Only when the lump in my throat begins to feel like a possible hazard does he turn to me. He reaches over and wraps those massive hands of his around my shoulders. He even gives me a little shake, to get my attention.
But I like it, because it knocks that sob right out of my throat.
“I like that you’re educated, Maddox. It’s hot. I like that you’re different. I fucking love that you’re so hell-bent on proving your worth to the pack. There are a lot of other pack members who should do the same, though they never will, because they think simply existing in the pack is enough. You’ve been proving yourself for years. Do you think I don’t see that? I do.”
“Then what does it matter which full moon we choose?” I ask, my voice quiet with all the apprehension and fear, longing and need at war inside me. “Why can’t we take our own time?”
“We had time,” he tells me. “And we’re rapidly approaching a point where I can’t protect you anymore. We might be past it.”
I blow out a breath. “That point would be where youdecidenot to. Is this about us, Ty? Or is this about your ego?”
I realize once I say it that Iwanthim to explode. That Iwanthim to storm off or yell or ignite into that flame we only ever douse a little by fucking it out.
What I don’t want is the way he looks at me like he knows me, inside and out. Like he can see every thought, dark and light and in between, that scrolls through my head.
Like I might be the book smart one, but I’m the only book he reads—and he knows me by heart.
I don’t even know what argument I’m making, especially when he doesn’t explode. When he doesn’t bring his temper into play, that means I can’t either, and I feel ... entirely too many other things instead. None I want to name.
He grips my shoulders tighter and pulls me toward him. I expect him to growl something in my face. Maybe even bite me.
Instead, he kisses me.
It’s a bruising, beautiful kiss. It’s somehow all the passion we always have but wrapped up in frustration, longing, and that bittersweet understanding that neither one of us can have exactly what we want.
That we don’t get to be Ty and Maddox, following our own road. We don’t get to do anything separate from the pack, no matter how much I wish we could. Ty is a king. I’m his queen or I’m no one.
There are no in-betweens. There never have been.
I know full well that if he hadn’t carved out these spaces for me, my life would look completely different. Unrecognizably so. If he hadn’t supported me, likely with teeth and claws over the years now that I consider it, I never would have had what autonomy I do now.
He might give me a hard time, but he sure as hell doesn’t let anyone else do it, not directly. But that’s changing too. That’s part of why all of this hurts so much, I understand as his mouth teases mine.
Because it’s over. It’s just a question of when. And how.
Ty kisses me again and again, a dance of tongue and teeth.
It’s a kind of mating. It breaks my heart.
Every slide of his mouth on mine breaks my heart and makes it bigger, and if I had ever known how to stop loving this man, this glorious creature, I’d like to think I would have. I would have run off from New York. I wouldhave lost myself, given up my wolf, and lived in cities too large and too packed tight with people for anyone to track me.
I toyed with the idea of those escapes from time to time, but I always came back to this.
To him.
Now there’s no pretending that anything’s going to change. Now there’s just us.
He pulls away and looks down at me, his dark eyes full of realizations that look a lot like the ones in my head. He runs his thumb over my lips and for a moment, out here in an early morning with no one around, he closes his eyes as he rests his forehead against mine.
I know he’s feeling all the same things that I am. I know that he’s more than the tough-as-nails alpha, the undefeated fighter, the most powerful werewolf in living memory.
For a moment, here with me, he’s just Ty.
And I think, maybe this will work out after all. Because beneath pack and fate and noise and full moons, tradition that scares me and traditions that will claim us both, there’s this.
Us.
Maybe moments pass. Maybe it’s half a day. I can’t tell, but when he pulls away he kisses me again, right between my eyes.
