by T. S. Joyce
“Have you had boyfriends?” he asked in a careful tone.
“In my whole life?” Because she didn’t know the answer for her first eighteen years.
“No, just that you remember.”
“Yes. Two. They both lived in my hometown. Kyle was a bank teller, and Ben owned a coffee shop.”
Clinton growled. “What color do you want?”
“You pick. Whatever you think would look pretty on me.”
“Well, that narrows it down to every color on the spectrum.” He meandered back into the bedroom with a slight frown marring his blond brows, and he wouldn’t meet her gaze again. “What were their names?”
“Who?”
“Your ex boyfriends.”
“I told you, Kyle and Ben.”
“No, I mean their last names.”
She shook her head and laughed. “Oh no. I’m not talking about them anymore. It’s about us now, and if I tell you their last names, I’m gonna be real disappointed in you if they end up in a ditch somewhere.” She was mostly teasing. He probably wouldn’t actually go find them.
“Fine,” he muttered, unscrewing the cap on some fire-engine red nail polish. “Oh, my God, your toes are so fuckin’ cute.” He plopped down on his side and drew her leg over his waist. “I always loved how they were in a perfect diagonal line.” He brushed his fingertip over the top of her toes.
Alyssa put an extra pillow under her head and frowned at him. “What do you mean you always loved them?”
But Clinton was apparently very busy painting her toenails now because he didn’t answer.
“Clinton, what did you mean?”
“I mean from the first day I saw you in Saratoga, you were wearing flip-flops, for reasons I can’t fathom, because it’s cold as a witch’s tit up here, but I noticed your toes.” His voice dipped to a grumpy snarl. “And I liked them.”
“Oh.” She let him work for a while before she asked, “Can I tell you the dream I had about the boy who looks like you?”
“I wish you would leave it alone.”
“You’re being rude again.”
Clinton blew on her toes and then tossed her a bright-eyed glare. “I ain’t him, and he ain’t me. I don’t want to hear about this boy who has nothing to do with me. You can like me as I am or not.”
“Oh, Clinton. That’s not what I was saying at all. I’m sorry if you think I’m trying to mash you up with some idealistic image I have in my head. I’m not. I like you the way you are.”
Clinton snorted. “You would be the only one.”
She canted her head on the pillow and watched him paint the big toe of her other foot. He was so gentle and precise, like he wanted it to be perfect for her. “What do you mean?”
“I’m the resident screw-up at the trailer park, really of all of Damon’s mountains. I’m on a C-Team crew, and even my own people call me Crazy Clinton, and they ain’t wrong. When I talked to my mom a few months ago, she told me she doesn’t understand how I got this way. She said she doesn’t even recognize me anymore.”
Alyssa reached down and brushed her fingertips over his elbow. Clinton tensed but allowed the affection. “Were you two close?”
“Yeah. I was close with both my parents. But I made a decision when I was sixteen that they hated, and when I came out of that decision, I wasn’t their little boy anymore. And I guess that still makes my mom really angry. And I get it. I would be pissed at my kid, too.”
“What decision?”
Clinton shook his head for a long time, then blew on her other foot. “It was just something I had to do if I was going to have a shot at being happy again.”
“Do you know a girl named Shae?” Alyssa blurted out. Because what he was saying seemed so familiar, like maybe she had a supernatural connection with this girl in her dream.
Clinton went rigid, then slowly leveled her with an angry look. “No, and if this is something to do with your dream, I told you, that ain’t me. You have to let that go.”
“But, I can’t.”
“But you have to!” Clinton rocked off the bed and strode into the bathroom again.
She’d pissed him off. Something about her dream made him angry, but that wasn’t fair. “So,” she drawled, stepping carefully off the bed so she didn’t mess up her nails, “you’re allowed to have baggage, but I can’t? You don’t want to deal with me, is that it? Because I’ve done this before with Ben and Kyle, and this is just like what always happens, except at least they were nice enough to wait a few months before they bolted.”
