by Molly Harper
“No!” I yelped. “No dresses from Vonnie.”
“Why don’t we just put it to a vote?” another cousin, Eugenelene, suggested. “Who likes the green dress?”
Six of my relatives raised their hands.
“And how many like the yellow?”
Four more raised their hands.
How in the hell did we fit this many people in my room?
“The green dress, it is!” Eugenelene announced brightly.
“Don’t I get a vote?” I asked.
“No!” It was the only thing they could all agree on, apparently.
Sighing, I slipped into the green dress and went to my makeup mirror. I’d intended to keep it minimal and somewhat natural, but the brushes were literally removed from my hands. I lost track of how many hands were on my face and it was all I could do not to bite out at them as they reached for my hair. By the time they were done, I was wearing a lot more eye makeup than I’d intended and a bouffant hair do that would put Vonnie’s 1980s brides to shame.
When they stepped back as a group and let me see the mirror, I marveled, “I look like a redheaded Grand Ole Opry-era Dolly Parton.”
“That’s what I was going for!” Lurlene crowed triumphantly. I thought maybe I saw sympathy in Shaylene’s eyes, but she simply disappeared to the back of the crowd. I hoped my younger cousins were paying attention. They were only seventeen, which meant they were due this sort of treatment in the next couple of years.
I pursed my lips and she smacked me lightly on the arm. “Don’t smudge that lipstick!”
“I’ll drive you into town,” Mama said, holding out a dainty pleather handbag I would never carry in a million years. There wasn’t even room for my cell phone in it.
I elbowed my way out of the room, waving off my aunts’ advice about good first date behavior and how to catch Donnie’s attention. I snagged my backpack on my way out of the trailer. Daddy was nowhere to be found, and I wondered if Uncle Lonnie had done something to get him out of the way.
“Can’t I just borrow the truck, Mama?” I asked as I climbed in. “I don’t need to be dropped off like some ten-year-old at a playdate.”
“No.” Mama shook her head. “I want to make sure you get there.”
“Because you think I’ll get lost?” I asked pointedly.
“Don’t you take that tone with me, young lady. You’ve been real sneaky lately, disappearing, not telling us where you are, who you’re with.”
“Well, maybe if you and Daddy believed me when I talked to you, I would tell you more,” I replied, pulling the visor mirror down the moment we left the compound. I shook my hair out of its ceiling-high arrangement and pulled it into a much more tolerable ponytail.
“Aunt Lurlene isn’t going to be happy about that,” she warned me as I started carefully wiping at my eyes.
“Aunt Lurlene will have to get over it,” I said, wiping at my lips.
“Don’t talk that way about your family,” she warned.
“I’m going on the damn date, aren’t I?” I shot back. When she looked away, wounded, I softened my voice. “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m just really frustrated with all of this. I’m tired of being treated like what I want doesn’t matter.”
We turned onto Paxton Avenue and I wished like hell we could skip this whole restaurant thing. I wished I could ask Donnie to meet me at Specialty Books for one of Dick’s cappuccinos. But I couldn’t imagine he would be okay with going to a vampire-owned establishment.
I did not have high hopes for this evening. I’d been on so many of these setups. Boys who were inevitably disappointed that I was not the agreeable domestic goddess they were promised and cut the dates short. I could only hope Donnie would do the same. I would give this guy thirty-five minutes. That was enough time to have a drink, make polite conversation, get an “emergency text” from a friend who “needed me to come pick her up.”
“Ty, it’s really important that things go well for you tonight,” she said.
I stared out the window, more than a little hurt that she didn’t even respond to my feelings. “I’ll try my best.”
“No, honey, you need to do more than try. If you don’t catch this boy’s attention, Mimi and Lonnie are bound to give up on you, and you know what that could mean for us.”
I didn’t want to scoff at my mother’s concerns, but in my recent conversations with Uncle Lonnie, he hadn’t mentioned my marriage prospects once. He’d been more interested in my happiness, my professional fulfillment. Was it possible my parents were putting pressure on me based on nothing more than their own misperceptions and my aunts’ nosiness? If I didn’t catch this boy’s attention, nothing would really change…other than maybe my aunts would leave me the hell alone.
