Page 5 of Crave

Those were the Council’s rules. We wouldn’t even talk about Ben Caldwell’s.

I told myself our growing friendship was harmless, justified the way my pulse spiked any time she entered a room as some freaky aberration. Every shifter had to learn to leash their inner wolf, particularly at the full moon. That was what this was. Nothing more. Lacey Blair and I were friends, and it never had to go any further.

That summer, on a lazy July night after we’d been lying out on a blanket at the lake watching the stars come out, we kissed for the first time. Our hands were sticky from ice cream, strands of her ponytail kept getting caught in my mouth, and as she whispered my name, breath tasting of chocolate dipped cone and me, I couldn’t lie to myself any longer. That kiss we never should have shared was the culmination of a thousand others I’d pictured every night before I closed my eyes, a future I’d never allowed myself permission to want. I craved Lacey Blair. And I didn’t know how to stay away from her without destroying us both.

We met in secret. School started back up in the fall, and we traded notes in the library at lunch where I managed to get us assigned to the same study group. We stole long kisses after football games. Every morning she left a single cupcake from her shift before school at her aunt’s bakery in a pink Blair’s box in my locker, all the feelings forming between us that I never should have allowed to grow spelled out in a thousand flavors of double chocolate fudge, pineapple upside down cake, and decadent buttercream frosting swirls.

I should have ended things that first fall. But each time I told myself it was time, something always stopped me. Home was a constant pressure cooker. Ethan got into fights and failed classes. I played varsity football and busted my ass pulling in A’s. Our dad wrote him a pass every time, coming down hard on me whenever the two of us fought. He only seemed to see the fault in everything I did, while when it came to Ethan, his mistakes were excused. I felt isolated, in desperate need of someone, anyone who could make me feel good again. And Lacey, whose hair always smelled like sugar from the bakery, who I could go running with, then argue about the best ingredients for salsa (our current favorite featured watermelon, mint, cilantro, jalapenos and sweet Texas onions), then kiss senseless under a canopy of stars, made me feel good. And so I said nothing, letting her work out the tight knots at the back of my neck on nights when things with my dad had gotten especially bad, all the while telling her what at best were half-truths, at worst, lies.

It was incredibly, unbelievably stupid, but somehow over the course of all those stolen weeks, months and yearsI convinced myself that one day I would reveal that last secret part of me. And just like she’d accepted my pain of feeling rejected at home, my shame over feeling like an outcast among my brothers, she wouldn’t run away, even knowing what I really was.

I was careful. We never went past first base. Every month at the full moon, I stayed home from school, making excuses to my mom. I told Lacey my parents were strict and wouldn’t allow me to date, which was only half a lie. If they’d known what I was doing, I would have been homeschooled until graduation with a chain and padlock around my dick. Which was why I couldn’t tell them. I got in so deep my stomach hurt at night even while seeing Lacey Blair was sometimes the only thing that got me up in the morning. I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t give her up. There was a way we could be together. I just had to figure out how.

Then came the night of the party our senior year, the singular day of my life I would have given anything to take back.

It never should have happened. The transmission window for lycanthropy was thirty-six hours every full moon, a day and a half when viral loads spiked and human transmission became possible. It was a week early, a week when contact should have been safe, and if you think our dad didn’t have the seven of us Caldwell boys lined up out in the barn making darn sure we knew to wrap it up from the time we were old enough to find our dicks, well, then you didn’t know Ben Caldwell. But in the end, those were just excuses. What mattered was this:

I was the one to blame for what happened that night. If I’d listened to my parents, I wouldn’t have shattered two families. If I’d stayed away, Lacey Blair would still be human. Instead, despite seventeen years of warnings from my father and Alpha, I had just committed the one unforgivable sin. And destroyed the future of the only girl I’d ever loved.

I got the ass-whooping of my life. Sometimes I think my dad would have killed me right there on the barn floor if my mom hadn’t stepped in. The truth was, I probably would have let him. Instead he just stared down at me, broken and bleeding while moths swirled crazy patterns silhouetted by the barn’s blinking fluorescent light, and told me to pack a bag and get out of his sight.

That was the last time he and I spoke for four years.

The bell over the door jingled.

“I gotta go,” I said to West, ending the call and tossing my phone on the counter. The TV mounted up in the corner over the bar was replaying game highlights from earlier in the day, casting flickering blue light out across rows of empty tables.

I balled my hand into a fist. Some things it was better to get over with fast.

“Wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“You saw the text from Brody.” Ethan was still in his work uniform of black skinny jeans and a t-shirt that said Dark, the retro hipster coffee bar in town that he and his wife owned.

Yeah. This was starting off great. Waiting until SportsCenter cut to commercial, I started towards the heat lamps.

“You hungry? Fixed us a couple of brisket sandwiches before we closed the kitchen—"

“I’m good.”

I stopped short. So here’s the thing about the South. We had about a thousand ways to flip someone the middle finger that you could get away with at high tea with the queen, bless your heart being among the more infamous. Announcing you weren’t hungry while sitting in pretty much the best BBQ restaurant south of the Red River was about like walking into Emo’s high-end coffee bar and ordering a can of Coke. Hold the ice.

And that went double when you were a shifter with a metabolism that burned through ten thousand calories a day.

Just saying.

“Want a beer?”

“That such a good idea?”

I gripped the counter so hard my knuckles turned white, wondering why the hell I’d agreed to this in the first place.

“Look, if you just want to go—"

He muttered something I didn’t catch under his breath. And then—

“Sprite, I guess, if you’ve got it.”

When I got back to the table, Ethan was still on his phone, glasses lit up by the glow of the screen. Like he couldn’t stay off social media for five minutes without getting the shakes. I ground my teeth.