by Aubrey Rose
Mara said no more, and Julia put two and two together.
“I’m sorry,” Julia said.
Mara nodded her thanks.
The sound of gurgling water was rising up ahead. The woods opened up and there was the stream, sliding languidly over a bed of smooth rocks. The moon was directly overhead and it gave the water an ethereal shine.
“It’s beautiful,” Julia said.
“Yeah,” Mara said, but Julia could tell her thoughts were elsewhere.
After a while, Mara asked, “Do you believe that Damien was meant for you?”
Julia thought about that for some time. “I do believe Damien is the one—I know he’s the one—but I think that if my life had been different, I would have found a different one. Maybe that means ‘one’ isn’t the right word.”
“No, I know what you mean. I feel like Antonio was the only one because I’m never going to meet anyone exactly like him and that means I can never be in love with anyone in exactly the same way. But that’s okay. I can fall in love again and it can be totally different and still just as good. That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway.”
“I’m sure you’re right. You’ll fall in love again.” Julia’s heart swelled in her chest when she looked at Mara, so beautiful and young.
“Thanks,” Mara said. “I’m really not looking, though.”
“Really?”
“Well, I mean, I’m not opposed to finding a mate, but I don’t really believe in looking. I’ve never understood how some people—most people, it seems like—always want to be in a relationship. Like, even when there’s not a particular person they’re interested in, they just hate being single. I love being single. When you’re single, you’re free. You can just do whatever you want and you don’t really have to worry about anyone but yourself. When I met Antonio—he made me not want to be single for the first time in my life, and that’s how I knew he was the one. So until I find someone else who can make me want to be in a relationship…I’ll just continue not wanting to be in a relationship. I guess it works out pretty nicely.” Mara paused thoughtfully. “You know, I’ve heard people say you should, like, keep your heart wide open. Let yourself fall in love freely. I kind of think you should do the exact opposite. Put up walls around your heart. Guard it. And if someone can break through those defenses…that’s how you know.” She paused again.
“Or no one will break through and I’ll die alone.” Mara laughed. She seemed genuinely amused, which surprised Julia. That notion would have terrified her. “Don’t worry, I hope you don’t have to go through any of what I went through.”
“Damien’s the first boyfriend I’ve ever had, so I’ve never been hurt before,” Julia said. “I’m lucky. But I could only imagine…if Damien died, or left me…I would be so hurt that I’d never want to open myself to the possibility of that much pain again. But I would want to love again, eventually. And if you want to love again, I think you have to open your heart at least a crack. Being in love, sharing love, requires vulnerability. You can’t be invincible.”
“You ever notice how addictive it is to talk about relationships?” Mara asked, her chin in her hand.
Julia laughed. “I hadn’t, but you’re totally right. I guess it makes sense. Most of life comes down to relationships.”
“All of life does. Speaking of which, how are you and Damien?”
Julia cast her eyes downward. She wondered how much to share for only a moment before speaking.
“Well…we’re not great. We just had a fight. It’s funny. When we first got together, I remember thinking that I couldn’t imagine fighting with him.”
“Really?” Mara’s laughs rang loudly through the dark trees beyond the stream. “My relationship with Antonio was pretty much founded on fighting.”
Julia smiled, but the smile faded quickly.
“It’s not like either of us is going to actually win the fight—we both think we’re right. So we just both apologize and move on. But I don’t want to do that. I’m mad at him. I know being mad at him isn’t going to accomplish anything but I still am.”
She picked up a pebble and threw into the stream. It hit the water and skipped once, then sank with a tiny splash.
“Well,” Mara said, “in two days you’ll forget it ever happened. You know, as much as I like the freedom of being single, when you’re in the right relationship, there’s nothing like it. But I think it’s easy to forget that when you’re actually in the relationship. You forget how nice it is that you’re never really alone; even if you’re apart from each other for a long time, even after you have a fight, they’re still there for you. When you can’t be with the person you’re in love with, you realize that it’s, like, a binary thing — either you have the person you love, or you don’t. And if you do have it, everything else is just background noise.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Damien
Julia went to bed before Damien and left for class in the morning silently.
They hadn’t talked at all since the fight. Her frustration built on his, tearing at the bond between them, stretching the fibers of their connection.
He thought about the fight as he lay in bed, inhaling the crisp air streaming in through the open window to calm himself. If he just apologized, it would be over. Continuing to be angry at each other served no purpose. He had lied. But it was a white lie, one meant to preserve her happiness. Everyone tells a small lie or two to their significant other occasionally…don’t they?
A sound from outside snagged his ear, in the planter below the open window. It was so faint he couldn’t tell exactly what it was—something scraping the dirt, maybe, or a few leaves brushing against each other—but it was definitely the noise of some small movement. A squirrel or a rabbit, probably. Damien rolled over in bed.
