I didn’t know if my request was imbued with magic or if it was simply so unusual for me to ask Hamish to tidy anywhere but one of his specific sections of the shop, but he spared me one last frown and wandered off.
I wasn’t sure if I kept imagining him repeatedly looking over at me for the final hour before the bookshop closed. It felt like every time my hand patted the soft fabric covering my throat, he was watching.
My hand shook as I counted up the day’s takings, my heart hopping in stutters of panic no matter how many times I checked my scarf was safely in place. I slumped onto the stool behind the counter when Hamish left at closing time without saying goodbye. At least that was a return to normality.
‘He won’t remember it,’ I whispered, rubbing my hands over my face. ‘It’s not significant to him.’
Hamish’s curiosity might have been awakened, but any interest he held in my scarves would be brief. I’d ignore his pointed looks and questions, leave him to make his own assumptions. He was young. Maybe he’d decide it was an eccentricity of the elderly.
I jumped when my phone buzzed in my pocket. My fingers clumsy, I fumbled it free.
Lucas’s name flashed across the screen. Since we’d established a routine of nattering through the evenings together, I’d usually managed to shut up the shop and start making dinner before he called. I didn’t realise how long I’d been sitting on the stool, trying and failing to reassure myself.
‘Hey.’ I raised the phone to my ear. ‘I’ve just got to sort out the shop and then I can chat properly.’
‘Are you alright?’ Wind blustered down the line alongside Lucas’s voice as he walked to the furthest reach of the signal around Callum’s cabin. He said these phone calls served a dual purpose; he didn’t go into Kit-withdrawal and they gave Callum and Aster a chance to dispel the rampant sexual energy between them. I’d been glad Lucas had opted for voice calls instead of video when he said both those things. A bright blush hadn’t left my cheeks for long minutes.
‘Yeah. Fine.’ I rushed over to the front door and twisted the sign to closed. The lock clicked into place and I gave the dragon window display a wide berth as I scurried to the back of the shop.
‘Busy day?’ Lucas asked.
That was a reasonable assumption. One I could go along with. It was hard for a werewolf to tell if someone was lying on the phone. We could pick out heartbeats if we tried, but it put a dampener on conversation to extend that much energy towardsthe other person’s inner workings, rather than the words they said.
‘Not really.’ I flicked off the lights and slipped into the narrow hall at the back of the ground floor. I’d swapped my voluntary walk around the cottages for extra moments of privacy tucked inside since Lucas started calling each evening. If I hurried past Bonnie and Joshua’s cottage while chatting to him, my Alpha might launch herself from an upstairs window to find out what was going on between us.
Which was nothing. Nothing but friendship. Which was fine. Good. Perfect.
‘Kit, are you sure you’re okay?’ Lucas asked as I climbed the stairs.
I stopped at the top. Usually, I’d head straight over to the kitchen and get started on dinner. I loved cooking meals from scratch, something which had been sorely lacking from my life while I studied law.
Tucking my chin into my scarf, I rushed over to the sofa. Despite my heightened werewolf metabolism, I wasn’t hungry. What felt more important right now was snuggling into blankets that held a hint of Lucas’s scent.
Kat hopped up onto the sofa as soon as I finished fussing. She curled into a black and white ball on my feet. I sank into the cushions, blankets bundled up to my ears.
‘Kit?’ The blustering around Lucas cut off. On windier nights, he took shelter in a goat hut. He said it was the main reason he’d mastered shutting off his enhanced sense of smell. The pervasive stink of goat was inescapable to a werewolf without the ability to control their nose. ‘You still there?’
‘Yeah.’ I tucked a corner of the softest blanket under my cheek, breathing deep of the underlying earthy scent that had been fading every day Lucas had been gone. ‘Can I tell you why I wear scarves?’
I hadn’t planned to tell Lucas about it. Whenever possible, I didn’t talk about this at all. Just after changing, I’d had teary conversations with the rest of my pack to explain what had gone wrong. Every time they tried to talk about it after that, I shut them down.
I didn’t know how to talk about this with them. They couldn’t make it better. What was done was done; my change into a werewolf irreversible.
It wasn’t like Lucas had anything to offer that the rest of the pack didn’t, but all I’d wanted to do since Hamish’s eyes had narrowed and questions had visibly formed beneath his messy ginger hair was curl into Lucas’s arms and tell him the truth. I couldn’t do the cuddling, but I could explain this deep hurting part of myself that I did my best to push away.
‘I thought you wore them because they’re soft and pretty.’ Scraping and shuffling filled the line, like Lucas was finding a spot in the hut unoccupied with goat dung to sit down. ‘They match the cosy jumpers you wear.’
‘Thank you.’ One thing Lucas offered that no one else could was that he would make me smile even when my ribs felt tight with crushing sadness. ‘They are soft and I do like how they look, but that’s not the only reason I wear them.’
Lucas huffed, and the line grew quiet. I imagined him tucked into a corner of a goat hut. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable place to sit, but knowing he was inside one and was safe was a balm against the memory of finding him half-dead amongst goats and straw.
We’d fallen into a pattern with these chats. We didn’t talk about the storm or what came directly before. Our avoidance was likely for differing reasons, but neither of us wanted to pick over exactly why Lucas had fled into the mountains instead of coming home, or how horribly close he’d come to no longer being here.
‘Why do you wear scarves?’ Lucas prompted. A question I’d dreaded and dodged, but it didn’t sound so dreadful coming from him.
That didn’t make starting any easier, even if it was something I wanted to talk about. I rubbed my cheek on the blanket and closed my eyes. ‘Do you remember that I told you I was unwell when I was baby?’
‘Yeah. You think it’s part of the reason you’re so snuggly.’ Clear affection warmed Lucas’s voice. I didn’t have to be near him to know his scent would be deepening, like a thick jumper I wished I could wrap myself in.