“Mama, I can’t force him to like me,” I replied.
“No, but you can put in more effort than you normally do,” she told me.
“I’ll be sociable and I’ll mind my manners. That’s all I can promise,” I told her.
“I’ll go shopping and pick you up in about two hours,” she said. “Do more than try, Tylene.”
I sighed as I slid out of the truck. I grabbed my backpack, even as Mama opened her mouth to object, and slammed the truck door behind me. Mama gunned the engine and took off down the street.
What did she mean, I needed to do “more than try?” Werewolves didn’t take this sort of thing seriously. It’s not like his family would be offended if we didn’t match up.
I shook it off, rolling my shoulders and walking into the restaurant. Thirty-five minutes. I could do thirty-five minutes.
I had this weird feeling just before I stepped inside. I didn’t want to do this. It was a betrayal of Alex. We didn’t have any sort of agreement to be exclusive, but it felt wrong to be out with someone else. And this restaurant was owned by one of Jane’s friends; what if word got back to him? I didn’t want to damage something special just as it was getting started.
I could just say that I showed up and hadn’t seen Donnie there…but Mama would sniff out that lie pretty damn fast. She was probably parked outside to monitor whether I bolted. My hand hovered over the doorknob. I couldn’t put this off. It was only delaying the inevitable. My aunts and my father would have their way or they would make me miserable at home.
I walked past a meticulously-polished oak bar that seemed to be made from repurposed wood. A pale boy hopped off one of the bar stools carefully circled around the bar. He was in maybe his late teens, and I might have thought it odd that he was sitting at the bar, if not for the dark shadows under his eyes and the sharp glint to his smile. Vampires had to carry special IDs to show their chronological age, otherwise, those who were turned young would never be able to vote or smoke or have access to all sorts of illicit adult things. And this one was dressed in pretty recent styles—a hoodie and jeans—which probably didn’t help his case.
I took a step back. Something was sending a note of alarm skittering across my nerves, but I didn’t know what—which was incredibly uncomfortable. I took a deep breath, cataloguing the malty smell of the beer, the savory scents from the kitchen, dozens of different perfumes and aftershaves and…this guy didn’t smell like anything, which should have been impossible.
Everybody smelled like something, even if they didn’t wear perfume or deodorant—the musty undercurrent of anxious sweat, the dark, bitter note of their morning coffee. But this guy smelled like…nothing, like a blind spot I couldn’t focus on. And rather than relief, it just made me squirm. How was my hind brain supposed to determine if he was a threat or not without data? A little consideration, please, honestly.
“Hey,” he said, stepping into my path, grinning. “I’ve seen you around the library, right?”
I arched a brow, taken aback by the sudden conversational ambush. “Maybe? You didn’t knock over a bookshelf there a couple of weeks back, did you?”
He grinned. “Nope. Not me. Can I buy you a drink?”
What was going on with me lately? Had I rubb
ed myself in vampire cat nip or something? He looked sort of familiar and it was possible I had seen him at the library. I tried to stick to my own business there, collapsing bookshelves aside. But I had enough vampire-related issues to deal with now, I didn’t need to add more to them.
“No, thank you.”
“Oh, come on, I’m a nice guy and—”
Suddenly, a tall form appeared at my left. I never thought I’d be glad to see Donnie Ansen, but there he was, tall and handsome as ever. “Hi. Tylene, right?”
Like he hadn’t known me since we were cubs. And then he turned and walked towards the table, without a word to me. I guessed I was supposed to follow.
I gave the vampire a polite smile. “Sorry. Meeting someone. Have a good night.”
He wriggled his eyebrows at me. “See you around.”
“I’m having the weirdest month,” I sighed, walking to the table where Donnie was seated.
