“Okay.” He blinked once. “I think? That’s not what I sni–never mind.”
“I am livid. Because you are, quite frankly, the best man out there. Like,all around.” She gestured at him, a helpless sweep of her hand at his general everythingness. “You growl a lot, sure, but you care. For the pack, for the forest. For me. You’re loyal and dependable and so freaking smart. And falling for you would be so, so easy—with or without a bond. And here we are.” She sat on her hands, which was not dignified, but was necessary because she was not touching him right now. “Talking about this, about a hypotheticalus, like it’s a job offer.” She picked up a blade of grass and held it like a pen. “If you accept the position to be with this amazing man, he might get killed because of you, and his pack, the pack he loves and is devoted to, might hate you. Sign here and here, and the bond will be activated upon consummation.” A sound escaped her that was almost a laugh. “How sweet.”
She felt his temper as that pull that was always there, always pulsing, always calling, gave a sharp, discordant tug, like a string plucked wrong. “Would you have preferred I kept quiet?” he growled.
“I would have preferred if you dying wasn’t in the options.” The words came out raw, but she didn’t take them back. “I would have preferred being with you to not feel like flipping a switch—on with sex, off without. I would have preferred it to be easier.”
“I can’t change who I am. Or what I am.” His voice was rumbly, but something ached in the shadows of it. “I am a werewolf. I am the Alpha. Nothing about me is easy.”
“Yes, well. Cheers to that.”
“There is a choice, Zoe.” He said it gravelly, like those words were being dragged out of somewhere it hurt to reach. “You can walk away from this.”
“And not be with you.” She scoffed. “Great.”
“No. It’s not great.” Something crossed his face, quick and unguarded and gone. “Itsucks.But it would be unforgivable if I didn’t tell you everything. If I didn’t give you every piece of information I have so you can make this choice knowing its consequences.” She could see how much he worked to stay still, to stay here, to staythis, while everything in him wanted to answer the thing in the sky that kept calling. He was doing it for her; she knew it, but it was not helping.
“I come with a lot of baggage, Moonbeam. You’d become my Omega. The pack’s Omega. If you were a wolf, that would just be what it was. You’d know all of it; I wouldn’t need to explain. But you’re not, and that makes it more important, not less, that you are aware.” He swallowed, and for just a moment his eyes blurred at the edges with something vast, dark, and wild, before he reeled it back. “I’m sorry it feels cold and calculated. I’m sorry I can’t give you romance and time and easy, sorry that I can’t tell you things like, ‘let’s see where it goes.’ But I am who I am, and I will not trick you into a decision you haven’t made with your eyes open."
The tears had gone from occasional to just happening, and she noticed—the way you notice silly things when you are upset and possibly in shock and your brain hands you the wrong details because the right ones are too heavy—she noticed his hands. More different now than they’d been even ten minutes ago. The fingers longer, or justmore, somehow, the hands of a man and something other. His jaw was a hard line. His chest rose and fell with the effort of someone who had decided not to give in and was making that decision breath after breath. The moon was getting louder, the conversation upsetting, and he wasgetting quieter. She understood, dimly, that he was paying for this moment in a currency she couldn’t fully comprehend. “Does it hurt?” she asked. “Not shifting, when the moon’s like this?”
“Not in the way you might think.”
But it did, nonetheless. “You should go,” she said. “Do whatever you need to do. Is it dangerous for me? If you go?”
His nostrils flared slightly, just once. “No. No predator close by.”
“Then go.”
He looked at the trees, then back at her, as if instinct and reason argued. “Are you going to leave?” He’d asked it like he didn’t want to be afraid of the answer.
“No.” She crossed her legs again. “But I need to think, and with you this close, it’s—The pull to you is stronger tonight. It’s hard to think around it."
“Yes,” he said. Very quietly.
“Go, Rex.” She nodded toward the trees. “I’ll be here.”
“Are you sure?”
“You said sitting with me in wolf form would be okay.” She looked at him, and something in her chest twirled. “So let’s do this: you have your run or whatever you need. Give me a little room. Come back. We talk.”
He took her hand. Brought it to his lips and held it there. A promise in a language that was older than the one they’d been using all night. “I’ll be close,” he said against her knuckles.
She nodded. “Go.”
When he walked to the trees and undressed, she meant to look away. She did not look away. The dark was full but notthatfull, and she was not, apparently,thatdisciplined. Moonlight bounced off the broad line of his shoulders, the shift of muscle, and an ass he had absolutely no business having.
And then the wolf was there instead, massive and silver-black in the moonlight, impossibly still for something that size.He padded back to her, pushed his great head against her shoulder, warm and solid and smelling like pine and wild, and she felt, again, that stupid, inconvenient, apparently cosmically ordained pull, steady as a heartbeat. “Just go, Rex.”
A low sound in his chest. Not quite a whine; not quite anything she had a word for. Then he leaped into the trees, and the clearing went quiet. She sat alone under the moon with entirely too much to think about.
She got as far aswe might be fated mates,and how she’d want him anyway, bond or no bond, which was terrifying enough on its own, and how the bond might just mean the universe agreed with her taste in men for once, but it came with some strings... and when she hit that, her brain, having had quite enough for one evening, simply declined to move on. She had wanted to. A full-scale thinking sesh. Was kind of needed, wasn’t it? She sighed, lay back on the blanket, and looked at the stars instead.
The moon seemed to smile. The sky was filled with stars. The trees breathed. She existed there, in that space of beauty and lightness, so full of thoughts her brain felt utterly empty.
Waited.
Waited.
