I didn’t like seeing him do it. It made me feel odd. Jules was soft in his heart. I’d always known that about him. I was the only one who knew it. It felt strange to see him showing someone else that side of himself. Not wrong, just strange. I knew he had it bad for Storm. I had it bad for her, too, but I didn’t like seeing Jules like that. It made me uncomfortable. It felt like I was seeing something intimate, and even though the whole situation literally did involve me, it made me feel left out. It gave me a hollow pit in my stomach.
“Why don’t you stay in Clearwater, Stormy?” he said.
“Nah, can’t. Gotta keep moving till I find what I’m looking for.” Storm was “between packs,” as she put it. “It’s not that I’m not happy with my own pack. There’s a good chance I’ll go back there someday. I just wanna know what else is out there, you know?”
“Why don’t you stay with us and join the Cleary pack? You’ll love it, you’ll see.”
“Uh-uh, no way. Told you, I can’t ’cause your alpha’s a douche.”
“But you saidallalphas are douches, so you may as well stay here with our douchey alpha. At least this pack comes with Sully and me.” It was hard to fault his reasoning.
“It’s not just that. I guess I don’t want to be part of an aging pack, you know? I want kids. Lots of ’em. I want a whole litter of pups and I want to be part of something a little less rigid. I mean, your pack’s kind of weird. You get that, don’t you?”
“What’s weird about our pack?”
“Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you don’t know.” The look on Jules’s face, and quite possibly on mine, must have told her that we weren’t all that clear on the matter. “All the secrecy is weird, okay? It’s weird that Dalton pulled me aside when I got here and said I could stay, but I had to agree not to talk to you about shifting. That shit is strange. And what’s with your alpha deciding when you can shift? That’s fucked up. It’s even weirder that he decides who you get to mate with. Like, omegas can’t be mated? What’s with that? And guys can’t mate guys? I’ve never heard of a pack that does that. It’s so weird. No wonder you guys still haven’t shifted.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“In other packs people teach their kids about shifting. It’s something you learn, like tracking or hunting. I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t they teach you?”
“Dalton says that shifting is one of life’s greatest mysteries,” said Jules, mimicking Dalton’s words almost verbatim. “He says it’s like how some humans like to find out the gender of their baby when they’re expecting, and some humans like waiting for a surprise. He says it’ll be the best surprise of our lives and why would we want to ruin that?”
“Why not? I’ll tell you why not, ’cause that shit is fucking you up. It’s making your wolves grow too big. It’s changing your magick and probably not in a good way.”
“But what could possibly be bad about our wolves being big?” asked Jules. One of Dalton’s proudest achievements was the fact that Cleary wolves were bigger than real wolves when they shifted. Hell, our wolves were bigger than werewolves in some cases.
“I don’t know for sure,” Storm said, “but did you ever think that maybe all these rules and restrictions are why your pack is aging? It’s unnatural to take something that’s wild and try to bend it to your will. Every wolf knows that.”
When she said it, something inside me stirred. It uncurled and stretched like someone, or something, that had been sleeping for a very, very long time. I felt the truth in her words before I even had time to think them through.
Jules was quiet after that. He was quiet on the way home too. Jules was as loyal as a wolf could ever be. I knew it hurt and derailed things deep inside him to hear Storm talking about Dalton and our pack like that.
That night, I had my second shifting dream. It was like the first one, except that it was darker and more violent. In the dream, the moon was a silvery sliver. There was no light in the forest. It was pitch black. I could hardly see, but I could feel. I could feel one thing. One thing only. That time, the rage I felt in the dream didn’t fade until long after I’d had my second cup of coffee in the morning.
11
Julesturnedtwenty-oneafew weeks after Storm left. For the first time in his life, he was in no mood to party. He went through the motions, and maybe most people bought it, but I sure as hell didn’t. I knew how he was feeling. I felt it too, but for me, it was different. I was sad to see Storm go. She was amazing and I was crazy about her. No doubt about that, but I was conflicted. In a way, Storm leaving was almost a relief. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that the way I was looking at Jules when he and I fucked Storm was, for want of a better word, fucked up. I knew that.
It wasn’t that I thought there was anything inherently wrong or unnatural about it. When it came to humans, I didn’t notice them all that much. When I did, sometimes I noticed girls and sometimes I noticed guys. It had never really occurred to me to think about the fact that I noticed girls and guys because it happened so rarely. It wasn’t a big deal. My attraction to humans had always been so mild compared to what books and movies made seem normal, that until I met Storm, I’d sometimes wondered if there was something wrong with me. You know, like if I was broken or something. Until I met her, I spent a huge amount of my time wanting to have sex, but not knowing who I wanted to have it with.
So, it wasn’t the fact that Jules was a guy that was confusing. It was just that it wasJules. My friend Jules. My first friend, Jules. I’d seen him almost every day of my life and yet I’d never, ever seen him the way I did when I saw him naked for sex. Not only that, I saw the way Jules had looked when he told me about Mason. I was there. He’d said his parents didn’t think Mason being with a man was natural. I saw his face when he said it. I knew how to read him. I knew him better than anyone. He wasn’t sure if he thought it was natural or not. He was my best friend, and I knew without having to ask that there was no way in the world he’d be comfortable knowing how I watched him when he was with Storm.
It should have been a relief for me when she left, and to a certain degree it was. It was just that her being gone didn’t have quite the effect I’d hoped it would. I’d hoped that everything would go back to boring normal, but Storm being gone didn’t do a damn thing to stop me from thinking about all the things Jules and I had done when we were with her. It did nothing at all to stop that. In fact, it might have made it worse. I was way hornier without having her around as an outlet. Without her being around, my mind ran wild. It ran wild in the night, and after a while, it started running wild in the day, too. I jerked off all the time. I jerked off so much that I heard my parents talking about it.
“It’s normal,” said my mother to my father. I was embarrassed to hear it. Mortified, really, or I would have been if not for the fact that at that time of my life, my go-to emotion was anger. Things being what they were, I was annoyed they were talking about me. Deeply annoyed. I gritted my teeth and kept my ears cocked.
“Of course it’s normal,” my father replied. “I only mentioned it because I’m a teeny bit concerned about it in combination with the moodiness. Aren’t you?”
My mother must have lowered her voice to a whisper because I couldn’t hear her response.
A little later, I heard my dad say, “Try to stay calm and breathe, love.”
In some ways, I thought my father was a very brave man for telling my mother to calm down and to breathe. He did it often. He always had. I was not what I considered an expert on women by any means, but to me it seemed ill advised. Every time he did it, I expected that to be the time my mother lost it, but strangely she never did. He seemed to have a calming effect on her. It was one of the many mysteries that existed when it came to my mother and father.
My mother was crippled, but strong. She was the strongest woman I’d ever met. I’m not saying that my father was weak. Physically, he was incredibly strong. It’s just that my father was the definition of a beta. The very definition of it. When I was little, he used to read to me or tell me stories about the White Wolf at night before bed. When he turned out the light, he’d trace his finger around the whorl on the crown of my head and he’d whisper, “Good night, my little beta boy wolf. We’re all betas in this family, aren’t we? That’s because being a beta is thebestthing to be.”
In fact, he said it so often that when I was nine, I paintedbeing a beta is the best thing to beon a clay mug and gave it to him for his birthday. He was made up about it and used that mug for years, until he dropped it on the kitchen floor and the handle broke off. After that, he kept it on his desk and stored his pens and pencils in it.
