SEVEN
Elizabeth liked having friends. It seemed like a bit of an obvious statement to make—who didn’t enjoy having friends, after all?—but it still seemed like a novelty to her, considering what had been her standard of friendship before she was thrown into Ambrose’s life.
It helped her stay away from Maxwell, and it helped keep him farther away from her than just arm’s length, true enough, but more importantly than that, she had a social life, at long last. She could hardly believe it. It seemed too good to be true, in a way, as if she hadn’t really thought she had deserved friends. She knew that was ridiculous, but it was a pervasive thought all the same.
After all, she had tried to make friends in the past. Really, truly, honestly, she had tried. She had given it her all. Sometimes, she even managed to come close, but then it would get out that her home life wasn’t ideal or that she lived on her own despite her young age, and as if by magic, whomever she was putting her all into befriending would find a reason to keep her at arm’s length, as if her home life would infect them if they let her get too close.
Well, sometimes they would find a reason. Sometimes, they would just step back and leave her guessing as to why they had backed away when they had seemed so willing to spend time with her before. When she was left to fill in the blanks herself, she tended to fill those blanks in…creatively, in ways that almost always made her into the bad guy, because if it happened so often, it had to be her, right? If they wouldn’t just tell her what the problem was, or if the reasons they did give were pathetic or made no sense, it seemed natural to assume that it was because of her, and not because of the hand that life had dealt her.
So, yes, she liked having friends; in fact, she loved having friends. Or more than friends, in the case of Ambrose, even if they hadn’t actually used real words to discuss what they were. And she looked forward to spending as much time with them as she could, as much as they would let her.
*
Ambrose was shaped like a bear. It was a lot less shocking after the first few times. (Elizabeth was pretty sure she got all of her shock out all at once when she stumbled upon a pack of wolves and a bunch of bears dueling for the rights to piss on her yard.) Even so, she couldn’t quite help but stare at him for a while. It didn’t seem like he minded, though. He was just so…large.
She wasn’t sure what he was doing, as he wandered lazily through the woods, pausing here and there as he went to rub up against a few especially large trees. She followed him just a few paces behind, watching with gradually increasing curiosity. He knew she was there; she was well aware of that. He looked back at her every so often, and he seemed to enjoy the company even if he couldn’t really say so just then, and Elizabeth was still not exactly fluent on how to speak bear body language. But up to that point, she hadn’t met a shifter that balked at nudity, so she was pretty sure that if he really minded, he would just turn back into a human and tell her to go back to the house.
That never happened, so she carried on following him on his circuit of the property. It was a relaxing evening, all in all, and Elizabeth never minded being one with nature. She was pretty sure her job would have driven her off of the deep end ages ago if that was a problem.
It wasn’t until Ambrose made it back to the house that Elizabeth was privy to any actual information related to what he was doing. He turned back into a human at the porch stairs and stretched, his arms reaching over his head with his fingers linked as his back arched, and Elizabeth took a moment to appreciate the way his shoulders shifted. She tried very hard to look innocent once he looked over his shoulder at her, though he didn’t look like he completely bought the act.
He cleared his throat, letting the moment pass. “I have to mark my territory every so often,” he informed her, lifting a hand and waving vaguely into the woods. “If it’s very, very obvious that a shifter already lives in the area, then I won’t need to deal with finding others fighting over my yard.”
“Lucky,” Elizabeth sighed. “Maybe you should just do that around my house whenever I go back.”
She meant it as a joke, more or less, but Ambrose looked thoughtful afterwards. “I suppose I could,” he decided after a moment. “Yusuke and Mara probably wouldn’t mind either. Even if someone might risk taking on one other shifter, three seems unlikely.”
She had meant it as a joke, but in that moment, it seemed like the best idea she had ever had. She wouldn’t need to worry about any shifters kicking her out of her house ever again, probably, and the only ones that would show up would be the ones that she actively welcomed. It seemed like such a basic level of decency, and yet the idea thrilled her just then.
