Chapter 3

Charles had been her first boyfriend in college. He’d also been the first man she ever slept with. He’d been so kind then, asking her several times if she was okay, if she needed anything, if he was hurting her. Afterwards, he bought her two bouquets of flowers and a box of chocolates, and walked her to and from class the rest of the week, even on days when he had classes of his own. When Diego first asked her out, there had been no competition there. Charles was all her eyes could see in any direction, even when they were closed.

But they had been too young for a fairy tale ending. All it took was one summer away from school and back at home for things to come crashing down in the form of a tantalizing ex-girlfriend and Andrea’s apparent “over-focusing” on her career too early. They hadn’t drifted apart; it had been a bombastic breakup. There had been shouting and tears and one would have thought they’d been married for fifteen years with the way they carried on to each other. Her mother said it was a testament to how much she cared looking at how angry someone could make her. She was sure from this fight that she was in love with Charles.

But she sent him out the door and he gladly followed orders.

A few months later, Diego was right there and she asked him out on a whim. Charles had started to message her again and she feared what would happen if she gave in. She did give in, once or twice, while she still decided how serious she was about Diego. She hadn’t slept with him in years and it was fascinating how easily he answered, how much they remembered about each other’s bodies, and how easy it was to fall back into the rhythms they’d once known.

“You break up with Saenz?” he asked when they were both laying on their backs, looking up at the ceiling.

She didn’t answer. She just got up to use the bathroom, wash herself off, and then walk out into the kitchen where she wouldn’t have to look at Charles or smell what they’d done. He didn’t follow her out, choosing instead to fall asleep in her bed. By the time she got back into the bedroom, he was snoring loudly, face down into the pillow, leaving a familiar spot of drool where his mouth hung open. She almost missed it. But then she caught sight of Diego’s t-shirt hanging over the door knob from the last time he’d been here and the spell of pretending was over.

Despite the discomfort, she got back into bed with him instead of sleeping on the couch. She refused to be forced onto the couch in her own house by the awkward afterwards of a booty call. She put a fair bit of distance between them. She refused to cuddle. This wasn’t some sentimental night where they’d rediscover their love. She needed someone to leave scratches on, someone to command, some pleasure to receive. And she needed to know it was something that would hurt Diego if he knew. She wanted to make him hurt.

In the morning, she woke up earlier than Charles as well and went out into the kitchen, making coffee for herself—a sign to him to find his post-coital breakfast elsewhere. She poured out the steaming mug and didn’t add any of her usual almond milk or fake sweetener. She needed a real kick in the pants right now. So she cringed as she swallowed the bitter taste of hot coffee. How did Diego drink this stuff? One year when she’d been over his place for Christmas Eve, his grandmother made hot chocolate the way they had it back in Mexico City. It was bitter and spicy, and it was all Andrea could do not to throw it all up.

She needed to get Charles out of there. She promised to meet Diego at noon and if she didn’t shower by eleven, she would never make that time. Though she thought he would deserve her showing up a bit late, she just wanted to get this over with at this point. And she wouldn’t delay it because Charles slept like a rock most days.

She walked into her bedroom, slamming the door, and watched him jump up and out of bed in a confused whirl. He groaned, let out a yawn, and ran his hand violently through his bedhead. He blinked at the sunlight she let stream through the room when she ripped the curtains open.

“Morning,” he said.

“Time to go, Romeo,” she said. “I have plans.”

He didn’t say anything at first and she looked over at him, seeing traces of true hurt on his face. She wouldn’t feel bad for him. She wouldn’t let the puppy dog eyes of two men cloud her judgement.

“I should have known,” he said, getting up and she purposely turned to avoid seeing him naked all over again. “But I pick up the phone anyway.

He always would pick up the phone too, that was his problem. She could do this to him five times in a row and he would still answer when she called and come running if she asked. He slid on his clothes, slowly and pensively. She wondered if he was truly thinking or just wanted to see what sympathy he could play out of her by moping his way through leaving.

