“You met…Selene?TheSelene?”
“I think so.”
“Wow.” He lies back down, wrapping his arm tighter around me. “What’s she like?”
I give a casual little shrug. “She was nice.”
Jasper cups my face and runs a thumb over my cheek.
“You do look different,” he says, reiterating his point from earlier.
“In what way?”
“I don’t know.” His eyes dart about my face, taking in my features, and I imagine him running them through his mind, comparing them to what he remembers from before I left yesterday. “You seem older.”
I throw my head back sarcastically. “Oh great! Thanks!”
He pulls me closer. “Not in a bad way. You just look more like you.”
“So…good change.”
He licks his bottom lip and nods. “Good change.”
I breathe a breath of relief and Jasper nuzzles his face into the crook of my neck.
“I feel different,” I say, sitting up slightly. “It’s like all this time there’s been something blocking my connection to my wolf-self and now…now that blockage is gone, and I feel…”
“What?” he says, his eyes wide in genuine excitement.
“I feel connected to everything, every wolf, and––I feel powerful.”
Jasper tilts his head back to take another look at me, gently moving a strand of hair from my face.
“What?” I ask when he doesn’t say anything, just stares with this amused sort of smile.
“It suits you.”
He kisses me once then holds me close.
“I missed you,” he says, and I love the way his breath feels on my skin.
“I missed you too.”
He lifts his lips from my neck to my mouth and kisses me again. We stay like that for a long time, and after everything that’s been going on these past few days, it feels so good—like kissing for the first time, or like we’ve unlocked some new level of kissing, the big boss of kissing.
When we come up for air I run a hand through Jasper’s hair.
“I think we should try again,” I say.
“Okay.” Immediately Jasper tries to kiss me but I dodge his lips.
“I meant the mind-link,” I say, laughing. “We should try to mind-link again.”
“You think it’ll work this time?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure. But with this new access to my blood wolf abilities, I think I’m closer than before.”
“Okay,” he says and kisses me once more.
