nuzzled my neck. “Well, you’ve kissed me. I’ve kissed you. This was the next logical step.”
“No,” I said, more emphatically than I’d intended. “The next logical step would be going out on a couple of dates and making out.”
He shook his head slowly, still smiling. “Oh Caroline. Wolf, remember? Do you have any idea how hard it was to dismiss you? Mind you, I tried. But with all your stroking and rubbing and teasing and touching; you were begging for it and I’m your mate and I certainly wasn’t going to turn you down. Especially after you lost interest in the necklace.”
“I did?” And then I thought about it, snatches of memory seeping through the magic-induced haze in my mind. “I did. Wow.”
Then even more of the night came through. Wolf had turned me down, more than once, and I’d kept coming and I wanted him. Wanted him so much I finally threw away his coat with the necklace in its pocket. What the hell was that supposed to mean?
Wolf let out a rough, contented sigh. I gazed down at him. His happy little grin was still in place. I should have been angry, at least with myself. Yet I wasn’t. I was…comfortable.
I pushed myself up—the lavawort had done its job on my arm—and poked Wolf in the chest. “Come on. We need to go find Marianne.”
We headed out, getting back to the trail within a few minutes. We skipped breakfast, instead snacking on the dried meat Wolf had bought. I didn’t know what it was—it didn’t taste like beef—but I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out, so I ate it and said nothing. Wolf, on the other hand, ate ravenously, growling and snarling more than I thought necessary over a large chunk of jerky. I still couldn’t quite believe what I’d done the night before, but it was clear as a bell in my mind now. All the magic gone, replaced by my actions, everything I’d said, everything I’d felt, everything I’d touched… I tingled, and this time the sensation wasn’t on my back.
“Why didn’t you want to use the necklace?” I asked as we walked, trying to shake off the feeling.
“Probably because it was meant to work with you,” Wolf said through a mouthful of jerky. He swallowed. “I don’t know what it is with humans and their fascination with flying, but as much as I’d like to get away, wolves have no desire to fly.”
“Get away?”
Wolf gobbled up the rest of the jerky and sucked on his fingers for a few minutes. “Yes. That’s what I saw in your eyes. You have a deep desire to disappear, my love, and yet last night you were afraid of being alone.”
That was it. The nail on the head. I tilted my head back and stared up at the forest canopy as it passed.
“When I was six,” I said quietly, “My sister Sasha gave my mother flowers she’d picked from the garden. My mom smiled, and said she loved them.”
Wolf turned his head to look at me.
“I thought, I could give her flowers, and I wouldn’t have to take them from mother’s garden. So I went out and picked dandelions and put them in a cup. And when I gave them to her, she took one look at them and said, ‘Oh no honey, these are just weeds,’ and she threw them out.”
For a long time neither of us spoke. I saw my mother in my mind, so casually tossing the golden dandelion blooms out the door before going back to doing whatever she’d been doing in the kitchen. I remembered well that crushed feeling. I couldn’t speak. All I could do at that age was walk away.
“That’s the way it was in my home,” I finally said. “I don’t know why. Maybe because Sasha was the first born and Brittany was the baby and I was just this person stuck in the middle. The other two required so much attention, Sasha wild and unpredictable, and Brittany just wanted everything all the time. I thought that maybe if I was good, if I didn’t cry or complain or ask for anything, my parents would notice me more.”
I thought on my sisters. They were much older now, of course, and weren’t the same, but it was too late now. Sasha was married with a baby on the way, and Brittany had a prestigious job; I was the odd one out, the ugly duckling who lurked in the woods, following after