“For the love of God, Montresor!” Our little brother grins, and mimes pounding against a brick wall. It makes me crack a smile. Some jokes never die.
“Don’t tempt me.” Logan rolls his eyes, looking like he’s trying to play along. “Come on. With all the coyote sightings, I’d hate for one of you to get pepper sprayed by some hikers.”
His words are light, but I can tell he’s worried. The eviscerated deer is still on my mind, and clearly his as well. But I don’t think locking ourselves in the basement is the answer.
“If one of us is going feral, the last thing I’d want is to be stuck in the brewery basement with him.”
“We’re all here together, we can’t go feral,” Aiden says, as if that puts the whole matter to rest. “I mean, you’re with us now, and we’re about to join with the Carrington pack. That’s more wolves in the family than we’ve ever had.”
“Yeah, there’s a real sense of community with a bunch of strangers.” I can’t help but tack on a little snark to Aiden’s optimism. He’s an extrovert, so of course joining with a bigger pack sounds like a party to him.
“Then why are there still coyote sightings?”
His expression falls a little, and he rubs the back of his neck uncertainly. “Maybe there really are coyotes.”
Logan doesn’t look impressed, of course. “So, are you coming?”
“Nah, dude, he’s gotta go annoy his girlfriend,” Aiden blabs, and I try to kick him through the pillow. He gives me his puppy eyes, and I glare at him, hopefully communicating that if he tells Logan I was married to Elise, I will make him regret it.
Logan gives me a side eye as he settles against the doorjamb. “You two have been getting pretty friendly. Are you sure that’s smart?”
He’s never been a snitch, but he does have our mother’sAre You Sure That’s Smart?glare down pat.
“Since when does Shawn do smart things?” Aiden snorts, his grin immediately falling when I shoot a glare at him.
I’m not sharing a couch with a traitor, so I get up and toss the other throw pillow at Aiden, directing my words to Logan. “I don’t need this from you and Mom, ok?”
Logan crosses his arms at me like he’s in any kind of authority. An older-brotherly annoyance rises in me. I’m not about to take direction from the kid whose face I used to wipe Cheeto dust off of, even if he is right.
He continues to lean in the wide-open doorway, making it impossible for me to leave until he’s gotten his way.
Instead of doing anything so obviously guilty as crossing my arms over my chest, I take one of the cans of ale out from the plastic loops that hold the pack together.
“I don’t mean it the way Mom probably means it, you and humans and all that,” Logan says quietly, leaning towards me, even though there’s no way Aiden can’t also hear it. “She is right though.”
That makes it sound like I have a weird, specific human fetish that I had to break all our rules for. Not really how I would frame it.
Still, Mom had never put it in the colorful terms that Dad did. She had always just reminded me,“Humans don’t know how we do things.”
Gentle words with a difficult meaning.
I bristle and resist the urge to roll my eyes. “Dude, if you have something to say that Mom hasn’t yet, you should get to your point.”
“Ok,” he shrugs, and says simply, “Elise is my friend, and I don’t want you to hurt her. Again.”
I pull open the tab and the harsh sound stings the air.
There’s no way Elise told him enough of what happened to merit him saying “again” like that. There’s a slight chance Laura told him whatever version Elise was willing to share with her. It’s possible he’s just imagining that because clearly it ended badly before, it was my fault.
Logan eases into the room and hands one of the other cans to Aiden, opening one for himself. He sits down on the coffee table, and if I wasn’t currently the problem child, I would have tattled on his ass so fucking hard right now.
“Back at the bar, she said you lied to her,” Logan chides, leveling a cool look at me. His tone drops into a low disapproval that manages to mock both me and Aiden, “Dude.”
The level of judgment in that one word. I guess they all must have heard us fighting the other day outside the bar after all.
“That’s what I got from the other day,” Aiden adds. Yeah, these little family togetherness moments are just so important.
“Just say you eavesdropped and move on,” I reply dismissively.
