When Laura’s eyes flick to Elise across the booth, her expression drops. Clearly, she’s been informed of some part of the recent drama. This whole town is too small lately.
There’s no backing out of this moment though, because Elise turns in her seat to spot us coming through the door. Something shutters in her face as her eyes meet mine.
I wonder briefly, mostly in a morbid worst case scenario way, if my mate might be in this bar. There’s a cacophony ofsmells in here, all layered and twisting over each other. It can’t be Elise. She is human, and that wouldn’t work.
That wasn’t the way it was supposed to work, anyway.
There weren’t other wolf packs in the area, so who would it even be? I’m pretty sure the only wolves around Mystic Falls are my family. I would have smelled another wolf trying to cut in on our territory. Logan had to go all the way to Boston to find another wolf pack. Boston-adjacent, one of those little towns outside the city that still considered themselves Boston-native, like that wasn’t half of fucking Massachusetts, but it’s like a two- or three-hour drive, depending on traffic.
But Elise’s scent rises above the rest, a part of my every breath. I never got the smell of her out of my sheets, all those years ago. I had to get rid of them.
I try to run through my head who I would have met in town. I didn’t really stop to talk to anyone or go into any of the shops. I went into the diner before home, but there weren’t really a lot of people in there, and I only talked to my cousin.
Maybe meeting face to face is too much to hope for, but having caught her scent without realizing is some special kind of torture. I would just assume some of the guests for Logan’s wedding came early, that it would be other wolves from the other family’s pack, but there’s no way I wouldn’t be able to smell them around.
What a time to have met my mate, when my ex-wife just came back into my life.
It sits uneasily in my stomach, the knowledge. I can’t really tell anyone here because I don’t even know who it is. And I don’twant to have to answer how I know, because I’m not about to bring up the knotting thing.
My dad never really talked to us about that in particular, when he was with us. I’ve mostly heard about how knotting works from my older cousins when they were trying to gross us out with exaggerated stories of how it worked. Not that they were old enough to know either.
I wouldn’t have been ready to meet whoever she is anyway, if it had happened to me before I met Elise. Maybe with another shifter it would have been different, and I wouldn’t have had to hide all the things I did from Elise, but I’d be stupid in all the same ways. Sometimes, all I can do is look back and sigh and cringe at how I handled everything. With a wolf shifter, I’d be able to be my whole self with her. And I was never going to have that with Elise.
Aiden pointedly corrals Logan into the side of the wooden booth that Laura is on. The things were never really meant to sit more than two adults, so Logan’s scrawny ass is in the middle, trying to fold himself smaller, with Laura shoved against the wall. In a way it was the same as when they were all kids, trying to fit more than there were seats for into a row, while I claimed the front seat as the oldest.
I look to the only seat available now, next to my ex-wife. Christ. Now it feels significantly less like the privilege it used to be.
“I’ll go get a chair from the bar...” I start to say, but glancing behind me, I see all the chairs in the place are taken.
Elise rolls her eyes and scoots over. My knees knock instantly with Aiden’s sliding in. I sit gingerly next to her, tryingto keep at least a couple inches of space between us, but it is tight.
Logan waves three fingers to someone across the bar, Laura nudges him and he changes it to four. It takes only a couple of minutes for a waitress to bring around four beers. I guess Logan at least is a regular.
Aiden is staring at us intently. Barely a moment passes before he asks, “So, uh, where have you two met before?”
“Oh, we’re just directly asking?” Logan scoffs at Aiden before either of us could come up with an answer. “I thought you said we were going to be subtle.”
“I was being sneaky about it until you ruined it, man,” Aiden exclaims, rolling his eyes.
“That was your idea of sneaky,” Laura deadpans. “Was it not obvious to you both that they dated?”
Logan mumbles from his hunched, folded form.
“Yes, which is why I asked where they met,” Aiden sighs. “Clearly, I want all the gory details.”
Elise glances at me, and I can practically read the thoughts crossing her face. She wants out of this situation as much as I do. If we don’t tell them the dates and locations, maybe they won’t have enough to put it together. Maybe it’s ok.
“We uh. Met at a traffic crossing,” she says, glancing at me again. I nod.
“What? That’s boring,” Aiden interrupts.
“She stepped off the curb too early, there was a car, she wasn’t paying attention,” I start to say. It was a perfectly innocent meeting, really.
“He grabbed my arm and pulled me back, and we started talking after that,” she shrugs, saying it like it wasn’t that special. Forgettable, even.
She looks to me, and for a moment, that memory passes between us. I remember every second of it. The way she was utterly windswept by the cold front moving in, and she was wearing some berry lip gloss, the surprise on her face when she’d realized how close she’d been to a much different fate, how fast it all happened, to how that one moment just stopped. I blink and see the new Elise, her hair frizzy and a lot more freckles than she used to have, her expression almost soft.
Laura squints at nothing for a moment. “Wait, you’ve told me this one before.”
