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It was actually one of the most adorable things I’d ever heard. “That’s cute.”

He huffed. “And sweetpea. My dad has grown this type of sweetpea in our yard ever since I was born, because the flowers are apparently the exact same shade as my hair or something. He’s such a dork.”

“Sounds like they aren’t afraid to show you just how much they love you.”

He blushed, squirming a little. “Yeah. They never tried to, like, embarrass me about it in front of my friends when I was younger though. But they’re embarrassing in general, so they still managed to do it.”

I chuckled. “Trust me, the older you get, the less you get embarrassed by stuff like that. Having parents who are still happily together, and who are emotionally available to their children, is nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s amazing.”

He gazed at me and nodded. “Yeah. I know I’m really lucky.”

“So am I. My mom…” I hesitated. It was a bad idea to start sharing personal things with Larkin. It would just make me glom onto him more tightly. Still, I found myself continuing. “My mom was injured when she was a teen. Her leg was mangled in a trap in the woods. She recovered, but she had a limp after that. Which… can be an issue for some packs. Werewolves can sometimes be a little ruthless. Uh, anyway, she met my dad when they were about twenty, and they fell in love pretty much instantly, but my dad was from the strongest and oldest pack in that area, and his parents… didn’t want him being with the ‘lame wolf.’”

My lip curled into a sneer. Every time I thought about this, it made me want to go to the town my parents had grown up in and beat the shit out of every member of that pack.

“So he cut contact with them, with his whole pack, and he and my mom moved to a new town and started their own. And he made sure to constantly tell me and my sisters when we were growing up that nothing could stop them from loving us. Not who we ended up being, and definitely not who we end up being with.”

“That… that’s amazing,” Larkin breathed. I felt heat rise in my cheeks and ducked my head, worried that I’d just overshared. “So your grandparents totally suck—on your dad’s side, at least—but your parents are the nuts.”

I chuckled, glancing at him. “Yeah.”

He nibbled on his lower lip, gazing at me for a long moment before blinking and looking down at the crossword book. Clearing his throat, he tapped the eraser on the pencil against the page. “Okay, so six across starts with F. Descending by mistake…”

I could see his brain churning, so I sat back and waited patiently. I probably would’ve had half of this crossword filled out already if I’d been doing it alone, but this was infinitely better.

“Um…” He looked at me uncertainly after a minute. “Is it falling?”

I smiled. “Yeah, I think it is.”

“Fuck yes.” He bounced excitedly in his seat, which made Cora startle awake with a snort and wriggle off his lap to flop down beside him. “I am a crossword master, dude.”

I gestured at the page. “Write it in.”

As he leaned down and scribbled the word in, my thigh twitched from the pressure of his hand resting against it through the book.

“Okay, number seven…”

He went quiet, concentrating on the clue and checking to see if we already had any letters for the answer from other words. I could tell he was mulling it over as he started doodling in the corner of the page, drawing what at first looked like a daisy before he began adding more and more petals, turning it into a mandala.

He suddenly seemed to realise what he was doing, because he stopped and flushed. “Oh shit, sorry. I can erase it—”

“It’s okay,” I said quickly, glancing over at him with a wry smile.

He grinned back sheepishly. “I used to draw that all the time on my schoolwork. My teachers would get so pissed.”

I chuckled. “It was something different when I was at school. Here…”

I took the pencil from him and quickly sketched the odd, jagged-edged S that all kids had, for some reason, doodled constantly when I was younger.

“S.” Larkin looked down at it blankly. “What’s it stand for?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. Was just what everyone doodled all the time. Dunno why.”

He took the pencil and started adding to it. I eventually realised what he was doing—drawing an E and a B in a similar style to write my name.

“There.” He handed the pencil back with a grin. “Now it stands for Seb.”

Something hot and sweet pierced my chest as I managed a weak smile. I already knew I was going to rip this page out and keep it. Sad, pathetic wolf that I was.