Ranger Knox (Shifter Nation: Werebears Of Acadia Book 1)

by Meg Ripley

  “Because they don’t want to get caught cheating on their girlfriend or something. Or they’re—they’re not as cute as Ethan, and want…”

  I shake my head again, and I can feel the blood roaring in my ears. It doesn’t make any sense. Ethan and I are happy together, we love each other. Sure, things have been tough from time to time; the guy I started going out with freshman year was a sweet, skinny kid who always took shit for being into costuming, but he’d found his stride with the fashion majors at UKA. Even if his ego had gotten a bit inflated, I figured it was a small price to pay after all his hard work to get the Marchand Prize. We’d had our fights, but he had told me he wanted to design my wedding dress, to make it my perfect day.

  I shake off my confusion and look at Claire. “Well, it should be easy to tell if it’s not really him, right?”

  “What do you mean?” she shrugs.

  “I mean, we can check him out online; do a little snooping. If this is someone else, it’s gotta be obvious, right?” I swallow down the lump forming in my throat and think about that. Sure, even if someone had linked to Ethan’s Instagram and his Snapchat, then there had to be some kind of proof otherwise. Anyone who’d done a quick search for his stuff online would have turned up those things.

  “When I tell Ethan someone’s using his name and stuff to impersonate him, he’s going to be pissed,” I say, picking up my laptop. I open a new tab and type in the one screen name I don’t recognize from the profile, rolling my eyes at how cheesy it is. Ethan would never pick a handle that ridiculous, I tell myself. Whoever is pretending to be him isn’t doing a very good job of it, obviously.

  “See? It can’t be him. Ethan would never have a profile on a site like this,” I say, as the results start coming up: Fetlife, UPorn, all kinds of sites that I would never in a million years expect Ethan to even really know about, much less have any kind of profile on.

  “Well, let’s just make sure, because I mean, if you don’t at least look, then you’re going to keep wondering, right? But as soon as you look at a picture, or a video, or whatever, and it’s not Ethan, then you’ll know,” Claire suggests.

  I can’t really argue with that logic; I have to admit that after almost four years, I should be able to recognize my boyfriend—and figure out that someone isn’t my boyfriend—in a picture or video, even if the face isn’t there.

  I click on the UPorn link and there are at least two dozen videos on the profile. The titles of some of them are enough to make my stomach twist. Some of them are things that Ethan and I talked about maybe trying, but always chickened out of; BDSM stuff, mostly. But there aren’t any good preview pictures that would relieve my mind. I take a deep breath and click on one at random, telling myself that there’s no way it’s actually Ethan; it has to be some other guy.

  The video is shaky but the picture is high-res, and at first, all I see is a girl—someone I’ve seen around campus, but never really talked to or learned the name of—tied up on all fours, dressed in an outfit that looks like something Ethan would design: it’s a black leather maid’s outfit with fine white lace and white satin touches, and part of me has to admit that it looks well-made. The girl is looking directly at the camera, her makeup already all smeared, with drool on her chin.

  “Do you want Daddy’s cock in your mouth again, you filthy little slut?”

  I don’t even have to wait until I see an image. That’s Ethan’s voice, I know it.

  But instead of closing out the video or pausing it, it’s like I’m transfixed. I’m just staring as the camera pans down, and I see what is unmistakably my boyfriend’s erection—with its little slant to the right, his quarter-inch trimmed pubes, and the tattoo on his upper thigh of his family crest that he got back when we were sophomores. I can’t help but watch as the video continues with this girl using her mouth to go to town on my boyfriend’s dick, and then he starts taking her from behind with the skirt of her fake maid’s uniform pushed up over her hips.

  Claire eventually grabs the laptop from me and closes out the tab, and I’m just sitting there with my hands on my lap, staring at nothing at all.

  “Okay,” she says, and I don’t even look at her. “Okay, so this is fucking awful, and—”

  “And I’m going to kill him,” I say quietly. But I don’t actually believe it; they’re just words that are leaving me. Because I don’t even really know how I feel other than sick.

