“It wasn’t medicine,” she protested, as she dropped the jersey and looked up at him. Though staring at his completely earnest face wasn’t any easier than staring at his side. He still looked just a little too eager. And, plus, now he was trying to make her face the other elephant in the room.
The magic elephant, which he somehow believed she had made.
“Whatever it was,” he said. “It happened.”
“Okay but. Maybe it wasn’t the soup I created.”
“Then what would you suggest did it, exactly?”
“It could have been your werewolf powers kicking in late.”
He chuffed out a laugh at that. And shook his head too. Like she was beingthatridiculous. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“Well, I don’t know, Seth. I just learned about this stuff ten seconds ago.”
“And I didn’t. So I know what happened. Whatever you make doesn’t just work the way your grandmother’s soup did. It isn’t just a cobble-level thing. It doesn’t just lessen the impact of transforming or make me less aggressive. It actually obliterates it. It stops it in its tracks. And then it reverses whatever transforming did to me.”
Again, with that surety. That confidence in all the mad things he was saying. It was unshakable, in a way she was starting to find very frustrating. Mainly because she had no way of knowing, as things stood, about how right he could possibly be. He had all the understanding and she had none of it, and that made raising questions incredibly difficult.
But damn it, she had to try.
“Okay, but you can’t know that for certain yet. I mean, don’t you have to, like, wait for a full moon to see if it has that effect? Because it might come and you might drink the stuff and then still turn,” she pointed out.
But all he did was look at her like she was mad.
“The moon isn’t what makes me transform. It’s usually—” Hestopped midsentence and swallowed thickly. Then his eyes seemed to briefly skitter away from hers. Like it was hard to think about. Though if it was, the difficulty passed pretty quickly. “It’s usually other things. Different things for different wolves. Maybe some turn because they get angry. Or sad. Or too happy. Maybe for others it happens because of hormone… fluctuations. Something spikes inside them and a kind of countdown starts. And when that happens with me, I can do all my breathing exercises and maybe play solitaire or stick my… my head in a freezer to slow it down. But sooner or later it will happen. It was starting to happen again this morning when I woke up… in an agitated state. Then I drank that soup, and you know what I feel now?”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing.”
He leaned forward as he breathed the word.
Which put them very close together, because apparentlyshehad been leaning forward too. And she couldn’t stop, because now he was explaining exactly what that one word meant. “For the first time in ten years, my whole body feels quiet. It feels completely at peace. It feels normal. Do you know what it’s like to get even five minutes of normality? To not have my heart race and pound, and my skin feel like it’s burning off my body, and my gums ache until I think my teeth are trying to burst right out of my head? I can’t even make out the pain of all the old scars. Because that groove wasn’t alone—I had dozens. Look at this.”
He turned his back to her, lifting his jersey again as he did. This time, however, it wasn’t quite as jarring. She didn’t have the urge to avoid looking at the smooth expanse of skin he revealed, right up to the nape of his neck. No, she had the urge to do the opposite. She almost stepped forward to see it more closely.
Even though she didn’t need to. He was already making things clear.
“Four yearsmy left shoulder blade has been in the wrong place. You’d never know it now. That arm you saw yesterday, I thought I’d be living with that for the rest of my life. Check it out. Gone.Like it was never there. And then there’s what seems to be going on here,” he said, in a way that sounded ominous. Though she didn’t realize how ominous, until he started unbuttoning his jeans.
And then it was flustered panic time, again.
“Oh my god, I believe you, I believe you, please do not take those off, okay? I’m already at my limit. The sight of your probably enormous werewolf dong will absolutely push me over the edge,” she blurted out before she could stop and think about it. And even though that meant she’d accidentally talked about his penis, she couldn’t regret it.
Because itdidmake him hesitate.
But then he said this: “Cassie, I was just going to show you my thigh.”
And her face immediately went all hot again. “Right. Right. Your thigh. Of course,” she squeezed out. Much to his amusement-slash-indignation.
“I mean, what do you take me for?”
“Sorry, I’m just all shaken up.”
“I know, but come on. I’d at least warn you before I flashed that huge thing.”
He shook his head, still appalled by her terrible assumptions.
