lush and thick as the hair on her head when she walked on two legs. He gently flattened his hands on her pelt, then smoothed it, then stroked it. It was like stroking a combination of velvet and wool. Wolf fur, he realized, was like the taste of chicken: hard to describe, but unmistakably its own thing. It wasn’t velvet and it wasn’t wool; it was wolf fur; it was Pack.
Bolder, he ran his hands all over her, curious and fascinated and awed all at once. Her ears were scuffed velvet and pricked forward alertly. Her long sleek snout was much darker than the rest of her, and—
“Wow. Just how many teeth do you have, Rache? I would not want to meet you in a dark alley. Okay, I absolutely would want to, but I wouldn’t want to meet another Pack member in that alley. Though I bet you could take ’em.
“And speaking of taking ’em, how lucky was that vampire dumb enough to throw a knife at you? You could have bitten her whole face right off! I mean, you could have run home and waited a couple hours for the moon to rise and then changed into a wolf and then run back and bitten her face off. And serve her right,” he added, enraged all over again at the thought of someone throwing a lethal weapon at Rachael’s head.
Though he admitted to some bias: he wouldn’t have liked it if someone had thrown a nonlethal object at her, either. Like a packet of shoelaces, or a baby’s pacifier. Oh, the humanity! Wait. Did that even apply here, when one of them wasn’t human?
“You just wait. Once you get me back over there, that vampire’s gonna apolo—ow! No. No,” he added firmly, rubbing his now-stinging elbow. “I’m not bending on this one, Rache. You can nibble on me until I’m skeletonized, you’re still taking me over there and introducing me to those knife-wielding psychopaths.
“I mean, how could they? You came in peace, right? Me acting like an asshole is one thing; I’ve acted like a true dumb shit this whole time. It’s not a new thing to the world. But they’re supposed to know better. They’re . . . they’re the grownups! And me, I was just...”
He shook his head and ran his hands over her fur again. Then he buried his face against her side. “You’re so beautiful, Rachael. How could I not have seen it? How could I have been such a hateful dumbass?” He thought of the things he’d said earlier and went cold. “Mine was the face to bite off, if anybody deserved having their face bitten off. If you forgave me, it’d be a miracle.”
He sighed into her fur, which smelled like soap and green grass and werewolf, Rachael’s own special smell. “If you forgave me, I’d spend the rest of my life trying to make it right. If you forgave me, I’d never take your good faith for granted. If you could just give me that one chance, Rachael, a chance I’ve done nothing to deserve.” He swallowed a sob and rubbed his eyes, hard. On top of everything else, he wouldn’t subject Rachael to his ongoing immaturity, his babyish lack of control. He didn’t want forgiveness as a result of her pity and his shame. Lock it back, dumbass. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She only looked at him, then leaned forward and snuffled behind his ear, the exact spot she’d pressed many kisses in the last week. Then she yawned, circled once, and curled up beside him.
And then she went to sleep.
After a few minutes, he said, “It’s wrong to find this anticlimactic, right? Grateful is the emotion I should be going for, right?”
Then he leaned back against the wall and dozed off, his hand resting on her back.
Forty-one
Rachael opened her eyes, surprised to find herself a) in her bed, and b) alone. Now last night of all nights, where would Edward—
She heard the door open, heard his light, eager step stop outside her bedroom door. He poked his head in and brightened when he saw her. “You’re awake! And you’re the other you again! Awesome.”
She was startled and touched by other you. Many people would have said back to normal, and she would not have taken offense. She loved that Edward had so easily grasped that she wasn’t part human and part wolf; she was all Pack. It was a tricky concept for non-Pack to grasp, and the centuries