  “You’re going to break up with him, right?”

  I’m not even crying, but it feels like a huge lump is growing in my throat, like my eyes are starting to sting and burn. I want to scream. I want to break something. I want to tear the hair out of my own head—or maybe tear it out of Ethan’s head.

  “I have to,” I say. Even with the undoubtable evidence right in front of me, there’s a part of me what wants to believe it’s not true, that it’s all a lie, or some kind of terrible prank.

  But there’s no way.

  “Oh, God…Claire—”

  “I think this calls for butterscotch pudding from the dining hall, a gallon of cookie dough ice cream, and approximately all the fries in existence,” Claire says.

  I can’t really disagree with her on that. My stomach feels sick, but just the mention of junk food is enough to make me want to devour mountains of it. I can’t even think of studying anymore.

  Claire leaves and I sit there in a daze, trying to make sense of what I’d just uncovered about my boyfriend of nearly four years. Trying to understand how he could be the same person who held me close in his dorm room and told me that if I ever left him, he would die, but also the person who not only openly sought out hookups with strangers, but posted videos of the results online for anyone to see.

  If Claire hadn’t decided to start using Tinder to find dates after things ended with Charlie, I might still be in the dark about what Ethan’s been doing. And what would have happened? Would we still be getting engaged after graduation? Would we still be moving to the city for me to start my MFA while he worked as an intern for some fashion designer?

  I know I have to call him, I have to confront him with what I’ve found out, but I still feel frozen from head to toe, like everything around me is going too fast and I can’t move. I don’t even feel like I can breathe. It takes me only a few minutes after Claire has left to start crying.

  Chapter TWO

  Nora

  I take a deep breath as I walk towards Ethan’s dorm, knowing that it’s going to be a huge mess, knowing that the next ten minutes, or fifteen, or thirty—maybe even the next hour—are just going to flat-out suck.

  It’s been a few days since I found out about what he’s been doing, and it’s like poking a bruise. I just keep looking him up online, finding more shit that he’s done and more bitches he’s fucked around with. A few of them have even been girls from classes I’ve had over the past few years, and I never heard a damn thing about it.

  I swipe my card to unlock the building’s door and decide that in spite of how agitated I feel, I’m going to take the elevator instead of the stairs. I’m glad to see that there’s no one getting on the elevator with me; that would just make psyching myself up for everything I have to do that much harder.

  I get off the elevator when it reaches Ethan’s floor and remind myself, yet again, that I’m doing the right thing; that there is no way in the entire world that I can just let this slide, and that no matter how he tries to deny it, I know the truth.

  At least there’s only so long that this can go on, I remind myself. Ethan has a class in about an hour and a half, and it’s their last session before finals, so no matter what, our conversation isn’t going to last much longer than an hour.

  I get to his dorm room and for just a second, any semblance of courage completely deserts me. More than anything in the world, I want to turn around, walk back down the hallway, and go to my own room, where I at least can be alone with the horror and humiliation of what I now know about my so-called relationship. There’s a tiny part
of me that believes if I don’t have the confrontation with Ethan, I can almost pretend like I never found out in the first place.

  But I know it’s a lie. I might be one of the last people on campus to know—at least, amongst the people who would care—but I know what I know, and I can’t just pretend like I didn’t find out about Ethan. So, I take a deep breath, and knock on his door.

  “Coming!”

  When the door opens to reveal the man I’ve spent the last three and a half years madly in love with, it’s almost too much for me to take—yet again. Ethan looks like he always does: lean and lanky, in black jeans and a black tee shirt. It’s practically his uniform, and I’ve only seen him in another color maybe a dozen times in the years we’ve dated—and those were all only because he was specifically forbidden from wearing all black. He’s got stubble along his jaw, and his big, dark brown eyes look like they’re about to bore into me until he realizes that it’s me, and then he’s all smiles.

