There were no basics, not this time. Willow set the dusting rag and furniture spray beside her door, to be put away in the morning. Nothing left to clean. Nothing to do with her hands. Saffron plopped into the stuffed chair, and Willow sat on her bed.
“Willow? Did something happen?”
“Yeah, um, you know how, before the art fair, we were throwing suspicions around, and one of them was Ezra’s physical type?”
“Sure.” She gave a faint gasp. “The lupine physical type?”
“Wolf,” Willow said. “Not lupine. They don’t use that word. But…yes.”
Saffron sat in silence. She stared until Willow had to look away. This was harder than it ought to be. Felt almost dangerous somehow for Saffron to know, which Willow hadn’t considered possible before this moment.
“Well, shoot,” Saffron said. “I’m sorry. I know you liked him a lot.”
For a moment Willow saw again the crumpling of Ezra’s face, the bowing of his head. “I still do, actually.”
“Oh, sure. I didn’t mean you could just shut it off overnight.”
“I didn’t find him out. I didn’t even have to ask. He told me because he wanted me to know, to be fair to me. That’s who he is. Private but honest.”
“A private but honest lupine.”
“Wolf.” If she could relearn language that had brought hurt in the past, then Saffron could too.
“Whatever.” Saffron stretched her legs so her feet dangled over one arm of the chair.
“No, Saffron. It’s one thing to use a word when you don’t know better, but now I do, and I’m not going to use it anymore. They call themselves wolves, and they prefer us to call them that too. It’s a small ask, all things considered.”
“What things considered?”
Willow drew her knees up and scooted back to sit against her pillows. She propped one up to cushion her back from the headboard. “I’m just saying, it’s not that hard to learn a new term for a group of people when one of them asks you to.”
Saffron sighed. “I’m not trying to be a jerk about it. I just don’t see that it matters much what they prefer. It’s not like you’re going to keep dating one of them.”
The thing she’d held out hope for: that Saffron wouldn’t expect her to break up with Ezra outright. That she would be cautiously willing to give him a chance. Willow held in a sigh of her own.
“What if Ezra’s not an anomaly? What if, just like humans, a wolf can be a jerk or he can be a good guy?”
An interminable silence followed. Willow’s eyes began to burn. There had to be something she could say, some piece of information she could impart that would make Saffron see she wasn’t being reckless here. Maybe her sister’s opinion of her would-be boyfriend shouldn’t matter. But it did.
“You know I’m just protective of you,” Saffron said. “You’d be protective of me, if the situation were flipped.”
That was true. Yet… “I hope I’d be open to your reasons. I hope I’d want to hear them.”
“It just sounds like maybe he’s got you a little swept up in your feelings right now, that’s all. I don’t feel like you’re hearing my objections.”
“Whatareyour objections anyway? He hasn’t done anything objectionable so far.”
She tried and failed to say it without an edge. Always, if her voice pitched toward frustration with Saffron, then her sister had to match her.
“I guess I didn’t say it clearly enough the first time,” Saffron snapped, and then her voice dropped to a whisper. Smart. Though eavesdropping wasn’t typical for their parents, it had happened. “He’s a freaking lupine.Yes, a lupine. It’s not a dirty word; it’s what they are according to science and DNA. You of all people can’t possibly want to argue with science. And science says lupines are prone to unreliable behavior, impulsivity, and aggression.”
“They’re also supposedly born with a lower base-level IQ and zero artistic interest. Does that sound like the guy who just took me to an art fair, appreciated every booth there, and builds his own gorgeous models of mountains and castles?”
“So he’s an exception, Willow. You know you can’t throw out all the science for one exception.”
Willow scooted to the foot of the bed as if shrinking the distance by a few feet could make her words more convincing. Her heart pounded with the adrenaline flood that always accompanied a fight with her sister.
She hated adrenaline.
