by Megan Linden
“It’s Connor,” Jack finally said. “He’s living here now.”
David opened his eyes at that and he focused his gaze on Jack. “And you don’t want to see him?”
“Not if I can help it—no.”
David nodded and didn’t ask anything else, which surprised Jack. Most people couldn’t help themselves and asked for the reasons, but not David. And he didn’t seem to dismiss Jack or anything. He just accepted it.
“Maybe we can do something else, then,” he offered.
“Like what?”
David smirked. “Like go for a run.”
“How would jogging—?” Jack paused. “Ah-h, you mean as wolves.”
“Exactly. Easier to hide, fast, unable to say anything stupid or embarrass yourself in any way. We could be out and back in what, thirty, forty minutes?”
Unable to say anything stupid or embarrass yourself in any way. It was as if David had read his mind. Jack had a tendency to run his mouth and, while it could come in handy occasionally, there were times when it turned into a mess—especially when he was uncomfortable or stressed. Jack looked back at his paperwork, biting his lower lip. There was still a lot to do, but he had almost two weeks of his forced exile left, and he was going to be done with everything tomorrow—or Friday at the latest. And he was getting close to climbing the walls here. Going for a run might be a very good idea.
“Fine,” he said, tossing his pen onto the desk. “I know just the place.”
David beamed at him and stood. “Great.”
“You can change and leave your stuff there.” Jack pointed at the screen on the other side of the room.
Sometimes the teachers shifted for class, so they’d dedicated one corner of the staff room to changing in relative privacy. When David disappeared behind the screen, Jack quickly undressed and left his clothes on his chair before shifting. His mood instantly improved. He stretched, pushing his front legs forward and arching his back, and he let out a satisfied sigh. A moment later, David came out, shifted, and they were ready to go. Jack had experience in opening this door with his paws, so soon they were running down the corridor to the side entrance, then out back to Jack’s favorite spot. Instantly more at ease now that he was free to move, Jack didn’t even think about being seen.
They sprinted through the line of trees and he jumped over the last big log before coming onto the clearing…only to almost stumble as he landed, because someone was already there.
For a moment, it felt like he couldn’t move, taking in the sight of Connor sitting on the grass and leaning against the wooden panel, and the baby—the pup, right now—who’d quickly dropped onto her belly the moment she’d seen him. Jack barely registered David landing next to him.
Before Jack could do much of anything, the pup was running in his direction. He wanted to run, wanted to turn around and flee, but he found himself frozen in place. In the back of his mind, he registered Connor’s shout to the pup and David’s unsure step in his direction, as if he wasn’t sure if he should intervene, but Jack was just staring at the tumbling ball of fur.
She—Jack knew that much. He knew the baby was a girl—came to a stop maybe an inch from his front paws and looked up at him, twisting her head back so much that her entire body rolled with the action and she landed on her back.
Someone let out a huff of a laugh and it took him a moment to realize it was him.
But he was still frozen in place, unable to move, so he watched her scramble back up and retreat a few steps, so she could stare at him from a better angle. Her nose twitched as if she wanted to catch his scent and suddenly something squeezed Jack’s heart so hard that he curled into himself a bit, biting back a whine.
A second later, Connor was right there, close enough to smell, and wasn’t it fucked up that even at a time like this, Jack inhaled sharply to catch his scent? Then Connor picked up the pup by the scruff and took a step back, and, suddenly, Jack remembered how his legs worked.
The moment Connor looked at him and opened his mouth, Jack bolted back between the trees.
He didn’t run back to the center, instead going left at full speed. He could hear someone running a few paces behind and for one blink-and-gone moment, he thought it was Connor. The whirlwind of emotions it brought and left behind was so messed up that he just pushed it aside, not wanting to deal with it now—probably ever.
The person behind him wasn’t Connor, anyway. It was David, who let him be, not pushing him to stop or do anything. He was just there, following closely.
Jack didn’t know how long they ran, but by the time they got to the forest next to his house—and really, he should’ve known where he was going to end up—apart from the burning in his chest, he felt as if the weight on his legs had doubled and the muscles were starting to strain from the exertion.
He stared at the house, visible through the trees, and tried to listen to see if someone was inside. Silence. Good. Good, that was what he needed. He glanced at David, who looked back at him and tilted his head to the house. Jack knew his friend wasn’t going to just leave him alone, so he nodded and started walking toward the back door. David fell in step by his side.
Once they were in his room, Jack went to the bathroom to change and pull on his sweatpants. He avoided seeing himself in the mirror and quickly came back out.
“I will lend you some clothes, but you’re on your own with explaining to Zack why you smell like me,” he said, coming up to the dresser. David just sent him a look and a huff. Jack shrugged. “I’m just saying. Don’t pretend you don’t know that your mate’s the jealous type.”
When David was in the bathroom, Jack kept himself busy with folding his clothes as he fought the urge to crawl into his bed and not come out until he’d forgotten what had happened in the forest.
Then David was back, human again, and Jack didn’t know what to do. “Uhm, coffee? Lunch?” he said in the end, finally raising his gaze to meet David’s.
“I could eat.”