“It’s nice to see you again,” I said, sliding into my chair. Unlike Alex, Donnie didn’t pull my seat out from the table. He was too busy staring over my shoulder, watching a baseball game playing on the TV behind the bar. Apparently, I was supposed to be on my best manners, but he wasn’t.
He sat there silently contemplating the menu, to the point where I wondered if I should offer to read it for him. His knee bounced nervously under the table and he looked anywhere but at my face. I supposed I could pass the next thirty-five minutes in silence, though I was sure that was not “minding my manners.”
“So, have you watched anything good lately? I heard Netflix has a bunch of interesting documentaries about people who enjoy tigers and extremely hard drugs.”
He frowned at me, turning his attention away from the TV for a whole three seconds together. “What’s Netflix?”
I had no idea how to respond to that. I felt almost swoony from the shock of it. How on earth was I supposed to find conversational ground, much less the foundation of a lifetime together with someone who seemed so cut off from the things that I centered my world around? Desperately, I missed Alex and his easy conversation. We had so little in common and somehow managed to find something to talk about every minute we were together. I had so much in common with Donnie and…nothing. I knew I was being more than a little unfair to my fellow werewolf. Maybe we were having so much trouble finding a topic because I was the weirdo, in terms of our kind. We’d never really clicked when we’d seen each other at pack meetings. He ran around hunting any game foolish enough to loiter nearby and I usually hid in a tree, reading a book. On the rare occasion he spoke to me, it was to ask after Jolene—which was typical.
The Southern Comfort menu was filled all sorts of delicious-sounding upscale delights that I would gladly scarf down any other night—seven-cheese macaroni, pulled pork smoked with cherries and apples, buttermilk chicken, next to an impressive list of imported bloods for the vampire customers. But a large, delectable meal didn’t fit with my thirty-five-minute plan. Donnie ordered a lot and when I stuck with a fried green tomato appetizer, he finally spoke. “You’re not one of those salad eatin’ girls, are you?”
I smiled, an upward quirk of the lips rather than actually baring my teeth—which I didn’t trust myself to do. “Not usually.”
“I just mean, your Aunt Lurlene said you were a healthy eater, a healthy girl,” he said, frowning.
A healthy girl who would give him lots of healthy babies, was the unspoken implication. It chafed that I was being discussed like a damn brood mare behind my back, but I knew it was no different than how almost any werewolf female was discussed at kitchen tables and wild clearings throughout the country, maybe even the world.
He mumbled, “That seems like a weird thing to bring up on a date, doesn’t it?”
My hand froze over the table as I reached for my drink. “Yes.”
“I don’t think humans talk about that sort of thing on dates, do they?” he mused. “What your relatives might have said about how ya eat.”
“Having been on a few dates with humans, I can tell you that they don’t,” I assured him.
“You’ve dated humans?” he whispered as if this was some unbelievable feat.
“Well, not dates that my family approved of, but yes.” The polite smile became just a little sharper.
“Well, you’re a brave one, aren’t you?” he marveled. “I don’t really go on dates unless my aunts set them up. I’d never hear the end of it.”
I stopped, tilting my head as I stared at him. While the girls in my family were badgered about their plans for courtship, their ticking biological clocks, the boys were pretty much left on their own. It was just assumed that my male cousins would eventually find someone —even though my cousin Vance was approaching thirty-five and hadn’t been on a proper date in years. It struck me that things probably worked differently in other packs, that the guys I was being pressured to date might be going through something similar. Suddenly, I felt really bad for Donnie. And all of the other male werewolves I’d assumed had it easier than I did.
It didn’t make me want to marry and/or reproduce with Donnie, but it helped me see him as something other than an obstacle for me to jump over into some other way I’d rather be spending my evening.
My appetizer arrived, and Donnie’s plate of eggs deviled with bacon and pimento. We stopped talking while the server set the plates in front of us.
“Did I say somethin’ wrong?” Donnie asked.
“No, I just never thought about it from your side,” I said, shrugging. “My aunts stick to hassling the girls in my family.”
