by Zoe Chant
There was a long pause...and then Joel shivered and shifted, rising up from his position on all fours to stand as a human in front of her. He was already as familiar to her as her own self—broad shoulders, messy dark hair, troubled silver eyes.
Nina wanted to throw herself into his arms. She wanted him to wrap her up and swear to her that she’d always be safe.
Instead, she stood where she was, and breathed. Joel, her breath seemed to say.
“I’ll leave you two alone,” Alethia murmured. “Remember what I said, Nina.”
Nina nodded. Alethia shifted, and slipped away.
“I’m sorry,” Joel said immediately, before Alethia was even out of earshot. “I’m so sorry I left.”
“Where did you go?” Nina demanded. “Why did you go? I thought you wanted me to leave town, but Alethia said no...”
“No!” Joel took a couple of steps forward, then seemed to force himself to stop.
Nina wrapped her own arms around herself to keep from reaching for him. She didn’t need his embrace. She needed his explanation.
“So why, then?” she repeated.
“I woke up and I knew we were mates,” Joel said in a low voice.
Nina nodded. “So did I. But you don’t want to be mates. You said last night how much you hated the idea.”
“Because the mate-bond compels us.” Joel sounded angry, now, even though he wasn’t any louder. “I don’t want some bizarre genetic force, or mystical force, or whatever the hell it is, keeping us leashed to each other. I can’t stand the idea of something forcing you to stay with me.”
Nina flinched. This was hard to hear. "But what if it's—" She couldn't quite bring herself to say what we want, because it was looking more and more like Joel didn't want it, after all. "What if people want to be together anyway?"
"Then they can be together!" Joel said. "Because if they do want to be together, then they don't need some crazy compulsion making them, do they?"
"But what do you want to do, then?" Nina asked helplessly, despair building inside her. "Since we have the crazy compulsion no matter what."
Joel's shoulders slumped. "I don't know. But for now, I think we should stay away from each other.”
An awful feeling pooled in the pit of Nina's stomach. "Stay away," she said stupidly.
Joel nodded, his mouth set in an unhappy frown. “Maybe if we keep away, it’ll lessen somehow, and let us think for ourselves. Decide what we really want.”
What we really want. Because Joel didn’t want the mate-bond, didn’t want her. The knowledge hit her like a knife to the heart. She wanted to melt. She wanted to run away.
She breathed instead. Like Alethia had said. Breathe in, hold it, breathe out. Breathe in, hold it, breathe out.
And after that, she knew what she really wanted.
"I don’t want to," she told Joel, lifting her chin.
He looked startled. "What?"
"I don't want to keep away from each other." She took a deep breath and forced her voice to stay steady. "But if you can't stay—if you have to try and get away—I can't make you and I don't want you to be unhappy."
The idea of Joel leaving hurt more than almost anything she could think of. But the one thing that was worse was if he stayed and hated it.
"So if you have to leave, leave. If you have to try and—and lessen the bond, I can't stop you. But I want you to stay, Joel!" Her voice was rising. "I don't want you to talk about this like it’s something to run away from! That feels like—like—" She couldn't think of a comparison awful enough.
She was hoping that Joel would realize he was wrong, or at least that he should think about this some more. She was hoping he'd apologize. But she only got startled silence in response to her outburst. Joel's mouth was open, but nothing was coming out.
Nina glared at him. "So make any plans you want, I guess, but don't include me." She took a step back, and then another, and then she shifted.
"Nina," Joel started, but Nina was already running away.
She crossed a stream to confuse her scent, then found a densely-wooded patch where she could hide among the trees and catch her breath. It took a while to calm herself down, but eventually she managed to slow her breathing, flex her claws in the dirt and do what Alethia had told her. Breathe in, breathe out, focus on what was happening now.
Joel didn’t want the mate-bond. He wanted to break it.
What could she do? She’d told him what she wanted from him. She’d made it clear as day.
So she guessed the rest of it was up to him. Because she couldn’t have that conversation with him again, arguing about whether he wanted her or not. She couldn’t.
So what now?
She wasn't sure where to go, but finally she turned back toward the cabin. The road to town ran by there, at the very least. And maybe Alethia was still there.
It turned out that she was. But it wasn’t just Alethia; the rest of the group was still there with her. Nina hesitated at the opening to the clearing where the cabin stood, not sure if she was welcome.
But Zach, Joel's brother, spotted her and raised his hand. "Nina!" he called. "Nina, come on out. Come say hello."
So she did. She came cautiously forward in her leopard form, and when she was still several yards away, shifted to human. "Hello."
"Nina," said Zach's mate. What was her name? Teri, Nina remembered, Joel had called her Teri. "I'm so glad you came back. Hi. I'm Teri, and this is Joel's brother Zach, and we're so glad to meet you."
Nina looked between them, feeling wary and wrung-out. "You are?"
"Nina, I don't know what Joel's said, or done," Zach said, coming forward a few steps. Nina resisted the urge to retreat. "But if you're his mate, you're part of our family now, and we'd like to get to know you."
"And," Alethia said pointedly from behind him, "we’d like to get to know you for yourself. It would be wonderful to have you stay no matter what your connection to Joel."
