Dylan wasn’t faring better.

The morning was a disaster.

Upon waking up to find that he should have been in the shop over four hours ago, he spent five minutes in the bathroom, paused just long enough to put socks on before shoving shoes onto his feet, and was out the door. Arriving at the shop, he found a parking lot full of confused mechanics playing poker on the hood of a Hummer while they waited for their boss to arrive. None of them had the right key to unlock the outside doors, which meant all they could do was hang around and keep turning customers away.

Dylan supposed he should just be glad that they decided to hang around instead of abandoning him, leaving him on his own by the time he showed up. They’d even tried to call him and when he would listen to their messages later on, he’d find himself touched at the content. At first annoyed, his workers eventually became concerned for his well-being and practically begged for some sign that he wasn’t dead or something.

Sure, they hadn’t actually come to his house to check on him, but it was the thought that counted. He was glad to employ such men and to make up for his errors, he bought them all a nice lunch.

His own lunch, he pushed back by two hours. Having to do so irked him to no end, but it was his fault, and he had to make up for it even though he’d never messed with his routine before. There was damage control to be done and quite a bit of it, especially considering one customer had their vehicle locked up and inaccessible in the garage. They had been late to work themselves because of him.

For that person, he cut their fee by 75% and then promised to contact their employer to set things straight. Which he did. The company manager he spoke to was very patronizing, but in the end they took his word and agreed not to reprimand the employee.

There were several other such situations he needed to fix. They were all time-consuming. He needed to reschedule appointments and had to listen to his customers bad-mouthing him for his lack of work ethic. Half of them said they would go elsewhere from now on. The rest agreed to reschedule if they had to pay less for it. As much as he hated to do it, he knew there was no other way to keep their trust.

He had to do all that while filing the usual daily paperwork, punctuated by trips out to the garage himself to see what was going on. There was really no reason for him to ever be out on the floor, but he liked it. Hard work refreshed his mind. Solving problems made him happy.

By the time he finally headed out for his lunch break, most of the problems of the day had been solved as best as he could manage but he was not happy. He was damn pissed at himself. Pissed at his own lapses, and pissed at his behavior last night.

Ryan didn’t deserve to be treated so coldly.

There had clearly been a rift between them, and it was all his own fault because he hadn’t been able to come out and say what needed saying.

What needed saying would no doubt ruin everything.

There had been so many chances to tell the truth but it was just easier to lie. Some days it felt as if he had been lying so long that he didn’t know how to do anything else now. Even if he wanted to break out, he was stuck in his own rut. The walls were too high to scale. He was choking on his own dust, withering in the shadows he had cast upon himself.

He drove out to the park where he always spent his lunch breaks. As usual, there were a few food trucks lining the street nearby. He normally bought from them, had tried everything their menus had to offer, and knew the truck chefs by name. However, today he wasn’t in the mood to exchange false pleasantries so he bought a lukewarm corndog from a bored-looking teenager just inside the park. Taking it over to one of many picnic tables, he sat down and started to eat. He’d forgotten his book, but his thoughts were too scattered. None of the information was going to stick with him anyway.

The corndog was flavorless mush on his tongue, congealing to a paste. Each bite was more difficult to get down than the last, but he forced himself through it, knowing he’d need the fuel to even have a chance of getting through the rest of his day without biting someone’s face off. Quite literally, if they pushed him hard enough.

Just as he finished with the corndog, his right hip started to buzz.

“Great,” he muttered, and fished around in his pocket for his phone. He pulled it out, expecting to see the name of a customer or maybe the bank.

Arden’s name was on the screen.

“Even better,” he growled. He thumbed over the screen to answer the call and then held it up to his ear. “What’s up?”

“Hi!” a tiny voice squeaked into his ear.

Instantly, his heart felt lighter. He smiled automatically as if Hunter was right there in front of him. “Hey! How’d you get ahold of your mother’s phone?”

Hunter mostly mingled with other human children, and he was too young really to understand how he was different from them. The fact that he could transform into a wolf didn’t seem to register as something important to his little kid’s mind. To that end, Dylan and Arden had decided that they should use human phrasing for things, giving themselves titles which agreed with their sex. It was practical, if not exactly accurate in the grand scheme of things.

“I found it!” Hunter said. “In her purse.” He sounded breathy and distant, as if the connection was bad. Having seen his son talk on the phone before though, Dylan knew that Hunter tended to hold the phone at an odd angle so that the speaker jutted out away from his face.