“Don’t compare me to those assholes,” Clinton gritted out, brushing past her. “They weren’t worthy of you. You picked bad. That had nothing to do with me.”
“But you’re shutting me down—”
“Because it hurts!” Clinton backed into the kitchen and she followed. In a softer voice, he said, “It hurts to talk about some boy you obviously have a connection with. I want to be it for you now. Me. Not anyone else. Not your exes. Not that boy from your dreams. I will give anything to protect you, I will give anything to see you happy, I will be the one breathing for your smile, and all those ghosts you keep bringing up are pitting me against people who have no substance! I want you to see me.” He gripped his shirt right over his chest. “Me. I thought my biggest competition would be myself. I’m a hundred percent guaranteed to screw this up on my own. I don’t want others in your head. One minute I think I can do this, and I think I can get better, work hard, and make you happy, but not if I’m dragging ghosts, too! I don’t want to be compared to anyone else. I’m worse. I already lose, and I’m really fuckin’ tired of losing.”
“Okay.” Feeling like crap, she murmured, “You’re right. I wasn’t thinking about your feelings. When you were talking about Amber, I hated her, and it made me angry. You weren’t mean enough to compare me to her, and I just did that with two people. It was messed up, and I’m sorry.”
Clinton eyed her suspiciously. “You don’t have to apologize.”
“Well, that’s what you do when you’re wrong. You apologize, and I was wrong. I am sorry. And…” She looked down at her perfectly painted toes. “You did a really good job on my pedicure.”
“I told you I was good at everything.” But the cockiness had gone, and in its place was a tinge of humor. “Did we just have our first fight?”
“Clinton Fuller, I think we’ve been in one long fight since I laid eyes on you.” He was letting her in, but on his own terms. This was his language—combativeness, defensiveness, pride. She’d never met anyone so complicated, but that was part of the fun with Clinton.
After one argument, she knew so much more about him than maybe she knew anyone. He might sound overconfident, but he’d just exposed his insecurities. He’d just told her he was in this, but she had to go easy on him until he could find his footing.
What a mess Clinton was.
What a mysterious, complicated, beautiful mess.
Chapter Eleven
Clinton surprised her by slipping his big, calloused hand over her thigh. The butterflies went to flapping in her stomach so hard she tensed her muscles and swallowed a happy squeak. How did he do this to her? How did he get such a reaction from her body with a simple touch? She was the fuse of a firecracker waiting to be lit, and he was the damned match.
“Is this okay?” he asked low, gray eyes worried as he dared to take his attention off the road for a second.
She pursed her lips to stifle her smile because it was a very serious question to him. Clinton—stompy, brash, mouthy, dominant Clinton—was making sure he was allowed to touch her. The smile slipped from her lips. His consideration reflected how deeply Amber had hurt him that he was this careful with consent for any kind of intimacy.
Someday, she wanted to know everything. She wanted to know about his first time, the pain, the insecurities, and the long-term damage it had done to him. With God as her witness, she swore she would make his life easier. She wanted to shoulder the burden of that pain. But r
ight now, she didn’t know if she could be strong enough to ask the questions and hear the answers without falling apart. Clinton deserved strong support. He deserved a listening ear and gentle hugs, not her tears, not having to console her when he was the one who’d lived through it.
She needed to be better for him. Braver and stronger. Clinton deserved someone in his life who was stable, and capable of propping him up when he was weak.
“Clinton,” she said, turning her shoulders toward him and curling her legs onto the passenger’s seat. She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles softly before she rested his palm back on her thigh. “You can touch me how you like. I love that you make sure I’m okay, but here’s what you do to me when you touch me. I get this beautiful breathless feeling, and I get so happy. I feel warm and safe, and sometimes when you brush my arm or my leg, you get this little smile, and it’s so…” Perfect, heart stopping, dashing.
“So what?” Clinton asked over the soft drone of the radio.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like going to the store and an old friend taps you on the shoulder. You turn around and realize how much you’ve missed them, how happy you are to see them right there in that moment.” She swallowed hard and rested her cheek against the seat. “Your smile feels like home.”
