“I can’t!”
“I assure you, you can.” Her feet were burning now as she picked her way over the curb and unlocked her car door.
“Can you walk faster then?” he asked.
“Why do you care?” she yelled.
“I don’t know!” he yelled back.
“You’re free from caring,” she said, her voice thick, and damn the tears that spilled over. “I’m not ready for any of this. I don’t like it. It’s not fun like I thought it would be.”
Destiny opened her door and climbed inside. Geez, it was cold. She turned on her car and turned the heat all the way up. The bottoms of her feet were numb.
A knock sounded at the window.
“Leave me alone,” she told Dodger. He would hear it just fine through the window.
Dodger linked his hands behind his head and paced away, ran his hand down his short beard and turned to her. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and dangled it for her to see.
She didn’t understand.
Dodger connected a call and her phone vibrated. Frustrated, she answered and glared right at him as she said, “Lose my number.”
“I have never done this before.” There was a pleading in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before.
“Done what?”
He inhaled deeply and made his way to a bench on the other side of the sidewalk, and sat down on it, eyes on her through her car window. “I do have two brothers, both were older, both used me as a punching bag. I have three younger sisters that I was very protective of. My dad did die when I was ten, and my mom, who had been amazing up until then, broke down and couldn’t function well anymore. That dead bond poisoned her. My mom didn’t pair up again officially, so there was never a strong male presence. There were drugs, and a revolving door of boyfriends that she used to fill some hole inside of her that had been opened when my dad died. I didn’t do well in school, I didn’t graduate, I don’t recall good memories from when I was a kid, and the Pack I was born into was shitty.”
“Why did you lie to me?” she demanded.
“Because that’s the story I’ve told everyone. If you paint a perfect picture, no one asks questions. There is nothing to dig into. And then you come along, asking questions and being too damn interesting for either of our own good, and I know we can’t do this, and so I did what I always do when someone gets too close.”
“Hurt me?” she guessed.
He dropped his gaze to the icy concrete. “I’m sorry. And you should know that’s the first time I’ve ever said that to anyone.”
“Why do you care about forgiveness from me? I’m just a fragile human.”
He made a click sound behind his teeth and looked back in the direction of Copper’s. “Because you just threw a drink inthe face of a werewolf and told me off, and you made my wolf go silent like you were his damn Alpha giving him an order. Nothing has ever done that for me but a fight. You are human, but I don’t think you are fragile.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Truth.” He sat up straight and shook his head, and she could see his empty smile from here. “You’re going to wreck me, aren’t you?”
“If you’re lucky.”
He ghosted a look up at her, but she was allowing the ghost of a smile now.
“You’re teasing me?”
“I’m going to go home now and overthink this emotional roller coaster you just put us both through. I have to decide if this dating stuff is for me or not.”
“You still call it a date?”
“It’s a date to a human. We ate together.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “Do you want to do a date like I know how?”
