Without any kind of theatricality, I tossed it over to Dean, who caught it with one hand. “It’s all a little maudlin, and I won’t say I won’t be embarrassed later, but I wrote a lot when I was struggling with my family and fiancé and stuff.”
He blinked at me for a moment, leaning over to set his own coffee down, looking at the book like it was a treasure chestthat someone had offered him on a random Saturday morning. “Seriously? I can just... you don’t mind?”
I crawled my way back up the bed and snatched up my perfect cup of coffee, which was worth more to me than all the words I’d written in that book. “I don’t. I also don’t know if I can recreate it if you like it. I’m not miserable anymore. But... I got into that hole”—I waved at the book—“because people I cared about were keeping secrets. Keeping secrets isn’t worth the pain it causes.”
He bit his lip, opening the book and paging through, and... was he excited? That was weird. “You... you’re really good. You know that, right?”
Was I?
That was a weird idea.
“I’m an IT guy, Dean. I’m not”—I waved a hand around, indicating nothing in particular.
“No, but you are.” He held the book up in front of him, and started to read. It was strange, hearing my own words from... well, I wanted to say it was long ago, but it had only been a few months. A few months before that I’d been writing about a darkness in my soul and storms on the horizon and... okay, when he said the words aloud, adding meter and his gorgeous voice, it actually did sound pretty good.
He looked back up at me after a moment, waiting, like there was something important I was missing. All I could do was shrug helplessly. “I mean, if you can use it, then you should? I’m not... I don’t feel that way anymore, so it doesn’t feel like something I need to keep hidden.” I leaned against him, looking at the words in my own handwriting, and it was strange, just how far away they felt. “If I were writing poems now, they’d be a total cliche. Coffee and cuddling in bed, wearing your shirt, your beautiful smile, and just... how I’ve been waiting my whole life for this perfect day.”
He blinked, staring at me, and I winced. “Unintentional rhyming, sorry.”
“No, but...” He jumped up and rushed out into the main room, coming back with his own tortured notebook, jotting things down for a moment, muttering to himself as he worked. It was weird, but somehow, utterly adorable. After a moment, he grinned up at me. “I got it. Figured it out. You don’t have to write them, but you... you’re the words.”
CHAPTER 20
DEAN
The only other person to ever come close to handing me their secret truths, well, he hadn’t had much left to lose. Henry had been on his deathbed, and young as I was before I’d had to stumble my way through the grief and recovery of losing him, every confession—open, honest, without pretense—had caught me up short.
Each one had felt like a goodbye, or at least part of one.
Stuff that he wanted to share with me while he still had the time.
That wasn’t to say it wasn’t brave. Some people looked at the ends of their lives and clung to their pride too much to allow them to remove their masks and share what really needed sharing.
I wouldn’t be the person that I’d become without Henry.
But this?
Landon had everything to lose. Given that he was a shifter like me, he could expect a long, relatively healthy life, at least compared to a human. If I had to dig down into the why of it, I’d guess that the transformation had something to do with how we healed—elasticity of stem cells or something like that.
His family had betrayed him. The man he’d loved had hurt him in the worst way imaginable.
It wouldn’t have been all that surprising if Landon had never been able to trust anyone again. I certainly wouldn’t have blamed him. But there he was, baring everything to me.
The point was, for some reason or another, Landon had looked at me, disaster that I was, and decided:this one’s mine.
He’d let me into his inner world, and hadn’t hesitated to throw that journal across the room like it was nothing to be that vulnerable. He hadn’t tried to keep any part of himself closed off from me.
Did he even fucking realize what a miracle he was?
He even let me take the journal with me Monday morning, when he had to go to work and, for the first time in a while, so did I.
I spent hours pouring over the pages. Every word he wrote was intentional, thoughtful in a way I’d never been able to commit to.
But imagining him putting this all down, the shape of his hand on the pen as thought flowed freely, it was—shit, it’d never been so easy for me to tap into those feelings, or the words I needed to convey them.
By five o’clock, I was ready.
I have something I want to show you, I texted Landon.