Clinton exhaled a shaky breath before flashing her that smile again. The one where just the corners of his mouth curved up slightly. He didn’t do huge grins yet, but he would, and when he did, she knew he would be stunning.
“I like the way you say things,” he said low.
She crossed her eyes and puffed her cheeks out in a silly face, and his smile reached his eyes. He lifted her wrist to his lips and let them linger there, right over her pulse.
God, he was handsome. T-shirt clinging to his defined chest, one arm draped over the wheel as he drove them to his trailer park, the sunlight streaming through the window, hitting his eyes just right. They were a darker gray now, which told her his bear was content. And even though she hadn’t met his animal yet, she already loved him, because he was a part of Clinton. Alyssa had fallen so hard. This wasn’t like her. She wasn’t Safety First anymore. She wasn’t the responsible one. Now she was Adventuresome Alyssa, because Clinton brought something out in her that wanted to live. That wanted to take risks and shake things up. He made her feel daring, and for the first time since she could remember, she was excited her days here weren’t planned out and identical to the ones before.
She wasn’t ready to go back home.
Her attention drifted to the towering pine trees that lined the road and blurred by. The landscape suddenly turned to a clearing, and what she saw there had her gasping and leaning forward in her seat. Clinton tossed her a worried look, but slowed and pulled over to the side of the road.
The entire clearing was scorched, the earth blackened. “Is this…?”
“Yes.” Clinton’s gaze drifted to the burned wreckage. “This is where IESA made their last move. They tried to kill Kirk’s mate, Ally, so it would start a war with the shifters. Her death was meant to unify humans against us. She got hurt. Has a limp now from chemical burns. I see Kirk watching her walk sometimes, and his eyes go all wrecked. He almost didn’t get her out of there.”
“I saw on the news that some of the shifters here were fighting the fire.”
“I was there. They used accelerant during a hot month, and it could’ve taken every inch of Damon’s mountains. All three trailer parks, Asheland, Grayland, Boarland. Mates. Kids. IESA put everything we’ve built here at risk, but that’s what they’ve always done. Too many mates got the government’s attention. I used to be so fuckin’ scared of attention on this place. I didn’t want humans taking notice of the pairings here. Of the babies. We were safer when it was just a few bachelor groups.”
“You didn’t want women up here?”
“Hell no. Women bring trouble. Bring pain. I wanted my friends to be safe. I wanted to be safe.”
Shit. “Because you were a breeder?”
Clinton just stared out the window at the scorched earth, his only movement a small muscle that jumped in his jaw.
“How long?”
Clinton offered her the empty smile she hated—the plastered one he used to shut down. “Two years. I escaped when I was twenty. After I killed Amber, I wasn’t safe to be paired with another mate. Maybe they were going to put me down, I don’t know, but one of the observers decided she was going to save me. Our handlers never wore nametags, but she told me her name was Alice. So she snuck me out one night, and drove me across a state border. I still don’t know why she did it. When I was in there, she’d been the meanest. The most brutal. Maybe she had to turn off her humanity to do a job like that. And I remember in the car, she was crying. Just tears rollin’ down her face, and I asked why she’d done it. And she said she’d seen enough. That she couldn’t watch it anymore. I asked why she was crying over someone like me, and she said she wasn’t. She said she was crying because they would kill her for destroying their program. She’d drugged her co-workers with the same shit they were pumping into the shifters to keep us calm. She’d unlocked all the cages, and disabled the alarms so the other test subjects could get out. There was a silverback in there they called Beast, and there is a hundred percent chance he killed every one of those lab workers before he left. He’d been in there the longest. He was even more fucked up than me. I don’t know if Alice knew, but she’d probably granted him vengeance he’d been planning since the day they’d taken him from his family group and brought him in.” Clinton cracked his knuckles loudly. “After I got out, I tracked down my parents. They’d moved to a new state to distance themselves from the fallout, and nothing was familiar. Not even me. I got tired of seeing the worry in their eyes—like their baby had been switched at birth and they didn’t know if they could love the one they had. So I found a crew of bachelor bears. Fucked that up, moved to another, and another. Ended up in Damon’s mountains, back near my hometown, because I heard an alpha was willing to take problem bears and was trying not to put them down.”
