I closed my eyes, and the scene changed. I was with Kara on the beach. It must have been on one of the many spring-break vacations in which her family had included me. The turquoise waters of the Gulf of Mexico lapped at our toes as we read Christopher Pike paperbacks and watched for cute boys.
“He’s good for you, you know,” Kara said in her old-sage voice. When we were kids, she’d considered the six months she had on me to be a lifetime of experience. As this dream seemed to be set in late high school or early college, she could have been talking about any number of “he’s.” And I found I didn’t really care, I just wanted this warm, familiar moment to last.
“You’ve said that about all of my boyfriends,” I reminded her, scrunching my toes into the cool, damp sand as I tipped my head back into the sunshine.
“He’s going to be the love of your life.”
“You’ve said that about all of my boyfriends, too, Kare,” I said. I reached out to pat her arm as I adjusted my Ray-Bans.
“You know, you’re home now, right?” she asked. “No matter what happens, that’s your home.”
I opened my eyes to find us in the parking lot of the Tast-E-Grill, sitting in my old Chevy, which we lovingly called the Rust Bucket. We were eating chili dogs and Tater Tots, with our bare feet propped on the cracked faux-leather dashboard.
This was such a weird dream.
“You’re home now,” Kara repeated.
“I’m confused.”
“You’ve been a girl without a home for a long time, Mo. It’s time to stop looking. You know where you’re supposed to be. When trouble comes, you’re going to stick. You always have, you always will,” she said, eyeing my Tots. “Are you going to finish those?”
I blinked awake, and I swear I could still smell the car exhaust and the chili dogs. Cooper stirred beside me, his arm tightening instinctually around me as he felt me sit up. I pressed a kiss to his shoulder and flopped my head back onto my pillow.
It didn’t surprise me, as it had on occasion, to wake up with a large, naked werewolf curled around my body. These days, we were together morning, noon, and night. Naked Cooper Time was like a drug. No matter how much I got, I ended up jonesing for more. Winter was passing, and I hardly noticed. Don’t get me wrong, it was cold, so cold that I occasionally feared losing outlying areas of my body just from walking to and from my truck. There were days when the roads were impassable, even with four-wheel drive, as drifts of snow reaching over my head piled in some lanes. Buzz would have to come pick me up for work on his snowmobile, and I would make minuscule batches of food for the handful of people willing to brave the roads so they could gather around the big iron stove in the dining room and avoid their own cooking.
There were afternoons when the darkness closed in on me like a smothering blanket and the wind howled like some horrible, rabid thing. The light, or absence thereof, controlled what I did, where I went, when I ate. But the claustrophobia and depression I’d expected never really set in. It’s not difficult to spend days at a time trapped inside when you’ve got a warm fire, good food, and generally nude company. It was like a prolonged snow day. The one time I’d gotten a snow day in my brief tango with public school was when we had a freak ice storm my junior year. Hail isn’t that much fun to sled on.
Christmas came and went. I counted my blessings that my parents didn’t care enough about Christian holidays centered on meat consumption to call and guilt me into coming home. Abner came to the saloon dressed as Santa and gave everybody bottles of his homemade vodka. Cooper said it made a handy antiseptic, but drinking it was taking your life into your own hands.
Cooper didn’t mention going home to see his family, so I prepared a low-key feast for him, Buzz, and Evie. I wasn’t sure what a girl should buy her werewolf boyfriend, so I stuck with something safe: a sweater. Mind-numbingly boring, I know. Cooper made me a little carved wooden wolf, which we promptly put on my mantel to watch over me when he wasn’t there. It was either endearing or a little creepy.>“I don’t believe that,” I said, careful to resist my urge to back away from him, to put space between us. It had taken me this long to get close to Cooper; rejecting him now was unacceptable.
He caught my chin and forced me to look him in the eye. “Believe it.”
“Fine, I don’t believe you could hurt someone unless you had no other choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” he insisted. “And I made a lot of bad ones. I couldn’t live with what I’d done, what it did to my family, so I left.”
I got the impression that was probably the most detailed explanation I was going to get at this point, which was maddening. So I switched tactics. “What about your dad?” I asked carefully. “Was he happy being a foot soldier?”
“I never really got to talk to him about it.” Cooper stared down at our hands. “My dad died in an accident when I was little. He was running with the pack, and one of my uncles was caught in one of those cage traps. Bunch of scientists were tagging wolves, tracking their movements for research. Pretty harmless, really. We’re usually able to avoid them, but my uncle, Samson’s dad, wasn’t very bright when it came to stuff like that. Dad volunteered to stay behind to try to get my uncle free, when the researchers came back to check the traps. Dad was still a wolf, and he got aggressive. They had a rifle. My uncle got free, but my dad, he was hurt pretty bad—shot in the head. He managed to make it into the woods so my uncle could bring him home. They couldn’t do anything for him.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “The humans didn’t know what they were doing. It took me a while, a long while, to stop being angry with them. They were being attacked by a huge, angry wolf. You’ve seen what I can do. Can you blame them?” When I didn’t answer, he seemed annoyed by my silence but continued. “Samson’s dad took off a while after that. He couldn’t stand seeing us every day, feeling like it was his fault that we didn’t have my father anymore. Samson’s mom died when he was a baby, so he moved in with us. He was always more brother than cousin, anyway.”
“Don’t you miss that? Would you ever go back, do you think, to be part of the pack again?”
He shook his head. “My mom comes to visit. I see Samson every once in a while. And our cousin Caleb helps me with hunting parties whenever he’s in town, which isn’t often. My sister . . . it’s pretty complicated with her. I haven’t been home in a couple of years. Every time I tried to visit, it just ended in an ugly scene.”
“Why?”
Cooper looked as if he was on the verge of telling me something important, then switched mental lanes before it could come out of his mouth. “She feels betrayed, like I left just to spite her or something. And she’s always been so damn pigheaded. Once she makes up her mind that you’ve screwed her over, you’re on her shit list for life.”
“And I assume that she doesn’t settle for the time-honored Southern tradition of passive-aggressive comments and insulting your cooking?”
“The last time I was home, I lost part of an ear and three fingertips.”
“Jesus!” I exclaimed, tilting his head so I could inspect both of his perfectly normal ears.