  “Hey, babe! Sorry, I’ve been working on my final project,” Ethan says. “What’s up?”

  “We need to talk,” I say, ignoring the charm in his voice.

  How can he even pretend like there’s nothing wrong? Just the night before, he’d uploaded a new video to UPorn, and according to the description, it had been taken during a time when he’d told me that he had a group project to work on for one of his classes.

  “What’s wrong, babe?”

  I push down the instinct to just start screaming at him, but it’s hard. “We need to talk,” I say again. “Are your roommates here?”

  “No. Nate’s down at the dining hall and Chester is looking something up in the library,” Ethan replies. He gives me a little smirking grin. “Need a little pre-finals stress relief?”

  Bile quickly rises in my throat. It takes everything I have to keep myself from vomiting right there.

  “Just let me into the room,” I say, already exhausted.

  After finding out what Ethan had been doing behind my back—apparently, for more than a year, according to the date stamps on his videos—I can’t even remember all of our dates, our nights together, all of the special memories we’d shared, without feeling like they’d all been tainted. He could have given me an STD; in some of the videos, he wasn’t even wearing a fucking condom! He could have knocked someone up.

  Apparently, none of that was all that important to him, though, and now everything about the man I loved had been totally ruined. I couldn’t even deal with his attempts at being charming; it just felt revolting.

  “Is something wrong, babe?” Ethan lets me into his dorm but it’s starting to occur to him to wonder why I’ve even dropped by, and why I’m not responding to his leering and smirking in my usual way.

  How is it possible that, in less than a week, he can go from being this charming, sort-of-sweet-underneath-it-all asshole, to just a regular old asshole? I ask myself.

  I let the door close and lock behind me, taking my phone out of my pocket. Before I even went to class that morning, I made sure I had everything saved on my phone; everything I needed as evidence. I open the screenshots and give myself a second to decide if I really want to do this.

  “Tell me about this,” I say, holding up the first one: Ethan’s Tinder profile. “And this,” I add, flipping to the next picture: a screengrab of one of his amateur porn videos, showing his face. I keep flipping through them and Ethan goes from looking like a cocky, horny lover to a sulking, spoiled child.

  “This is your fault, you know,” he says once I’ve shown him all of the pictures.

  “What?” I thought nothing that Ethan could say could possibly surprise me, but I can’t believe he’s going for this tactic.

  “You wouldn’t do any of these things with me, so I had to find someone else who would.”

  “Without telling me? Without even seeing if I might be okay with it? Without using a condom half the time? You could have given me some kind of fucking crotch rot, Ethan!” I stuff my phone back into my purse before the anger can get a hold of me strongly enough to make me throw it.

  “Don’t be such a prude,” Ethan says, rolling his eyes. “Come on, Nora. We both know we love each other. This isn’t even the kind of thing that should worry you.”

  “It worries the hell out of me that you’ve kept it from me for...I don’t know—like a year or better?”

  “How did you even find out about it?” he hissed.

  I shake my head. “That’s not important. What’s important is that you’ve been cheating on me all this time, and you’re too much of a goddamn coward to even admit what a piece of shit you are,” I say.

  I hear my voice rising. I know I’m almost screaming, but I can’t stop myself.

  “What are you going to do, Nora? You gonna dump me?” Ethan rolls his eyes again. “Come on. If you weren’t such a prude, this wouldn’t have ever happened. But it’s out of my system now. If you’re jealous, maybe I can show you what I’ve learned, and then we can put this all behind us.”

  My jaw drops. I can’t even believe Ethan is uttering the fucking words that are spilling from his mouth right now.

  “It is not prudish for me to expect you to be honest with me, for me to expect you to break up with me if you apparently need a bunch of strange women slobbering on your cock to be happy and satisfied. It’s not prudish for me to expect you to have the common decency to not cheat.”

