Mac blinked at me. I bit back my smirk as he tried to follow my logic and failed. “And…?”
“And I needed chopped tomatoes,” I said, as if it were obvious. I mean, it was tome,but not everyone’s brain was as awesome as mine. “So the pasta went back in the cupboard when the tomatoes came out.”
Mac chuckled as he shook his head. “Okay.”
We exchanged idle chitchat as Mac put away the rest of my shopping. I knew better than to interfere. It stressed Mac out to have things in the ‘wrong’ place. How he determined what the ‘right’ place was was something I’d never learned. But what Ihadlearned was that it was easier to just let him get on with things. It made Mac happy and was no skin off my nose. If anything, I appreciated how organised my kitchen was.
Even if I could never remember exactly where to put things, it didn’t matter. Mac just relocated them on his next visit.
Mac folded my bags for life and somehow fitted them in the cupboard under the sink. I watched with a wince, wondering if I’d hit a hundred bags yet. It wasn’t my fault Iforgot them every time I went shopping. Bryce often said that if they were bags for life, I better hope I’d live to be a thousand years old.
It was the one joke I had to force a laugh for. My friends knew everything about me…except that I was born a human to a clan of shifters. It wasn’t the secrecy surrounding supes that had me holding my tongue. I trusted them all with my life. It wasn’t them not believing me, either. Sure, it might take them a while to wrap their heads around it, but they were all open-minded blokes. It was easy to explain when you knew where to look for evidence. Given my understanding of how compulsion nets worked, I knew I could find enough to convince them.
My silence was born of fear. Fear that they too might see me as an anomaly. That they’d side with my clan. That they’d judge me for being born a human when I should’ve been born a shifter.
It was a baseless fear. Mac, Cole, and Bryce had accepted me for who I was. They loved me as fiercely as I loved them. They were the family I’d chosen for myself.
But fear wasn’t rational. It couldn’t be reasoned away.
Not when it ran this deep.
It was too difficult to laugh when Bryce teased me about needing to be immortal, because that was what I should’ve been.
I should’ve been born strong.
Fast.
Supernatural.
But I hadn’t.
It didn’t matter that I had no control or say in being human. It didn’t matter that I understood that. Nothing could stop me feeling like a failure. Brains were funny that way. Neural pathways took years to be written. The onesthat were formed during your early years were particularly difficult to change.
Most of the time, it didn’t bother me. But then there’d be something stupid, like the bags for life, and I’d be back in the clan. In my father’s office. His voice ringing in my ears.
“Useless.”
“Weak.”
“Abomination.”
“A waste.”
“Right.” Mac clapped his hands together, dragging me back to the present. “Let’s go discuss your SOS. Are we talking nuclear level meltdown? Or ‘lost your keys’ level?”
I shook off the lingering ghosts of the past and hopped off the counter. “Nuclear. Although I have lost my keys too.”
“They’re here.” Bryce tossed them to me as I entered the living room. “Found them in the bathroom sink.”
I frowned down at them, walking through my morning to try and figure out how I’d left them there. Nope. It was too long ago to remember.
“Reid,” Mac barked. “What are you doing?”
I froze, hand half in my pocket. “Um, putting my keys away?”
Mac gave a long-suffering sigh before plucking them from my fingers. “They live on the hook, babe. We’ve been through this.”
I shoved Cole’s feet off the sofa and plopped down where they’d been. “I don’t know why he bothers. We all know I’ll forget.”
