on my lap, singing and making hand puppets. It took a while, but he eventually calmed down, ended up falling asleep on me. It wasn’t until a few days later when I was talking to my mentor about it that she mentioned I should talk to a music therapist. Something just clicked. I realized that was what I wanted to do—still helping children, but in a different way.”

  “Did you have to retrain at all?”

  “I was able to transfer a few of my credits, which was good, though I did have to move to a new college. Berklee.”

  “Berkeley?”

  “No, it’s a specialist music college in Boston. They liked that I already had some clinical training, and I got to transfer midway through the year if I promised to catch up. I ended up graduating in three years. Now I’m doing my mandatory supervised hours before I can start practicing on my own.”

  “That’s incredible,” Jackson said softly. “Were you a musician before you started training?”

  Leo screwed his face up and made a noise. “Sort of. My mom made me take piano lessons as a kid, and I play guitar and ukulele pretty well. Being a good musician isn’t necessarily that important for my job.” He licked a crumb of cake from his finger and sat back in his chair. “I deal with a whole range of kids who have really different conditions. Some of them are in for routine operations, but they’re scared out of their minds. Singing with them helps distract them, like that first little boy. Other kids have terminal illnesses or severe disabilities. A lot of the time it’s more therapy than music.”

  “You seem young to have it all figured out already.”

  Leo tried to shrug off the compliment, but his flushed cheeks and almost hidden smile gave him away. “It’s not hard work when you love what you do.”

  Jackson barked a laugh.

  “What?” Leo demanded.

  “Nothing. I’m not laughing at you, I promise. It’s just… I say that all the time. To my sister. Who says I work too hard.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe we have that in common, then.”

  It was a nice thought.

  They’d almost finished the cake and the coffee and Jackson was approaching his limit for interacting with new people for the day. Leo gathered up the mugs and plate and took them back to the counter. Apparently he was that kind of guy.

  Jackson walked Leo over to his car and waited while Leo fumbled with his key to unlock it.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “What for?”

  Jackson smiled hesitantly. “Giving me a chance?”

  Leo shrugged. “It’s not much of a hardship.” He looked at Jackson then, really looked, making Jackson feel like he was under scrutiny.

  After a second, Leo pulled Jackson into a hug.

  Jackson went with it, too surprised to resist, and wrapped his arms around Leo’s shoulders. Leo tucked his forehead under Jackson’s chin and just held on, warm and solid and right.

  There was still a lot that was fucked-up about this situation. But he was starting to feel that maybe Leo wasn’t the fucked-up part.

  Leo broke away first with a sad smile. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Okay,” Jackson said and just watched as Leo got into his car and pulled out of the parking lot.

  JACKSON THOUGHT it probably wasn’t a coincidence that he’d found a true passion in brewing. It was both exacting and creative, requiring a methodical patience and a curiosity to experiment. That dichotomy had always appealed to him.

  He thought Leo could be another enigma he had to unravel, full of what-ifs and coincidences that had brought them together.

  After their coffee date, he craved the familiar.

  His home was outside the city, near the tiny town of Nine Mile Falls. Jackson had been hounded by his mother when he bought the house, mostly because it was in the middle of nowhere. The isolation suited him, though.
He’d grown more and more fond of it as he’d gotten older.

  Jackson rarely shifted outside of the full moon, and sometimes not even then. He was a born wolf, not bitten, and he’d always had impeccable control. Once he’d parked the truck, he went to the porch, stripped off his clothes and shoes, and stood naked, looking out at the forest.

  He didn’t feel the cold, not really, even though there was still a frost on the ground that hadn’t thawed yet. It would later, when the rain came. He’d always been good at being able to smell when rain was on its way.

  For a few seconds, he took deep, energizing breaths, and then he let the wolf out.

  In the space between an inhale and exhale his body grew, thickened, and the dark gray wolf took over. It was a relief to let go, to not think for a while, and Jackson trotted toward the edge of the tree line.

  He was familiar with the forest, was grateful for it, even though he’d grown up in the city and had never had a lot of outdoor space he could call his own. There were a few other wolves in the local area who ran in the forest, and Jackson was always careful to not scent-mark or claim any space as his own.

  He could share.

  Though the trees stretched for miles, Jackson stuck pretty close to home, circling round his property, checking for any anomalies. A cold wind whispered through the trees, stirring up the scent of the forest, and Jackson reveled in it. He caught the scent of a squirrel and chased it for a hundred yards, snapping his teeth, then headed back to the house, satisfied.

  He couldn’t quite name the instinct that insisted he run the perimeter. Sometimes it was easier to just give in.

  Back at the house, he shifted into his human form and quickly dressed, then let himself into the house and back to the brewery. There he could spend a few hours getting lost in his work, not thinking about Leo or anything else.

  It was pure luck he heard the knock at his door. He’d only stepped back inside the house to grab lunch and wasn’t expecting anyone. He shoved the rest of the sandwich in his mouth and jogged through the house, then swallowed before he pulled the door open.