“You did, huh? She’ll be glad to know that. Was it missing?”

“Nuh-uh. I just found it. Are you coming with me, Daddy?”

That word made his heart throb. He closed his eyes, struggling to keep anything from entering his voice as he responded. “Coming with you where, buddy?”

“Mom said I’m going away soon! I think it’s a secret vacation. Are you going to be there?”

None of this was making any sense to him. If Arden was planning some sort of surprise vacation, she hadn’t informed him of it. And why should she? He had very few rights to his own kid. She was under no obligation to share anything with him if she so desired.

He was just about to open his mouth to reply when his son suddenly squeaked out, “Oh! Hi!”

Someone else replied, sounding exasperated. The tone of voice and the soft timbre was very familiar to Dylan’s ears. Arden usually sounded that way no matter who she was speaking to, as if there was always something better she could be doing with her time.

There was a sound of shuffling and then Arden spoke into the phone, voice coming through loud and clear. She had clearly wrestled the phone away from Hunter. “Sorry to bother you, Dilly,” she said. She didn’t sound bothered at all. “He’s got a fascination with my phone this week. Keeps trying to take it apart.”

Dylan remembered his parents talking about him in such a manner when he was younger. If he could get his hands on it, he could take it apart. Pens, action figures, clocks, small pieces of furniture...there was nothing he hadn’t tried. Unfortunately, taking things apart and putting them back together again weren’t always skills that went together. Sometimes they had to be developed separately, with intent.

He could have said this out loud, could have shared some of his pride that his son was just like him, but he bit his tongue instead. Their divorce wasn’t amicable. They weren’t still friends. He knew nothing about Arden’s personal life, so he could only assume that she wouldn’t want a reminder of him around. Best to say nothing.

“It’s fine,” was all he said. “I’m on my lunch break anyway.”

“You see?” he heard Arden say, addressing Hunter. “You bothered him.”

“Don’t tell him that!” Dylan snapped. A growl slipped loose from between his lips, full of a warning that she would never heed. “He can talk to me whenever he wants! So can you! In fact, I’d prefer to hear some things from you first instead of having to get all my information secondhand.”

“Don’t know what you’re talking about, Dilly.”

“Mom, let me talk to Daddy!” Hunter’s faint protests filtered through the speaker. Dylan winced as something brushed up right against the speaker, and this sound was followed by a sharp-but-muffled burst of words. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Arden had covered the phone to reprimand their son.

“Sorry,” she said again.

He really hated those fake apologies. “It’s okay. Anyway, Hunter said that you were planning on taking him on a trip or something? Don’t I need to know about that just in case I need to get ahold of you?”

“What?” The frown was as clear as if he could see it. He knew every inch of her skin, knew exactly how frowning made deep wrinkles form at the corners of her mouth. “I don’t know why he told you that. Must have been eavesdropping and heard it wrong. He’s as nosy as you are, I swear.”

“So, no vacation planned?”

“I just said there’s nothing. Are we done here, Dylan? I’ve got a pie in the oven and the timer is about to go off.”

“Okay, all right. Can I say goodbye to Hunter?”

“I’ll tell him you did,” Arden said, and then she hung up.

The click of the canceled phone call was like being stabbed in the stomach. Dylan set the phone down on top of the picnic table, being far more careful than that action really warranted. The urge to throw it was almost overpowering, and his hand shook the entire way. He couldn’t afford that, though. Between paying his employees, bills, and child support, he didn’t really have enough money to go throwing it around on a new cell phone every time he lost his temper. Even if others went without, he just couldn’t do that.

As he placed the phone down on top of the table, his fingers accidentally struck against the power button and the screen lit up once more. He was looking at his lock screen now, at an image of his son at his last birthday party. God, that was a rotten affair. Everything should have gone right but instead it had all just gone plain wrong. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault, especially since Arden was a planner by nature who had to have all the details exactly right before she’d allow something to happen, but things had just gone astray. Only half of Hunter’s friends showed up. The parents stuck around, which wasn’t something either of them expected. Since when did the parents linger at a child’s party?

The cake sucked. Later, Arden would complain to the manager of the store where she bought it and the man would give her a coupon for half-off the next cake. Dylan was pretty sure she’d used that coupon but he wasn’t given any cake. Not that he expected to be, but it felt like a slight all the same.

