Page 72 of Full Moon Frenzy

“That’s ridiculous. An app? For flashcards?! You know what, that actually makes a lot of sense now that you’re telling me this. Because some of these residents would come through our doors not knowing their ass from their elbow, and it’s probably because they never had to haul around twelve pounds of flashcards. That was character building.”

“Or stuff their lab coats with anatomy booklets,” Trapp agreed, laughing. “I hate to break it to you, Adi, but your schemes wouldn’t work today. We’re officially old.”

When his nights off coincided with hers, they stayed at his house.

The area around the university was beautiful. The streets tiered around steep hills like piped rings of frosting on a cake, full of uneven sidewalks and quirky little boutiques and taverns. Trapp seemed more at home in this little section of town than in the coolly sophisticated development she lived in, with its young professionals and the overzealous HOA that had given her a citation her very first night in town, for her trailer blocking several inches of the sidewalk.

When they would walk hand-in-hand to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant down the street that served authentic amphibious cuisine, Adriana would watch their reflection in the glass of the shops, feeling as though she were looking through that rain-soaked alternate reality once more, happy that in this version, they’d wound up finding each other again.

Despite his brother’s impatience, the full moon was upon them in the blink of an eye. It was the first turn they were spending together, and she was terrified.

He had a cabin at some secluded lake, because fucking of course he did. It would be safe, he assured her. It was a huge tract of wooded property, the closest neighbors being the cabins that belonged to his older brothers. There would be no one — and no other wolves — around for miles. They could leave a day early, he’d suggested, enjoy the quiet of the woods together before the turn.

She’d never been on vacation with anyone. She’d never been on vacation at all.

The turn was unsafe, and now she was going away with him for what was supposed to be a romantic weekend together, spending the moon together, the epitome of were passion. All she could do, however, was panic.

As the moon moved across the sky each month, it took her calm with it.

She had never been this way before. She focused on work, and work took every ounce of her focus, and even though every day was different, the emergency department was always the same. She knew what to expect — controlled chaos and sometimes outright mayhem, patients she would stabilize and never see again, patients she would lose, an unceasing wave of bodies through the door, punctuated by long hours and little sleep.

Here, though . . . the clinic provided nothing for her brain to chew. Low-acuity patients who never coded in the middle of the waiting area, no one shouting for an assist, names she was expected to remember, one more question she was expected to ask. Too much time to overthink, and with the increased heat in her veins as the moon approached, Adriana felt like she was in a freefall.

It gave her too much time to think about Trapp. Think about him and stress over him, for surely something was going to go wrong. Either he would decide she was too much or too little, the reason everchanging in her imagination, or else she would discover something about him that she would not be able to overlook. Going away together, even for just a day, held the promise of amplifying that possibility, until the moon had her convinced it was inevitable.

When she left the clinic the day after Trapp had casually suggested the cabin plan, she wandered around the Food Gryphon as if it was the first time she had ever been grocery shopping in her life. What would they need? What would he want? Maybe this is moving too fast. You should stay home in your yard where you’ll be safe. After all, it had only been a month since that night at his house, when they’d agreed to give their relationship a second chance.

What if you get to the cabin and he does something disgusting? What if he cuts his toenails while you’re sitting on the sofa? What if he leaves wet towels on the bathroom floor? Are you willing to be in a relationship with a werewolf who doesn’t put his dirty underwear in the hamper? She didn’t know him anymore. His own mother had confirmed that. She didn’t know if Trapp did any of the above, and that was the point. There was no greater source of anxiety than the unknown.

She wandered around the store, thinking of one horrific scenario after the next, somehow finding herself at the checkout with several bottles of wine, a charcuterie board, and a decadent-looking brownie tray from the bakery. What if he can’t have chocolate?! It took her several panicking moments in front of the trollish cashier to remember that she, herself, was a caninae were and unaffected by chocolate in her upright bones.

Her anxiety crouched within her like a toad, silent and waiting in the darkness for an opportunity to begin croaking. By the time she got home, it was all she could hear.

He’d pulled into the townhouse’s short driveway only minutes after she had, not even giving her the chance to melt down privately. You knew he was coming over tonight. He literally texted you from the grocery store. Why are you acting like this is a sneak attack?!

“Do you go up there often?” she asked, forcing herself to focus on the conversation they were in the midst of, him asking again if she wanted to leave the next day to go off to the woods.

Trapp shrugged, carrying the grocery bags upstairs to the kitchen. “Not as often as I’d like to. It’s hard with work. I don’t always want to make the drive the morning of the turn and then have to drive all the way back the next night. My ex and I would go up for a weekend here or there, but not often. My brother has used it more than I have in the past two years.”

Adriana turned from the counter, where she’d pulled out the wine. “Your ex?”

Trapp’s head raised from the bag he was emptying, his eyes wide. “I . . . my ex-girlfriend? Like I said, it’s been a while. My brother was the last one to use it, and that was like eight months ago.”

Of course he had an ex-girlfriend. Look at him. He probably has dozens of ex-girlfriends. “Oh. Yeah, sure. That makes sense. How-how long were you together?”

He was bent over, half in the refrigerator, putting things away. “A few years.”

She should have been helping him. At the very least, she could be pre-heating the oven for dinner. “How long ago did you break up?”

Trapp’s head raised again, his dark eyes still wide. “Um . . . not . . . not that long ago. She’s moved away already. I’ll probably never see her again.”

“What’s not long ago?”

“This conversation just got really painful, didn’t it?” he laughed uncomfortably. “Almost four months ago?”

“Four months?” Adriana squinted. This was her third full moon since she had moved for the job at the clinic. Her third full moon, and she had been in Cambric Creek for at least a few weeks before that first moon. “That’s . . . right around the time I moved here?”

“Sure, maybe? It was at the end of the school year. There was this festival on Main Street . . . we broke up that same night. So like, end of May?”