“Oh, no,” Donnie said, shaking his head. “Everybody my age gets the guilt trips in my pack. I hear it from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to sleep. My parents, my aunts, grandma, even a couple of my uncles—When are you gonna find a nice girl and settle down? It’s not like you’re gonna meet someone new, we know all the werewolves around here. What are you holding out for? Who are you to be so picky?”
“Yeah, I hear that one a lot, the ‘picky’ one,” I said, raising my hand. “I also hear, ‘you’re not getting any younger’ and ‘if you wait much longer, you’re going to be the spinster aunt that everybody feels sorry for.’”
“Dang.” He recoiled from the table. “That one has to smart.”
“You’re telling me,” I snorted, slicing into the crisply-breaded tomato. Yes, I liked tomatoes in that form. I was a werewolf with layers.
“So, is dating humans a rebellion thing?” he asked around a mouthful of egg.
“Oh, I haven’t done that in years,” I told him, carefully omitting my recent dates with a vampire. Just because I’d managed to exchange a few sentences with Donnie didn’t mean I trusted him. “And it wasn’t so much about rebellion as wanting something uncomplicated, you know? Something for myself? Going out with someone I liked, instead of someone I was told I had to go out with.”
I paused. “That was a really rude way to put that. I’m sorry.”
He laughed. “No, I get it. I really do.”
He was staring over my shoulder again. I turned and saw a slim, pretty girl sitting at the bar. She pivoted suddenly on the stool, pretending she hadn’t been watching us. I realized Donnie hadn’t been watching the game. He was watching the girl. She turned again, and couldn’t seem to look away from our table. She couldn’t have radiated heartache any more clearly if she’d been carrying a sign that said, “My heart has been run through a paper shredder.” And he wasn’t looking at her like she was a stranger. I could feel their sadness stretched between them like a string. I didn’t want to be the one to make it snap.
“Is she human?” I asked quietly.
He shook his head and whispered. “Mountain lion shifter.”
“Really!” I gasped, making him jump. His expression changed from defensive to intrigued by my absolute glee.
Much like humans throughout Kentucky claimed to see mountain lions—which never seemed to be substantiated by photos in this camera phone-infested world of o
urs—every werewolf I knew claimed to have met a mountain lion shifter. But somehow, they never showed up to the shifter meetings. It made sense looking at her, the tawny golden eyes, the feline grace even as she shifted uncomfortably in her seat. I gave her a little wave, which made her frown. She looked caught between wanting to cry and rip my head off. I wouldn’t have blamed her, either way.
“That’s Mara. My family doesn’t accept her cause she’s ‘not our kind,’” he said sadly. “Who knows what sort of babies we would have, confusing the bloodline, like we’re some sort of royal family.”
“Why would you bring her here?” I demanded, fully irritated on her behalf. “How could you put her through watching the world’s most uncomfortable blind date?”
“It hasn’t been that bad,” he protested, only stopping when I glared at him. “We don’t get to see each other very often. I don’t get off of the compound without some member of my family tagging along. If it wasn’t for cell phones, I think we’d go nuts.”
“What’s her name saved under in your phone?”
“Uncle Eustace,” he muttered.
I cackled until I had to wipe my eyes. “My special friend is saved under Aunt Myrtle.”
I reached across the table to pat his hand, and then, remembering the girl at the bar with the mountain lion fangs, I thought better of it.
“Have you loved her long?” I asked.
“Since we were twelve,” he said, swallowing thickly. “But my family acts like I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I couldn’t love someone they don’t want for me. It’s the reason I dodge so hard when they try to set me up. I don’t want anybody else.”
And just like that, my heart broke for poor Donnie and what he must have going through all those times our families got together. He probably spent the whole time running around, being all manly and loud, because if he stood still long enough, they’d ambush him with a surprise ceremony with a “proper candidate” from my side.
We were in the same situation, the three of us—wanting people we were supposed to stay away from. A wave of anger and sadness hit me, so heavy it nearly knocked me out of my chair. I wanted Alex, and I wanted him desperately, right that minute.