The man she didn't recognize came forward. His face was so friendly, his body language so nonthreatening, that he was right up next to her before she even thought about whether she should step back or not. "Alethia's right," he said. "Hi, Nina, I'm Jeff, it's really nice to meet you." He held out his hand.
Nina stared at it for a second, and then remembered her manners. She shook. It all felt very surreal.
"Please stick around at least for a while," Jeff said, smiling at her. "We could really use some more pack members who aren't rangers. Alethia and Leah get sick of us after a while."
"True," said Alethia, straight-faced.
The other woman, the one Nina had seen with a baby in the diner, came up next to Jeff. "I'm not a leopard," she told Nina, "but I'm still an honorary member of the pack, and let me just say that having some more ladies around would be great."
"We're working on it, but it's still a bit of a boys' club," Teri said.
Nina looked around at all of them, feeling overwhelmed. "I don't know what Joel's going to do," she started.
Zach's jaw firmed. "I'm going to have a talk with Joel, I think," he muttered.
Alethia stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder. "Listen," she said. "I won't say it doesn't matter what Joel does. I know that it matters. But that's not part of the consideration for me here, okay? We're inviting you to stick around, and get to know us, because we want to get to know you, Nina, the new leopard in town. Not Joel's Mate, Insert Name Here. Okay?"
"Okay." Nina's voice was thready. She didn't know if she could believe this. She wanted to, but it was just so much.
"Nina," Teri said, "do you want a ride home? Where are you staying?"
Nina felt a flash of shame. Should she lie? But they all lived in town, they knew the place much better than she did after two weeks. She didn't think she could make up a convincing lie.
"I've just been sleeping in the forest," she admitted, feeling her cheeks heat and glad she was too dark-skinned to show a blush. "I have a little cave where I keep my stuff. I
shift and sleep there."
Jeff, Zach, and Grey all looked varying degrees of surprised, and...something else. Angry? Upset? Jeff and Zach were definitely upset. Grey's expression was much more subtle, but it seemed similar somehow.
Alethia had the same kind, compassionate look. Teri, though, smiled ruefully and said, "I wish I'd had that solution a little while back. I could've used it for sure."
"Me too," said Leah, startling Nina a bit. "That's smart, knowing how to keep yourself safe and have somewhere to sleep even if you can't pay rent."
Nina had been expecting shock or pity. "Did you—not have somewhere to stay?" she asked them, surprise making her bolder than she would've been otherwise.
Leah nodded. "Kicked out of my apartment, alone with my daughter. Almost froze to death in the snow." She cast a fond look at Jeff. He must be her mate, Nina thought. "Would have, if not for him."
Teri nodded. "For me it wasn't so bad; I had a roof over my head. But it was a pretty awful roof. If I could've slept out in the mountains, I would have, believe me."
"Same, for a while there," added Alethia.
"But now I live in this nice house," Teri continued, "and it has this nice guest room. Would you like to come check it out? You don't have to stay the night if you don't want to, but we could at least feed you lunch or something."
"Joel might show up," Zach added, "since it's technically his home." His expression darkened. "I don't know if that's a pro or a con for you, but it's true."
See Joel's house. Have lunch with his family.
His family, who was welcoming Nina in, and saying that it didn't matter if Joel wanted her or not. They wanted her.
So even though she had a deep hollow in her chest where Joel should be, even though her leopard was snarling at her to run back into the woods, find their mate, and make him come with her, Nina nodded. "All right. Yes. I would be very happy to have lunch with you."
To her own ears, she sounded stilted and strange, like an alien who'd never learned human customs. What did you say when accepting a friendly lunch invitation? And what did you say when accepting an invitation to join someone's family? She couldn’t make it sound natural, even to herself.
The next hour or so was even more surreal. Nina was packed into the car with Zach and Teri. Teri insisted on sitting in the back, and offered her the front seat. On the drive back to town, the two of them chatted about little, inconsequential things, like their respective shifts working at Glacier Park, the work Zach was doing around the house, the schools Teri was thinking of applying to so she could become a park ranger too.
"I want to go somewhere local," she told Nina, "because I don't want to be too far from Zach. But I still want a good education. There are a couple of different options, but I'm not sure what's best yet."
"For the millionth time, you should do whatever gets you the best education," Zach said. "We'll be okay even if we have to be apart for a bit. That's why Skype was invented. Also phones."
"He doesn't want to admit he's going to be lonely without me, because he thinks it'll hold me back from being my best self," Teri told Nina. "I know he's going to be lonely without me. I'm going to be lonely without him, too. It’s with him that I’m my best self."
Zach reached his hand back, resting it on the top of the driver's seat, and Teri leaned forward and gripped it for a long moment. "We'll figure it out," she told Nina. “It’s not forever, no matter what happens.”
Nina took all of this in with a kind of a surprised hunger. They seemed so happy. Even in the face of separation, of hard decisions, they were both loving and kind, and they wanted the best for each other.
Could she ever have that with Joel? Right now, it didn’t look like it at all.
But it seemed to prove that Joel’s theory about the bond being some kind of awful compulsion was wrong. Teri and Zach were happy together. Alethia had said that Grey was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Leah had looked at Jeff with more love and affection than Nina was used to seeing between couples.
