Aris
I should be loving this. This is actually what I wanted out of my last summer of freedom before I submit to my grandfather and let him turn me into the new king of shadows he’s been pestering me to be since I was little more than fourteen.
I should be shitfaced right now with my tongue down some stranger woman’s throat, but instead, I’m watching the beach and the hundred or so people I don’t know mingle and rally like this is their last night in the Goddess’s kingdom.
Half an hour ago, I’d been finishing my second beer while watching Posey talk to a tall, dark-haired idiot I immediately recognized as the Alpha of Ruby’s son, Mason. I’ve only met the guy once, when I came to view the lake house for the first time, and didn’t hate him then, but I sure as hell do now because I can’t find the knuckle-dragging bastard anywhere, and I’m guessing wherever he went, he took Posey with him.
I can’t relax, even after downing a third, then fourth drink… Well, perhaps this is my sixth, judging by the scattered beer cans. My body is on fire from within. I scan the crowd below, shadows snaking from my fingertips in a blurry dance, also feeling the effects of the cheap booze weakening my system. No one notices them. It’s dark, and my shadows merge with the natural shadows being cast by the fire. They pick through the crowd, searching, clawing for any sign of Posey.
Just to make sure she’s fine. That she’s not being taken advantage of. Not because I actually, deeply care. Just because… if I don’t find her, I’ll scream. I swear on the Goddess–
“Where’d Roman go? I just saw him and Willow like ten minutes ago.” Tate is suddenly at my side, stumbling, a woman I don’t recognize swaying under the weight of his arm resting over her shoulders. She giggles but can’t form a single syllable. I frown at them. Tate is barely lucid. He takes a single step and sits directly on the sand at my feet.
“I don’t know where Roman is, and I don’t care. Where’s Posey?”
“Oh, she went home like an hour ago,” he says with a wave of his hand. “She was all bent out of shape about something and–”
I turn, leaving him behind mid-sentence, and break into a near sprint until I reach the tree line where the beach ends and the forest hugging the small town begins. My clothing shreds into ribbons when I involuntarily shift and promptly disappear into a wolf of pure, nearly invisible shadow. It’s unnecessary, but it’s not up to me. My senses propel me forward. I'm driven by my thundering heartbeat with every rapid step. I barely breathe until my paws touch the smooth white gravel driveway, and I skid to a stop, spraying pebbles all over the porch and tumbling into my human form without being able to even remotely stop the shift from happening.
I storm into the house prepared to fight, shoulders squared, haphazardly snatching a pair of shorts off the staircase railing that likely belong to Tate or Miles and pulling them on while the house blurs and adrenaline rushes, blinding me to the world. Posey’s door is open when I climb the final staircase to the top floor of the house. A shadow moves through the stream of light pouring through the crack then pauses, halting mid-step.
I charge, fist drawn back, prepared to flatten the Alpha’s son who followed Posey home to torment her further and…
“ARIS!” Posey’s scream bounces from wall to wall, booming through my ears. The noise rattles me to the bone, snapping me out of my delirium in a heartbeat, and then the booze, nerves, and overwhelm crush me, sweeping me into a furious current I can’t find the footing to fight.
“What–are–you–doing–here?” I choke out, panting, gripping either side of the doorframe as I look down at her.
She’s white as a ghost and dressed in nothing but an old Wellington T-shirt that brushes the top of her thighs, her face free of the makeup I know Willow piled on. Her hair falls loosely over her shoulders, and her eyes–as wide and round as tea-saucers–wildly scan my face. I can almost feel her racing heartbeat through the floorboards between us. Her left hand is fused to her chest like she’s trying to steady it.
“You scared me to death! What’s wrong with you?” she shouts. “I thought…. Were you going to hit me?”
“Of course not.” I heave a sharp breath and enter her room, kicking the door closed with a crunch. My face is glazed with sweat, and my skin prickles as I move across the soft carpet to the edge of her bed, where I sit, ignoring the scattered books and trinkets, nearly crushing her glasses. She snatches them out of my hand and inspects the thick lenses before gripping them like a weapon, her cheeks finally turning from a pale cream to a rosy, furious pink again.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Why do you need those anyway? Your eyesight can’t be that bad.” I motion to the glasses, and she glowers, tucking them behind her back. I take several more deep breaths, trying to fill and calm my lungs.
“I don’t have a wolf, remember? You can thank your wolf for your better-than-perfect eyesight. I wasn’t as blessed.” She sets the glasses carefully on her side table before forming a fist. “I almost had a stroke, Aris. I heard you sprinting up the stairs and thought someone was, in fact, here to kill me–or worse.”
“I heard you left the bonfire and wanted to make sure you were okay.” I can’t be this out of control. Now, I’m the one with a hand clasped against my chest, my body screaming from excretion, my skin slick with sweat.
“Did you sprint the entire way back?” she hisses, moving across the room. She turns, giving me her back, and begins to twist her hair into a bun on the top of her head, the shirt lifting ever so slightly to reveal the tight boy shorts beneath. Panties. Fuck.
I look away, coughing, struggling to clear my throat. “I–I shifted. It was faster that way.”
“You’re actually insane. What is your deal? Why are you so concerned about me and what I do?” She tosses out the questions like they’re insults.
“Why’d you come back?”
“I wasn’t having fun anymore. Everyone else was drunk, so I figured it didn’t matter. I just wanted to be home.”
“You should have told me.”
“I told Willow I was leaving.”
“You should have told me.”
