by Selena Scott
Elizabeth rolled her eyes but her love for her son was wildly apparent. “A real knight in shining armor, my son.”
“And don’t you forget it!” He lunged for another carrot stick but yelped when Elizabeth slapped his hand away.
“Are we eating soon, Ma?” Jackson asked as he came into the kitchen. “The moon’s only an hour away from rising.”
Seth turned and watched his oldest brother take a knee in order to stow away the toolbox he’d just been using to fix whatever it was that he’d fixed for Elizabeth.
“Jackson Durant, do you think I need your help to remember when the moon is rising? I’ve been doing this since you were in diapers. Literally.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, rising back up with a small smile on his generally serious face. “Oh. Seth. I didn’t know you’d gotten here yet.”
The brothers bumped fists. Seth and Jackson, though not genetically related, assumed a startlingly familiar position as they both leaned up against the counter, arms crossed over their chests and their legs crossed at the ankle. Jackson was dark where Seth and Raph were blond. And he wore the same carefully sculpted beard that he’d worn for a few years. He was taller than the twins, topping out around 6’3”, and lanky. Jackson’s wingspan had been a source of admiration from Seth since they were children. Playing basketball against his older brother was a study in blocked shots.
“Sethy, will you set the table?” Elizabeth asked over her shoulder, and with the manners of a well-brought-up son, Seth immediately grabbed out dishes from the cabinet.
“Enough for the girls, too,” Elizabeth reminded him.
“Oh. Nat and Kaya are joining us?” Seth asked, glancing over at Jackson surreptitiously.
Just like Seth knew he would be, Jackson looked livid. “You invited Nat and Kaya here on a full moon night, Ma?”
Elizabeth kept her back to her sons while she fiddled with something on the stove, which was the first clue that she’d known Jackson would react this way. “They eat dinner over here three or four nights a week, Jacks. Why would tonight be any different?”
Jackson took a deep breath that obviously did nothing to calm him down. He pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed closed his chocolate brown eyes. When he spoke, he spoke slowly, with a deadly calm. “Because it’s a full moon night, Mother.”
“Oooh, Ma, you’re in trooooouuuuble,” Raphael sang out. “You got hit with a ‘mother.’”
“Shut up, Raph,” Jackson said, pushing off from the counter. “Ma, I thought we agreed that it isn’t safe for humans to be around us on the full moon.”
“No,” Elizabeth said, whirling around and wielding a spatula like a sword. “You agreed that. With no one but yourself. These boys right here are not a danger to anyone on a full moon night. And neither are you. It’s about time you learned that.”
Jackson’s face battened down and it was clear just how much he disagreed with his mother on this point. “Ma, it’s bad enough that Nat and Kaya even know about us. But to be here for it? To see it?”
“It’s not the first time they’ve joined us on a full moon, Jackson,” Seth said in a soft tone he’d always used to calm his family down.
“I know that, Seth. I hate it every time.”
“If you hate full moons so much, Jacks, then why do you even bother coming here? Why not just chain yourself up in your own basement?” Raphael demanded.
His words fell like gravel on a glass-top table. The silence swelled and strained in the kitchen. They rarely spoke, as a family, of the ways that Jackson felt he had to punish himself for what they were, who they were born as.
The silence broke at the sound of the front door opening.
“Yoohoo!” Nat’s voice rang through the house. “Honeys! We’re home!”
“In the kitchen,” Raph shouted back to Natalie, his best friend since grade school.
“Great. Just great,” Jackson muttered, yanking the dishes and silverware from Seth’s hands and vacating the kitchen before the girls set foot in there.
Seconds later, Natalie and Kaya Chalk came into the kitchen. Natalie came in like a firework, grinning and waving her hands. Kaya, though younger than Natalie, was much more reserved, and came in with a small smile on her face.
Seth noticed the way Kaya’s eyes flashed around the kitchen and then dimmed just slightly as she realized that they were short one Durant.