Grinning, she linked her hands together behind her back. “Sounds like a great idea to me.”
*
When Mara said she wanted to get Elizabeth out of the house, Elizabeth hadn’t been particularly surprised when she was led into the woods. It seemed like all three of them considered the woods to be the best place to be.
She hadn’t expected, however, to be led to a clearing with targets nailed to a few of the trees surrounding it. The clearing wasn’t particularly huge, but it was a decent enough size. It would have been pretty, except for the targets and what were clearly a few gun cases sitting between the roots of a large oak. Their manmade qualities rather detracted from the natural beauty and serenity of the scene.
“Welcome to my shooting range!” Mara declared, throwing her hands up and out to her sides. “It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s served me pretty well.” Her hands settled on her hips as she nodded her head once in satisfaction. “I figure I can pass on some of my skills to you. It’s better than just sitting around in the house all day.”
“You want me to shoot something,” Elizabeth stated, her tone caught somewhere between bewildered and skeptical. “For no reason other than to shoot it.”
Mara rolled her eyes. “You say that like I’m asking you to shoot an actual living thing,” she groused. “I’m asking you to shoot a paper target. It’s not even shaped like a living thing. It’s just a circle. Or I guess multiple concentric circles.”
It was Elizabeth’s turn to roll her eyes that time. “Yes, thank you, I could put that together myself.”
Mara held her hands up in a pacifying gesture. “It never hurts to be specific.”
Slowly, Elizabeth returned her attention to the rifle in her hands. It wasn’t particularly large. It was reasonably lightweight, at least compared to what she had been expecting. (Mara had told her what it actually was multiple times already, but each time the knowledge fled a moment later, so Elizabeth silently dubbed it the cowboy rifle in her head, mostly because it was the same shades of brown and black as her boots.)
Slowly, she sighed. “Alright,” she relented. “I don’t know why this is a big deal to you, but I guess I can play along. What do I do with this?”
Mara offered her a beaming smile and picked up her own rifle (well, they were both Mara’s rifles, but only one of them was actively in her use at that moment). It was larger than the one Elizabeth was holding, but presumably the basic concept remained the same, as Mara lifted it into a proper shooting stance and said simply, “Do what I do.”
Carefully, Elizabeth mimicked Mara’s stance, though Mara still had to offer a few corrections. She followed Mara’s lead as she settled a finger over the trigger and as she pulled it.
She was wearing earplugs, but she couldn’t quite decide if she had expected it to be louder or quieter. The kickback as it recoiled into her shoulder felt a bit like someone had kicked her in the torso. The shot went wide, missing the target entirely and hitting a tree a few feet to the side, sending splinters of bark in every direction. By contrast, Mara’s bullet sank into the target almost dead center.
Elizabeth had never fired a gun before, but she was pretty sure the idea was typically to hit the target, so she was pretty sure that counted as a failure. Despite that, Mara still threw her hands up in excitement and proclaimed, “Just like that!”
“So, missing is secretly the goal?” Elizabeth wondered wryly, her eyebrows rising as she lowered the rifle.
Mara rolled her eyes. “No, of course not, but you didn’t drop the gun or freak out, so you did better than you could have. You just need to adjust for the recoil, and you’ll be hitting the bullseye in no time.”
What followed was a slightly roundabout conversation on what, exactly, adjusting for the recoil entailed because it turned out to be the sort of thing that Mara couldn’t just say and then instantly expect Elizabeth to know what she meant. Still, it went fairly well, all things considered. True, Elizabeth wasn’t exactly hitting the bullseye, but she was at least hitting the target. Considering she had never fired a gun before, she was willing to consider it a victory.
And she even had a good time, to her own surprise.
*
Ambrose was a tidier. He tidied when he was thinking about something and didn’t otherwise have something to keep his hands busy readily available. It had the rather entertaining side effect of a billionaire with a dishwasher that could have probably kept several restaurants in clean dishes instead hand washing all of his dishes in the sink.