Was there any practical benefit to telling Julia about his scare in the woods? Not really. She’d be more careful now, but she would have been more careful anyway because he’d told her to stay out of the woods. Never mind the fact that she actually had gone into the woods immediately after their fight, which angered him. He hoped she’d gone because she genuinely wanted to be alone and not just to spite him. Because if she had put herself and their children in danger just to spite him…
No. She would never do that.
Damien still felt he hadn’t done anything wrong in not telling her about the scare. She would have been just as safe either way. Shouldn’t a man prefer that his mate be safe and happy as opposed to safe and scared? His mind swirled with questions he’d never thought through before.
A door opened downstairs.
Damien listened curiously. Julia had only left fifteen or twenty minutes ago. And the other members of the pack usually knocked before coming in.
There was no more noise, and Damien sat forward, scrunching up his face in concentration. He heard nothing. Nothing at all. He could always hear people when they walked in—clothes rustling, floorboards creaking, joints popping. In fact, it was strange that whoever it was hadn’t already called out a hello.
He opened his mouth to call out a hello himself, but something held his tongue.
There were no scents in the air, not even the lotion Julia put on every morning. He opened his mind wide, trying to sense a familiar presence. There was absolutely nothing.
His chest felt hollow and his heart was starting to beat too fast. Maybe the wind had blown the door open, though he could have sworn he’d heard the creak of the knob turning, the click of the latch bolt.
Leave.
The thought fluttered at the edge of his consciousness. A blur of other thoughts was whirling around his skull but for some reason this particular thought stood out.
As quietly as he could, he slid out of bed, wanting to be on his feet if something attacked him. There was still dead silence in the house.
The pack is in danger you can’t stay here you have to—
Damien felt a jolt. This stream of thoughts was in his head. Yet the thoughts were too
distinct, more distinct than any of his other thoughts, as if he were hearing another person’s voice in such a way that it bypassed his ears and ran straight into his mind.
He shook himself, trying to clear his head. This was nonsense.
“Julia?” he called.
Nothing.
“Dee?” He walked to the doorframe, his head cocked. “Who’s there?”
Nothing.
Then, downstairs, a floorboard creaked.
The tiny noise snapped Damien’s composure. He flung the door shut, lunged over to the window, and shouted as loudly as he could.
“KYLE! KATHERINE!”
Turning, he felt his body ride the edge of shifting, his wolf form intruding as adrenaline urged him to fight. He expected to hear footfalls thundering up the stairs as the intruder abandoned stealth and charged, but the silence held. And then, in the silence, one word that blasted through the darkness and left his ears ringing even though he swore he heard nothing.
LEAVE!
Damien fell to his knees, clutching his head as the sensation in his head. It reminded him of his connection with Julia, only a dark and perverted version of that connection. This bond was controlling, the thoughts penetrating into his skull without thought as to the intrusion.
“Damien?” Kyle’s voice rang from the clearing and came into focus as Damien forced the alien thoughts from his mind. A second or two later. a door banged open downstairs and Kyle yelled again, this time from inside the house.
“Damien?!”
Damien yanked the door open again, still primed to lash out if anything came at him, and called out downstairs.
“Kyle, be careful! Something came into the house.”
“A shifter?”
“I don’t know,” Damien said, his muscles twitching, on edge.
“I don’t sense anything,” Kyle said. “Wait where you are. Don’t move.”
Kyle dashed up the stairs and looked in every room. Then he rushed back down and covered the first floor. Damien waited helplessly, cursing his blindness.
Finally, Kyle came back up the stairs, no longer in a hurry.
“There’s no one here,” Kyle said. “What happened?”
Damien’s fear over an intruder was dissipating just as a very different fear curled itself snugly around his heart.
Another false alarm. It was the second time in as many days that he had been sure he’d sensed something when there was actually nothing.
Was he going crazy?
“Was the back door open when you came in?” Damien asked.
“It was open a crack, yeah. You heard something come inside?”
“I heard the door open…and then I thought I heard…” Damien trailed off. He’d thought he heard a floorboard creak. It could have simply been the house settling. Houses made noises all the time.
“Could the wind have blown it open?” Kyle asked.
Suddenly Damien remembered that rustle of movement outside his bedroom window.
“Come outside with me, I want you to look at something,” Damien said.
He led Kyle around the house to the planter beneath the window.
“Do you seen any footprints or anything in the planter? Earlier I thought I heard something right about here.”
Kyle stepped into the planter. Damien waited anxiously. He didn’t know if he wanted Kyle to find something or not. Either there really had been an intruder, or he was insane. Neither was an ideal outcome.
“There’s a few footprints,” Kyle said, and Damien’s insides clenched. “I mean, I don’t know. There’s footprints everywhere. Julia was planting things last week.”
Damien frowned.
“Are there prints that aren’t Julia’s?” he asked.
“How should I know?” Kyle asked.
“You’re a wolf, dammit,” Damien said, trying to make the half-joke sound friendlier than he felt at that moment. “Don’t you know how to track?”
“By scent, yeah!” Kyle said. “Sure, but the only scent here is from members of the pack.”
“Pack? What pack?”
