Temptation (Journal of the Wolves of Spruce Hollow)

by Tarrah Betts

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  I hated hearing the Alpha say these things that I knew deep down to be absolutely true. I was deeply unhappy with my relationship with Aspen. I wanted her so desperately but wanting her made me feel like a degenerate pervert because of her age. I had a month or more to decide, was I going to let her go until she grew up or take her as my mate the way she currently was?

  Chapter 22

  ***

  Justin sought me out on Monday at school during lunchtime.

  He was wearing an American Eagle hoodie and jeans. The boy sure liked American Eagle. I suppose it went well with his all-American, star football player good looks. Looking up from the lunch table that I shared with Sorcha, Justin was so beautiful as he walked towards us with his perfectly styled blonde hair and infectious smile.

  I wasn’t surprised to see him, as I knew there was no way in hell he was going to try and call me on the weekend after Roan had pulled me out of his vehicle, taken his keys right out of the ignition and then slammed the door.

  Justin’s father had shown up to pick up the Jeep late Saturday afternoon and hadn’t said a word. He just rang the doorbell and when I answered it and told me that he was here to pick up the Jeep.

  It was weird but I wasn't surprised that Justin didn't come and get it. Anyone that wasn't afraid of Roan after an episode like that would have to be an idiot.

  Even weirder was the fact that Justin’s dad looked exceptionally young and was nearly as good looking as Justin was. I’m sure that man couldn’t have had an ugly kid if he tried.

  “OMG, Aspen, what the hell happened on Friday night? We pulled into your driveway and that massive dude from the auto body shop came stalking out of your house and yanked you out of the Jeep. You know that guy??” Justin asked, his tine full of shock.

  Sorcha snickered, while pretending to be absorbed in eating her lunch.

  “Umm, that was Roan.”

  “Is he like your older brother or something? He looked like one scary dude,” Justin said, shaking his head.

  “Yeah, it’s complicated. He’s cool though. I’m grounded for a month now.”

  “Seriously? Oh man, I’m so sorry. That totally sucks! I guess you’re going to miss the Christmas formal then. I was going to ask you if you wanted to go with me,” he looked down at me with a smile.

  Crap, the Christmas formal!

  I’d forgotten all about it with all the chaos over the weekend. There was no way Roan was going to let me go now! There was no sense in even asking him. Once he doled out a punishment, it was expected to be paid in full or you’d better be in the hospital getting your appendix removed or something.

  The thought of sneaking out of the house again and going to the formal without Roan's permission crossed my mind for about two seconds. Roan would be deep in the woods with the new Were, he wouldn’t even know.

  This thought lingered for a moment before it died a quick and painful death.

  Nope, Caver was living with us right now and he was one of Roan’s right hand men. There was no way I was going to chance getting caught by him and pissing Roan off again after everything that I had already done. I'd be grounded for months.

  “Oh well, that’s okay. We can still hang out after school. Are you grounded from the computer too or just from leaving the house?” he asked.

  “Just from leaving the house, I think. I’m not really sure.”

  Roan wasn’t really specific on what I was and was not allowed to do while I was at home; he’d only said that I wasn’t allowed to leave it. So, technically, he couldn’t get upset from me using the computer, could he?

  “Okay, well why don’t you give me your email and we can chat on the computer? I really want to get to know you better, Aspen. I had a great time with you on Friday and I’d like to go out with you again, if you’d like to,” he smiled shyly, “that Roan guy isn’t going to beat me to a bloody pulp, is he? He looked pretty pissed?”

  "Naw, everything’s fine. He’s just really protective is all,” I said, even though I knew it was a lie.

  Roan may still very well pound Justin into the ground if I continued to see and talk to him, I wasn’t really sure. It was kind of a grey area and Roan was a Were. They kind of had their own set of rules and code of conduct that rarely made any sense to me.

  But I was just a runty, little human, what did I know?

  Justin and I spent the entire lunch hour together, talking and laughing. Sorcha had watched us with a twinkle in her eye and then excused herself from the table with a wink. She’d said that she had a meeting with the yearbook committee, which I knew was a boldfaced lie because I was on the yearbook committee with her and there was no scheduled meeting today. That’s my girl, she always had my back.

  Justin and I continued to talk about the Dam party as we ate lunch together. Lunch was a lot more interesting and exciting when you ate it with someone like Justin. Even my apple slices seemed to taste better!

  Justin was taking a big leap out of his social circle by searching me out at lunchtime and I knew that everyone was looking, at us whether they did it by overtly staring or not.

  For one thing, I was a junior and not even a popular junior at that. Even within my own peer group, I had very few friends. It was kind of Sorcha and I against the world. Roan never allowed me to go out and do anything and therefore didn’t really know very many of the other kids, especially the boys. I was only allowed to have female friends as per Roan and his ridiculous rules.

  Seniors rarely hung out with juniors but here was Justin, smiling down at me like I was the most attractive and interesting girl in school. I was flattered but sort of confused at the same time.

