She knew things wouldn’t change much between them, after that. Because of course whatever lust he was feeling toward her wasn’t real. It was just a weird werewolf thing, triggered by events he barely understood. Like a gushing comment, or too much contact after too little, or violent assholes making him be all protective. Or her scent, which was most likely loaded with all kinds of hormones and pheromones and other chemicals his body appreciated.
And she could simply avoid every one of those things.
The assholes weren’t going to be coming back any time soon to trigger protectiveness on Seth’s part.They’re afraid of you,he told her simply, when she asked.You made them shift their whole territory twenty miles away. I checked them out a few days ago and they ran when they caught my scent.
So that was that. Or, at least, it was for now.
And as for the other triggers, well. She could easily stop herself from gushing over him, or touching him unexpectedly. Neither of those were things she had done intentionally, or liked doing. Which only left her scent—and there were definitely ways to mask it.
A simple blocking potion, used like soap and shampoo, saw to that.
By the time he came over next, she felt pretty sure she smelled like nothing to him. In fact, she knew she did, because after she’d called for him to come in, he just stood tensely in the archway that led into the kitchen. Breath held, shoulders hunched, one hand raised. Like he was just there for a quick hello. A reassurance, she thought, that he hadn’t abandoned her.
And that felt pretty awesome, she had to say.
But even more awesome when she saw the realization dawn all over his face.
His expression went from strained panic, to a kind of soft confusion, to something so full of relief it made her heart lift. And he let himself come into the kitchen. Tentatively, while taking slow breaths. But he did it. He got all the way to the kitchen table. Tried sitting down, just to see how it went.
And when he managed, oh the laugh that broke out of him. “Fuck, that is so smart. A scent blocker. Why didn’t I think of that?” he asked, then seemed perfectly content to be across from her. As if everything else—her face, her body, her personality—meant precisely nothing to him, attraction-wise. And that was good. It was fine.
It was great, in fact. It meant they had a stopgap now.
A way to spend time together—both as friends, and as a team to work on his problem.
Because if she was being honest, she already knew she was going to need his help. This potion—to break the connection between horniness and turning, or to stop him from feeling desires he didn’t want—felt complicated, in a way the other potions hadn’t. In fact, every time she tried to think about it, her mind seemed to slide sideways, or circle it nervously, or give her answers she didn’t understand.
You need to satisfy the requirements, it kept telling her.
And all of this made her really glad for his presence. And not just because it meant he could offer solutions or suggestions, or give her clippings of his hair and his fur and other bananas stuff like that. No, there was also something else. Something he had often done back when they were kids, and now just started up again like it was nothing.
He organized the study area.
She had spilled the contents of her old pencil case over the table; he neatly lined up all the pens and pencils and erasers and highlighters. Then he grabbed the two guides whose pages she’d been dog-earing, and replaced the folded corners with little Post-itlabels. Ones that he scribbled on, and cross-referenced, in a notepad she didn’t remember having.
She saw him jot down ingredients and how to obtain them—like fairyroot, which involved burying an item owned by a fairy beneath a patch of moss, and frostweed, which could be found growing over anything dead beneath a frozen lake. Then he added questions to terms that weren’t quite clear. Need to find out what molloch is, he wrote, on a tag he applied next to the circled and mysteriously definitionless word.
And finally, he tidied the file she’d opened on her laptop.
Instead ofhiw to hekp an horny wwrwolf, in a terrible font, it became:How to Help a Hungry Werewolf, in his favorite one, Book Antiqua.
Because she had always been the sloppy ideas girl, and he had always been the tidy idea polisher, and apparently nothing had changed. They just fell back into their old patterns, like it was nothing. Like horny awkwardness wasn’t even a thing.
In fact, by day three she was starting to think it possibly wasn’t.
That maybe he had gotten worked up over nothing.
It’s not just that he isn’t actually attracted to you that’s keeping him calm, her mind suggested.But the fact that lots of simple, boring exposure to the way you are is actively killing whatever pheromones and danger and touching briefly created.
And okay, that sounded a little extreme. But a lot of things did seem to bear it out.
Like the day before, when their hands had accidentally brushed as she passed him a spoonful of potion to try. The contact had sent a jolt all the way up her arm. It had made her drop the spoon. But he had just mused about the taste of the sample.Sort of reminds me of root beer,he had said. Nice, but does nothing at all.
And then there was that morning. When she’d leaned over him without thinking to look at something he’d pointed to on the laptop screen.Shehad immediately registered the mistake.Shehad felt every inch of that sliver of space between them, like a crackling forcefield she shouldn’t cross.
But he hadn’t. He’d just smiled at her blandly.
Like it was all nothing to him, in a way she should have felt relieved about. Shewasrelieved about it. There was no other way to feel, if she was being honest about it. Things were exactly as they had always seemed. They were exactly as they were supposed to be, in every single possible way. Because even though he had shown her he wasn’t an ass about how she was, he was still the kind of man who dated Prom Queens.
