“No,” she said, then studied his face. “I think…time. Maybe a lot of time.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know what else.”
“Okay.”
“And…and I think that’s…all I have right now.”
He nodded, lifted her hands to his lips and kissed them. He would have let go, but she still clung to him. He couldn’t apologize again, couldn’t promise. Words would not make this right. He longed to hold her, to leave them both breathless with the kind of kiss meant to erase her fears. But that wouldn’t be right either, not now.
“I need to ask you something,” she said.
“Okay.”
She cocked her head at him. At last the heavy fragrance of her hurt was lifting, minute by minute, as a deep part of her revived. Her curiosity. Whatever she asked, Trevor would do his best to answer, even if she asked again about the fading.
She said, “You thought I deserved an epic life. I need to know why you think you don’t get to have one.”
Maybe she shouldn’t ask now, shouldn’t try to follow up everything she’d just spilled with a request that he pour out something of his own. But she had to understand this.
“Trevor, you wanted everything I did. Remember that summer we made foam boards of our bucket list destinations? And you printed pictures of Wales and Greece and New Zealand and Italy. And we were going to step foot in all fifty states.”
He fidgeted. He tried to tug his hands away, though he’d never done so while she spilled all her hurt. So she held onto him. He might need her grasp the way she had needed his a few minutes ago.
“We were ten and eleven,” he said, staring at their linked hands.
“So what?”
“So my life was still…”
“Still what? Normal? Human?”
“More or less.”
Somewhat less, growing up with the pack, his dad and then Ezra too heading off to the paddock overnight once a month. Her heart panged for him as she remembered how Trevor had held out hope for himself. In fact he’d held it out until the morning he woke up back in human form after spending a night with snout, fangs, and a four-legged gait.
Trevor simply sat there, holding her hands, gazing down at nothing. Clammed up wasn’t going to cut it.
“Trevor,” she said.
“It’s a fact, Kels. I’m chained to the paddock. Doesn’t matter that I’m never physically chained.”
“So in all these generations, no one in our pack has ever seen Italy or Greece or Wales? I don’t believe that for a minute.”
Our pack. Despite everything she’d just poured out, she still called them hers. It was reflexive, the only way she could think of them.
Trevor gave a weary shrug. “I don’t think they care much. Seems like wanderlust is rare for a wolf. Pack creatures, social creatures…grounded and steady.”
“Well, fine, you can break the mold then. We’ll find a way.”
“You want to see the world in twenty-day increments?”
“That would hardly be a tragedy, you know. But also the full moon doesn’t last a week.”
He recoiled so hard into himself, he tugged her hands toward him. Kelsey went with him, scooted forward a few inches on her knees. He didn’t appear to notice. She had touched on it somehow—the reason he’d ended what they had, and the thing that lay behind it.
“Hey,” she said. “Trevor, talk to me. Tell me.”