(Not that washing dishes was the only way he tidied. He dusted, he vacuumed, he swept, and he rearranged things that had been bumped out of place. Washing dishes just seemed to be something of a standby because…well, there were always more dirty dishes. Shifters ate a lot, to put it charitably, and Yusuke and Mara had no compunctions about raiding his fridge.)
It was strangely mesmerizing to watch. He had it down to something of a science, like a machine, almost. Not that Elizabeth was ever actually going to say that out loud. She had learned after the first two days that the quickest way to figure out what was on Ambrose’s mind was to just wait until he exhausted his supply of dishes and then let him bring it up on his own. But he wasn’t going to bring it up if he thought Elizabeth was otherwise occupied, so she just…watched him do the dishes, steady as a robot.
Eventually, after the last semi-dry dish was set aside to finish drying, Ambrose set his hands on the edge of the counter near the sink and leaned on them, staring down at the draining water.
“I’m pretty sure Maxwell is hiding something,” he stated eventually, as the water drained away and the sink burbled loudly. “He’s never in his wolf form around any of us. Not when he’s close to us, at any rate. It’s getting a bit bizarre.”
“I’m not going to defend him, but why does that specifically mean he’s hiding something?” Elizabeth wondered, leaning back against the kitchen counter as she asked.
“A shifter’s human form and animal form smell different,” Ambrose explained, drying his hands off on a dishtowel as he did. “So, for some reason, he doesn’t want us getting a whiff of his animal form. I’m not sure why.”
“And just demanding an answer probably won’t go well,” Elizabeth finished, making an educated guess.
“Precisely,” Ambrose sighed. With a wry laugh, he added, “Much like animals in the wild, we prefer not to provoke a fight until we really think it’s necessary. Even if there’s a winner, the damage will be bad enough to make it so it wasn’t worthwhile. So, I’d rather not chase him into a corner.”
“What about off of a cliff?” Elizabeth wondered innocently, and though the words were largely a joke, she couldn’t help but wistfully entertain the idea. It would certainly be one way of getting rid of Maxwell, and dare she say it, it would definitely be permanent.
“There are no cliffs around here,” Ambrose reminded her patiently, “mostly just trees and farmland.”
Elizabeth heaved a melodramatic sigh, slumping back against the counter as she did. “That’s so unfair,” she groused, wrestling a tiny smile under control when Ambrose snorted out a quiet laugh.
Despite that, she couldn’t help but feel a burst of alarm at the idea that Maxwell was hiding something. It sat in her gut, coiling around her spine and ribs like a snake. She did her best to ignore it, considering it didn’t seem like there was much she could do about it just then.
*
The sky was cloudless. The surface of the pond was placid and crystal clear. The breeze was gentle, and it smelled lovely as it swept through the trees. It was all very peaceful, almost idyllic. A picture perfect little pond, and Elizabeth would have been thrilled—honored, even—to spend a day there.
If not for one minor flaw.
Elizabeth eyed the bucket in front of her in distaste.
In theory, she had no issues with fishing. She liked seafood, and she knew where it came from, obviously. She didn’t even mind the idea of giving it a try as a hobby, in theory, at any rate.
In practice, she was less than thrilled about the bucket in front of her, filled halfway with wet dirt that was swarming with worms. Granted, she was aware that fishing typically worked out better with bait, but that didn’t magically make her a fan of bugs and creepy crawlies. She wasn’t afraid of them, but she preferred to keep the relationship between her and crawly things professionally distant; if they left her alone, she left them alone, and if they bothered her, she would readily stomp on them. It seemed like a perfectly agreeable arrangement to her.
Yusuke was looking at her, his expression caught somewhere between ‘amused’ and ‘unimpressed.’ “The line’s not going to bait itself,” he eventually pointed out.
Elizabeth scowled at him. “You aren’t even holding a fishing rod,” she grumbled, as she lowered herself to a crouch beside the bucket. “You shouldn’t get to complain.”
