His face stuttered a bit, and he said, “You did. You promised me. You promised.”
I said, “I’m not much. I don’t have a lot. Sometimes I feel dumb and I say stupid things. My dad left, and I make mistakes all the time. I didn’t go to college, and I come home with grease under my fingernails and on my pants. I don’t have many friends. But I made a promise to you, and even though I wish you’d find someone better, I keep my promises. So, yeah, Joe. Okay? Just yeah.”
I must not have been a man yet because my eyes burned a bit. Mom was crying at the table and I could hear Elizabeth sniffling outside the window, but there was Joe in front of me. He was the little boy who had found me on the dirt road the day I turned sixteen. The little boy who had become a man and stood before me a few days before I turned twenty-three. He thought I was worth something. I wanted to believe him.
So he pressed his forehead against mine and breathed me in and there was that sun, okay? That sun between us, that bond that burned and burned and burned because he’d given it to me. Because he’d chosen me.
And I got to choose him back.
what life is/i need you
SO MATES were a thing.
And I learned that I still didn’t know jack shit about werewolves.
I SAID, “I feel like this is something I should have been told.”
Thomas looked at me as we walked through the trees. “Is it?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“Elizabeth is your mate.”
“For lack of a better word, yes. We can call it that. But she is so much more to me.”
“How did you know?”
He laughed. “Because every time I saw her, I wanted nothing more than to make sure she never left my sight again.”
I understood that. Completely.
“You knew,” I said. “About Joe and me.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why….” I stopped.
He waited.
“When you train him. You bring me out.”
“Yes.”
“Because of what I am. To him.”
“Yes.”
“Mate.”
“If you want to call it that. It’s very romanticized, but I suppose that’s as close as we’ll get.”
“What am I?”
He looked surprised. “You’re Ox.”
And I said, “To him. What is Elizabeth to you?”