“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.