“What are you doing?”
“I’m not going to need a coat. Or rather, I come with a built-in one.”
He put the four discs he had made down on the floor and looked up at her. “You’re going to have to put these on me.”
“You made snowshoes for a wolf?”
“He’s probably going to be fine, but I am a common Appenine wolf, not an arctic wolf.”
“Okay?” she said, still staring at the snowshoes.
“Arctic wolf paws are very broad for the snow, but mine aren’t, and we need to move fast, so you just strap this over the paw, okay?” He held up the strap he’d made of the smallest branches.
She nodded, and he began taking off his clothes. She turned red and looked away, and he snickered. “Really? After last night?”
She turned back. “I was trying to be respectful. But fine, I will ogle you all I want.”
He regretted telling her to watch him when he realized what he had to do next. “He’s big.”
She grinned.
“I mean the wolf, Patchouli.”
“I know.”
He shook his head. “I hope you know he also would never hurt you.” That was meant to be reassuring, but her heart rate sped up.
“Is it genuinely not you? Like you can’t control its behavior?”
He laughed and then coughed, visions of endless negotiations and battles of will throughout his childhood coming to mind.
When she didn’t smile, all urge to laugh disappeared. “I don’t know. He’s not just me in a different form; he has a mind of his own, but he’s not a free and whole wolf. There are parts of us we share, and there are parts of us we definitely don’t. I’m not a huge fan of raw squirrel…” He laughed again, and she still didn’t. “No one knows what we are or what we were supposed to be or what we’ve become, but I will not lose control of him even if he wanted to hurt you, which he absolutely doesn’t. He’s actually weirdly invested.”
She crossed her arms and forced a smile. He realized he could tell now when she was faking it. “It’s weird to care about me, is it?”
“No! Not at all! It is the most natural thing in the world, and everyone should do it…” His wolf rose in anger. “But I should do it the most! What I meant was that he mostly doesn’t care about humans. They’re just not on his radar unless they’re a threat,and the fact that he does care about you even though we’ve known you for a day—that’s the weird part.”
“So he normally doesn’t care, but now he cares, and definitely under no circumstances will he eat me?”
“Yep!” Mateo was normally persuasive. It wasn’t a natural skill, but launching his business forced him to speak with some of the most powerful people in the world and ask them to trust him to protect them. He’d gotten good at this kind of convincing, but for some reason, all skill flowed out of his mind the moment he met her.
“Are we good?” he asked at last.
She nodded once and stuffed his clothes into her backpack.
He couldn’t put it off any longer, standing naked in the rapidly cooling cabin.
He let the wolf take him, and as his senses shifted and the overwhelming spices came back into his awareness, he struggled not to sneeze and also not to move, sending the strictest instructions he’d ever given his wolf in his life.
The beast felt offended that it would even need a reminder not to hurt her. It wouldneverhurt her.
Mateo tried to breathe slowly as her heart rate sped up. It hurt that she feared him beyond the atavistic reaction to a predator. She had a deep antipathy toward everything that he was, and he never wanted her to feel like this. All he could do about it now was stay still.
Slowly, she took a step forward as her breath began to normalize, and she reached out a hand. He lowered his nose so that she was heading toward the top of his head and not his impressive teeth.
He suddenly recalled visions of Little Red Riding Hood. The whole fairytale had confused him as a child because no one would’ve mistaken him for a grandmother, but somehow, they were acting out the scene as if it was safe for her to pat his head.
It is. It has to be.
