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“You always smell so good,” he muttered to me.

“Just because I’m an omega,” I said. But Opal had been one too.

He was looking at my lips, too.

Nothing happened. No way would he have tried something. No way would I have let him.

But that was what I was thinking about when I arrived at the Sign of the Fang, a hole-in-the-wall bar out on the edge of the old town square. It was a place that mostly the locals came to. They sold sandwiches in the front, and we used to come here sometimes when we were teenagers, but we were not allowed in the room in the back where the bar was, just in the front to buy food.

I’d never been back here, actually, I thought as I walked into the small room. The bar stretched across one side of the room and the other side had a few tables and chairs. It was dimly lit, and there weren’t many people here.

Walker came over to give me another hug. “You made it!” That was when I noticed the bite mark on his neck.

He noticed me noticing. He fingered it. “Yeah, my wife is the splashy claimer type.” Mating bites made both beta wolves into alphas, but the bite didn’t have to go both ways. It was traditional for the male to bite the female. The bite would effectively sever both wolves from their familial pack ties and create a new pack, both of them co-alphas over whatever offspring they’d have together.

Sometimes, though, females liked to mark their mates, too.

However, the bond between two alphas wasn’t as intense as an alpha-omega bond. It was a physical bond. It meant that there was shared sensation between them, shared emotions, too. It meant that there was real physical discomfort if the person with the bond did anything with another person, something I’d witnessed myself. It was possible to cheat on a person who you had a bond like that with, but it wasn’t necessarily pleasant.

Alpha bites like Walker’s, it wasn’t quite the same thing, but it was still a mating bond. Wolves took commitment very seriously. Divorce was not a thing that werewolves did lightly. A mating bond was for life, that was the expectation. Obviously, things like abuse and repeated infidelity, these kinds of things might mean that a mating bond would be broken, but wolves were expected not to do things like that, also.

So, Walker wasn’t flirting with me, apparently.

I was a little bit disappointed for some reason. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t kissed a Black man in the interim. That wasn’t why I was disappointed. I was attracted to Walker, I guessed, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted this to be some kind of date.

I lived in the city. I did not live here. I did not want to stay here.

Why did I feel like I needed to convince myself of this?

Maybe it was an odd feeling of relief being back here, both for myself and my wolf, who had stopped being so antsy once I got back to town. It felt like being home again.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Oh, we been together since college,” he said with a shrug. “She came back here with me, though, and she loves it here. It’s a great place to live.”

“Yeah,” I said, looking around. “But not for me, I guess, since I shouldn’t have come back here?”

He gestured to the bar, where he’d been sitting. “Sorry I said that. Let me buy you a drink.”

I came with him and sat down. “I can get my own drink.”

“You can, but you should let me do it,” he said. He nodded at the bartender, someone who I recognized as well, from high school.

“Hi, Jimmy,” I said.

“Leo,” said Jimmy. “You still like hard lemonade?” He nodded at the assortment of bottles they had here.

I was embarrassed. “I’ll have a glass of white wine.” I did still like hard lemonade, of course. Everyone likes hard lemonade. But I wanted to appear as if I’d grown up a little bit in fifteen years.

“Sure thing,” said Jimmy.

“I just meant that Damian… you know… you two, maybe if you give him a little time—”

“I’m not here for Damian.” It came out very sharp and irritated.

Walker drew back. “Right.”

I sighed. “Sorry.” Jimmy put the wine in front of me. I ran my finger around the edge of the wine glass. “Everyone seems to think that’s why I’m here, that’s all. If I wanted to see him, I would have seen him already.”