by Selena Scott
Sarah thought about that for a long minute. Surprisingly, she’d never really given that much thought before. She considered her warm and lovely feelings for Simon. How it had felt to get to know him. How it had felt for him to share his shifter secret with her. “No,” she said eventually. “But I loved him very much as a person. And I had a little bit of a crush on him. It took a long time for me to get close to anyone after he died.”
Sarah was surprised and touched to see that both Nat’s and Kaya’s eyes were capped with glossy domes of tears.
“Oh, jeez,” she said with a chuckle. “Quick, somebody say something light and breezy!”
“I lost my virginity at seventeen. In Sawyer Ferragamo’s basement. His mom came down like ten seconds afterwards and I fell down, bare ass up, trying to get my band uniform back on.”
Sarah’s eyes went so round that Kaya burst out laughing, which made Sarah laugh, which made Nat laugh.
“I think that’s the worst story I’ve ever heard in my entire life,” Sarah said through gasping laughter.
“Imagine if it had happened to you. Then it wouldn’t be just a story. It would be a moment in your life. That other people experienced along with you,” Nat said, brandishing a mascara wand like a tiny sword. “Poor Sawyer. He didn’t have another girlfriend for two years after that.”
That sent them into more hysterical giggles. “The first time I heard that story scarred me so much it’s probably the reason I’m still a virgin,” Kaya said through tears of laughter. She was hanging halfway off the armchair now.
“Did we miss the pillow fight or are we just in time?” Raphael asked from the doorway of Kaya and Nat’s apartment. Apparently, the women had been laughing so hard they hadn’t heard the Durant brothers knock.
Sarah’s laughter stopped abruptly as she glanced at Kaya, who practically had heat waves of embarrassment rising off of her face. It didn’t take a PhD to see that she hadn’t particularly wanted to share that detail about her love life with the Durants. And Sarah could see why. Raphael was looking like it was total joke, Seth looked mildly embarrassed and Jackson, his expression freakishly serious, looked as if the word ‘virgin’ was bulldozing itself in circles around his poor, Y-chromosomed brain.
“Hi, guys,” Nat said, wiping tears from her eyes and obviously trying to move past the moment. “I thought we were supposed to meet you at the restaurant.”
“You were late,” Seth said. “So we thought we’d come see what was holding you up. But now I wish I’d waited for the big reveal.”
His eyes met Sarah’s across the room, warming with attraction and desire and pure happiness at the sight of her.
She looked down at herself in confusion. Big reveal? And then she realized what Seth was talking about. Even though she’d come over to Nat’s house in jeggings and a V-neck shirt, slowly, over the course of the last hour and a half, Nat had talked Sarah into letting her blow dry her shower-damp hair, shoved her into a sweater dress and was just putting the finishing touches on her eye makeup.
Sarah narrowed her eyes at Nat, who was briskly snapping makeup cases back together and zipping bags and looking altogether suspiciously busy. “Did you plan this?” she muttered at Nat.
Nat’s already gigantic green eyes got even more gigantic and even more doe-like. Her glossy, dark hair brushed her shoulder as she tipped her head to one side. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t be fooled, Sarah,” Kaya said, boosting herself off the couch. “My sister is always planning something when it comes to love. Whatever the word is for someone who is both conniving and incredibly well meaning, that’s Nat.”
“Amen,” Raphael said with a good-natured smile on his face. “You girls ready? The restaurant is holding our table.”
From the back of the group, like a silent, black storm cloud, Jackson pulled out his phone. “Looks like I’m getting called into the office,” he said in a low voice.
“I didn’t know you were on call tonight.” Raphael had a skeptical expression on his face.
Jackson said nothing in response. Just shrugged his shoulders. “Gotta go. Goodnight, everyone.”
And then he was gone, back into the hallway and down the stairs.
“Should we get going?” Kaya asked, jumping to her feet, her expression a strange mixture of relief and disappointment.
Seth strode over and reached a hand down to Sarah where she knelt on the floor. “Let’s get this date over with,” he said to her quietly. “The sooner we go home, the sooner I can get you alone.”