“Any coffee?”

“Try Starbucks.”

“Right.”

And then he was out the door and she didn’t have time to be overly guilty about it, jumping into the shower and turning it up as hot as it would go to fill the bathroom with steam. She let the mirror fog up so she couldn’t see herself and turned it back down to just short of scalding as she stepped in, watching her skin redden from heat and irritation as she worked the soap over her body, scrubbed the shampoo in her hair, carded her hand through her strands of hair with conditioner all over her fingers. She took her time, giving herself a few moments to think.

It wasn’t the wine headache that made this morning difficult. She wanted to be swallowed up into a blackhole and never come back out again. She wanted to eat her weight in ice cream and pizza, and watch Netflix for several days. She wanted a lot of things that weren’t a reality right now. She needed to get a grip on a new take on a once familiar world. Things were different this morning than they had been yesterday. That was the way life went sometimes and no matter how long or hot of a shower she took, that wouldn’t change.

She stepped out of the shower, the bathroom still awash with steam. She wrapped a towel around her and granted herself a few more moments of contemplation by dripping dry a bit on the bathmat before she set to work at really getting her body dry enough to slip on clothes. She walked out into her bedroom and received a rush of cold air in contrast to the cocoon the bathroom had been. It was certainly a wakeup call, but she needed several more of those if she would get through his day.

She put on the first clean things she could find. There was no use getting dressed up. There was no use trying to impress him or make him feel bad. She’d already slept with another man and kicked him out of her apartment only hours before meeting him. Knowledge that she’d done that would be punishment enough for him. If he got too difficult to deal with, she’d level him with that information and let him wallow in some more self-pity.

She stepped outside into the mid-morning air, still chilly from the remnants of the evening but warming up as the sun moved to heat the ground. Summer was nearly in full swing now. The time had come to sleep with the window open, allowing a midnight breeze into the room. She often found herself kicking the covers off her body as she slept in nothing but short gym shorts and a tank top. Usually this time of year brought forth some kind of excitement. But all that was sucked out of her. She’d been stood up by her boyfriend less than twenty-four hours ago. She couldn’t exactly get into the carefree summer spirit.

She elected to walk. The bus was there on the corner, perfectly timed to pick her up as a passenger, but it was a nice day out. She wasn’t exactly itching to get there on time. So, she shoved her hands in her pockets and made her way walking to the Starbucks she’d told him to meet her at. Several people were already out and starting their day. One mom she passed pushed an expensive-looking sporty stroller down the street as she jogged her way down the sidewalk in pastel-colored running gear with the familiar-looking logo.

There were several dogs just happy to be out and about in the sunny air, and even some children ready to play their day away now that the last remnants of winter were gone completely from their minds.

She walked on, wishing she could take in the most of this nice weather as they were, but there was so much blocking her mind from seeing the goodness in absolutely anything. Hands in her pockets, shoulders slumped, head down to avoid talking to anyone, she made her way across town and to the place where she was sure she would end up breaking up with her boyfriend.

She opened the door to the Starbucks and slipped in. He was already there. Of course he was. He sat at a table in the corner looking just as sleep deprived and crazy in the eyes as he did when she last saw him. He tapped out a rhythm on the table, looking around wildly for anything to occupy his gaze or anywhere to put his attention.

Then his eyes settled on her. He looked like a kicked puppy. She wouldn’t let that affect her though. She wouldn’t let him win that way. He’d always been good about drawing her pity right out of her and making her feel like she owed him some sort of apology for reacting to absolutely anything he did. But not today.

“Diego,” she said with measured politeness, like a stranger on a business meeting.

“Hey,” he said.

She didn’t say anything back. She didn’t want him to be comfortable. She wanted him to know the exact type of pain and awkwardness she’d felt waiting all night for him to never show at an expensive restaurant they’d planned out for weeks. He didn’t get to be the victim here, no matter how sorry for himself he felt.

“You’ve got five minutes,” she said. “Convince me to stay longer.”