“Put them down?”
“We police our own. Crazy shifters are killed by an alpha. I knew if I was lucky, Creed would let me go out with honor, but he was too damned patient. Believed in me, or some hippy dippy shit. The Gray Backs started pairing up, and I was pissed because I’d finally found a place I felt okay, and they were ruining it. They were drawing too much attention, breeding. Our population was exploding, and I could see it coming.” He dragged sad eyes to her. “I just had this feeling that we would burn, but this time it would be the end of everything because it wasn’t just a bunch of bachelors. It would be their mates and kids. Their families. It would be me losing more people I…”
“Love.”
Clinton winced and shook his head. “I don’t use that word.”
“Why not?”
He kissed her wrist again and pulled back onto the main road. “Because nothing hurts worse than love.”
****
She’d wanted to argue with him. She’d wanted to tell Clinton that rejection hurt, but that love was the greatest feeling in the world. But the more she thought about it, the more she considered the possibility that perhaps love really had poisoned him. He had an animal side that had been manipulated to bond to a woman who abused him. And that’s what he’d known of love. It wasn’t real love by any normal standards, but to Clinton, that’s what he knew of it. If she had been hurt sexually and emotionally over and over and over by someone calling what they were doing “love,” then perhaps she would hate the idea of it, too.
But a tiny, selfish part of her was saddened by the thought that she might very well never hear those three coveted words from his lips.
Alyssa hated Amber with the heat of a trillion meteors. A surprising, beastly corner of her heart was glad Clinton had given her a bear and killed her. Amber deserved to die at the hands of the boy she had destroyed.
Boarland Mobile Park read the sign over the
white gravel road. As her gaze landed on the largest singlewide trailer facing them, she couldn’t help but smile at the strange sensation that came over her. That must be 1010. It was cute that Bash thought it had magic, and even cuter that Clinton wanted her to stay there for undisclosed reasons. Perhaps he believed in magic, too.
Clinton’s leg bounced in quick succession, as if he was nervous, so she rested her hand on his powerful thigh and gave him an encouraging smile. “I’ve already met the Boarlanders. I like them.”
“Yeah,” he said noncommittally. “Everything will be okay.” It sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than her, though.
Clinton drove to the back of the park to a small trailer sitting catty-corner to 1010. The words FUCK THE NEW RULES had been burned neatly into the weedy yard. Stunned, she got out and made her way to the scorch marks.
“Don’t judge.” Clinton’s voice was soft, pleading.
“I’m actually really impressed with how perfect this looks. Is the font Times New Roman?”
Clinton looked uncertain and suspicious all at once. “Yes.”
“How did you perfectly burn an actual font into the yard?”
“Thank you!” He held his hands out and yelled it louder. “Thank you! Finally, someone sees the effort in my artwork. I spent an entire week pissing on Harrison’s front lawn last month. An entire week, every piss, just so I could kill his grass into the perfect shape of a penis, and not a single one of these assholes complimented it.” Clinton sauntered toward the beat-up old trailer and muttered, “They all just bitched about me acting out again.”
Alyssa laughed hard, and damn it felt good after the emotional roller coaster of a morning they’d had. She could just imagine him out there in the middle of the night drawing a cartoon penis on his alpha’s sod. It was new enough still to show the squares of grass in perfect lines in front of each trailer. Except for Clinton’s. Apparently he’d refused to conform. She giggled again. That’s my man.
Clinton’s trailer was a patch-work wreck. A third of it had been destroyed at some point, but it had been repaired, and that part spray-painted in camouflage shades of green. The front door, which looked new and had been stained a rich, chestnut brown, boasted the neatly written words, Fuck off, in red spray paint.