  I mean, before this I’d seen him looking at me during the summer whenever I went into town and stayed over at Sorcha’s house. Sorcha and I would go and hang out at the same spots as the other local kids, whether it was the park or the ice cream shop. There were always kids hanging out somewhere and I started to hear through the social grapevine that Justin had a crush on me and had been asking around about me, but I never put very much stock in teenaged gossip.

  Really, what could someone like him possibly want with someone like me? We didn’t even inhabit the same planetary cosmos, for goodness sake. As I gazed into his smiling, perfect eyes, at the lunch table, the thought escaped from my consciousness and I was swept back into a magical world that lacked forethought and concern.

  Roan had been gone for more than a month and I missed him terribly. Not having him around everyday throbbed painfully inside of me. It was an ache that reverberated inside my bones and seeped into my fleshy parts.

  It was a perplexing feeling and his long absence (and the punishment that he had imposed upon me before he left) gave me more than enough time to think about our connection and what we meant to one another.

  Who and what was Roan to me? Was he my brother, my father or my guardian? Or was he something so much more and deeper than that?

  It was frustrating because I felt like the answers were hidden deep inside me, just barely out of reach. But, somehow if I could just stretch out and grasp hold of them, then everything between Roan and I would suddenly make perfect sense to me. Kind of like when you’re trying to think of a word and it’s just on the tip of your tongue.

  Yeah, it was like that.

  There was only one more week left until Christmas and it didn’t look like he would be getting back to Spruce Hollow any time soon. I was curiously depressed about it and spent most of my time mopping around the house.

  In my eyes, Christmas was the most important holiday of the entire year and knowing that Roan was going to miss it entirely was enough to set me bawling like a baby. It’s just that we did so many special things together at Christmas, just the two of us and the older I got, the more I realized that I really wanted that time alone with him.

  For instance, he always took me out to pick out a tree. My mom never wanted to come; she was always working or too tired. So, it would b
e just Roan and I. We’d jump into his truck and head ten miles out of town to the Johnson’s tree farm. Roan would bring a thermos full of hot chocolate and we’d walk around the Christmas tree farm, talking and laughing. Roan would always tease me or I’d tell him stories about the things I did at school that day.

  Roan was a funny adult; he really liked to get inside my head and always wanted to know what I thought about. He was truly interested in my thoughts and how I felt about things. It was almost like he really wanted to know me deep inside.

  We would frequently discuss topics like animal rights, boys, what I wanted to do after high school, my thoughts on life or I would try and explain my love of unicorns to Roan and unlike most adults I knew, he really listened to what I had to say.

  We would walk around the tree farm like this for hours, debating the merits of different trees until we found the perfect one.

  We always picked the same type of tree every year. Honestly, it would have been easier and quicker if we’d have just driven up to Johnson’s tree farm and said, “Load, er up Mr. Johnson, we’ll take the biggest, most ungainly one you have!”

  Our Christmas trees were always humongous and would take up half the living room. We would drive home with Roan smiling and me laughing from imagining my mother’s reaction once she saw us pull into the driveway with the monstrous tree hanging out the back of the truck bed.

  Without fail, my mom would always be waiting for us to return and would throw on her coat and come out, shrieking, “Oh my god, did you pick out the biggest one they had?”

  Then I would grin from ear to ear and as I held the door open for Roan, who would haul the tree out the back of the truck and into the house.

  Wrestling with the tree, he would curse and swear as he set the tree in the stand in the corner next to the fireplace.

  But then, something magical would happen. We’d string Christmas lights all around the tree and hang every single Christmas tree decoration we could find in the boxes carted up from the basement. It didn’t matter whether they matched or not. Our monster-sized tree held everything from precious blown glass ornaments to glittery popsicle stick ornaments that I’d brought home from school in the second grade.

  Then Roan would hold the ladder steady as I climbed up and placed the star on top and suddenly it wasn’t just a big tree anymore, it was the most beautiful Christmas tree ever.

  I swear, even better than the year before!

  And we did it every single year; it was tradition between Roan and I! And now he was going to miss it.

  Who was going to take me to go get a tree this year? We didn’t even have a tree up yet and Christmas was only a week away. If Roan were here, we’d have had one a long time ago, I know we would have. I was sad and lonely without Roan at home.

  Nothing was the same.

  Chapter 23

  ***

  Roan texted me that the new male Were was doing much better but that he’d had a pretty rocky start.

  It made me curious. What exactly was it that the Weres did up at the training camp?

  As a human, I wasn’t privy to pack customs and rituals. That information was reserved for pack members who were of the Were persuasion only. Of course, I’d heard stories as a kid but you could never tell whether the content of a conversation between children on the pack playground was a reliable source of information or not.

  Regardless of what my human brain thought about the training camp, Roan figured from the way things were going that he’d probably be back by New Years for sure.

  I was still upset about it.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to miss Christmas!” I’d texted him one evening.

  “I know, I’m sorry little girl.”

