by L. C. Davis
I closed up the clinic and walked outside to get some fresh air since I’d been working since before it was even light out. I froze, nearly missing the man who was leaning against the wall outside my building, smoking. “Allen?”
“Sup, D.”
“How long have you been there?”
He shrugged. “Since I took over for Cam a few hours ago.”
I frowned. “Took over what?”
“Watching you,” he said as if it should be obvious.”
“Uh...why?”
“Because Nick told us to while he’s out of town.”
“He’s out of town? Since when?”
“Since Uncle Luke sent him to deal with some shit upstate.”
I blinked. “What kind of shit?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“Or I could kick your ass for being a smug, stalking bastard.”
He rolled his eyes. “You can try. See, this is why we don’t tell our wives shit. You get all panicky as soon as there’s a whiff of werewolf drama.”
“Werewolf drama? What kind of -- I’m not his wife,” I added suddenly. “What kind of drama, is Nick in danger?”
“No more than he is every other weekend. Just a lone wolf sniffing around territory he has no business being in.”
“So he’s out there on his own while you’re here, watching me work?”
He shrugged. “Nick can take care of himself. You’re a squishy human.”
“Squishy?” That was it. No more skipping the gym.
“Chill out, he’ll be back any minute. Actually, I’m supposed to get you somewhere,” he said, glancing at his phone.
“What? Where?”
“That’s confidential. My job is merely to get the package from Point A to Point B.”
I scowled. “I’m not going anywhere without an explanation.”
“I’ll carry you if I have to.”
His face was blank, as usual, so it was hard to tell if he was joking. I hoped to God he was joking. After a few more seconds of a staring contest I realized I wasn’t going to win since I couldn’t actually ever remember seeing Allen blink, I grudgingly said, “Fine. Lead the way, Benji.”
Satisfied, he slipped his hands into his jacket and took off at a cocky stroll toward his car parked at the curb.
He stopped and made a big show of holding the door open. “My liege.”
I grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled it up over his head before climbing in, because deadly werewolf or not, I wasn’t gonna take lip from Allen fucking Whitaker. He got in and revved the engine like a douche, snickering as he peeled out down the road.
“Christ, Allen, it’s Stillwater, not the side streets of Tokyo.”
“Who’s gonna pull me over, me?”
It was a fair point. I tried to get comfortable in the unnecessary sunken seat. I remembered Nick putting the car together from scraps in the family garage a few summers earlier, and I didn’t see why he needed to choose a glorified rocket engine. “Where the fuck are you taking me? I know your family’s major export is cryptic bullshit, but I’m not in the mood.”
“Cranky,” he said with a click of his tongue, taking off down one of the side roads that wound through the woods. “You’re part of that family now, y’know. You kind of always have been.”
“Right. That’s why I didn’t know any of you were werewolves until last year.”
“Hey, half the family doesn’t know,” he reminded me. “You’re living proof that’s the right call.”
I grunted in contemptuous acknowledgement.
Allen glanced over at me, and I wished he’d just focus on the road since I wasn’t ready to get into another fatal accident. “He loves you. He’s an idiot, and he says the wrong thing because he’s afraid to say the right thing half the time, but he loves you. On some level, I think you know that.”
“If it’s all the same, I’d really rather not have this conversation.”
“When Brent first suggested Nick had imprinted on Holden, things got weird,” he continued, as if he hadn’t heard me. “There’s some shit you need to understand about how the pack works, since you’re gonna be Nick’s mate. Shit he won’t tell you.”
I said nothing, because as pissed as I was, I was more curious. I hadn’t said more than a few words to Allen ever since I’d stopped hanging out with Brent.
“Witch or not, Holden wouldn’t have been good for the pack,” he went on.
“You didn’t even know him.”
“No, but I know my brother. From the moment Holden came into town, he pulled away. He changed, and it wasn’t in a good way,” he muttered. “I haven’t seen him pull away from the pack like that since…” he trailed off, but I knew how the sentence ended. If there was one thing I still had in common with the Whitakers, it was that none of us liked talking about the night Nick had tried to take his own life. “Anyway, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t relieved Holden’s gone.”
I frowned. “How can you say that? You should know better than I do what it’s done to him. What it’s been like.”
“I do. That’s the problem. Imprinting trumps everything, every impulse, every bit of loyalty and logic. All the things that a wolf needs to remind him who he is. Imprinting on the right person means becoming a better version of who you are, but imprinting on the wrong one? It’s easy to lose yourself entirely. Even moreso if you’re an Alpha. A pack’s only as strong as the bonded pair that leads it.”
“Your mates don’t even know they’re in a pack.”
“Yeah, but there’s benefit in that. It keeps us grounded. Keeps us part of this world instead of on the outside of it,” he murmured. “I’m not saying it was Holden’s fault, but I stopped recognizing the person Nick was when he was here. When he’s with you, it’s different. You ground him. You make him better, but you don’t try to change him. You’ve always made it easy for him to be exactly who he’s supposed to be, even when the rest of us hadn’t come to terms with it,” he said, guilt edging into his voice. “I don’t think I’ve ever really thanked you for that.”