“Perv.” She rolled her eyes at him in flirty delight.
“Yeah, but just for you. I’m your personal perv.”
“That’s weird, bro,” Raphael cut in, shamelessly eavesdropping. And for what felt like the millionth time that night, Sarah burst into laughter.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jackson slammed into the driver’s side of his jeep and gunned it onto the main road. He was breathing hard enough he felt like there was a chance he’d look down and see shoots of flame coming from his nose.
This was why he didn’t usually spend time with his brothers and their friends. Because something always happened that made him feel like a middle-aged lecher peeping on schoolgirls.
“God damn it,” Jackson growled, slamming the palm of his hand against the steering wheel as he took a sharp curve up toward his mother’s house, his jeep slicing through the dark like a knife. “She’s a fucking virgin.”
He hated that he knew that. It was knowledge he could never erase. He’d barely ever let himself think about Kaya’s sex life before. He knew which way madness lay. He knew that he could never have her, so what did it really matter? It was none of his business anyways.
But now? Knowing what he knew? Hearing those words fall out of her perfect mouth, well, not only had it been a punch to the gut, but it had immediately set off some sort of cosmic timer deep inside Jackson. Suddenly, he felt he had entered a race he could never win. He could only wait to lose.
Because someday, she wouldn’t be a virgin anymore and he would have absolutely nothing to do with it.
He might be a monster when he was in his wolf form, but he refused to be a monster when he was in his human form.
For one terrible moment, he let himself wish that things were different. He wished that he were Seth and Raphael’s age. Or that Nat and Kaya were switched. That Kaya was the one who was almost twenty-seven and had lost her virginity a decade ago. That he could smile at her without feeling like a pervert. That he could whisper in the shell of her perfect ears. That he could touch her. That he could let her touch him.
He turned up the long, windy driveway to his mother’s house. How foolish to wish for things that could never happen, for things that could never change.
Jackson slammed his brakes and skidded across the gravel driveway. He jumped out of the car and jogged up to his mother’s front door.
“Ma?” he shouted, kicking his shoes off. He could smell her homemade chicken soup, but for once in his life it didn’t soothe him at all.
“Kitchen!”
Usually, his mother was extremely empathetic to her sons’ moods, sniffing them out faster than they did themselves. But tonight, she was viciously chopping up some carrots for a salad and Jackson could see that her temper was high.
“Would you do me a favor?” she asked, whirling on Jackson, the dicing knife clutched in her fist.
“Um, yeah?” He lifted his eyes from the knife to his mother’s narrowed eyes.
“Go out to the garage and make that damn fool come inside.”
“Bauer’s out in the garage? It’s fifty degrees out there. He’s still recovering!”
“You don’t have to tell me twice. I’m the one who told him that.”
Jackson strode over to the garage door and yanked it open. Bauer lay on his cot, his arms crossed in what looked like stubborn resolve.
“Bauer, you need to come inside. You’ll freeze to death out here.”
“I�
�m fine.”
Jackson sighed, pinching his nose. His patience was at an end tonight. “I know I’m a vet and not a doctor, but considering you’re half coyote, I think you can go ahead and consider me your personal physician, all right? And I’m asking you to please come inside before you exacerbate your bullet wound or get a fever and make everything worse, okay? You’d be doing me a favor.”
Bauer glared at him but after a few moments of stillness, hauled himself off the cot and limped into the house. Jackson knew that the wound was painful, but he also knew better than to offer the old man a hand.
Bauer limped over to the kitchen table and perched on the end of a chair, careful not to hurt his injury.
Elizabeth stalked over and slammed down a bowl of soup and a plate of fresh bread and salad.
“More soup?” Bauer said in a low voice. “I don’t have strep throat, I was shot in the leg, for God’s sake!”
“Old man,” Elizabeth said in a voice that made Jackson’s skin crawl as she gestured to Bauer with a salad spoon. “You will eat what I give you. Then you’re going to sleep in the guest room in the bed that I went out of my way to make for you. And you’re going to stop complaining like a grumpy child and you’re going to allow me and my son to care for you. Because, like an adult, you’ll realize that refusing the help is really just making all of this harder on the people who are trying to care for you.”
