“Nothing,” Joe said. “He did nothing.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
“You asshole,” Joe shouted at me as he pulled away.
I said, “What,” because what?
“Look at me,” he demanded.
And I did. Because I always did.
“What do you see?”
“Joe,” I said. “I see you.” Maybe a little rumpled. Maybe some bags under his eyes. Maybe he was a little pale, and if he wasn’t a werewolf, I’d wonder if he was getting sick. But he couldn’t so I didn’t wonder at all.
“You don’t,” he cried. “You fucking don’t.” I’d never seen him so pissed.
“I don’t… understand?” I asked him. Or told him.
“Gah!” he shouted at me, eyes flaring orange and red and then he turned and left.
He apologized the next day. Said he was tired. I said, “Sure, Joe. Okay. No worries.”
Then he held my hand and we walked down the dirt road like we always did.
It was April when Frankie stopped coming by the house. I wanted to ask Joe about it, but I could never find the words. Kelly said they’d broken up and I said, “Oh,” even though what I thought in my head was Good. Good. Good.
It was May when everything exploded.
It was the strangest thing.
THE DAYS were hot and humid. The news said it was going to be the hottest summer in years. Heat wave, they said. Could go on for weeks and weeks.
It was almost my twenty-third birthday. I figured maybe it was time for me to move out of Mom’s house, but the thought of not living next to the pack caused me to sweat, so I didn’t push it too hard. Mom never complained. She liked me there. And it meant I could keep her safe in case the monsters ever came again.
So there, shortly before I’d been on the earth for twenty-three years, I went over to the Bennetts’ for Sunday dinner. Elizabeth asked if I’d get some of the tomatoes out of the garden. She smiled at me and kissed me on the cheek.
Joe and Carter and Kelly were coming out of the woods, finishing up their run as I came back from the garden.
They were laughing and shoving each other the way brothers do. I loved all three of them.
Except.
Except.
Joe wore a pair of low-slung shorts. Just the smallest things.
And that was it.
He was almost as big as I was now. We were eye level, or so close that it didn’t matter, which put him a couple of inches over six feet.
There was a sheen of sweat over his torso. A spattering of wet blond hairs curling on his chest that looked to be cut out of granite. The soft definition of muscles on his stomach. A line of sweat that hit his happy trail and soaked into the waistband of his shorts.
He turned, saying something back to Carter, and I saw the dimples above his ass. The way his legs flexed and shifted as he hopped from one foot to the other.
He pointed wildly at something back in the woods and there was a blue vein that stuck out along his bicep and I wanted to trace with my fingers because when had that happened?
And those hands. Those big fucking hands and I—