Natalie, with her chin-length, dark brown hair and flashing green eyes, launched herself into Elizabeth’s arms for a hug and then elbowed Raph in the side in greeting.
Kaya kissed Elizabeth’s cheek and then sidled up next to Seth. “Is he mad that we’re here?” she asked in a low voice. Seth didn’t need clarification on who she was talking about.
“He’ll get over it,” he whispered back.
“He’s capable of getting over things?” Kaya’s eyebrows rose abruptly. “News to me.”
Seth smirked. Seth and Raph were friendly and goofy. Jackson, on the other hand, was reserved, businesslike, ordered, and very hard to know. Besides, he and Kaya were practically in different generations. Jackson was thirty-five to Kaya’s twenty-two. When Jackson had gone off to undergrad, Kaya had only been eight years old. When Jackson had returned to Boulder after Veterinary school, Kaya had been graduating high school, and in many ways, had been more a part of the Durant family than the distant Jackson.
In Seth’s opinion, Jackson had a tough time forgiving the Chalk sisters for commandeering his family while he wasn’t looking. But Seth wished he’d just get over it already. It had been four years since Jackson’s return and he still could barely be in the same room as the sisters.
“Dinner’s up, kids,” Elizabeth said, snapping Seth out of his reverie. “Let’s get some food in these boys’ bellies before moonrise.”
***
Jackson ate his food quickly and silently, barely looking up from his plate. All full moon days were torture for him, but ones where he had to act like a civilized human being, sharing a dinner table with Kaya Chalk? Well, those were extra torturous.
It was as if Kaya Chalk had been specifically designed by the devil to test Jackson’s limits.
She was thirteen years younger than he was. And in his eyes, she was utterly and completely perfect. With hair that was sometimes brown and sometimes blonde, and always messy, her bright green eyes always seemed to be looking up at him from the bottom of some terrifyingly powerful ocean. She had the poutiest set of lips he’d ever seen in his life and a small, straight nose. She was classically gorgeous, except for how messy her hair always was, and it endeared her to him to no end.
He tried not to think about her hair. In fact, he tried not to think about her at all. Which was infinitely easier when she wasn’t picking carefully through broccoli casserole on one end of his mother’s table. He thanked God they hadn’t been seated next to one another.
He would never forget the last time they’d sat next to one another. It was four years ago and he’d made sure it had never happened since. He’d just come home after graduating Veterinary school. He’d paid his way through school and hadn’t been able to afford to visit hardly at all in pretty much a decade. His mother had thrown him a coming home party with ‘just family’. Which, Jackson had realized belatedly, also meant the Chalk sisters.
Nat Chalk was Raph’s best friend since forever and apparently since Jackson had been gone, she and her sister Kaya had been spending quite a bit of time at the Durant house. Enough time for Ma to consider the girls family.
He’d entered his mother’s dining room to see Nat looking almost exactly as he remembered her. Smiling, chatting, her face a constant, moving piece of artwork. He’d hugged her and then turned to the other person in the room.
It was then that Jackson’s life as he’d known it had ended.
The most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen in his entire existence was blinking shyly at him with big green eyes.
“You probably don’t remember me,” she’d whispered. �
��I was only eight when you left.”
…Which made her eighteen years old then.
Jackson’s image of himself took a stab to the gut. No. No way. He was not lusting after an eighteen-year-old. He was a thirty-one-year-old man! This. Was. Not. Happening.
“I remember,” he’d told her, and shook her hand.
Unfortunately, they’d sat next to one another at dinner. Jackson had closed in on himself, refusing outright to even directly address her. It was an act of self-preservation. Any word shared between them merely ballooned his desire for her. And he refused to fan those flames.
Thus began the four-year trial of denying his attraction to the girl. The girl who’d turned into a woman before his very eyes.
Time marched on and Kaya aged. But unfortunately, so did Jackson. As cruel as the world was, their age difference never shrank.
