She turned into the parking lot on a sigh. Maybe she was making a tempest in a teapot—a carefully labeled, cross-referenced, color-coded tempest in the right teapot, complete with a legend and footnotes, which was arguably worse. Maybe she should think a little less and make her decisions when decisions need to be made.
Regardless of all the mental gymnastics she’d just put herself through on the drive over, her heart went immediately into overdrive when she saw his truck already parked there and his gorgeous self leaning against it.
Alright then.
She got out of the car, then went back in to get the backpack she’d forgotten on the backseat. Perfect start. That only sank even more when she started toward him, and he smiled. He just smiled, and she was ready to bury herself in him.
What the hell? It was even worse than usual.
“Good evening,” he said. If he’d hoped to mask the tiny flare of his nostrils and the consequent grinding of his teeth before forcing a relaxed stance, he’d failed. But she wasn’t starting the night by pointing it out.
“Good evening to you, too. You’re not only on time, but early.”
He pushed off the car and chuckled, and it skidded down her spine like the first measure of a song she loved and knew by heart. “The pack is too distracted on a full moon to give me grief.”
The spike in longing—there was no other word for it, she’d tried several—when he took both her hands in his and brushed a kiss to her cheek probably needed to be studied at length. In a controlled environment. With proper documentation. “Hello, Zoe,” he greeted her again, but this time it was low and deep, and it held a sky full of stars and the weight of something only the night fully understood. Then he motioned toward the trail entrance, keeping her hand in his. “Shall we?”
She just smiled, and they walked in—him first, because... safety.
The forest at nine-fifteen on the solstice was something different entirely. The sun hadn’t gone to bed so much as it had started getting ready for it, pulling its light back in slow, unhurried degrees. It left the sky above the tree line not dark, not light, but something in between. The air was cooling but still carried the smell of a warm June afternoon. The distant sound of a creek threaded somewhere close. Everything was ripe, and soft, and slow.
She’d been in this forest at dawn, in the middle of sunny afternoons, and at dusk. Never like this. This felt different, like a secret. One she was sharing with him.
She almost said that out loud, then didn’t. It was too honest for the first five minutes of a hike, and besides, there was something in him tonight she sensed and was still trying to read. She filed the secret away for later and watched him instead as they walked without urgency. His stride matched hers, as if he’d calibrated himself to her pace without thinking about it, and there was still that protection—the branches he lifted before she had to duck, how he slowed half a step whenever the trailnarrowed and put himself through first, or how his free hand drifted toward her elbow on the uneven ground before she’d seen the root. But there was a tension, controlled and banked, running through him.
She noticed and decided, for now, to leave that alone, too.
“Jade was glowing,” she offered instead, because it was true and because the silence, while not uncomfortable, had an edge to it she couldn’t quite locate. “More than usual, which is really saying something. She was exactly where she needed to be, and she knew it.” She glanced up at him. “It was good to see.”
“Mm.” He nodded. “Letha does that. Makes all glow. Or, more.”
“Is that a general magiks thing?”
“Some more than others. Oreads and Elves are the ones most affected by it.”
“Not you? As in, all of you growlings.”
“Not particularly, no.”
“Is that why you didn’t go to the celebration?”
He shrugged, helped her through a rocky, narrow patch. “Sometimes I go, but not on a full moon.”
She nodded and would have asked him more questions, but for one, it already sounded enough like an interrogation, and for another, she had noticed that tightness again—a tightness he managed with clearly considerable effort and was obviously hoping didn’t show.
His jaw was set a fraction tighter than usual. His eyes darted for the deep trees more than the trail. His grip on her hand was slightly more present than it needed to be. “Rex?”
“Mm.”
“You’re tense.”
The trail rose slightly under their feet. “I’m fine.”
“I know you’re fine.” She watched his profile in the fading light. “I said you were tense. Not the same thing.”
He was quiet long enough that she thought he might let it go, then he exhaled through his nose. “The moon,” he said. “On a full moon, the wolf feels it more than usual. Everything is louder. Instinct. Scent.” A pause in which he glanced at her and quickly turned away. “The pull of it.”
“Pull toward what?”
