“That is so true.” Kelsey shook her head as the full picture coalesced. “Aaron knew about her surgery—at the gas station, I mean. He knew details. Has the whole pack stayed in touch with my aunt for the last nine years?”
“She took us into her home, Kels, knowing we were wolves. It meant a lot to us as pups that she accepted what we are, even though she’s outside our pack. So she never stopped being important to us.”
Not even when her niece by blood moved to a new state and severed all ties with the wolves. Blood-related or not, family was family. Never too many nephews for Maggie.
“I’m glad she got to keep you,” Kelsey said.
Shoot. More unplanned words.
He blinked. “You are?”
Don’t confirm, downplay. Distance. Take a deep breath and step away. But her feet were planted on the kitchen rug. “You’ve been good to her. I know that without a doubt, Trevor.”
“How?” His voice had dropped, low and unguarded.
“Because that’s who you are.”
Sincere. Sweet. Taking notice and taking time. He had remained all these things—Kelsey had seen his heart on display nonstop for the last several hours. But if Trevor hadn’t changed, then…had she? Unknowingly at seventeen had she become someone he could no longer want? One question she would not ask. Ever.
After all, the answer didn’t matter.
“Furniture next?” she said. “You mentioned wanting to move some things in the living room.”
“Oh,” Trevor said. “Yeah. I planned on doing it myself, but since you’re here you could lift one end of things.”
Kelsey laughed. “Sure.”
In an hour they were done with everything on his mental list. The house had been thoroughly rearranged, and Kelsey’s strategies, so carefully considered both before arriving here and since, had been thoroughly demolished.
Avoidance: a dismal failure. Trevor would show up at least a few times a week, and she couldn’t prevent him. Worse, she didn’t want to. Detachment: an equally dismal failure. What she wanted was to know him again. To hold him. Something in her gut was hollering at her to take him in her arms and hold on tight, just as she had when he was thirteen years old and came to her days after his first change.
“I’m a wolf, Kels.”
“And you’re Trevor. And it’s going to be okay.”
“I can’t do anything about it.”
“You don’t have to.”
He had cried then. She’d never seen her boy cry before. His frame, sprouted whole inches in the last few days, quaked in her arms. He curled into himself as though he could ever again be small for his age. Kelsey, twelve and insecure in every other area of her life, kept her arms wrapped around her best friend and pressed her cheek to his chest, eliminating as much as possible any space between them, certain down to her bones that she was doing the right thing for him, the thing Trevor needed most in this moment.
“Please don’t let go of me.”
“I’ll never do that, Trevor.”
No avoidance. No detachment. The opposite of both burned in her gut while they worked together to ready Maggie’s home for her recovery. While they moved quietly around the house, crossing paths as needed, awkwardness dissipated well before he left. When at last he said goodbye and got in his army-green pickup, Kelsey cursed herself and jogged out to motion for him to lower the driver’s window.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Um, Aaron invited me to the cookout tomorrow.”
He nodded. He’d known somehow. Wolf senses, or something.
“I just wanted to say… I’ll see you there.”
Sandy eyebrows arched. “I don’t have to be there tomorrow. We get together every weekend.”
While this was Kelsey’s one chance to socialize before surgery; afterward, Maggie might need her too much. “Don’t stay away on my account, Trevor.”