They went down to the kitchen in silence and it wasn’t until the smell of reheating lasagna made Jack’s stomach growl that David leaned on his elbows over the table and spoke.
“You know you don’t owe me an explanation, right? I mean, I’ll gladly listen if you want to talk, but if you don’t, we don’t have to.”
Jack turned away and split the lasagna onto two plates. He struggled with what to say.
“Maybe I should just go out of town for a few weeks. I could visit Julia, maybe meet with my college advisor, go to a party, get drunk, maybe get lucky,” he said as he served the food.
“Would it help?” David asked before stuffing his face with a big piece of lasagna.
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. Wouldn’t hurt, though, I think.”
“It would the next morning,” David said, his dry tone blunted a little by the food in his mouth. “You’d be miserable and hungover on top of that.”
“Lovely.”
“Could be worse, is what I’m saying.”
Jack swallowed a small bite. “Worse than running scared from a pup who’s maybe seven or eight months old?”
“At least you managed to sprint your walk of shame,” David said with a smirk that turned into a grin when Jack let out a surprised laugh.
“Nice one. It actually made me feel better.”
“Don’t act so surprised. That hurts my feelings.”
Jack pointed at his plate. “It doesn’t hurt your appetite, so you’ll be fine.”
David only grinned while he shoved another big piece of lasagna into his mouth.
The tension broke when they continued to bicker and, as he shoved away his empty plate a few minutes later, Jack knew he could ignore the topic of Connor entirely and David wouldn’t push, just like he hadn’t at the center. But Jack realized he wanted to talk now. He needed to get it off his chest.
He gestured to the living room and they settled on the two ends of the couch, facing each other.
“It’s quite a long st
ory.”
David shrugged. “I fired the electrician earlier today. I don’t have anything to do before we find a different one.”
“I…don’t really know where to start with this, to be honest.” Jack rested his elbow on the back of the couch and focused his gaze on the coffee table. “Connor is… Connor’s the one that got away, would be the shortest version, I guess.”
“Figured that much.”
“Yeah.” Jack winced. “You don’t react to an old friend like that, right? Anyway, the long version starts five years ago, when I was seventeen. I went for a run, and I came upon this wolf who smelled familiar, but also not really. I knew he was pack but couldn’t recognize him. He was definitely not someone who regularly attended pack gatherings. I was curious, but the guy was sleeping under some bushes, so I let him be.”
Jack rubbed his chest as he remembered how hard it had been to back away and leave. He’d had to fight the urge to wake up the wolf.
“With anyone else, I’d probably just have forgotten about it, but, for whatever reason, I couldn’t get him out of my head. I even dreamed about him,” he continued. He remembered that dream as if it were yesterday—Jack had curled up next to the sleeping wolf and Connor had nuzzled him behind his ear before falling back to sleep. Jack had wanted to cry when he’d woken up alone in his bed. Fuck, he wanted to do that, now, too. “I went back after a week or so. It took a while to find the place, but I didn’t care, because he was there again. And this time he woke up and saw me.”
Jack remembered that when their gazes had met for the first time, he’d almost choked on the whine that had stuck in his throat. He’d known his life was going to change from that moment forward. He just hadn’t expected it to change so much.
“Did you say anything?” David asked and Jack realized he’d stopped talking, lost in the memory.
“No, we didn’t even shift that day. We just…” He shook his head. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but we just sat there, looking at each other. Then he got up to go, but, before he left, he moved closer and brushed his muzzle against mine.”
David’s soft smile made Jack’s gut clench. That first touch had been the most intimate thing to have ever happened to him, up to that point. And later, he’d looked back at it and decided that had been the moment his wolf instincts had decided. Mate. His human brain had been way behind and hadn’t realized it until later, but his instinct, his feelings, had already been set.
“We talked the next day,” Jack said, going back to the story as he stared down at his legs. “I came prepared. I had a backpack with clothes for both me and him, in case he wouldn’t have anything with him—which turned out to be a good call, because he didn’t. We changed and dressed, then spent the rest of the day lying on the grass, looking up at the sky. We didn’t talk much, which, as you might have noticed, is kind of a challenge for me.” Jack smirked and shrugged.
David snorted. “I might have, yes.”
“It seemed right, back then. But at least I learned his name. When I went home, I tried to find out as much as I could about him, but I couldn’t outright ask my mothers because I’d just get questions instead of the answers.”
“You didn’t want to tell them you met him?”
“He’s five years older than me.” He shrugged again. “Now it’s nothing, but when I was seventeen…”
“Yeah.” David grimaced. The topic of age difference was a hard one for him, Jack knew, since Zack was older, as well.
“Besides, I liked the idea I had something to hide, something just to myself.” Jack paused. “It sounds so bad.”
“No, it doesn’t.” David shook his head. “What teenager doesn’t want privacy? And we do tend to get a little possessive.”
Jack nodded. He wasn’t about to tell David this, but he’d figured out later that the possessiveness was way up because his wolf had already decided Connor was his mate. It hadn’t been too bad, not enough for him to realize it at first, since there hadn’t been sufficient contact between them for Jack’s wolf to completely imprint on Connor, but the pull had been definitely there.