If that was what the mate-bond did, then it wasn’t wrong. Nina knew that.
And even more than that, it wasn’t a compulsion. Because having someone look at her with love, having a partner who wanted the best for her, was something she’d wanted for years and years.
And Joel was it. The way he’d rescued her without asking for a thing in return, the way he’d made himself vulnerable to her by telling her about how much he’d been hurt—and the way he’d comforted her when she did the same. Because they were the same, two semi-broken people who wanted to be better.
Teri said that Zach made her better.
Nina suddenly wished she hadn’t run away from Joel earlier. She wanted to hash this out with him. She was afraid of what he’d say, yes—but they needed to talk about it and decide together.
Soon. She’d make sure it happened soon.
They pulled into the driveway to a comfortable-looking house, and Nina got out of the car with a sense of unreality. It had been a long time since she’d even been inside someone’s house.
She followed Teri up the steps, took her shoes off inside the front door because Teri did it first, and then followed her into the kitchen. Teri said, “Have a seat, I’ll get something started.”
“No,” Zach said, coming up behind her, “I’ll cook. You can talk to Nina.”
Teri and Zach exchanged a look that seemed to speak volumes, and then Teri nodded. “Thanks, love,” she said to Zach, and he smiled and dropped a kiss just behind her ear. Nina looked away, full of a hopeless longing. She remembered Joel kissing her softly, just last night. Could it only have been last night? Would it ever happen again?
Teri sat down next to Nina at the kitchen table. “I wanted to ask you something,” she said.
“What?” Nina was nervous, suddenly—what could Teri want to know about her?
“Leaving aside everything we’ve been saying about wanting you to stick around,” Teri said, “and leaving aside whatever Joel’s said to you, I don’t know what any of that was. Leaving all that aside. What do you want?”
“What?” Nina said again, although this time it was fainter, more of a reflex than a real question.
“What do you want?” Teri repeated. “You haven’t been in town for very long, so you probably came here for some kind of reason. I don’t know if you were planning on sticking around before all this happened,” she waved a hand, indicating the whole messed-up situation, “or if you wanted to go somewhere else. We’re happy to have you here, we want to get to know you, but what do you want? What would make you happy, here?”
“Did Alethia tell you to ask me this?” Nina asked, still feeling a little stunned. This was twice in the space of a couple of hours that she’d been asked this question. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had really wanted to know the answer.
Teri shook her head. “Nope. But it sounds like she and I are on the same page. So? What do you want?”
When Alethia had asked her, she’d said Joel. And that was still true, no question. But there was another answer, a larger answer. Part of what her best self would be.
“A family,” Nina breathed out. The answer seemed to hang in the air. Her whole body tensed at the sound of it, like she’d said something dangerous.
But nothing terrible happened. Teri just smiled at her. “I’m glad,” she said. “I hope we can make that happen.”
Me too, Nina thought, but it was too much to say out loud.
They had lunch. Zach moved around the kitchen with confidence, cooking for all three of them without any trouble; they ended up with grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, and salads. Comfort food, Nina thought as she ate, trying to ignore the aching hole in her chest where Joel was supposed to be.
Zach and Teri brought the conversation back to light topics, and didn’t pressure Nina to participate, just letting her eat. But it still seemed almost oppressive, the amount of domestic happiness surrounding her. Nina had said she wanted a fam
ily, but she tried to imagine living here, in this house, with these people, and just...couldn’t. It seemed impossible.
Maybe she’d been alone for too long. It felt like she’d been starving, and suddenly someone had seated her down at a five-star restaurant and put a seven-course meal in front of her. Nina wanted to say, I can’t eat all of this. My stomach can’t handle it.
But it looked so good.
She remembered thinking that she could see herself living in Joel’s cabin so easily. That small space up in the mountains, with just the two of them alone and wilderness all around, was much easier to imagine than this neighborhood, this house, this family.
If she could live in the cabin with Joel, but visit this house with Teri and Zach...could that happen? That sounded so perfect. A place to get away, to be alone or with her mate, out in the wild where she could be her leopard. But also a family waiting for her, a place to sit in a kitchen and have grilled cheese and soup together, and talk about their lives.
Was it possible? Could something like this ever happen?
Nina’s instinct was no. It felt like she was being given this little tantalizing taste of the future, and waiting for it to be snatched right away again.
But she remembered what Alethia had told her. Just because she’d hoped in the past, and it hadn’t turned out the way she’d wanted, didn’t mean that that would happen again. This was now. This was not then.
It all depended on Joel.
Nina was suddenly, furiously angry with Joel for leaving her without any answers. Why did he have to do this? What was wrong with her—or with him, that he didn’t want this?
But she had to remember what he’d said about his past. How he’d always blamed the mate-bond for keeping his parents away from their families, from any help they might have gotten.
She understood. But it hurt so much.
***
Joel stared at the rangers’ headquarters building, not entirely sure why he was here.
He needed to talk this over with someone. It couldn’t be someone who was mated, because he didn’t trust them to be objective about the situation. So that let out his usual confidant, Zach.