Which meant that now, when Jackson’s phone alarm went off in his pocket, reminding him that moonrise was only fifteen minutes away, he rose without a word to anyone, and not even a glance in Kaya’s direction. He strode quickly and methodically to the stairs of his mother’s basement, where a set of steel chains awaited him and the long night ahead. As he descended the stairs, he didn’t even bother turning on a light. He just let the darkness swallow him up, every step a reminder of all the reasons why he could never, ever have Kaya Chalk.
***
Seth frowned after Jackson, still never quite able to understand why he was so much harder on himself than either Seth or Raph were.
Seth knew that within two minutes, Jackson would have firmly manacled a steel collar around his neck and around his ankles. Then he’d sit, naked as a jaybird, and wait for the full moon to rise.
Seth and Raph, on the other hand, always waited until they only had a minute or two to spare, and then they’d race one another outside. Seth glanced at the clock.
“Met my new neighbor today,” he informed the table.
“Oh yeah? The house across the street from you?” Nat asked. She was a real estate agent and had shown that house the month before to a set of clients who hadn’t liked it very much.
“Yup.” Seth fiddled with his napkin for a minute. “She’s cute.”
“Ooooooooo,” Raphael said, leaning across the table and batting eyelashes at Seth. “Seth has a girlfriend.”
“Be careful, Raph,” Nat teased, tossing her napkin at him. “If you say the word ‘girlfriend’ too many times in a row, you magically end up with one. It’s like beetlejuice.”
Raphael gave a fake shiver and, with wide, terrified eyes, pretended to zip up his lips. Natalie made eyes at her sister and they laughed good-naturedly. Raphael’s ADD dating life was a source of great conversation and gossip for them.
“She looked kind of familiar to me,” Seth said, ignoring Raph and Nat’s teasing. “But I can’t quite place her.”
“What’s her name?” Elizabeth asked, glancing at the clock. The last time the boys had missed the deadline for the full moon, they’d scratched her living room carpet to hell and back.
“Sarah Moyer.”
“Sarah Moyer?” Kaya asked, her voice rising in an excited pitch that they’d rarely heard her use. “The Olympian?”
“Huh?” Seth asked.
“Wait.” Kaya pulled out her phone, like a good little millennial, and searched the web for a hot second. She held her phone out to Seth. “Is this her?”
“Yeah, that’s—holy shit, she’s a silver-medal-winning Olympian?”
Kaya nodded and put her phone away. “Yeah. She’s totally badass. She won silver in archery two Olympics ago.”
“Oh,” Elizabeth said, grimacing. “I think I heard about this.”
“Yeah,” Nat said, nodding her head. “It’s a sad story.”
“What happened?” Seth asked, glancing at the clock. They only had four minutes to get themselves naked and outdoors.
“Well, she’s considered to be the best in the world. This year she was totally expected to sweep and win all golds. But I guess she totally choked. She lost in every competition. She was even investigated for cheating.”
“Why would they investigate you for cheating if you lost everything?” Raph asked. He rose up from the table.
So did Seth, and the two of them started undressing. None of the women in the room even blinked. They’d seen this routine dozens of times.
“Because the Olympic committee suspected her of purposefully throwing the competition. They needed to make sure she didn’t have money riding on it, betting against herself or something. She was cleared, though.”
“So, why did she do it?” Seth asked.
Kaya shrugged. “Nobody knows.”
“Wow.” Seth folded his clothes neatly and shook his head at the wrinkled pile of his brother’s clothes on the floor. “Now I really, really wanna go back over there and make friends with her. Goodnight, everybody.” He waved his hands at the women and his mother blew a kiss to her boys.
He and Raph filed out of the house and to the backyard, standing in just their underwear, which they yanked off and set on the porch for when they got back in the morning.
“You really like this girl, huh?” Raph asked, stretching his arms across his chest like he was gearing up for fight night.
Seth called up Sarah’s blunt features, her fierce brow and her pink lips. He couldn’t help but mentally slide down her toned legs. The girl had serious stems. He shrugged. “Like I said, she’s really cute. But…”
“But…” Raph said, shoving Seth to get him to keep talking.