She slammed down a glass of ice water in front of him and turned on her heel.
Jackson quietly pulled out a seat and made sure to thank his mother when she set down a bowl of soup in front of him. Now that Bauer was sullenly eating soup, her temper seemed to have cooled a bit. She stroked a hand over Jackson’s head as she sat beside him, her eyes on the side of his face.
“You all right, honey?”
He frowned into his soup, wishing her eyes weren’t quite so sharp. “Fine.”
Then he felt another set of eyes on him. “You look worked up,” Bauer said.
Jackson shrugged and silence reigned at the table.
“You ever going to tell us how your shift was?” Bauer eventually asked when his bowl was clean and there was nothing left on his plate.
Jackson grimaced, his stomach turning. This was yet another subject he didn’t care to address. “It was fine.”
It had not been fine. It had been the most painful shift of his life. He’d tried so hard to let it happen, the way that Bauer had taught them, but in the end, he couldn’t let go. Without even trying, his body had fought the shift.
And what was worse, his temper had been high ever since. Everything irritated him. He was on edge, the way he was on a full moon day, but now it was every day.
The conversation stalled again.
After dinner, Jackson changed Bauer’s bandages in the guest room and by the time he came back out, his mother had already done the dishes.
“I would have done those, Ma.”
“I know,” she said, a small smile on her face. “That’s why it was easy for me to do them. Because I knew I didn’t have to.” She waited a minute. “Is he sleeping?”
“I think so.”
“How’s his wound looking?”
“Good, actually. He’s gonna be fine in a week or so.”
She let out a long breath that told Jackson just how much she’d been worried about this. “You know he drew those hunters toward him, right?”
“What?” Jackson stilled.
“The hunters saw Seth and Raphael and chased them. But I saw the tracks. Seth and Raphael went one direction, up the mountain. Bauer went in the other, across the creek. Maybe it’s a coincidence. But something tells me that he drew them away from the boys on purpose.”
Jackson turned to look thoughtfully in the direction of Bauer’s room. He wasn’t quick to trust normally, but something deep in his gut told Jackson that his mother was right about Bauer.
***
“Nat-a-lie, guess who’s HeEEre,” Raphael singsonged to his friend as they all sat in a booth at a Mexican restaurant.
“Who?” Nat craned her neck around as Sarah looked on with interest from across the booth.
“Your boyfriend.” Raph tossed his head to one side, motioning to the door of the establishment, where a dark-haired professor-type had just walked in.
Natalie went bright red. “Oh my God, Raph, don’t embarrass me. He’s not my boyfriend.”
“Only because you’re too chicken to do anything about it.” Raph yelped and wiggled away from where he sat next to Nat. “No pinching! No pinching!”
“Then no teasing,” she reprimanded him, her pointer finger dangerously close to the end of his nose.
“Are they always like this?” Sarah whispered to Seth.
“Pretty much,” he whispered back, his eyes glinting. He sat against the wall and Sarah sat next to him, the lengths of their thighs pressed compactly together. His arm ran along the back of the booth and Sarah could feel him absently playing with strands of her hair. It was entirely and completely distracting and Sarah was loving every single minute of it.
“See,” Seth whispered, leaning down even further, his lips brushing the shell of her ear, “Natalie has had a crush on that guy, Paul, for over a year and it drives Raph crazy.”
Sarah’s brow furrowed. “Is he jealous?”
Seth laughed. “No way. It’s not that. It’s that Raph doesn’t understand the concept of waiting for anything. He sees a pretty girl, he flirts with her. He hears a song he likes, he downloads it. He—”
“Sees a burrito, he massacres it,” Sarah finished for Seth, watching in a sort of disgusted awe as Raphael barely let the waitress set the plate down before at least a third of his dinner was shoved into his mouth.
“Exactly.” Seth shook his head as he watched salsa dribble down his brother’s chin. “Disgusting.”
“So, what does that have to do with Natalie and Paul?”
