That night I shifted and went to Andrea’s.
She wasn’t in her usual spot, was instead on the top step with her knees pulled up and her arms wrapped around them, making herself small. Red-rimmed eyes, puffy face, and when she saw me her expression crumpled for a second before she pulled it back together.
“Hey, Fin.” Her voice was thick.
She didn’t reach for me right away. I pushed my head against her arm until she uncurled enough to let me in, pressed my body against her side. Her hand dropped onto my back and just held there, still, resting.
“I took Buddy back today.” She stared straight ahead at the dark yard. “He was doing so much better. He let me hold him this morning, like really hold him, arms around his neck, and he didn’t shake at all. Then I had to hand the leash to Mary and walk out and he just stood there watching me leave, Fin. Stood there and watched me walk away and I sat in my car and cried for twenty minutes like an absolute disaster.”
My jaw clenched. I hated this. Hated hearing the thickness in her voice and not being able to do a damn thing about it, hated being four-legged and silent when every part of me wanted to shift back and pull her in and tell her she wasn’t a disaster, she was the best person I’d ever met.
“My house is so quiet.” Her voice dropped. “I come home and there’s just nothing. No sound, no one. I call my grandma on Sundays because sometimes that’s the only day all week I hear a voice that isn’t work.”
My wolf pressed forward so hard my vision blurred for a second. She was lonely. Genuinely, deeply lonely, and she was saying it to a dog because she had nobody else to say it to. I wanted to howl, wanted to shift right here on this porch and grab her face and tell her she’d never be alone again if she’d let me, that I’d fill every quiet room and every Sunday and every goddamn second she felt like nobody was there.
She leaned her head against the railing post. “Finneas brushed my shoulder the other day. In the hallway, walking past me to the conference room. His hand touched my shoulder and I know it was an accident, I know that, but my whole arm went warm and I just stood there like a complete idiot for god knows how long. Someone from accounting had to ask me if I was okay.”
It wasn’t a goddamn accident. I’d spent ten minutes planning that brush. Waiting until she was in the hallway, adjusting my stride so the back of my hand would graze her shoulder as I passed. A Lycan King orchestrating a hallway collision like a teenager. Pathetic. And then I replayed it for the rest of the day: her skin warm through fabric, that freeze mid-step, the catch in her breath barely audible to anyone but me. I almost turned around right there. Almost said her name and let everything crack open in a hallway at two in the afternoon. Kept walking instead. My hand burned for a fucking hour after.
She laughed, but it was tired. “I have a crush on my boss and I confess it on my porch to a stray dog. That’s where my life is at, Fin. Twenty-five years old, living alone, talking to you about a man who probably doesn’t think about me for a single second outside of work.”
Hell. Fucking hell.
I thought about her constantly. At council, in the shower, at 3 am when my wolf wouldn’t let me sleep. Her margin notes in pink pen and the way she cocked her hip when she argued with me and how her laugh sounded through the glass and how she looked when she was concentrating, pen behind her ear, bottom lip between her teeth. Every goddamn second of every goddamn day, and she was sitting here telling a dog that I probably didn’t spare her a thought.
She reached for her book but only half-heartedly. Read a few pages in a flat voice, none of the usual energy, and after one chapter she closed it and set it aside.
“I don’t want to read tonight. I just want to sit here.”
So we sat. The neighborhood was quiet around us, her hand on my back, neither of us moving. A car passed on the next street and somewhere in the distance a dog barked, a real one, and Andrea’s fingers twitched against my fur before going still.
What she’d said was sitting in my chest like a fist. Twenty-five and alone and confessing her feelings to a stray on a porch. What she didn’t know was that I had a pack of hundreds and a company with thousands of employees and I had never felt less alone than right here. Every room I walked into was full of people who bowed or deferred or calculated. Nobody in my entire goddamn life talked to me the way she did. Argued with me, made me laugh, made me want to be something better just by being in the same room.
I could fix this. All of it. Tell her the truth, shift back right here on this porch, show her who Fin really was, explain the bond and the mate pull and every lie I’d been living for two years. End her loneliness tonight.
But that would also terrify her, break every rule my kind had about revealing ourselves to humans, and destroy the trust she had in the one version of me she actually felt safe with.
So I didn’t. I stayed still and I kept my mouth shut and I let her sit in the quiet with her hand on my fur and I hated myself for every second of it.
After a long time her breathing changed, slower, deeper, and her head tipped sideways against the railing post.
She wasn’t alone. Not really. She had me, even if she didn’t know it yet, and that was the part killing me slowly every single night.
My wolf was harder to control with every visit, the distance between what I wanted and what I allowed myself shrinking each time she said my name on this porch. The pressure had been building for months and I could feel it constant in my chest, an ache that didn’t ease when I shifted back, that followed me into work and council and every minute in between.
I stayed until she woke, stiff and blinking. Stayed while she went inside with one last pat on my head and a mumbled goodnight. Then an hour after the lights went off, just sitting on her damn porch in the dark like a man who’d lost every shred of self-preservation he ever had.
I was going to break. Soon. And I wasn’t sure anymore that I wanted to stop it.
6
— • —
Andrea
I was buried in Finneas’s calendar, rearranging a double-booked Thursday that was going to give me a migraine if I didn’t fix it in the next ten minutes, when the elevator dinged and a guy walked out who clearly did not work on this floor.
Late twenties, navy suit that fit like it cost more than my rent, brown hair pushed back, and he was already grinning before he was halfway across the room. He made a beeline for my desk with the confidence of someone who had never once second-guessed where he was going.