“Our pack,” Kyle said, beginning to fray at the edges of his patience. “Your pack. It smells like Julia in here.”
“I know how it smells,” Damien said.
“Well, then, why’d you yell like the moon had gone out?” Kyle asked. “You scared me.”
“Those footprints,” Damien said, latching onto a new thought, “You’re not sure they’re Julia’s?”
“Again with the footprints?”
“Kyle, just tell me.”
Kyle sighed.
“They look like Julia’s. Definitely too small to be you or me, or any of the males,” he said.
“Which direction do they go outside of the planter?”
“Well…it looks like…” Kyle’s voice trailed off.
“Looks like what?
“I can’t find any footprints leading away.”
“No prints?”
“Maybe Julia was too light. Or maybe it’s a kid, Damien.”
“A kid?”
“Kids all think these Victorian-looking houses are haunted. You know, I’d bet one of his friends dared him to open the door and then run for it.”
Damien nodded slowly. That seemed pretty reasonable—at least, more reasonable than anything that had occurred to him, but his mind was reluctant to accept the reasonable explanations. Still, it wouldn’t help things to stand here and argue with Kyle for any longer.
“Do me a favor and don’t mention this to Dee or Julia, will you?” Damien said.
“Sure thing,” Kyle said. But there was more than a trace of wariness in his tone. Damien went with him as far as the porch steps and then retreated into the house. He locked the door behind him and slid the bolt into place.
CHAPTER NINE
Julia
Her literature class was called Rhetorical Technique Analysis of Poetry of the Second Romantic Generation. Damien joked that he’d gotten bored before she’d even finished saying the name of it, but Julia was excited. She loved poetry — the harder to understand, the better.
When she read a novel, the words were like the camera in a movie. Assuming it was well done, she didn’t even notice it. She saw straight through and got lost in the story, ignoring everything else.
That was great in its own way, but she loved that poetry was almost completely the opposite. The language was the story. The words kindled emotions by how they sounded and interacted, not just by the meanings they represented.
And because of this, because the rhetoric itself was the focal point, you could be confident that everything about a poem was deliberate. Julia saw poets less as artists than as meticulous engineers who were concerned with the function of every single little piece of their creations, every cog in the machine. It fascinated her to imagine what was going on in the poet’s mind when they were crafting a piece, to try to infer why they picked this word instead of that one, why they placed this dash here and that comma there.
The professor of the class was a burly man in his fifties with a crown of brown hair. Julia got the impression that he wished he was a Victorian-era English aristocrat. His default expression was haughtily thoughtful—Julia kept waiting for him to stick out his pinkie while drinking from his mug—and he enunciated his every word slowly and precisely, like an English-as-a-second-language teacher demonstrating proper pronunciation. He clearly liked to hear himself talk.
He spent almost the entire lecture reading the syllabus. Considering that the class would be expected to interpret complex poetry, you’d think they could be expected to grasp a plainly written syllabus on their own. The rest of the lecture wasn’t much better—he just talked about John Keats’s childhood.
Julia remained upbeat, though—what she was really looking forward to was the discussion section afterwards.
However, as it turned out, the teaching assistant wasn’t really looking for discussion.
The TA was a lanky woman who looked young enou
gh to be an undergrad. Sharp face, black-rimmed glasses, porcelain skin that contrasted strikingly with her short black hair. One whole arm was sleeved in colorful tattoos.
“We’ll start with the first poem of the packet, and go through as many as we have time for,” the TA said, popping a mint into her mouth. “Okay? Lines 6-8. Anyone want to do a close reading?”
Julia looked down at the page and reread the lines to herself.
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
and I think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
She’d read the poem before, many times. Keats was one of her favorites. Still, it took some courage to raise her hand.
“Yes?” The TA didn’t seem to care who Julia was, or what she wanted to say. Julia licked her lips before she spoke.
“I think that Keats is saying that the clouds in the night sky are love—well, symbols of love, because love isn’t something you can grasp tangibly. Like clouds.” The TA looked at Julia with pity, and Julia stammered on. “And love is magic. Some of it is due to fate, and some to chance, but Keats is saying that he might die before he gets to know love. ”
“Can anyone here tell me the definition of a romance?” the TA said.
A blonde girl who looked like she was in high school raised her hand. The TA called on her.
“A romance refers to a medieval narrative,” the girl said smugly. “It usually follows the epic struggles and exploits of the romantic hero.”
“Which means that this isn’t about love,” the TA said. “Or at least, not when you look below the surface. Anyone else?”
Julia flushed hot as she slumped down in her seat. She was relieved to hear a boy behind her whisper to someone sitting next to him: “How the fuck were we supposed to know that?”
The class wore on and Julia was surprised to find herself looking at the clock to see if it was time to go. When the TA finally dismissed the group, Julia waited for Katherine outside.
She looked at the students passing by. They all looked so young. Then she scented Katherine through the crowd. Turning her head, she saw the younger woman with a broad smile across her face.