I grunted at him, unsure of why I felt this way. “Not me you should apologize to.”
“Sorry, Robbie.”
Robbie yipped and pushed himself to his feet, rubbing against me as he walked past. He butted his head against Carter’s hip and all was forgiven.
“You’re still thinking of them as separate packs,” Joe told me later that night. We lay side by side in my bed in the old house. The room was dark and the moon was a sliver in the sky. “You saw that as an attack on your pack, not as two packmates roughhousing with each other.”
“I don’t know how to switch it,” I admitted quietly. “It’s been this way for so long.”
Joe sighed.
“I’m not blaming you, Joe.”
“Maybe you should,” he muttered.
“I did. It’s done. I just need to figure out how to work through it.”
“Maybe….”
“Maybe what?”
“My dad,” Joe said. “He… taught me things. About what it meant to be an Alpha. What it meant to have a pack. I could… show you. If you wanted.”
I took his hand in mine.
I said, “Yeah, Joe. Sure. That sounds fine.”
ONCE WHEN I was seven, my father came home from the garage.
He sat on the porch, opened a beer, and sighed.
I sat near him because he was my father and I loved him so.
He looked at the house at the end of the lane. It was empty. It had been for a long time.
The sun was setting when he was on his fourth beer.
He said, “Ox.”
I said, “Hi, Daddy.”
He said, “Hey” and “Ox” and “I’m going to give you some advice, okay?” the words tripping all over each other.
I nodded, though I didn’t know what he was talking about. I just liked the sound of his voice.
He said, “You think you’re gonna get somewhere. You think you’re gonna do something great with your life. Because you don’t want to be like wherever you came from. But people are gonna shit where you walk. They’re not going to give a damn about what you want. All they want to do is knock you down. Trap you in a job you hate. In a house you can’t stand. With people you can’t even look at. Don’t let them. Okay? You don’t fucking let them do that to you.”
“Okay,” I said. “I won’t.”
He grunted at me and took another sip from the red and white can.
He said, “You’re a good kid, Ox. Stupid, but good.”
I wondered if that was what true love felt like.
JOE TOOK me to the trees, to the woods, walking the path of his father. His Alpha.
He said, “Dad told me that there have always been these threads that connect us. They bind us to each other because we’re pack. The better we work together, the more we trust and respect each other, the stronger the bonds become.”