“Anyway, I did find out a bit about him,” Jack continued. “His family was always on the outskirts of the pack, keeping to themselves. Later I learned it was his father’s influence and decision.”
“Do you know why?”
Jack shrugged. “I may give you a lot of reasons, but ultimately, I’m not sure. His father doesn’t like Mom A, but he can’t exactly challenge her openly, so he keeps to himself. He was close to crossing a line a few times, but since no one believed the shit he was saying, Mom let him be. It didn’t help, but it didn’t hurt, either, I guess.” He pulled his legs up onto the couch to bring them closer against his chest. “Other than that, I think he’d tried to isolate Connor and his mother from others by not letting them go to, like, ninety-nine percent of pack events. I couldn’t even recognize Connor’s mother from the photo I’d seen a few times.”
“She’s not around anymore?”
“She died. She was a human and she got some weird heart condition. She went to bed one night and never woke up.”
David rubbed the back of his neck. “Damn it.”
“Yeah. It happened a few weeks before I met him. He was spending most of his time in wolf form.”
“I know how that goes,” David said quietly, and Jack remembered that David and his brother had lost both their parents in a car accident years ago.
He just nodded. “That wasn’t a good time. If I hadn’t shown up every day like clockwork, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have spoken to anybody for days.”
“Not even his father?”
“Oh, no. After his wife died, Connor’s father stopped even pretending to care about anything, especially Connor.” A cold surge of old anger rose again. “He was an ass. If I’d lived with him, I would probably prefer the forest, as well.”
“That explains why he’s staying at the center and not at home.”
“Yeah. Hopefully, not for long. There’ll be an Alpha Tribunal next week to take care of the legal matters, but Connor is as entitled to his family house as his father is, and it’s not right that he gets thrown out of there.”
David nodded. “It’s good he talked to the Alpha.”
Jack looked down. He wasn’t going to tell David that she’d pretty much made him talk to her. The end result was what counted.
He went back to the story instead. “So, coming back to the way-back-when… We were just friends for a long time. I mean, I wished for more, but…” Jack shrugged. “Just friends.”
“Hiding all the time?”
“Yeah. I’m surprised nobody noticed. Except for Julia, but it still took her about a month.”
“But if you were just friends, why hide?”
Jack shook his head. “At first, because it would look weird. Then we just…fell into things. I brought it up a few times, mentioned something that would be cool to do in town, but Connor always said no. He wouldn’t get out of the woods, but he was always talking about leaving Harrington Hills.” He paused, hearing the resentment in his voice, the same old anger that kept surging back.
“When did he leave?” David asked quietly.
“Eighteen, almost nineteen, months ago now.”
David frowned. “I don’t know why I thought it was longer. Maybe because his daughter is…”
“Yeah, he didn’t waste his time, did he?” Jack’s throat felt scratchy and his eyes burned. He blinked fast, looking away. Aside from the fact that there was a baby in the first place, her age hit Jack the hardest. No matter how many times he’d told himself they had been over when Connor had left and nobody had owed anyone anything, everything in him screamed in protest at the thought of Connor sleeping with someone else.
“I’m sorry.” David’s whisper dragged Jack back and he blinked the tears away.
“Yeah, well, it is what it is.” He took a deep breath. “But to map out the missing pieces… I kissed him on my eighteenth birthday and he
kissed me back. We were still hiding, still meeting in the woods and sometimes at his house when his dad was away, but we weren’t just friends anymore. I was the happiest I’d ever been.”
Nobody told me we weren’t forever, he wanted to add, but it wasn’t true. Looking back, Connor had dropped all the hints. Jack had just refused to accept them. He’d hoped his gut feeling, the one that had made even seeing Connor one of the greatest things in the world, would win in the end. Because nobody would leave their mate behind, right?
“When I finally convinced him to go out together into town, the news spread fast,” he continued. “I’d thought it had been a big gesture on his part, a sign in the right direction. And it was great for almost a year after that, until Connor announced he was leaving.”
‘I feel—I know—that I have to leave. It’s time. This life isn’t for me.’ Connor had said many different things along those lines, but all Jack had heard underneath it all, over and over, was that Jack wasn’t for him.
“Did you ever think about going with him?”
Jack bit his lip hard and it took him a while to respond.
“Yeah. He just never asked.” He turned away, knowing that this time he might not be able to stop the tears from falling but trying to hide them anyway. “Then he was gone. I stayed here and lied through my teeth that I was fine. The end.”
“Until our car accident.”
Jack closed his eyes. “Yeah. Until that.”
Chapter Six
Connor stared at the tree line where Jack and the other wolf had disappeared, until Rosa squirmed and shifted back in his arms. She blinked at him then turned in the same direction, frowning. A moment later, she was on the verge of tears and Connor just lost it. His knees wobbled, so he flopped on the ground and pulled Rosa closer, nuzzling the side of her head and pretending his hands weren’t shaking.
Rosa hiccupped into his neck and let out a few sobs, but, thankfully, it didn’t become a full-on cry spell. He didn’t think he could handle that right now, not when he felt as if every part of him not attached to Rosa was fraying at the seams.