“You are. But you gotta admit I'm a little bit right.”
Nate watched the exchange, fascinated. This sibling relationship clearly had a complicated history, and he found himself weirdly curious about Lynn and Stella’s past.
“Fine, you're right,” Lynn grumbled. “Let's leave Nate to go to sleep.”
Ken leaned in and kissed her temple. “That's code for ‘get your butt upstairs now,’” he confided to Nate.
“Oh,” said Lynn, “was I not clear enough? Get your butt upstairs, now.” But she was grinning, and so was Ken.
“Duty calls,” Ken said, and grabbed Nate's shoulder, shaking it with that same rough affection he'd hugged with. “Good to see you, man.”
“Same. Nice to meet you, Lynn,” Nate said.
Lynn nodded. “Good to have you here,” she said, and tugged Ken out of the room behind her.
Nate watched them go with a feeling he eventually identified as...wistfulness.
He'd never thought much about having a mate. He was happy playing the field—a different woman every time he went out kept the variety going in his life. He couldn't stand boredom, always needed to be moving around, experiencing new things. Dating had been the same.
But for some reason, the sight of Ken and Lynn together, comfortable and happy, awakened some kind of basic longing in him.
Good to have a mate, his panther growled.
We'd get bored, Nate pointed out. Do you want the same woman telling us to get our butt upstairs in the same house every night?
That's not our mate, his panther pointed out.
Well, all right. Maybe his mate would be different, if he had one.
But he didn't. And at forty-six, he was pretty sure it was too late for him to find one. Ken had gotten lucky, but Nate was just as happy with his life as it was.
His panther rumbled, dissatisfied, but didn't contribute any more opinions. Nate turned to the couch. Time to get some sleep while things were quiet.
***
Stella
Stella heard the conversation as Lynn and Ken got home, and thought that she should probably go downstairs, join in.
But she just...she didn't want to. She was so tired of pretending that nothing was wrong, she was fine. It had been a crazy kind of relief, to let all that go with Nate, just give up the effort and let herself be scared, be upset, be silly and fidgety and nervous. The quiet confidence he'd projected, the way he hadn't tried to judge, just help...it had made it easy.
But if she was with Lynn and Ken, she'd have to decide whether to show them how she felt, or start up the masquerade again. And she didn't have the energy to decide that right now.
So instead, she knocked on Eva's door. “Honey? Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
She slipped inside. Eva was curled up fully-dressed on her bed, with her phone in her hand. Stella sat down next to her. “How are you doing?”
“Fine.”
“Can you set your phone down for a second?” Stella asked her, as gently as she could.
There was a long moment where she wasn't sure if Eva would listen, and then finally the phone was tucked under a pillow—Stella didn't miss the fact that Eva never let her see the screen, and wondered what sort of crazy Internet stuff she was looking at, or who she might be having a text conversation with.
But that wasn't why she was here. “I'm sorry you had to be scared earlier,” she said.
Eva shook her head. “He's not after me, Mom. He's after you. What happens if he does something crazy?”