Mark and Elizabeth followed suit, Rico muttering about everyone being way too calm with the nudity and Chris calling him a prude.
Soon, there were four wolves in the clearing, and they rubbed up against each other, Carter and Kelly crowding on either side of their mother, wriggling excitedly like puppies.
“Go ahead, Robbie,” I said, feeling Joe’s eyes on me.
“I don’t have to,” he said through a mouthful of sharpened teeth. “I can stay with you. I can run like this. Or half shift. It’s fine.”
But it wasn’t fine. I knew the moon was pulling at him, his wolf clawing just under the surface to break free. Mark had told me once a long time ago that it physically hurt not to change with the moon, and that if a werewolf denied it for too long over too many moons, it could cause a mental break.
“It’s fine,” I said lightly. “You should get used to the others.”
He didn’t look happy about that, glancing between Joe and me. He let out a huff and started stripping. I averted my eyes as a courtesy.
Joe was still watching me with a blank look. He didn’t used to be able to do that. I hated it.
Robbie shifted somewhere behind me. He was ganglier than the others and smaller, with long, thin legs and a narrow body. His tail twitched as he came to stand next to me, watching the wolves from his pack mingle with wolves from another pack.
He looked tense and unsure. I ran my hands over his head, tugging gently on one of his ears. He nuzzled into my hand and I felt a pulse of warmth along the thread that stretched between us.
“Go on,” I said.
And I thought he would. I thought he’d join the other wolves, but instead, he turned back to the humans behind us and started rubbing up against their legs, snapping playfully at their heels to get them moving toward the trees to run through the woods.
Then it was just Joe and me, listening as the wolves sang and the humans hollered.
He spoke first.
He said, “You did good, Ox.”
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I just said, “Thanks.” But that didn’t sit right, so I added, “It wasn’t just me.”
“Oh?”
“It was all of us. They did as much for me as I did for them.”
“I know. That’s what pack does.”
I bit back the retort and pushed away the familiar curl of anger. Joe probably knew it, could probably taste the bright spark of rage before I caught it, but he didn’t say anything about it.
Instead, he said, “But don’t think it wasn’t you, Ox. If it wasn’t for you….”
I waited to see if he would continue.
“Ox.”
I looked over at him. He was closer to me than he’d been in over three years. I didn’t understand why it felt like he was still so far away.
“Thank you,” he said.
“For what?”
“For doing what I couldn’t.”
I shouldn’t have had to! I wanted to shout at him.
You shouldn’t have put me in this position!
You left us. You left me.
“I didn’t have a choice,” I said instead.
He snorted, eyes bleeding red. “You always had a choice, Ox. And you still chose us. You always did.”
“That’s what pack does,” I said, throwing his words back at him.
He smiled at me. He had many teeth.
“Are you going to shift?” I asked, suddenly feeling very warm.
He took a step toward me.
My feet wouldn’t move.
Another step. And then another.
He stopped within arm’s reach but didn’t move to touch me. It was odd, knowing I didn’t have to look down to meet his eyes anymore.
“When I was gone,” he said, playing with the hem of his shirt, “when we were gone, every day was hard.”
I watched his fingers as he started to tug on his shirt, pulling it up.
“But the full moons were the hardest,” he said, and there was miles of skin. He wasn’t a little boy anymore, or even a teenager stumbling in his father’s footsteps. No, he was a man now and an Alpha. And it showed in the cut of the muscles in his stomach. The breadth of his chest, and the way it was covered with a smattering of lightly colored hair. The way his biceps bunched as he pulled the shirt up and over his head before dropping it to the ground beside him. “They were the hardest,” he said, “because I would be howling for my pack, and only some of them heard me. Only some of them howled back.”
His hands moved toward the fly of his jeans, fingers trailing along his waist, curling into the hair on his stomach. He lifted one foot behind the other, toeing at his boot. It slid off and he pushed it to the side. “I was howling for you,” he said quietly as he slid off his other boot. “Even if you didn’t hear me, even if you couldn’t feel it, Ox, I swear I howled for you.”
He unbuttoned the top button of his jeans, and I told myself to look away. I told myself this wasn’t right. That I was still so angry at him that I could barely stand it, that we had so fucking much to talk about to even see if we could get back to the way we once were. Or even close to it.
He knew what he was doing to me.
And for a moment, I hated him for manipulating me like that.
But if I thought about it, really thought about it, I didn’t think he’d do something like that. Use his own body to get what he wanted. Granted, I didn’t know this Joe. I didn’t know what he’d done while he was away. How many people he’d fucked, if he’d fucked anyone at all. He was innocent and kind, the boy I once knew. I tried to fit him with the man before me, tried to reconcile the differences between the two.
The second button was undone, then the third.
I didn’t think he’d worn underwear, and the moon was bright enough to see his pubic hair, the base of his dick.
I looked back up at his face.
The blank look was gone, the mask of the Alpha slipped and discarded, even though his eyes still burned red.
He looked younger, almost. Softer. Unsure of himself.
He said, “There was never anyone else the entire time I was gone. There was never anyone else for me. Because even if you couldn’t hear me when I called for you, the howl in my heart was always meant for you.”
I wanted to tell him to get out of my head, because somehow he’d known what I was thinking. He shouldn’t have been able to see that. To hear that. To know that.
I wanted to tell him I hadn’t been with anyone else either.
That I had waited. And waited. And waited for him until I thought my skin would break apart and my bones would turn to so much dust. That I did what I had to do to keep us alive, that even though we had become something more than what the pieces of us should have made, there was an ache in my head and a hole in my heart and it was because of him. He’d done this to me.
He didn’t fuck anyone else?
Well good for him.
I didn’t even think about it.
There was a yip in the trees, louder than the others.
I looked over.
Robbie stood at the tree line watching me, head cocked in question.
“He cares about you,” Joe said from behind me.
“I’m his Alpha.”
“Sure, Ox,” Joe said, and I knew from the sound of it that he’d stepped out of his jeans. I told myself not to turn around. I’d already seen too much and I wasn’t going to break down that easily, even if he was all I’d ever really wanted.