  We had gotten into a routine where Roan would text me every morning before I caught the bus for school. I would stand at the bus stop, shivering with cold or maybe it was anticipation, with my hand in my pocket, waiting for the telltale buzzing against my fingers, signifying that I had received a text from him.

  And then he would text again in the evening before I went to bed. I would lie in bed at night, waiting for him with my phone in my hand and picture him doing the same thing as we texted back in forth.

  I would close my eyes and visualize him, his perfect body, bare chested in jeans, while laying down on his back with one arm behind head and my heart would start thudding with longing to be near him.

  It was a curious feeling.

  Sometimes Roan would even text me throughout the day if he had something important to say. I’d even spent a very boring study period and one school assembly clandestinely texting Roan.

  He’d get mad and say something like “Little girl, you cannot text me during school hours unless it is some sort of emergency.”

  So, I would ignore him for a few minutes and then text again. And he would answer.

  Every single time.

  Roan would mostly tease me and tell me stories from his day with the new Were and it would make me miss him even more.

  Things were changing between us, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but I could feel it in the way that we spoke to one another through our texts back and forth.

  Roan was loosening up and becoming more of what I wanted him to be, rather than what he thought I needed from him. I guess maybe Roan didn’t feel like he had to control me so strictly now that I was grounded and he was so far away from me. Or maybe it’s because he realized that even if I broke the rules, there was nothing he could do about it from the training camp in the woods.

  Of course, this was Roan we were talking about.

  Who knows, maybe he was storing up all my infractions in his head for a monumental payback when he got back home? You just never knew what devious thoughts were hiding behind those cerulean blue eyes.

  One thing is for sure; I was getting bolder and bolder with him. I said things to Roan now that I would have blushed about saying aloud to him a month ago. The phone had brought about a new intimacy between us, as it was a lot easier to say things to him when I didn’t have to look into his face and see him raise his eyebrows or cock his head in reaction to my words.

  No, this way, I merely had to wait breathlessly for a response to my provocation. I had discovered over the past few weeks that I liked teasing Roan and saying outrageous things to him. Ruffling his feathers and trying to break his death grip on propriety was my new favorite pastime over the past month of being grounded.

  “I’m wearing pink panties and a pink tank top right now, what are you wearing?”

  "Who was that text for, Aspen? Are you texting someone else right now?”

  “No, just you.”

  “In that case, I’ve already seen you like that.”

  “Did you like it?”

  “I think it’s time for you to go to bed Aspen.”

  Teasing Roan was fun.

  I wasn’t grounded anymore though, but it didn’t matter, I was still bored and stuck in the house.

  It was Christmas break and Sorcha was spending time with her very large, extended family, which had come in from the East to spend the holidays at her house. Sorcha and her family amazed me with the amount of togetherness they all seemed to enjoy.

  Secretly, I was mildly envious of her. I wished so hard that I had the same type of life as they did.

  While I loved my mother to death, there was no denying it, she was a workaholic and had been since the first day I walked through her door. I suppose that was why I felt such a strong connection to Roan. He was the only one person in my entire life that would drop everything in a second and come running if I needed him. He was the one constant that I could always count on.

  And while my mother was there too, she was always kind of in the background, mourning her mate and devoting the majority of her time to her job.

  I couldn’t tell you how many business trips she had been on in the last ten years, but it was a lot.

  She would always call Roan when she had to leave town and would either dro
p me off at his place or he would come over and stay at our house to take care of me.

  It was unusual for sure, for a mother to leave her child with a twenty year old boy, but there was never a question of whether he would do it or not, he was always available, always there for me and he never complained about it.

  Roan was never too busy for me, like my mom was, and he always made room in his life for me, no matter what was going on.

  I was at Roan’s so much that I even had my own room at his place when I was younger!

  Someday, when I had children of my own, I hoped to be someone they could count on, someone like Roan had been for me.

  Even though the holidays were only a few days away, my mom was still busy with work. I fervently wished she’d take some time off and spend it with me, so I didn’t feel so alone over the Christmas break.

  And our temporary house guest, Caver? Well, Caver was barely “tolerating” my constant attempts at engaging him in conversation or begging him to watch movies with me. I guess one man can only stand so many romantic comedies and feel good movies before they go insane.

  Exasperated, he’d say “Oh Jeez, Aspen, don’t you like anything else?” as he dutifully sat through our second viewing of “It’s a Wonderful Life”. Caver was a dark haired, young, macho Were and sitting there keeping an eye on me, night after night, was not his idea of a good time.

  He was itching and restless to roam and to spend time with drunken women at the bar. Roan tried to shelter me, but I wasn’t stupid, I knew what they did when they went out to the bar. I’m sure he, Caver and Griff had to beat the women off them with a stick.

  Oh, who was I kidding, I'm sure they loved every scantily clad, heaving bosum that was pointed in their direction.

  Caver's phone blew up hourly with texts and emails from different women but he ignored pretty much all of them. I'm not sure if that was part of his strategy, playing hard to get, or if there were just so many woman that wanted to be close to him that he could pretty much pick and choose whoever and whenever he wanted.