“You shouldn’t. I didn’t do it for you. I didn’t do anything. Nick is who he is, and I’m in this for him, not for your family. I’d never do anything to come between you because I know how important you are to him, but that’s it.”
“That’s why I approve,” he smirked, pulling off the dirt road in the middle of nowhere. I looked around warily.
“You know, usually when you bring someone out into the middle of the woods at night, it’s not to express your approval of their pseudo-relationship.
He snorted. “This is where I drop you off.”
I squinted into the darkness, barely able to make out the old sign put up by the abandoned campgrounds the town had stopped paying to maintain years ago. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” His golden eyes had a menacing glint in the moonlight streaming in through the sunroof. “Off you go.”
I reluctantly slipped out of the car because I was only slightly warier of Allen than whatever was lurking in those woods. “Where the fuck am I supposed to meet him?” I had the feeling I was about to walk into some weird werewolf hazing ritual.
“Nick’ll find you,” he said, pulling the door shut before he took off.
I watched the car disappear down the dirt path and turned back to the woods, contemplating whether I should just turn and walk back to Cold Creek when I caught sight of a light through the trees. “Fuck,” I muttered. “Nick?”
No response. I looked down at my phone and of course I had no bars. Fucking Whitaker bullshit. I ventured a bit further toward the light, telling myself that I’d survived demons, cannibalistic fairies and death itself. The thought wasn’t nearly as reassuring as I wanted it to be.
I paused in the loosely trodden path as a sense of familiarity washed over me. I knew this place. The gnarled tree in front of me still had the old tire hanging from a low branch that Brent had put up when we were kids. About a quarter of a mile north was t
he site we’d spent damn near every summer camping at. At least, until he’d discovered girls and I’d discovered Dennis Mills.
I ventured forward, following the glimmering light through the trees. It was a campfire next to a vaguely familiar looking tent. Brent and I had arranged those old stones around the fire a good twenty years earlier, and they were still standing. I let out the breath I’d been holding, but my heart faltered when I saw Nick sitting there on a log by the fire, lazily holding a broken twig over the open flame. He stood when he saw me. I looked him over, unsure of whether I was more confused by the fact that he really had ordered Allen to bring me out there or because he was wearing a suit. A nice suit, with his hair slicked back and everything.
If he thought looking good was going to distract me from how pissed I was at all the theatrics...he was right. One look at him and I forgot how to be angry, which was saying something, because that had always been my strongest skillset.
“Hey,” he said, like having your brother practically kidnap someone and abandon them in the middle of the woods while you waited in a fucking suit and tie was perfectly normal.
“Hey,” I said. At some point, I had to stop blaming Nick for his weird behavior and start blaming myself for enabling it at every turn. “I see you’re back from your secret mission.”
He snorted. “It wasn’t a secret mission. Just taking care of something for my uncle.”
“You realize that every word out of your mouth makes it sound like you’re in the mob, right?”
He shrugged, taking a step forward. “You still mad at me?”
Fuck yeah, I am, asshole. “I’m not mad.”
He gave me The Look. “You’re a shitty liar. That vein in your forehead always pops out when you’re pissed.”
“Did you really have Allen kidnap me to insult my deception skills?”
“Kidnap?” His lips twisted into an amused smile. “That’s a bit dramatic, isn’t it?”
“He dropped me off in the middle of nowhere with no explanation.”
Nick muttered something under his breath about killing his brother, which wasn’t as amusing to me as it would have been if I hadn’t come from the timeline where he’d done just that. “I thought you’d recognize where you are. You really don’t remember this place?”
“Sure, it’s the old campgrounds, but I don’t have night vision,” I reminded him. “Why’d you bring me here, anyway?”
“Because there’s something I need to do and this is the place that’s always stood out to me as ours,” he murmured, coming even closer. He came to a stop a few feet away, slipping a hand into his pocket. “You remember that summer eight years ago?”
I hesitated. “Not off the top of my head.”
“Brent had just come back home,” he said. “I was back from the Army and you guys decided to reignite your old Memorial Day weekend tradition, where you’d come out here, get hammered, and usually end up fighting because Brent wanted to hunt something cute and fluffy and you pitched a fit,” he teased.
“Yeah, it’s coming back to me,” I muttered. “Brent stood me up because Monica French agreed to go out with him last minute, and I ended up getting stuck out here alone in the rain. Until you showed up.”
Nick grinned. “I’d been watching you for a while, you know.”
“You had? Why?”
“I was out in the woods hunting, sorry to say,” he chuckled. “I caught your scent and watched you from the trees. I thought of going up to you like that, but I figured you’d probably have a heart attack if a wolf crept into your tent.”
“You’re probably right.” I frowned. “You said you got in a fight with your girlfriend and she left you by the road.”
“I said a lot of shit back then. I just wanted an excuse to stay with you.”
“Why?”
He didn’t reply right away. He just watched me in that way that made me feel like a riddle being solved by a mystery. “I’d just gotten back from basic. It was the first time I’d really seen you since...you know.”
“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “You kind of kept a low profile after that.”
