“I’m handsome at minimum, striking on a good day.”
“Grayson.”
I hear him chuckle and the rustle of fabric. Through the gap between my fingers, I catch the line of his hip as he steps into his pants, the muscle moving along his stomach as he reaches for the button. My face is so hot I could fry an egg on it. I press my palm flatter against my eyes and breathe in through my nose, willing my blood pressure down.
“You can look now.”
I peek. He has his pants on, but his chest is still bare, and his hand is held out to me. I take it. Grayson pulls me to my feet, careful of my arm, the warmth of his skin hitting me sharper now that I know what’s underneath.
His face looks the same. Same jaw, same mouth, same scar at the corner of his eyebrow he won’t tell me how he got. The same man who hands me coffee in the mornings and complains when I steal his pillow.
“My grandmother used to tell me stories about people like you.”
His head tilts. “When you were little?”
I rub my good arm absently. “I always thought she made it up.”
Something behind his eyes sharpens. “Your grandmother must have been involved with a pack,” he says slowly. “Humans don’t tell those stories. They don’t know enough to.”
“She disappeared when I was twelve.”
He goes still.
“My mother said she was gone, and we weren’t to look for her.” I shrug with one shoulder because the other pulls at the stitches. “I was a kid, so I assumed she’d died. My mother wouldn’t talk about it.”
Grayson is quiet for a long moment, and when he speaks again, his voice has gone gentle. “Humans who get involved with our kind sometimes get pulled into the territory of the pack they’re attached to. If she was loved by one of us, that pack would have taken care of her with or without your family’s knowledge. From the outside, it would have looked like a disappearance.”
The breath leaves me in a slow exhale. For twenty years, I’ve imagined my grandmother walking out of her house in a coat and never coming back, pictured her in some city alive and choosing not to find us, pictured her dead in a ditch. What I never pictured was a place under trees somewhere with people standing around her who knew how to say goodbye properly.
“Oh,” I say.
I sit down on the chair heavily, and Grayson lowers himself into the chair beside mine, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. The porch is quiet around us. Down by the tree line, something rustles and goes still.
“So what are you really, wolf or human?”
“The honest answer is complicated.”
“You can try me.”
His mouth pulls. “There’s a creation story we tell. A human and a wolf spirit fell in love, and out of that union came the first of us.”
I narrow my eyes. “No, they didn’t.”
“You’re right, they didn’t.” He’s grinning at me now. “I just wanted to see if you’d buy it.”
I shove his good shoulder with mine.
“My kind was around before humans were. We weren’t wolves who learned to walk. Something else came first, and we took on this form because the world started filling up with you, and looking like you was useful.”
“You’re terrible at storytelling.”
“I’m a hockey player. Storytelling wasn’t in the contract.”
I laugh into the cold air. He’s watching me. I can feel it.
“What’s that look for?”
“You’re taking this better than I thought.”
