It cost me. I felt hollowed out, raw, scraped clean.
But for the first time in years, the empty space didn’t fill with guilt. It filled with her.
22
— • —
Andrea
“I want to see your wolf again,” I said. “The real one.”
We were in the library. Book on my knee, tea going cold on the side table, the usual. I tried to sound casual about it, like I was asking about the weather and not requesting that the man I was sleeping with turn into a massive predator in front of me.
He looked up from his laptop. “Any particular reason?”
“I’ve only seen it once, and I was busy having a nervous breakdown at the time. I’d like to actually enjoy the experience without the hyperventilating and the existential crisis, if that’s okay with you.”
He closed the laptop and looked at me like he was deciding whether I was serious. “Tonight. After dinner.”
He took me to the forest behind the estate at dusk. The trees were tall and close, the air smelling like pine and damp earth, the last of the daylight filtering gold through the canopy. I was wearing completely the wrong shoes for hiking, flats that were already sinking into the soft ground, but I didn’t care.
He pulled his shirt off and I watched because I was going to watch every damn time he took his shirt off for the rest of my life, wolf form or not. The muscles in his back moved in the fading light, the stubble on his jaw catching shadow, and I should have been focusing on the wolf thing but the shirtless thing was right there and I was only human.
“Stop staring,” he said without turning around.
“Stop being shirtless.”
“I have to be shirtless. I’m about to shift.”
“Convenient excuse.”
The shift took a few seconds. His body rearranged, stretched, fur spreading across his skin in a wave of dark color, bones reshaping under the surface with sounds I tried not to think too hard about. Then the wolf was standing in front of me.
I’d never seen this form. On the porch I’d seen Fin become Finneas, wolf shrinking into man. I’d never seen it go the other direction, never seen his real size. Fin the husky came up to my thigh. This wolf’s head was level with my chest, coal-black, paws bigger than my hands, amber eyes that caught the last of the sunset. He was still, watching me, and every instinct I had should have been screaming to back away from the massive predator standing three feet in front of me. My heart washammering, not from fear exactly, but from the sheer size of him, the power radiating off his body, the knowledge that this was what he actually was underneath the suits and the desk and the grunts. This was the real thing.
I walked up to him anyway. My legs were shaking slightly and I didn’t care. I scratched behind his ears. “There you are, you big dramatic bastard.”
He nuzzled me so hard I stumbled backward, grabbing onto his fur to keep from falling. I laughed, and he licked my face. A full wet stripe from chin to forehead. I shrieked and shoved his enormous head sideways.
“I will never get used to that. Ever.”
He did it again.
“Finneas, I swear to God, if you lick my face one more time I’m going to...”
He licked my face.
“You’re disgusting. You’re a disgusting wolf and I’m filing a complaint.”
We walked through the forest together, my hand on his back, the heat of him constant under my palm. His fur was coarser than Fin’s husky form, thicker, muscle shifting underneath with every step. He was enormous next to me, his shoulder at my waist, his stride covering three of mine. He kept slowing down to match my pace, which was both sweet and slightly humiliating.
“You know, when I pictured romantic walks in the woods, my date was usually on two legs,” I said. “Just for the record.”
He looked at me sideways. Even as a wolf he had that expression, tolerating my comment without dignifying it with a response.
“Also taller. And less furry. And not capable of eating me if the date went badly.”
He huffed, which I chose to interpret as amusement.