“I won’t be fishing with a rod,” he answered primly, and for a moment Elizabeth was confused, until he started stripping off his clothes and transformed a moment later, sitting down and watching her expectantly. That cleared up most of the confusion as to his methods, at least, though it brought other confusion to the forefront, instead: namely about cats not liking water.
Granted, she couldn’t really ask those questions just then. He couldn’t answer when he was cat-shaped. With a sigh, she resigned herself to the fact that she was going to need to either stand there in silence while doing nothing, or she was going to need to touch the worms. She took a deep breath and plunged a hand into the dirt in the bucket, feeling around until she felt a worm after only a few seconds. Her nose wrinkled as she pinched her fingers around it, and she yanked it out of the bucket. It wiggled and squiggled and squirmed the entire time as she got it hooked onto the end of the fishing line, and once that task was accomplished, she scrubbed her hand furiously on her pants.
Yusuke huffed out a breath, and his little stump of a tail wiggled from one side to the other in impatience until finally Elizabeth got back to her feet and cast her line out into the water. Yusuke bounced to his feet and then plunged into the water, bounding through it with relative ease.
Elizabeth hadn’t expected it to turn into a competition, though she supposed she should have seen that coming. And she was hopelessly outmatched.
By the time they finished up, Yusuke had a pile of almost a dozen fish clumsily dropped into the cooler, and Elizabeth had three and a half.
(She didn’t somehow manage to lose half of a fish or, potentially even more bizarrely, catch half of a fish, but she was still in the process of reeling one in when Yusuke decided to call time and see who won. It counted as half a fish. As far as Yusuke was concerned, he was being magnanimous.)
Elizabeth was not going to admit that she was pouting after that, as she gathered the fishing supplies back up while Yusuke put his clothes back on. If nothing else, her mood couldn’t really fall too low, considering Yusuke was completely ridiculous even when he was gloating, and she knew dinner that night was going to involve fresh seafood. She wasn’t going to complain about that, and she couldn’t even pout about losing the competition for too long, when there hadn’t been any stakes other than listening to Yusuke crow about it for a few minutes.
*
It wasn’t so odd that Ambrose had two cars. Most of the people Elizabeth knew had two cars, considering how many of them needed a car or a truck specifically for heavy-duty use and also chose to have something a bit speedier as well. It was pretty normal.
It was, however, slightly annoying that one of them was a manual, and that one was not the one that Ambrose preferred to drive.
Elizabeth did not know how to drive a manual. It wasn’t as if her father had ever had any plans to teach her, and driving lessons at school had been strictly geared towards automatics. She had never had the chance to learn how to drive a manual, and it wasn’t the sort of thing she was especially keen on teaching herself how to do.
“You should take the coup out more often.”
It was supposed to be a mild, innocent observation, but it didn’t sound particularly mild or innocent when Elizabeth said it over lunch.
Ambrose arched one eyebrow. “Dare I ask why?” There was something playful in his expression; he knew exactly why she had decided that, and she knew that he knew.
Groaning, she dragged a hand down her face. “What if I want to go somewhere every so often, huh?” she asked, folding her arms expectantly. “What if I want to have a life now and then?” The words could have sounded argumentative, but mostly they sounded playfully exasperated.
“I could teach you how to drive the coup,” he volunteered, trying so very hard to look innocent as he said it. “Then everyone wins.”
“Or you could take the coup instead of the sedan every so often,” Elizabeth replied, pitching her voice to something reminiscent of an elementary school teacher’s.
“I’ll give it some thought,” he replied in a tone that very much implied that he would not be giving it an ounce of thought and would probably forget the conversation shortly after they finished it. Elizabeth supposed that it would probably be annoying if she was anyone else, but she would admit more readily than anyone else that she had no social life and barely felt a need to leave the house, so she wasn’t especially bothered by the lack of a car. Maybe she should have been concerned about it, but on the other hand, she knew that if she actually pressed the matter, Ambrose would switch cars.
So, it was more just an entertaining argument to have every so often when it got too quiet.