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“If that was how we did things, no one would ever be allowed to change anything. They’d be stuck in whatever sexuality, gender, or religion they were born as, you know?”
I nodded. “Yeah. And it’s not like the members of our pack are the people who hurt them. That would be like...like if Marley never touched a shifter again because of what shifters have done to her.”
“I think the best we can do is just to continue to be good people. And keep proving we don’t want to cause any harm,” Travis said. “I’ll apologize to Ashton later for being a prick and try to have a heart-to-heart with him, if he’ll let me.”
“I think that’s a good call. Show him you’re more dedicated to keeping the peace than making an example out of him,” I said, nodding. “It will be like a big ol’ slice of humble pie, too, you know?”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”
It took us until moonrise to finally clear all the paper from the roof. We’d have more to take care of the next day, sure, but it was a pretty solid start.
When we were finished, we sat on top of the roof with a few beers Marley had been kind enough to bring us and drank them as we watched the slow, sleepy arc of the moon across the night sky. She was waxing, almost full. We’d all be getting the itch to go for a run soon.
“It’s strange,” Travis said after a stretch of comfortable silence, “how my relationship to the night has changed, I mean. Sometimes, I find myself just sitting on the edge of my bed and staring out the window at the moon.”
“Yeah,” I said, taking a sip of my beer to create a little time between thoughts. “I still don’t think they’ve figured out the whole moon and shifter thing. I mean, why it feels so different for us to look at the moon versus nonshifters.”
“Sometimes, I wonder if there is something spiritual going on with it,” Travis said, eyes hooded and shining with the moon’s milky light. “Maybe it has to do with the way it gets illuminated. Maybe that’s why pack dynamics are so important. Maybe that’s what’s different between shifters and nonshifters, that we recognize the need we have for others in our lives.”
I thought about that while I stared up at the moon along with him. I remembered feeling a lot of the same things when I was a teenager, how school was so much harder for me because of how hard I took others’ rejection of me. That was the very reason Travis was so damned important to me, and the reason I was so angry with my parents for not letting me have a proper relationship with Gramps. It had felt wrong to be severed from the people I loved and admired so much.
Maybe that was what all this drama was about. Maybe that’s why starting a pack was so hard. It was the constant push and pull of tension as I tried to get people to work together. Constantly feeling like my equilibrium had been thrown off because the relatively steady comfort of my family had been thrown off-kilter by adding a bunch of new people to it.
Maybe Travis knew more about being a shifter than I’d given him credit for. Maybe he knew even more than I did because he’d existed on both sides of the divide. Maybe it didn’t fucking matter who was more experienced, just who was more perceptive.
I took another sip of my beer and sighed. “What changed for you after you finished your transition?” I finally asked him. “Not just physically. I mean…internally, how does it feel different? How has your mind changed?”
It was Travis’s turn for some thoughtful silence. He leaned back on the palms of his hands, still staring at the moon in quiet introspection. “I feel…more secure in a lot of ways,” he said finally. “And I feel more frightened than ever, too.”
“How do you mean?”
“Since I transitioned, my bond with Lana is closer than ever. We just click in a way we didn’t before. Sometimes, I can look at her and know exactly what she’s thinking or feeling based on the expression on her face alone. But I also feel way more protective. I feel like I see danger everywhere around us, around you and Marley, around Noah and Syl. I just feel like I have to be so hyper-vigilant now, even when things are calm. I think that’s why I was so hot under the collar with Ashton today. It felt like I needed to get a fight out of my system.”
“I’ve been there, man,” I said sympathetically. “You know I have been.”
“Yeah, about that…” he said. “I feel like I ought to apologize to you…”
“What?” I asked, confused.
“You know, there have been a lot of times I kind of shamed you for your aggression or even considered distancing myself from you when we were kids, and you were in your angst phases and stuff,” he said. “There were a lot of times I told you your biology was no excuse—”
“That was true, though,” I interrupted. “Biology or not, I can’t go busting people’s jaws every time they piss me off.”
“Even so,” Travis said. “I was super-judgmental about it, and you didn’t deserve that. I should have given you more grace and understanding. Now that I’m experiencing it for myself, I’m amazed at how cool you’re always able to keep it. Like, it’s a fucking accomplishment, dude.”
“I can’t really tell if it’s an accomplishment anymore,” I said. “You’ve been warning me about Ashton for weeks and—”
“You gotta stop beating yourself up about that,” Travis cut in. “You can’t control other people, and when it mattered, you stepped in, and you did it in a way where no one you cared about got hurt.”
“They could have,” I pointed out.
“But they didn’t.”.
I smiled a little to myself before taking another swig of my beer.
“What is it?” Travis asked.
“You and Marley sound a lot alike sometimes, you know?” I said. “She told me the same thing—that it’s dangerous to get entrenched in what could have happened instead of focusing on what actually did happen.”