He took a breath. Then he began. “Okay, so—clearly I’ve not been honest about some parts of me. I’m a shifter. Wolf. I was taught all my life not to tell anyone because shifting in public was illegal and my parents thought I wouldn’t make any friends. I was adopted, you know that part and it’s true. I never met my real parents and my mom and dad were saints for taking in a shifter kid like me. It was like Clark Kent and his Kansas family or something—”

“Okay, spare me the part where you compare yourself to Superman.”

“Anyway. I felt alone and scared, and my parents taught me to hide myself. Repress everything, you know? So I did and I never told anyone. Not my best friends, never my girlfriends, not even my family, like cousins and aunts at Christmas. No one knew. So, don’t feel like you were the only one in the dark.”

“And here I was hoping I was special to you in some way.”

He cringed. “At a certain point, I got tired of hiding it. I mean puberty hit and all I wanted to do was shift. My parents didn’t even like me doing it at home in the backyard or at night; they were afraid the neighbors would see. All that stuff starts to get pent up, like a shaken soda bottle. I ended up just letting out all that tension in the wrong way,” he said, taking a breath and leaning back.

So there it was. A repressed teenager who went rebel in a wrong way and was now dealing with the consequences. Somehow, she felt there had to be something illegal about being a shifter and not telling your partner. She knew there wasn’t. They hadn’t yet progressed so far in the country as to say that shifters needed to wear some kind of badge identifying them. It’d come up once or twice and several shifters argued that nons (the name they used for non-shifters) should be the ones wearing badges. The argument there, of course, was that violence against shifters was a lot more prevalent than the other way around and they were the ones that needed protection.

Would knowing Diego was a shifter change anything for her? If he’d told her on the fifteenth date or after a year of dating, would it have mattered? Probably not. But now he sat in front of her, spilling his secrets about how he lied the entire time they were together.

“So tell me about your little heist,” she said, crossing her arms and leaning back.

His eyes widened, just for a second. His face paled and he cleared his throat. “We’re not looking to hurt anyone. We just want attention. Every time something happens to shifters, they distract everyone in the news with some kind of story about a cat up a tree for God’s sake.”

“So you robbed a place of combustible materials?” she said. “That certainly sounds like a ‘we come in peace’ move.”

“We’re not like the extremists.”

“You’re not?”

“We want equality. Not to be better. The extremists want revenge. We just want to be people. There’s a professor I’ve been in contact with at a university in California. Drake Tekkin. A lot of his writings have inspired me on the kind of man I want to be in this world, the kind of shifter.”

Somehow, she knew this was more honest than he had been in years of knowing him. He looked a little desperate, a little childish. Whether or not the harmlessness of the organization was the truth, he believed it. He wanted it to be true. She knew, deep down, he didn’t have a bad bone in his body. Even if he was lying, even if things weren’t exactly what they seemed, he didn’t want to hurt anyone. He could very well be surrounded by people who wanted to hurt others, but he himself wasn’t a bad person. She knew that about him.

“So,” he said. “That’s all I have.”

She thought about her plan to break up with him. She still thought it was the smart thing to do. He was a liar and now a wanted man. He was potentially dangerous and no doubt surrounded by dangerous people. But could she really abandon him? He looked ready to cry at any moment, a grown man in public. She could see years of desperation hiding there. His sob story about his lonely shifter adolescence was a true story. What would she be in the story if she abandoned him after finding out the truth?

But she needed time away from him. She needed to sort through all these feelings and all this strangeness. She needed to know that he was capable of giving her space and letting her make her own decisions, not just throw puppy dog eyes her way—God, literal puppy dog eyes.

“I need some time to think,” she said. “I don’t know what’ll be waiting on the other side of me thinking. But I will take the time and I need you to give me that space.”

He nodded. “Right. Sure.”

“I mean it. Even if it takes me three months to talk to you again, I need you to back off for a while. I will get back to you, I promise. I just need to do it on my own terms.”

“Yeah. Of course. Let me know.”

I will.