“Tell me everything.”
I dragged a hand down my face, already regretting how easily I’d been pulled into this. “There were a lot of trees, I guess.”
“A lot of trees,” Janine repeated slowly. “You’re the worst storyteller I’ve ever met.”
I huffed a laugh before I could stop myself.
“The place was beautiful, okay?” I said, leaning back slightly as I finally gave in a little.
The cookout had been crowded in that easy, familiar way.
Families had spread out at picnic tables, kids ran barefoot through the grass, and conversations spilled across one another in a constant, comfortable noise.
I had expected to feel like an outsider standing at the edge of it.
Instead, no one had looked at me like I didn’t belong, and no one had spoken to me with that careful hesitation like I needed to be handled differently just because I was human.
“Everyone was really nice,” I added after a moment, turning the napkin dispenser slowly in my hands. “I don’t know. It just… didn’t feel like I had to work for it.”
Janine frowned slightly. “Why would you have to in the first place?”
I gave a small shrug. “They’re shifters.”
Janine tilted her head. “And?”
“I mean, Dane brought me there,” I said more quietly, like that explained the part I couldn’t quite name. “A human, in their space. And nobody really reacted to it. It just… wasn’t something they focused on.”
That earned a brief pause from her.
“So they didn’t care he was with a human,” she said slowly.
“I guess not.”
I’d known shifters my whole life. Most of my friends were shifters. It wasn’t like there was some hard line between humans and wolves. But there was still a difference.
Shifters tended to end up with other shifters. Most built their lives inside the pack, something self-contained, already complete.
There were exceptions, of course.
Janine seemed to follow that same line of thought. “Some of them have human mates, don’t they?”
“I guess.” Human mates weren’t unheard of, just rare.
She waited, like she was giving me space to fill the silence if I wanted to. When I didn’t, she let the subject drop without pushing further.
A moment later, she wandered off to check on our only customer, an older woman who’d been nursing the same cup of coffee for the last hour.
I returned to my task, refilling the napkin dispensers one by one just to keep my hands busy. The bell over the front door chimed, and a couple of customers entered.
Normally, I would’ve greeted them right away, but I was still drained from Janine’s interrogation, and they didn’t seem in any hurry anyway.
The couple lingered a few feet from the counter, speaking quietly between themselves like they were still deciding what to order.
So I kept working, topping up the dispensers and straightening them into place.
A minute passed. Then another. I frowned, wondering how long it actually took to choose a drink, and looked up.
Two familiar faces were standing in the middle of the café, both wearing identical grins.
