“TikTok is what keeps me going,” I replied primly as I snaked a hand underneath the blanket and yanked Juneau out of her hiding place. “Don’t be embarrassed, it was my fault.”
If Juneau’s face got any redder, I was afraid she would explode. “It wasn’t just you,” she muttered, staring at her lap. I wanted to tilt her chin up and kiss her again, but of course Rex had to chime in at the worst possible moment. The asshole.
“Don’t get too attached, all of you, she’s going back home in two months.” With that lovely reminder, Rex crawled out of the nest, leaving the rest of us behind.
Juneau frowned as she turned to look over at Podcast with an expression that I could only describe as conflicted.
‘We’ll make the most of it,’he signed, looking just as upset about the information as I felt.
I wasn’t going to make the most of it. I was going to spend every day of the next two months trying to convince Juneau that her place wasn’t in the past, but in the future with us.
Chapter Eighteen
Rex’sbaronaFriday night was always bustling. People filled the booths laughing and drinking while others surrounded the four pool tables by the entrance, doing their best to pocket the balls while inebriated and laughing when they failed utterly.
It wasn’t often that I wandered into the bar when it was open. It usually made me anxious to be in a room packed full of so many people, but tonight was special.
Juneau had finally convinced Rex and Doc to let her sit and watch how the bar looked when it was full. It had taken wheedling, cajoling and a little bit of a fit being thrown for them to finally agree and even then we had a long list of rules to follow.
She wasn’t allowed to leave the table next to the door that led into the house, I had to sit near her the entire time, and if anyone approached our table we were to go inside the house immediately.
Juneau had agreed, her eyes sparkling with the idea of a new experience. I knew better, the bar experience was… not my favorite. But I had noise canceling headphones for both of us and enough TV shows queued up on my laptop to fill the night in case she got bored.
Juneau wasn’t bored, far from it actually. She completely was enamored by all of the people laughing and having fun, her eyes glued to them as they roared with laughter or danced next to the jukebox.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she half-shouted into my ear as a group of older men took a group-shot of whiskey at the bar top.
‘It’s the same old thing to me,’I signed slowly with a little eye roll.‘Drunk guys spend their night getting wasted only to do the same thing all over again tomorrow.’
Her eyes watched my hands move and she grinned when I finished. She was getting much better at sign language, so much so that I found myself communicating more and more with her that way rather than typing things out on my phone.
“I always wondered what Timothy got up to at night. Especially when his idiot friends had to drag him home at the end of the evening,” she said, a fond smile on her face as she reminisced. “Now I see what all the fuss was about.”
The same feeling I always got when she talked about the past filled my chest. A week had passed since the huge storm that had ended with all of us inside of Juneau’s nest. Ever since then I found myself sneaking into her nest after the guys fell asleep just to be closer to her.
More often than not I found Bat already passed out next to her, sleeping as soundly as a baby amongst her mounds of blankets and pillows. There was a level of peace to Bat that I wasn’t used to seeing. He still muttered to himself sometimes, and still popped out of shadowy corners to scare the shit out of me, but he didn’t seem so tortured now.
We also now had an unspoken agreement that we were going to try to do everything possible to keep Juneau in the future with us. We just needed to get the rest of the pack on board.
Storm was easy, he was already there with us even if he didn’t say it out loud. I’d known it when he’d chosen to stay inside a few days ago and watch a movie with Juneau rather than enjoy the literal buckets of rain falling outside.
I also knew that Doc was almost there too, though getting him to admit to it would be a problem. Doc was the most honorable alpha I’d ever met, and he’d promised to help Juneau get back to the past. Even if he wanted her to stay, which I was pretty sure that he did, he wouldn’t make a move unless we pushed him into it.
Lastly, there was Rex. My sweet, grumpy Rex who was busy still pretending like he didn’t watch Juneau every time she walked into a room. If people wore their hearts on their sleeves, Rex kept his locked up tight deep inside of his chest. All of that coupled with the fact that he’d been working out his emotions at night inside of my nest and I was pretty sure that the growliest member of our pack liked Juneau a whole hell of a lot more than he was letting on.
I was going to get all of them on board. I had a plan, well, multiple plans. Maybe I was meddling too much and needed to chill the fuck out, but I would be damned if I let Juneau go back through that mirror without fighting for her first.
“Are you two behaving yourselves?” Doc asked as he dropped off a basket of fries smothered in thousand island dressing, my favorite.
“Of course, Podcast and I would never do anything against the rules,” Juneau replied saucily as she snagged a fry and popped it into her mouth. As she chewed her eyelashes fluttered and she let out the kinkiest little moan that I’d ever heard. “I’m adding french fries covered in whatever this sauce is to my list.”
“Your list?” Doc asked, his expression amused but his eyes filled with heat as he watched. I could feel through the bond just how hot that moan had made him and I gave the tether connecting us a playful little tug. His dark eyes found me and he mouthed the word ‘brat’ at me.
Juneau reached into the little tote bag that she’d taken to carrying everywhere with her lately. In it was a notebook and pens that I’d given her when she was still learning everything about the future. The pages were full of notes that included everything from sketches of hand signs to what not to put into the microwave (she’d learned to read the packages of certain wrappers after lighting a burrito on fire a few days ago).
She flipped through her notes before finding the page she was looking for and held it up. In neat, nearly calligraphic, handwriting she’d titled the page ‘Juneau’s favorite things about the future.’
“Television, soft blankets, microwaveable foods, computers, the internet…” A smile formed on Doc’s lips as he read.
