Or gotten my head out of my ass.
Same difference.
Robbie had called back East to let Alpha Hughes know Joe and the others had returned. She had questions that needed to be answered, but Robbie couldn’t. He hadn’t really spoken with Joe, aside from their initial confrontation outside the house on the first day. He spent most of his time at home with me in the old house. The rest of the pack came and went, as they normally did. They felt the pull toward me, but not as strong as the wolves. While it was common for the human members to be gone all at the same time, I usually had a wolf or two with me.
But I hadn’t spoken with them, hadn’t even really seen them aside from a glimpse or two. There was a moment when I was coming back from the garage that I came face to face with Carter near the old house, and all I could think about beyond his rough exterior was the way he’d laughed after Joe had found out Carter had kissed me first. The way they’d run through the forest. The way Kelly had called me Dad in that wry tone of his.
Everything had seemed so simple then.
Carter had opened his mouth to say something, but I’d just nodded and sidestepped around him. I thought he was going to reach out and stop me, but he didn’t, though I could feel him staring after me as I went inside and closed the door behind me.
I didn’t see Joe, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t watching.
I didn’t ask Elizabeth or Mark about them. They didn’t volunteer anything.
But if they weren’t in the old house, I knew where they were.
“Looks good,” Gordo said, and I froze over the expense invoices I’d been staring at for the last hour.
I looked up at him slowly, a weird déjà vu washing over me to see him standing there, like he was coming in to check on me to see how my homework was going. He wouldn’t let me out on the garage floor unless I could list off seven facts about fucking Stonewall Jackson, and it’s not that har
d, Ox, you can do this, come on.
Except this Gordo wasn’t that Gordo. This Gordo was harder than the other Gordo had ever been. There were lines around his eyes, more pronounced than before. He was thirty-eight years old now. The last three years hadn’t been kind, though he was bigger than he’d been before. I didn’t know if it had to do with the pack he was in, or if they’d done nothing but work out the entire time they were gone.
It was his eyes, though, that threw me the most. They’d always been vibrant. Bright. Quick to flash in anger, quick to light up when he was happy.
Now they were dull and flat, slightly sunken. This was a Gordo who’d lived hard the past three years. I didn’t want to know the things he’d seen. The things he’d done.
This new image of him wasn’t helped with what he wore. He wasn’t in his usual shop gear, no work shirt with his name stitched on the breast, no navy Dickies. He wore jeans and a tank top stretched tight across his chest. A beat-up brown leather jacket, the collar curved up around his neck.
“Yeah,” I said, because I didn’t know how else to start. “We’ve done all right.”
The no thanks to you was left unsaid, but he heard it. Even if I hadn’t meant for it to be out there like that.
He nodded, running a hand up the frame of the door, fingers picking at a little sliver of paint. “Better than that, I expect.”
“We haven’t gone under, if that’s what you were worried about.”
“No. Didn’t think you would.” He cracked a smile that I didn’t return. “Never worried about that, kiddo.”
I looked back down at the invoices, unsure of what to say next.
He sighed and moved into the office, dragging his hands along everything he could reach. I recognized it as the habit of a wolf when they wanted to get their scent on something or someone. The Bennetts had done it when they’d come into my house the first time, sprawling over and touching everything they could. Joe especially. When he’d gone to my room. When he’d seen the stone wolf, sitting on my—
No. I wasn’t—
“You act like them,” I said rather than follow that train of thought. “Like a wolf. Move like them too.”
He arched an eyebrow at me. “Pot, kettle.”
“That wasn’t an accusation.”
“I didn’t say it was one.”
“I don’t….”
He waited.