“Oh. Right.” They were still whispering together and the others were giving them a bit of privacy anyways, but even so, Seth looked around to make sure that no one was going to overhear them. “Nat has a huge crush on that guy, but he barely even notices her, I guess.”
Sarah squinted across the room at Paul. He was almost handsome, she supposed, in a wiry kind of way. Then she let her eyes settle on Natalie’s face. Incredibly doe-eyed, with eyes so green they made you think of springtime. She had a pert little nose, even skin, cute lips, and her hair was shiny and cut to just under her chin. Sarah thought she looked like an actress kicking back between roles. “Not possible that he hasn’t noticed her. Unless he’s not into women. But any man who notices women would have noticed Nat by now.”
“You know? That’s always been my assessment as well. She’s too hilarious and fun and pretty to go unnoticed. But, anyways, for whatever reason, Nat is too nervous to declare herself and Paul isn’t helping her out at all. And Raphael is climbing the walls trying to get them together. Last month he was trying to talk Nat into letting him lock them in a storage closet someplace. Or emergency stop an elevator.”
Sarah laughed. “That sounds like an episode of a 90s sitcom.”
“That’s exactly what Nat said. She’s determined to do it at her own pace.”
At just that moment, Natalie took a deep breath. “I think I’ll go to the restroom,” she said in a funny, mechanical voice that Sarah had never heard her use before.
Nat rose up from the booth and walked slowly in the direction of Paul.
“Oh, God,” Raphael said, his mouth full of burrito. “This is when we have to watch her awkwardly walk past him ten times and still not get up the courage to say hello. I can’t watch this. It’s torture.”
Even having said that, though, Raphael’s eyes stayed glued to Natalie like he was watching the most dramatic part of a soap opera.
“Would you, for the love of God, mind chewing your food with your mouth closed?” Seth asked.
In response, Raphael just opened his mouth wide, showing off the multicolo
red mastication on his tongue, but his eyes stayed glued to the action across the room.
“What’s happening?” Kaya hissed to Raphael. She sat at Sarah’s side and her back was to the action just like Seth and Sarah.
“She walked past once and sort of tripped so she kept on going. It was terrible—a total trainwreck. And then she disappeared into the bathroom. Oh! Now she’s back. I think she’s gonna… Oh my God!”
“What?” Kaya hissed. “What’s happening?”
“Shhhhhh!!!!!” Raphael hissed back, reaching out and sliding one of his large hands down Kaya’s face in an effort to get her to shut up.
She recoiled from him. “At least wipe the sour cream off your fingers before you do that.”
“Shhhhh!” he hissed again. And then he groaned and dropped his head back. “Oh, God. She’s totally bombing this. You should see the look on his face. She’s coming back over here.”
A moment later, Natalie dropped back into the booth, a look of horror on her face. “Tell me that didn’t just happen.”
“What didn’t just happen?” Kaya asked, reaching across the table to nudge Natalie’s plate toward her.
“That I didn’t just shake his hand while mine was still wet from washing up in the bathroom. And then I explained that it wasn’t pee. I said ‘pee’ to him. Pee. I said pee to Paul Lawrence.”
“If Paul Lawrence can’t handle hearing the word pee, then he’s not worth your time,” Kaya said, switching one of her tacos for one of Natalie’s. Then she tipped her head to one side, as if considering what had just happened to her sister. “But yeah. That’s really embarrassing.”
Natalie groaned again, burying her face in her hands.
“Did you at least ask him out?” Raph asked, mouth full once again.
“Are you joking? Did you not hear the part where I said the word pee to him like five times in a row? There wasn’t exactly time for me to work in a movie invitation.”
“Natalie,” Raphael said in a very quasi-patient tone, as if this were something he’d explained to her a hundred times. “All you have to do is let him know you’re interested. In any way, shape or form. Trust me, if he thinks he has a shot, he’s gonna take it. But you’ve probably bamboozled him with your awkwardness so many times, he’s confused. It doesn’t have to be some grand, romantic proposal. Just ask him on a date. He’s gonna say yes.”