  “We have our whole lives ahead of us,” Ethan says. “Give it time, and you’ll forgive me for this.”

  “I never will,” I tell him. “I didn’t come here for you to explain this. There’s no explanation that could ever be good enough. I came here to tell you that I know what you’ve been doing, and we’re over.”

  “We can’t be over,” Ethan says. “We’re going to New York together. We’re going to be engaged in like, a few weeks—as soon as the ring I designed for you is done.”

  “No,” I say through gritted teeth. “Not happening. Hope you can get your deposit back, because I will never wear that fucking ring in my life. I am never going to touch you again. I’m never even going to speak your fucking name again.”

  For the first time, Ethan looks truly panicked. He stares at me, and I watch his mouth open and close, open again, and then he’s just staring at me like that.

  I turn to leave his room. I’ve had all I can stomach of this conversation—Ethan blaming me for his cheating, insisting that I’ll forgive him, that everything will be fine between us, when there’s not even an ‘us’ anymore. If I stay much longer, I’ll just start screaming, making a huge scene out of it, and I don’t want to have a dozen people watching me leave the dorm building in tears.

  “Wait! Nora, come on!” Ethan grabs my arm and I turn on my heel. Now, I’m not even sad anymore, just flat-out angry, and I reach for his wrist and dig my fingernails into his skin until he lets out a stupid, shrieking yelp, and starts to loosen his grasp. I bend his hand backwards as far as I can, and shove him away from me, and then I’m out the door, hurrying down the hall.

  I hear a few people’s doors opening and closing; obviously some folks overheard some part of what happened between me and Ethan, and they’re curious. But my blood is roaring in my ears, and all I can think of is getting back to the privacy of my room before anyone can really notice me. I hate the idea of anyone seeing me crying over Ethan, or figuring out that’s why I’m crying. I manage to keep the tears in my eyes as I ride the elevator to the ground floor, and I make myself slow down a bit on the way to my own dorm building.

  One of the sophomore BFA students, Jamie, says hi to me as I’m walking past her, and I give her the best smile I can manage, say something about the finals for Drexel being brutal, and just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

  In three weeks, you’ll have graduated, you’ll be off campus, and you can forget you ever even met Ethan. The first two would just be a matter of fact; I know better than to believe the third thing will really happen, though. But I have to at le
ast pretend to believe there will be a day when I barely even remember my now ex-boyfriend’s face, when I’m not walking around like I have a jagged, cold diamond in my chest instead of a heart.

  I have to believe that I can recover. It’s just really hard to imagine right now.

  Chapter Three

  Jacques

  “Hey, have you heard old Claude finally found a tenant for his place?”

  I spray down my tattoo station with antiseptic and shrug. “Good for him,” I say. Claude owns the apartment directly across the alley from mine; it should probably concern me more than it does that he’s found someone to rent it, seeing as how it’s so fucking close to my place, but after the day I’ve had, I don’t have it in me to give a shit.

  “Apparently, it’s some American girl,” Christophe continues. “Some artist.”

  “Good for her, then,” I say, wiping down the table and spraying it again for good measure, thinking back to that last client of mine who looked entirely too sketchy. At least he was in and out of here in no time, just getting a small, dumb-ass tattoo of a cartoon character right above his ankle.

  We’re about to close for the evening, and Christophe never seems to be able to focus on cleaning up his station at the end of the night, which makes it take twice as long. Usually, all I want to do is get to the bar, have some beers and see what fine piece of ass I can take home with me, but tonight, I’m headed straight home; I’m beat after finishing the 6-hour back piece I worked on earlier today.

  “You’re not even a little bit curious?”

  I shrug off Christophe’s question. “Fuck that,” I tell him. “After all the shit that went down with Amandine, I promised myself that I wouldn’t tie myself down to anyone for a while. I’m just looking to have fun and get as much ass as possible, man.”

  I start to check my inventory of inks, gauze, nitrile gloves, antibiotic ointment—the whole mess.