“Yeah.”
The volleyball game was too boisterous for any real quiet to settle, yet a stillness and silence leaked from Sydney. At last she blinked and looked away toward another ring of chairs. Oh, there was Ezra, sitting with Jeremy and Lucy while their three little girls played at their feet.
“You never wanted to come home?” Sydney said quietly.
“Of course I did. But not if he… I couldn’t call this place home without him.”
“I guess I wouldn’t either, if Cassius said we couldn’t be together.” She shook her head. “Not the same thing, of course. We’re mates. But still.”
Kelsey’s cheeks warmed. “Itwasthe same thing, and you should know that as well as anybody. I—” She didn’t want to say it, not as long as Sydney sat there in judgment, but maybe if she did say it, she’d be believed and accepted again. “I loved him with everything I had, Syd. Wouldn’t it have hurt you just as much if Cassius said thatbeforeyou got married?”
“Well…yes.” Sydney cocked her head. “But we’re mates.”
“I just told you—”
Ember put up her hands in ahushgesture to both of them. “Kelsey, you know mates and spouses aren’t one and the same, right? Since you grew up here?”
Aaron’s voice came to her, overflowing with joy.“Meet my mate…”So it wasn’t some wolf slang forwife? It was something else? She shook her head.
“I guess as a kid I didn’t hear details either,” Sydney said. “No reason to.”
“Okay, um, so tell me now.”
“Short version,” Ember said. “A wolf experiences a lot more intensity when he finds the woman he wants to be with. He doesn’t have to date her to know it’s her. It’s sort of an overwhelming instinctiveyesin his head, and it comes with immediate physical awareness of her and a major protective drive. And it’s…uh… This might sound weird, but it’s fated. Like, we can’t really escape it? Or I guess we could, but it would majorly suck for him.”
“Wait,” Kelsey whispered, but she couldn’t tell what she wanted them to wait for. Maybe for her brain to catch up. Maybe for this somehow not to be true, because if it was… “A wolf has to be with this person fate picked out? And he knows her as soon as he meets her?”
“I… Yeah, I think so,” Ember said, and her voice had gone terribly gentle. “That’s how it was for Aaron, the day he met me.”
Six weeks from meeting to marriage made more sense now. If he knew the right path, Aaron wasn’t one to delay walking it. “Oh.”
“You just turned sort of gray,” Sydney said.
A weird choking sound escaped her. Words had abandoned her head.
“Kelsey, really, are you okay?”
Oh, shut up, Sydney. She hunched up in the chair and hid her face in her hands. Shame oozed up from a pit inside her she’d thought she’d covered well enough to hide forever. The shame of being sent away by the boy she loved, the shame of not knowing why, and now the shame of hoping this cookout might matter for the two of them, might be a milestone they could look back on in a few decades.“And if we hadn’t reunited that afternoon at Aaron’s and really talked for the first time since…”Right. Talked for three minutes, until he fled her and disappeared into the house.
She hadn’t even noticed how big her hope had grown. Now it seeped out of her, rancid.
An arm came around her shoulders. She wanted it to be Trevor’s sister, wanted Sydney to want her as the best person in the world for Trevor. For Trevor’s mate. But the voice close to her ear was Ember’s instead.
“You still love him. You never stopped.”
Kelsey sat up, away from the support. She had to be tougher than this. Not as if it changed anything. Well, anything but her stupid hope. But when she found the words, they wouldn’t come louder than a whisper. “He wouldn’t have done it, if we’d been…mates. He wouldn’t have been able to.”
“I don’t know.”
Well, Kelsey did. The truth was obvious.
“I mean, maybe it’s different for different people. Maybe it can take longer for some wolves. You met him when you were kids, so maybe that can affect it too.”
“Not for twenty years. No, I’m…I’m not it. Right, Syd?”
“I don’t think so,” Sydney said. “But…”
Across the yard charged Ezra. He was coming directly toward them, and Ember stood to meet him head-on. Wow, she really took this hostess thing seriously.