As he spoke, that rainy day we’d spent trying to stay dry in my shittily constructed tent was starting to come back to me. It was the first time I’d ever really seen Nick as anything other than Brent’s kid brother. It was the beginning of the end.
“We talked all day and all night,” he said with a nostalgic smile.
“Mostly I bitched about Brent,” I scoffed.
“Yeah, but then we got to talking about our families. About how my mom was handling my transition, how yours freaked when she found out about you and Dennis. I told you shit that night I’ve never told anyone. Some things I haven’t told anyone since.”
“Me, too,” I admitted. “It was a good night.”
“The best.” The sincerity in his husky voice took my off-guard. He slipped something out of his pocket, keeping it closed in his fist. “There were things I didn’t say. Things I didn’t know how to talk about, but that night changed things. It changed the way I saw you. Sometimes I wish…” He let out a deep breath, clenching his hand around whatever he was holding. “I’ve never been good at words, especially when it comes to you. I guess that hasn’t changed.”
“If this is about the other day, forget about it. I was being over-sensitive.”
“No, you weren’t,” he said firmly. “You’re always so careful with everything you say, everything you do and I just...do things. I say things I don’t mean and I don’t say the things I should. You’re safe to make mistakes with, because I know you’ll always be there. Instead of treasuring you for that, I take you for granted.”
“Nick, you don’t --”
“Please, Daniel, just let me say this. Even if you don’t think you need to hear it, I need to say it.”
“Okay,” I said warily.
He looked me in the eye and took my hand with the one that wasn’t holding The Thing. “You’ve always been there for me, and you have every right to be pissed that it took this for me to come to terms with how I feel about you. I marked you. I did something no one should ever do without asking, and instead of hating me for it, you went along with it like you always do. Because it was what I needed. Because you’re always thinking about what I need, what this town needs, what everyone else needs. I should have been focused on how this thing I did to you was going to affect you, but instead, I made you feel like it didn’t matter--like you didn’t matter, and I’m so sorry for that.”
I swallowed hard, struggling to take it all in. “It’s okay, Nick. I know this isn’t what you wanted.”
“It’s not okay,” he said through gritted teeth. “It’s not okay that I let you fall to last place when someone new came into the picture, and it’s not okay that I’ve gone this long without facing up to the way I feel about you. It’s not okay that I marked you. It’s not okay that I brought you into my fucked-up world because you’re the only thing in it that makes sense, and it’s not okay that I waited this long to tell you I love you. Not just as a friend, not as a brother, as mine. Maybe I suppressed it for so long because I was afraid of what it would mean to just accept it. Maybe that’s why, the moment I had you where you always should have been, that part of me that always recognized it just snapped and took over. Either way, I’m sorry, Daniel. Can you forgive me?”
“Of course I can,” I said hoarsely. “There’s nothing to f--”
He kissed me before I could finish that thought, and all the other thoughts fled as his tongue entered my mouth. When he finally pulled away, the sorrow and regret in his eyes had faded into something even more bewildering. “Thank you,” he whispered against my lips. “That’s all I needed to hear before I do this. The right way this time.” He took a step back and got down on one knee, and everything--my heart, the sounds of the forest around us, time itself--seemed to freeze. I realized it was a small black box he was holding and he opened it, revealing the silver band sitting inside.
&n
bsp; “Jesus Christ, Nick…”
“Daniel,” he said with a nervous smile, gazing up at me. For the first time since I could remember, he seemed as uncertain as I always felt in his presence. “There’s something I need to ask you.”
“Fuck. This isn’t happening.”
“Normally, I’d ask you to be my mate,” he said, ignoring the downward spiral of my composure. “But since mate is just another term for the person who stands by your side and supports you and keeps you in line no matter how many times you fuck up and you’ve already been doing that for years, I’ll ask this instead. Will you let me be your mate? Will you let me take care of you the way you’ve always taken care of me? Will you let me be there for you, and protect you, and claim you in name the way my heart already has?”
I tried to swallow but my throat was like sandpaper and I couldn’t remember exactly how I’d been managing to get oxygen into my lungs for the last thirty-some-odd years. He took my hand and brought me back to Earth.
“Will you marry me, Daniel?”
I stared at him in disbelief, still struggling to convince myself this wasn’t real. Why it was so hard to accept, I didn’t know. I already knew we had to get married because he’d marked me and that was just what werewolves did, but as much as it had hurt to have him treat it like an errand to check off his to-do list, this was overwhelming in an entirely different way. “You’re serious.”
He gave a stilted laugh. “For once, yeah.”
“Okay.” It was the wrong word, but it was the only one that came to mind. The only one that didn’t stick in my throat.
“Okay?” he asked dryly.
“Yes,” I choked out. “If you get off the goddamn ground, yes, I’ll marry you. Fuck.”
He stood and took my face in his hands, and the smile on his lips as he gazed at me brought everything back. That moment eight years ago when I’d seen him for the first time, even if it was the thousandth. He kissed me and even though I couldn’t remember how it had gotten there, I felt the weight of that silver band on my hand and I’d never realized how empty that space felt until it was occupied.