The presents sucked, too. They were all dollar store items which broke before the day was done. When had that started happening? When had people stopped putting thought into presents?

No one wanted to play any of the games Arden made up. That would have been fine had one of the kids not been hurt playing a game of their own making. Shortly after that, the rest of the kids trickled away from the party until only Hunter and the obligatory weird kid were left. The weird child’s mother didn’t come to pick him up until an hour after the party was supposed to have ended, and she’d had the gall to try and pay them like they were a babysitting service!

“So,” Dylan had asked Hunter, “what did you think of your first party?”

The pup had thought very long and hard before answering. “I loved it! Can we do it again next year?”

There were no words for how startling that statement was. Dylan and Arden exchanged perplexed looks before focusing on their son again. “Sure you can, buddy,” Dylan said slowly. “What made it so great? We’ll try to do it again next year.”

And Hunter stood up from where he’d been sitting on his special Birthday Throne at the folding table, went to Dylan, and hugged him fiercely around the middle. “Because you were here!” Hunter piped.

Somehow, Dylan managed not to cry over that until he was out of sight.

Now, looking down at that image of his son and remembering the sweetness of those words and the utter sincerity in which they were spoken, he felt the hot press of grateful tears again. There was nothing better than the love of a child.

He had taken the picture for his lock screen background during those long moments while Hunter pondered over the question asked of him. Balloons surrounded his son’s stocky frame, singling out that one chair out of many as the Birthday Throne. The yard behind him was a mess, trampled grass strewn with confetti and scraps of wrapping paper which had been blown away by the wind. To this day Arden was still finding pieces of paper here and there.

But the real star of the picture, the focus, was Hunter. His eyes were as sweet as sage, perfectly gray-green, and nearly hidden beneath a heavy shock of blonde hair that framed his youthful face. There were sprinkles in his hair and a smudge of frosting on the tip of his nose, but little else because he was a much daintier eater than other kids his age and always had been. Most parents had a scrapbook which included funny pictures of their baby making a mess with spaghetti or some other food, but Hunter had never been like that. He just ate.

Arden sometimes said that she hoped this was a sign that Hunter would be as intelligent and detail-oriented as she was. She said this as a boast at first but it was a sentiment that had grown more bitter as time passed. Hunter was very unlike her and not just in attitude. He looked nothing like her.

And he really looked nothing like Dylan, either.

No, Hunter resembled the person who had fathered him.

I think he’s going to be an alpha. Just like his Daddy.

He’d said that while looking right into Ryan’s eyes but the alpha didn’t catch on to the meaning. He never had. There was no reason for him to suspect such a thing, no reason for him to pick up on all the hints which had been dropped throughout the years.

Feeling almost sick with unhappiness, Dylan looked away from his phone and stared out across the park. His heart felt heavy, threatening to drag him down to that dark place he’d seen too many times before.

When had this started? He asked himself that question a lot. He used to think that all this started on that night he and Ryan got drunk and slept together. That had to be the root of it all because they hadn’t done anything like it since, which meant Hunter was conceived that night.

Now, Dylan wasn’t so sure. He thought all this might have started back when he had first met Ryan, when they were just two strange pups being delighted over the fact that their names were similar.

Or was it somewhere down the road, when they realized that Ryan was going to become an alpha?

Was it when Dylan was ten and realized he liked boys?

Or when he was 13 and realized that Ryan didn’t?

Was it at 14 when he decided to reject that part of himself, or at 17 when he cried out of jealousy over the fact that Ryan had fucked some girl at prom?

Somewhere along the way, he’d gone wrong, and it was too late to recover. It wasn’t that he thought being a good friend meant Ryan owed him something. He wasn’t being a Mr. Nice Guy who thought he deserved something that wasn’t his. Ryan hadn’t ever been his except for that one fateful night, and Dylan had been too drunk to be able to remember most of it later on.

He wished sometimes that he’d told the truth instead of dropping hints, but what might have happened had he done that was uncertain. Ryan might have abandoned him a long time ago. And what was better? Being abandoned but at least having a firm answer? Or clinging to some shred of hope without knowing anything?

He didn’t know.

When his lunch break was over, he returned to the garage and just sheltered inside his office until it came time to close shop. His excuse was that he didn’t feel well and it was the truth, except the problem wasn’t that his body was sick. It was his heart.