“You are not my brother. You’re not responsible for me in the slightest. I’m a grown woman, Aris. I’m capable of making my own decisions.” She walks into the bathroom and shuts off the light like I’d interrupted her just as she was getting ready for bed, which explains the books and the glasses I nearly snapped in half sitting on the bedspread.
I don’t take the hint and move when she approaches the bed, so she gestures to me, to my unkempt state. “Are those even your shorts? They barely fit.”
“I think they’re Tate’s. He’s a lot smaller than me.”
“Are you okay?”
I blink, spiraling back to reality as my wolf senses fade. “Yeah. I just wanted to check on you.”
“Well, I’m in one piece–”
“Did something happen?” I meet her eyes. She’s standing only a few feet away, and I can tell the question is hanging in the air between us as she ponders her answer, then surrenders, her shoulders slumping. She sits down beside me. Her leg brushes mine when she reaches behind her for a small tube of cherry lotion, that scent I keep catching when she’s around.
She smoothes it onto her hands, slowly massaging it along each digit. “I came home before anything could happen.” She purses her lips and shakes her head. “If you really want to know.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean? Gods, you were just asking if I was hunting tonight. Maybe I was, Aris, and then realized how grossly unprepared I am for the real world and something as simple and innocent as flirting with someone who showed even the smallest fraction of interest in me.” Her cheeks flare, turning from rosy to a deep red. “I felt awful, so I left. I didn’t like it. That feeling.”
“What feeling?” My voice is low enough to be barely audible, but she chuckles darkly, her eyes suddenly glossy like she’s on the verge of tears.
“You know, I have done everything right. I’m pretty.” She meets my eyes briefly. “I apparently have childbearing hips and breasts to match. My mom had the highest hopes that I’d make a good, strong match.” That dark chuckle turns self-deprecating. “I grew up thinking I’d be like Dad and Roman–an alchemist. Gods, that’s all I wanted. I wanted a room in the spires in Sapphire Ridge where I bent metal all day. I didn’t care if it meant making uniforms for the Ghost army or little trinkets for your extended family. I wanted that. And then I realized what was happening to me, and I went off to college to give myself some space to figure it out. I was terrified the whole time. I didn’t know how to talk to people. I didn’t know how to want anything other than the future I’d carved for myself that was getting ripped away second by second, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
She looks at me again with tired eyes that scream for me to understand, to see her.
“You’re not worthless because you don’t have a wolf.”
She searches my gaze. Unsaid words sit on the tip of her tongue, which she bites. “Mom wanted me to come home after school, so I did. That was the deal–I could leave and go to college in Crescent Falls, but I’d have to return and… be who I promised I’d be. Marry who I promised I’d marry. But I made those promises when I thought I could still be an alchemist. I can’t now. And I can’t remain… I’m a stain on the family's name.”
“You’re not.”
“You don’t understand–”
“You know my family. You know what we’re capable of. One word of this to my parents–”
“No,” she breathes, shaking her head. “You don’t understand, and I can’t make you understand my reasoning for signing my life away to the temple.”
“Why there? Why do it, Posey? You’re right, I don’t understand. You can do anything you want. You’re not tied to your parents and their expectations.” I turn toward her, the space between us shrinking.
“You heard Roman.”
“I don’t give a shit about how Roman feels about this.”
“He’s your best friend.”
“You’re my friend, too.”
Posey stares at me for several seconds before looking away, taking a deep, slow breath. “Aris–”
“Why’d you leave the bonfire?”
“I already told you.”
“Why did you leave and not tell me? Have I done something to offend you, Posey? You know…how I act around you… what I say to you sometimes… it’s just who I am, and it doesn’t mean anything.”
“I know.”
“Then what’s going on?”
Her nostrils flare, but she looks down at her lap, her blush creeping down her neck. “Willow has a list, you know. To sleep with someone from every place she visits. She’s doing it because she likes it but also because she thinks she’ll meet her mate when she gets back to Crescent Falls, and then it’s over. Her life begins.”
She wrings her hands, scrubbing the lotion in deeper, like her fingers hurt, especially the tips.
“It’s like everything is changing at the end of the summer for everyone, and everyone has these plans to experience stuff, to check things off a list, and I’ve been so–” She sucks in a breath, letting it out slowly. She doesn’t finish the sentence, but the look on her face crushes me.
“What’s on your list?”
Posey blinks, shaking her head. “I don’t have one. I thought… maybe tonight I’d try to be more like Willow and allow myself to… just talk to someone, but it’s not what I think I wanted.”
“Posey, come on.” I nudge her, but her answering smile is half-hearted and faint.
“Don’t laugh.”
“I’ll try.”
“I wanted to kiss someone. I just… wanted to know what it felt like.” She rolls her lower lip between her teeth before looking up at me, those doe-eyes unraveling any traces of common sense I have to my name. “It’s so stupid.”
“Kiss me.”
“What?” She starts to laugh, but I lean in, and she doesn’t lean away.
“It’s just a kiss, Posey. If you want to know what it feels like, kiss me. It doesn’t have to mean anything every time.”
She looks at my lips and back up again, that blush creeping back into existence.
“Aris…”
I wait for the “we can’t” to follow.
It doesn’t.
“Tell me no,” I tell her.
She looks into my eyes. I give her the space of a breath, of a single heartbeat, to say the word.
She… doesn’t.
It’s just a kiss. Something I’ve done a million times before. If my best-friend’s little sister is serious about joining a fucking convent… kissing her is the least I can do. The least.
I lean in, my fingers stroking her cheek. I angle my mouth over hers, and she closes her eyes.
“It feels like this,” I whisper against her mouth.
And kiss her.