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I thought of Luke and his stupid prank about the alliums, and my chest tightened. I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “I’m good.”

I took my backpack into my room and unpacked, then threw a load of laundry in. When I got back to the living room, there was a beer waiting on the coffee table and Dylan was scrolling through the menu on Netflix. “Rom-com or action?”

“Action,” I said immediately. The last thing I needed was to watch some dumb fictional characters mess up their love lives through a misunderstanding that could have been solved with a single conversation.

Dylan picked a recent release and I settled in to watch, but I found my mind wandering. I kept thinking about Luke, wondering what he was doing and if he was okay. I fought the urge to call him because what good would it do? But my gut squirmed uncomfortably for reasons I couldn’t pin down. I’d turned down plenty of dates with shifters, so why did this time feel different?

Because none of them made you feel the way Luke does. You like him.

I let out a sigh.

Dylan got up and went to the kitchen, and when he came back, he silently handed me another beer. He waited until it was mostly gone before he said, “Spill. What happened?”

“Spill what? There’s nothing to tell.”

He gave me a flat look that clearly said he knew I was lying. “Something went sideways with your client, didn’t it?”

And maybe two beers were all it took to loosen my tongue—in which case thank fuck I wasn’t a spy—or maybe I just really needed to talk about it, but whichever it was, I found myself saying, “He asked me out.”

A furrow appeared between Dylan’s brows. “And? You have clients ask you out all the time.”

“I know. And I said no.” Another sigh escaped me. “But now I’m wondering if that was a mistake.” And as soon as I said it out loud, I knew it was true.

Dylan plopped down on the sofa next to me and slung an arm over my shoulders, and I leaned into his touch. “Then why’d you turn him down?”

I examined the back of my hands as I thought about how to answer. I’d never told Dylan about my no-dating-shifters rule. I hadn’t thought it would ever come up. But I guessed the day had come. “I don’t date shifters, Dyl.”

He tensed and withdrew his arm. “You wanna tell me why that is?”

I glanced up to find him watching me, the hurt raw on his face. Guilt twisted in my gut, but then I remembered Kevin and squared my shoulders. “It’s a personal choice.”

Dylan’s mouth became a tight line. “Okay, so we’re good enough to live with, but not to date. Got it.”

“It’s not like that,” I protested.

Dylan was usually pretty laid-back, but not about this apparently. His voice was hard. “No? Well, tell me what it is like, Hunter. Because it sounds like you made some stupid judgment about shifters not meeting your high standards for dating, and now you’ve discovered someone who’s an exception to that rule. And instead of reconsidering your stance, you’re saying no and making both of you miserable in the process. Which makes you kind of an asshole, just for the record.”

That hit hard, coming from him. And I didn’t want to fight with Dylan, not when I already felt like shit. “Trust me when I say I have my reasons.” I lifted my arms over my head as I turned toward Dylan, and a wave of rank armpit sweat stink hit me in the face with all the force of a baseball bat. My eyes watered. “Holy shit, I really need to shower.”

“You do that,” Dylan said, staring fixedly at the TV.

Dylan was my best friend, and I hated that he was judging me when he didn’t know the whole story—and that was only because I hadn’t ever told him about the fiasco that had been dating Kevin. Some part of me had assumed he’d reinforce Kevin’s views, and I hadn’t been ready to think of my best friend as someone who thought like that, so I’d just never brought it up—which, now I thought about it, was a pretty dumb assumption. Dylan had always had my back.

I needed to tell him about my disaster dates.

“I promise that when I tell you the story, you’ll understand.”

That caught his attention, and his stony expression softened. “There’s a story?”

I wrinkled my nose. “Yep, and it’s a doozy. But I do need to shower first because I’m actually offending myself right now. But I promise once I’m clean you’ll get the scoop.”

Dylan raised an eyebrow. “And I reserve the right to tell you if you’re a dick. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said, and some of the tightness in my chest eased.

I got into the shower and let the hot water wash away the stress and the stink of the day, but as I stood there my thoughts circled back around to Luke. I ducked my head and let the water run down me, carrying away the shampoo suds while I stood there feeling sorry for myself. It figured that the one guy I was genuinely attracted to would be a shifter. Which, in what universe was that fair?

But based on what Kevin had told me, there was no way a shifter would be able to cope with my job, which was literally dealing with other people’s bodies. I tried to imagine how he would have reacted to me touching Luke as I helped him climb the stairs, and I couldn’t picture it—or rather I could, and it wasn’t pretty.