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TWENTY-TWO
Lizzy was already sittingat a booth tucked in the far corner of the coffee shop, with both of our drinks and a handful of wrapped baked goods. She knew how shitty it was to be a new werewolf, since she’d experienced the increased appetite of being newly turned while also being pregnant with a werewolf baby. And the money problems that she refused to let me help with for so long had disappeared entirely when she mated with Elliot and found out that her parents hadn’t drained her trust fund after all.
My money and assets had never been in a trust fund; my dad trusted me enough to let me have full access since I was too young to do anything with it.
The worst I’d ever done with it as a teenager was rent out one of the neighbor’s mansions for a party, but my friends had convinced me to do that, and my dad had been so glad I was socializing that he didn’t care about the party. Hell, he even set up cleanup afterward and paid for the cleaning service himself, after claiming to have been there as a chaperone when angry parents called him.
He'd been thrilled with it, but I had felt so guilty afterward that I didn’t even go to another party for the rest of the school year.
“You should be glowing,” Lizzy remarked, as I collapsed into the seat across from her. The booth was big enough for four people, so Char and Lisa would both be able to sit too.
“I feel hungover,” I grumbled, grabbing my coffee.
“What happened?”
I leaned over the table. “The sex was incredible, Lizzy. Like mind-blowingly incredible. The shifting was hell though—apparently, I’ve got magic in my blood that makes it extra miserable, and makes my wolf really weak. So we were trapped in wolf form, and then having sex for a week, and…” I let out a long, harsh breath.
“Breathe, Sabby,” Lizzy teased me.
I sighed and slumped back against the booth’s seat. “I don’t know him, okay? I don’t know anything about him. We’ve only been together for what, two or three weeks now? And I don’t know what he does for work, or what his favorite food is, or… anything. He told me he loves me, and I don’t even love him, Lizzy! I don’t even know him well enough to feel that way. He told me he loved me, and I literally ran away and hid in the bathroom. That’s how much of a shitshow I am. And we didn’t talk about moving in together, but he just kind of assumed we would, and…” I groaned. “I don’t know what to do.”
Lizzy grabbed a flimsy white paper bag and handed it to me. “Eat these.”
I glared at her. “That’s your magical, best-friend solution to the fuckery that is my mating?”
She laughed. “No. But you’re hungry, which means you’re sad and angry too. So eat this, and then we can try to work through it.”
I scowled at her, but opened the bag. There were three croissants inside—all ham and cheese.
“You got these for me, didn’t you?” I asked, chowing down on one end of one of the croissants.
Damn, they were good.
She nodded. “The first year of werewolfism is rough. Probably extra rough for you, considering the magic in your blood and the shitshow your first transformation was. You lost a lot of weight, too, and that probably makes the beefing up thing harder.”
“Did the main alpha spread the news about the magic in my blood?” I asked, still going to town on croissants.
She nodded. “And Dax’s parents.”
I grimaced. “Yay.”
“At least you’re not dying anymore,” she offered.
I snorted. “There’s that.”
She caught me up on her life while I ate all three croissants, plus two muffins she’d also bought, and a Danish, and two donuts.
“Maybe it’s not so bad being a werewolf,” I remarked, as I swallowed another sip of my coffee to wash down that last donut. I was going easy on the caffeine, worried I might jack my anxiety up if I wasn’t careful. “Think of all the extra desserts I can have now, without my ass blowing up.”
Lizzy flashed me a grin. “That’s the spirit.”
I nodded, relaxing against the back of the booth and leaving my coffee cup beside my hand.
“So, Dax.” She studied me, watching for my reaction, I assumed.
I grimaced.
“He already told you he loved you?”
