Kelly

Two days later, she was still imposing on her best friend.

“It’s fine, Kel, trust me. You’re not bothering us at all,” Erika reassured her. “You can stay as long as you need to.”

Harden, Erika’s mate, nodded from across the table, his mouth full of pancakes.

“I should really get going though,” she said, spearing a chunk of pancake and smearing it through some leftover syrup. “But when you keep cooking like this, it’s damn hard.”

They all chuckled, though none of them thought for a second that Erika’s cooking was the reason she was staying. The truth was that Kelly had overstayed her welcome despite their assurances, and it was past time that she got up off her ass, stopped moping around, and tackled her problems head-on.

Which sounded great in practice, but in reality wasn’t anywhere near that easy for her to just jump up and do. She knew. She’d been trying, and failing, hence her elongated stay. Now though, her manners were finally starting to overwhelm her reluctance to confront her life. She was imposing on Erika, who had been more than generous, and she needed to stop pushing it. Which meant sucking it up, and getting shit done.

Starting now, with asking for advice.

“How do I do this?” she asked abruptly, without any segue to the new topic.

“Talk to him,” Harden said immediately. “Just go over to the embassy, find him, corner him in a room alone, and tell him what’s up.”

Erika reached over and swatted her mate. “It doesn’t work like that, you big dummy.”

Harden looked back and forth between the two of them. “Gray is male, is he not?”

Kelly nodded slowly. “Yes?”

“Okay, and of the three of us at the table, which one of us is also male?”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Erika replied with a snicker before becoming serious. “Okay, and your point is?”

“My point,” Harden said, ignoring the pointed tone, “is that I know how to deal with these things as a male, and I can give you better advice. The easiest way to achieve this will be to just hunt him down, trap him, and tell him that he’s going to listen to you, that he owes you that much, and after that, he can make his decision. He’ll have no choice; his pride won’t let him. Then you tell him how he’s being a dumbass over this, and he’ll be cool, and forgive you, and everything will be okay.”

Kelly considered his words. “And if he isn’t okay with that?”

“Then me and the boys will go down to see him,” Harden said flatly. “We’ll convince him to see reason.”

Erika made an exasperated noise and stood up from the table, gesturing at her. “Come on, let’s go chat in the other room. We’ll leave the caveman here to his own things while we figure this out.”

Harden just shook his head. “Me Harden, know talky talky with dumb dumb. You woman, no get.”

Both women fixed him with glares, and he immediately bent over his food, shoving huge forkfuls into his mouth.

“That’s what I thought,” Erika said, sticking her tongue out at her mate and giving him a wink.

Kelly admired that about them. They could disagree with each other on topics, but at the end of the day, their love was so strong that it could easily withstand them, and in fact made them a better couple because of the disagreements. It was something she’d seen more clearly after spending a few days in close proximity to the two of them, and it made her realize it was something she wanted as well, a bond that was flexible and bendable like theirs, willing to accommodate things on the fly as they happened.

Before they could go, Harden’s hand shot out and caressed Erika’s swollen stomach. His eyes were closed, ear cocked in her direction. At one point his hand stilled and he just sat there listening to it. His lips curved upward in a beatific smile of supreme satisfaction.

“Our son is lively today isn’t he?” Harden said softly.

“Yes, he is,” Erika said, resting her hand on top of his.

Kelly slipped from the room while the two of them shared a moment, and furiously wiped away the tears building in her eyes. That was something else she’d seen during her time here, the sheer love Harden had for a child that wasn’t his.

Our son, he’d called him. Even though Harden’s not his biological father, he still considers the child his.

That was something else she wanted. It was what was tempting her to give Jacen a shot. To have a father figure, someone who cared for her child that strongly. She knew he would be invested in its future, and that was something she craved. Gray…she didn’t know if Gray would be that person. He hadn’t seemed afraid of the fact that she was pregnant, but then neither had he shown himself to be capable of that father figure role.

That’s because you didn’t really give him a chance to, either. You never really talked about it, besides asking if it threw him off.

It was true. She couldn’t blame him when she’d not made herself available to him in that concept. It simply wasn’t something that they’d discussed yet, so she couldn’t allow herself to form an opinion on that subject until they had. But she made a mental note to have that discussion as soon as she resolved this current issue between them.

“Sorry about that,” Erika said, coming into the half-finished sitting room in her walk-waddle that had become commonplace as she got into the later months of her pregnancy.

The two of them settled down into the chairs, plush single-seat recliners. It was all that they’d put in the room, as work was still being done on it. The outer walls were up and insulated, and a sub-floor was down, but that was about it. Other parts of the house, including the nursery, were much higher in priority. Kelly also knew this was one of the rooms Harden and Erika had hoped to tackle before she’d shown up.

