I’d walked in on was a quick, no-strings tryst. It was just an outlet, not a relationship. Not like what we had.
He knew how upsetting all this must be to me; he and Kimberly forgave me for my temper tantrum, though she’d like me to reimburse her for the clothing I’d destroyed. He, on the other hand, wouldn’t hold my rash acts of the moment against me.
He talked about how understanding Kimberly had been, how very gracious she was about the whole thing. That she’d taken it all in stride when he explained to her that he might be sharing his body with her, but his heart lay with me.
It was all flowery and flattering and passionate—and clearly horseshit. I didn’t believe any of it for a moment. His justifications were just that—a means for him to make it okay to cheat on me. The lengths to which he went to delude himself, coupled with the tiny voice screaming in the back of my mind about how I might have to seek him out during the next full moon for help, edged a spell of car sickness closer to a full-on bout of vertigo-inducing nausea.
When he figured out I wasn’t speaking to him, he quieted, fingers tightening on the steering wheel. I snuck a glance at him under my lashes; he wore the tiniest frown, biting the inside of his cheek as he sometimes did when stressed or uncertain what to say. It was a trait I’d once found remarkably endearing. Now the sight of him like that further roiled my already upset stomach.
It took a couple of hours for us to get back to the city. Thankfully, I didn’t barf. We made one pit stop on the way, otherwise shooting straight for home, with little said between us other than an acknowledgment of directions or curt remarks about stopping for gas or food. When we reached the heavy traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike that preceded the George Washington Bridge, he started talking again, this time with a touch of that trademark anger that called so easily to my own.
“Why aren’t you talking to me about this, Shia? Why can’t you accept what I am? I saw the contract—you very nearly did it. What’s so hard about letting me be who I really am? You know how perfect we are together. We can make this work.”
I thought about all those lazy afternoons spent in his arms, the nights we shared before I found out what he was and kicked him out of my apartment over a year ago. He’d been deceitful then, and I hadn’t given him an opportunity to explain himself or regain my good graces until my mom had intervened on his behalf at a badly timed moment. That led to his helping me fight the psychotic sorcerer planning to destroy or forcefully rule over all of the Others in New York, and me coming to realize that I’d been foolish to judge him for hiding his nature.
After all, my response to Chaz’s revelation was typical—he’d decided a little wining and dining would make me more responsive to the truth. That he chose to shift in front of me right after we’d had sex had only served to underscore how shocked and appalled I’d been about being blind to all the signs.
Now that I’d had my nose rubbed in the fact that his entire fucking pack knew he was cheating on me while I’d been busy obliviously agonizing over whether or not to sign a contract, it stung all the more. I was a private investigator who specialized in spotting and outing cheating spouses.
Don’t judge. Despite hours of boring surveillance work, it was often better paying and more interesting than insurance work.
That I’d missed all the signs with him—again—was a gut blow. It wounded far more than my pride. It cut down to the very core of who and what I considered myself to be—an ace P.I. with enough experience and know-how to spot the signs of a cheater without effort. Clearly I’d been deluding myself about that. Perhaps there were other things I’d been wrong about, too. This situation undermined everything about who and what I was—and for that, I could never forgive him.
“There is no ‘we’ anymore, Chaz. You burned that bridge and any other chance you might have had with me when you chose to lie and hide things from me.”
He glanced over at me, brows deeply furrowed over his eyes, though he seemed