“I mostly want to go back to her house because she hasn’t really unpacked anything yet and her living room is a crime against humanity.”
“Oh my God! You are a total freak. You’ve got a cute, silver-medal-winning chick living across the street from you and you wanna organize her spice rack.”
Seth shrugged, grimacing as he remembered the astonishing disarray of her belongings. “It’s a sickness. I won’t be able to sleep knowing that mess is over there.”
Raphael chuckled and shook his head, his eyes on the horizon where the full moon was peaking over the edge of the earth, almost fully exposed. “Ready to party?”
Seth’s eyes were trained on the moon, his neck cracking from one side to the other. “Always.”
CHAPTER TWO
It usually took at least a day to recover from a full moon night, so it was a day later than he wanted it to be when he stood on Sarah’s porch and knocked again. The fall day was sunny but chilly and Seth straightened the cuffs on his button-down while he waited for her to answer the door.
But it wasn’t Sarah who swung the door open.
“Lynn!”
“Well, look who the cat dragged in.” Lynn stood there, tiny, dark-haired and a wry skepticism etched across her face.
“Who?” Sarah called from the other room and then the two of them were standing in the doorway, peering out at Seth. Sarah had a head of height over her aunt but they were both looking at him with the exact same expression on their faces.
“Ah. I finally see the family resemblance,” he said with a grin.
Lynn laughed and rolled her eyes. “Right. You’re just trying to butter me up for more lift tickets.”
“Nope. I’m being perfectly honest.” He cocked his head to one side and studied the women more. “It’s something in your noses. And your eyebrows. But you two definitely look alike. Besides, I don’t need to butter you up with words when I can just butter you up with this frittata I brought.” He held up the cast iron pan he’d brought with him and just like he’d hoped, Lynn’s eyes went wide.
“Come in! Come in! Ooh, Sarah, you’re in for a treat. This boy can cook.”
Lynn dashed away from the doorway but Sarah still stood there, eyeing Seth. Though he’d been invited in by Lynn, he waited at the doorway for Sarah’s approval. It was her house, after all.
Sarah leaned forward and peeled the tin foil off the top of the cast iron pan, taking a hearty sniff. “Com
e on in.”
Seth stepped into Sarah’s house, noting that it was a shoes-off house and kicking his boots neatly to one side of the door. Then he turned to the front room and abruptly had a heart attack and died. Or that’s what it felt like anyways.
The room was exactly the same as when he’d seen it two days ago. No, that wasn’t even true. It was worse! The boxes were in even more disarray and, horrifyingly, some of them had been torn open and picked through, but not unpacked. Items littered the floor of the living room and in one corner, a box had tipped over, dying on its side in a sea of packing material.
Without thought, he handed the pan off to Sarah. “Heat that at 250 for fifteen minutes. It’s still pretty warm, so it shouldn’t take too long to heat up.”
He took two steps into the living room.
“And what are you going to do?” Sarah asked from behind him, in a voice that was both off-put and curious at the same time.
“Oh.” Seth cleared his throat. “I thought I might give you a hand in here.”
“Nonsense,” Lynn called from the kitchen. “The coffee’s fresh. We’ve got bagels and frittata and a sunny porch.”
Seth hesitated.
“Look,” Sarah said, stepping toward him. “I think I was rude the other day. But I talked to Lynn and it seems like she really likes you. And she’s a tough nut to crack. So. Yeah. Stay for breakfast. It’ll be nice to have a friendly neighbor.”
Sarah’s words were slightly forced, like she barely believed them, but it was enough to pique Seth’s curiosity. And remind him that unpacking, uninvited, for a near stranger, was super weird and would probably freak her out.
“Okay. That sounds nice.”
He waited while Sarah put the frittata in the oven and the two of them joined Lynn out on Sarah’s back porch.
For as much of a trainwreck as her house was, her backyard was even worse. But this wasn’t the kind of trainwreck that kept Seth up at night, wanting to organize. No, in her backyard, he saw only potential. In the mess of weeds and overgrown flower beds, his creative heart started pumping hard.