“I promise, I’ll be out of your hair soon,” she said. “I’m leaving shortly. I just need to know how to best go about this.”

Erika gave her a long look. “Don’t you ever let him hear that I said this, but I think Harden may have a point,” she admitted.

“Heard that,” came the call from the other room.

Erika expelled air from her nose in something not quite a snort, not quite a sigh.

“Anyway,” she continued. “You need to talk to Gray. Alone. Explain everything. Tell him that nothing happened with Jacen, that he was just visiting. Don’t hold anything back, tell him the whole truth, and let him decide for himself what he wants to do.”

Kelly looked away. “What if he decides he still doesn’t want anything?”

Erika gave her a “are you stupid?” look. “Well if that’s the case, is he really the type of man that A, you thought he was, and B, that you would want to be with?”

She rocked back in the seat. “I…I honestly hadn’t ever thought of it that way to be honest,” she said. “But I guess that makes a hell of a lot of sense, doesn’t it? If he won’t believe me, then why would I want to pursue things with him into more serious territory?”

“Exactly,” Erika said. “Which is why talking to him straight is probably your best bet, as much as it pains me to admit it.”

“Oh come on, I’m not that terrible,” Harden complained from the other room. “I can give good advice too, you know. You don’t have a monopoly on that.”

Erika grinned. “It’s true. He does give good advice, and he knows male shifters better than we do as well. If he says straight-up talk to him is the best thing to do, then that’s what I’d do.”

Kelly sighed. “Yeah. I suppose that’s the next step then, isn’t it?” She nodded mostly to herself. “Go home, shower and get my bearings, then hunt his ass down and drop some truth on his ass. See how he handles it.”

“Sounds like a plan to me,” Erika said.

“Yeah, me too,” she agreed.

Neither of them moved.

“I really wish I could have a glass of wine right now,” she complained a minute later.

Erika smiled. “Want some apple juice?”

The two women laughed.

***

Kelly got out of the cab, pocketing the change the driver had given her and heading down the pathway. The winding pathway that served as a road between the buildings of the complex that housed the women’s units had a single entry and exit point, and her building was near the end. It was much faster to get dropped off on the side of one of the more “main” streets and walk through the buildings and cut across the complex. The fact that it was cheaper as well played a huge factor. Kelly didn’t have much money to spare, so she needed to be careful how she spent what she did have.

Eating several days straight at Harden’s place had given her the extra money to afford the cab ride back without really affecting her budget, which was nice. Kelly spent a moment envying her friend’s newfound life, and the relative wealth it had given her. She knew Harden had come from his homeland of Kronum with next to nothing to his name, but the Koche brothers had banded together to provide him enough to buy his property and build a house on it. In fact, they were doing that for the other shifters that Gray had rescued as well, providing them all with funds to start off a life in Cloud Lake.

There was a dark part of her that hoped Gray would understand her situation and let her back into his life, because she knew if things worked out between them, that he would be able to help provide her with a much nicer life than the one she was living just then. Kelly didn’t often let that part of her mind out, instead keeping it locked deeply away, but she wouldn’t have been human if she didn’t admit it was a nice thing to think about.

She walked between two of the buildings, the two-story-high walls closing in around her. The little paths between the rear of buildings weren’t much more than five feet wide, giving a very narrow, almost claustrophobic feel to her journey. Kelly normally tried to avoid taking them, but she was ready to do what needed to be done now, and she was afraid if she delayed any longer than necessary, her courage would begin to fade. So it was home to shower and change into some fresh clothes, and then make her way over to the embassy, which would use up even more of her meager funds.

Still, it couldn’t be helped either way, so she resolved to spend the money and walk through the maze of pathways to get to her own building as fast as she could. Not long after she entered the huge complex, a feeling settled between her shoulder blades. An uncomfortable sort of pressure, as if someone were digging two fingers into the muscles on either side of her spine and pressing. Not hard enough to hurt, but enough to feel an odd discomfort. It was something she’d experienced before.

Someone was watching her.

Glancing over her shoulder, Kelly looked around, trying to see what it was. Perhaps it was just another one of the women who lived there making their way through the paths. That would be her most hoped for resolution.

There was nobody in sight, however, so she kept walking, trying to increase her pace as much as the extra added weight in her stomach would allow. Speedwalking had never been Kelly’s thing, and even now she strained to gain more speed in a desperate attempt to make it home. All she wanted was to have the door close behind her and feel secure in her own home once more.

Somewhere nearby, something scraped on stone.