Page 4 of Full Moon Frenzy

His grandfather had only lived with them for a few short years, but it had been enough.

He, Jackson and Gray all joked that they were bonded over their shared childhood trauma in a way that they simply weren’t with their three younger siblings, but the joke was merely a smile the truth wore. They were his brothers in a way that Lowell, Owen, and Liam were not. Similar to the way Vinlop and Ragnam were his brothers in uniform, in a way the rest of the firehouse was not. They’d come through the ranks together, had each started in the box, EMT to paramedics, road trauma not shared by the members of Cambric Creek’s Fire and Rescue brigade who’d only ever worked on the fire side.

He had a smile for every script he found himself in, but the corner of his mouth faltered now. He didn’t know his line, and that wasn’t a position Trapp was comfortable in. Not at all.

Julia’s movements were still slow as she gathered up her bag, still not meeting his eye. His brows drew together when she swung the bag over her shoulder, realizing she wasn’t merely retrieving something from its depths.

“What—where are you going?”

Blue eyes met his at last. She did look tired, but end-of-the-year exhaustion wasn’t the only thing he saw there. “I’m going home. I told them I’d help until seven, and now it’s ten after.”

The notion of leaving a volunteer post before the event was done and dusted was completely foreign to him.

His mother had been the one to start this whole senior celebration festival years earlier, along with more than half of the other seasonal celebrations Cambric Creek loved so well. He’d been volunteered to help set up tables and stack chairs since he was old enough to do so, setting out paper plates and stacks of cups when he was even younger, every community holiday celebration, every picnic, every street fair. He’d been an official volunteer for so long, festival and fair worker should have had their own segmented entry on his resume. Leaving early when the party was still in full swing, when there was still so much to do, so much to manage, simply wasn’t done.

“It’s called healthy boundaries, Trapp. But you shouldn’t leave. You . . . you love this. You genuinely do.”

He did. There was no point in denying it.

He liked being the Hemming everyone liked. There would be eyes on his back regardless simply because of his name, because of who his father was, and he preferred the scrutiny to be frosted in fondness. He didn’t aspire to having his name on a monument, like so many Hemmings before him. He didn’t need to play Jackson’s game of respectability politics or Grayson’s cronyism. He didn’t mind showing up when he was needed, lending a hand to whoever had use of it. The town thrived on gossip, but memories were short. Better to fill the collective consciousness with seeing him everywhere, helping everyone, rather than disappearing and letting folks remember just how he’d wound up back in Cambric Creek in the first place.

“I do,” he nodded. “But you said you wanted to talk.”

Her smile was miserable as she edged around the table, ducking under the tent’s anchor rope without looking back. “We don’t need to do that now.”

Something tightened within him, his wolf whining in warning. Something was wrong.

“I think we do.”

Fortunately, Julia lived only a few blocks from the town square, in a duplex shared with a nurse at the hospital, a batperson who worked third shift and was rarely seen. The short walk was silent. Trapp had no idea what had happened to put her in such a melancholy mood, so unlike herself, but clearly something had happened. Something bigger than last week of school exhaustion.

Nothing that you did. Of that fact, he was sure.

Trapp mentally rewound the last month of their lives — they’d both been busy with work. End-of-the-year grading and new teenage drivers hitting the road with too much confidence, a soggy wet full moon followed by a subdued brunch at his parents’ house, everyone tired and grumpy after the soaked night.

He paused, wondering if her feelings had inadvertently been hurt that day. As the only human amidst their monthly brunch, Julia was the odd one out, but his parents never made her feel excluded. Did they? No, he decided. His mother was warm and welcoming with everyone, and his father . . . well, Jack was Jack. He possessed a low estimation of the human majority in general, but he was a politician by birth, if not by profession. His father had never treated Julia with anything less than the polished, slightly aloof pleasantness with which he treated everyone in town.

Her own mother had fallen a few months earlier, Trapp reminded himself, but her sister lived nearby and had been there through the following physical therapy. Maybe she’s worried about things that have nothing to do with you. After the moon, the rest of the month had passed peaceably, if not wetly, as expected in late spring. They had a comfortable routine and nothing out of the ordinary had rocked it. Nothing he could remember.

Her house always smelled faintly of her vanilla body butter and whatever simmer pot concoction she’d most recently obtained from Owen’s girlfriend. Today was an herbaceous blend of chamomile and mint, making his nose twitch as he stepped over the threshold. Both of them fell into unconscious habit a step before their brains. Shoes off, closest to the door on the mat beside the entry table, her keys dropped in the little ceramic dish the table held, her bag deposited on the kitchen island as she crossed the room, as he turned to close the door behind him.

Vanilla, chamomile and mint, and tension.

The smell of it was sharp, almost bitter. He could hear the nearly imperceptible shift of her pulse, increasing just enough to put the hackles up on his wolf. Trapp felt the whine within him but kept his face from betraying his unease.

It wasn’t strictly necessary to close the storm door, but he did so anyway. He shut the heavy door with a click, instinctively feeling as though this conversation, whatever it was, needed containment. He would treat this like any other blaze that needed extinguishing — starve it of oxygen and smother it with cooling platitudes, whatever Julia needed to hear to bring the sparkle back to her eyes.

Leaning against the wall partition between the miniature dining room and the kitchen, he waited as she puttered absently, moving a dishtowel from the sink to its hook on the cupboard, opening the door to survey the glasses, but removing none of them. When she turned, it was nearly a spin, as if she’d sucked in a breath and was moving on the momentum of it alone, her palms flattening against the marble-topped island.

“I’m leaving, Trapp.”

He blinked. “. . . Leaving. Leaving to go where?”

“Back to Alden Arbor.”

He exhaled heavily, relief slumping his shoulders. Back to her hometown. See? Nothing to do with you. “Sure, yeah. Is your mom okay? I know you said she’s still having some issues with that elbow. Will-will you be gone long? Not the whole summer, right? Is there anything I can do to help? You’re not moving her out of the house, are you? The boys and I can come up and get that done in one afternoon if you —”

“I’m not leaving for the summer.”