CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 

 

“I went to a CTAARUS meeting on Friday night.”

“What?” Raphael looked up from the earth he was splitting and squinted at his brother. “You went to a meeting on Friday night? I thought you were getting laid on Friday night.”

“I was. And then we went to the CTAARUS meeting.”

The meaning of Seth’s words seemed to hit Raphael all at once and he dropped the hoe he’d been working with, slowly turning around. “Hold the got-damn phone. You went to a CTAAURUS meeting?” Raphael looked around to make sure they were alone. “The lion’s den? You just marched right in?”

“It was Sarah’s idea to go. Apparently, she’s really passionate about shifter rights.” He avoided Raphael’s eyes as he kept working the ground. “She heard the gunshots on the mountain on the full moon and wanted to go to the meeting to see what they’re planning next.”

“She heard gunshots that were directed at us, Seth. They were trying to kill us. And you just waltzed right in and took a nametag?”

“We sat at the back and didn’t draw any attention to ourselves. There were too many people for us to really get noticed. I’m glad I went. Because now I know that they’re planning to comb the forest next month and we’re gonna have to get the hell out of dodge for the full moon.”

“Jesus.” Raphael was quiet for a while. “You shouldn’t have gone without me. Invite me next time you do some crazy shit like that.”

Seth nodded. He was grateful to have a brother who wouldn’t harp on him for something like that. Raphael was already letting it go, where Jackson would still be listing all the reasons why it had been a stupid move. He would just be getting started.

“So,” Raphael said as they started loading up Seth’s truck. It was time to knock off and for that, Seth was grateful. A day without Sarah and he was going nuts, everything in his body was jumping and anxious to get closer to her. “You think we need to get out of town on the full moon? Get somewhere where the CTAARUS wouldn’t think to look for shifters?”

“Actually…” Seth cleared his throat. “That was Sarah’s idea. She thinks we need to put up flyers to warn shifters to get out of town for the next few shifts. That it’ll be the only way to protect themselves.”

Raphael didn’t say anything until they’d both slammed the doors of Seth’s truck and done up their seat belts. When Raph spoke, it was with an extreme seriousness that Seth had rarely ever heard his brother use.

“Seth, are you considering telling her?”

Seth took a long moment to answer, because he couldn’t lie, not to Raph. “I did consider it this weekend, after we had sex. It sounds lame, but yeah, I’ve never really felt this way about someone before. But… no. I don’t want to put her in danger like that. I know that she’s gonna figure it out if we’re together much longer. So, I figure that we’ve got until this upcoming full moon. You and I will take a week or so off of work to make it look less suspicious. I already lied to her and mentioned that we take a family vacation every October. Hopefully us leaving for a week, instead of just for the full moon, will throw her off the scent. Before we go, I’ll break things off with her. For good. Once I’m not spending as much time with her, she won’t notice our calendars as much. We won’t have to be as careful around her.”

Raphael absorbed all of this quietly. He knocked his closed fist against his leg. “Why not just break it off now? Might make it easier on yourself.”

“No,” Seth said immediately, shaking his head. “No. I have a little more time. I at least have another three weeks until the full moon. I have three weeks.”

Raphael watched him for a long minute. Long enough that Seth got uncomfortable and started the car.              

“Dude, I think you might be in love with her.”

Seth pulled the truck onto the main road and grimaced. “Does that even matter?”

“It should,” Raph said sadly. “It really fucking should.”

 

***

 

 

The next two weeks were the happiest of Seth’s life. Sarah’s job on the mountain had officially started, so unless they were at work, the two of them were together. They hiked together, jogged together, though Sarah had to keep it in a low gear for Seth to be able to keep up. He talked her into attacking her guest bedrooms on the second floor, dragging her back to the hardware store and the flea market.

Though the second floor was smaller than the first renovation they’d done, it took them considerably longer to set the damn thing up. Mostly because they just kept stopping to have sex. Seth had never had sex like this in his life, and he knew that Sarah hadn’t because she told him so.

“Holy God,” she’d panted in his ear as he’d lifted her down from where she’d just been draped over a step ladder they’d been using for painting. “What the hell was that? That was like sexual nirvana.”

Or a few days later, after he’d slid out from behind her and fallen, sweaty, back to his sheets, Sarah had rolled over and faced him with that easy smile on her face. “Did you take a class or something?”

“A class? In what?”

“Sex stuff.”

He’d choked on a laugh, tugging her closer. “What are you talking about?”

“You. You’re freakishly good at sex and I want to know how you got that way.” Then she’d screwed up her face and shook her head. “Actually, I’m just realizing that the answer to that is most likely a lot of sex with other girls. So, yeah. Forget I said anything.”

He’d laughed again and tugged her even closer. “Sarah, the answer to that question is actually not the reasonable amount of sex I’ve had with other girls. The answer to that question is most definitely you. Whatever it is that you do to me… I can’t explain it. You unlock something in me. Make me better. More.”

They hadn’t gotten much sleep that night. Seth wasn’t getting much sleep at all, actually. He felt time marching onward like a constant ticking timebomb in the back of his head. Every morning, he opened his bleary eyes one morning closer to the full moon, to the trip he and his family were taking in a week. To the day he’d have to break things off with Sarah.

And every morning he woke up realizing just how far gone for her he was. She was driven, passionate, kind, funny, quirky, pretty. But more than that, he felt drawn to her on a chemical, cosmic level. He couldn’t explain, not to himself, not to his family, and definitely not to Sarah.

He found himself in the grocery store with her, the words tripping over themselves to get out of his mouth, but he swallowed them back. In the middle of a movie on her couch, with her curled on one side, he had to force himself not to pause the movie and just tell her every part of how he felt about her. In the shower with her, her legs around his waist and her head tipped back on the tile as he pumped into her, giving her everything, he was swallowing down words he knew he could never say to her.

Because he was leaving her.

For her own good.

And that was that.

“You okay over there?” Sarah asked, as she straightened a picture frame on the wall of one of her guest rooms. “You’re quiet.”

Seth internally winced. This was just yet another time that he was going to have to lie to her. Because no. He wasn’t okay. Not in the least. “Yup. Just tired, I guess.”

Sarah opened her mouth to reply, and he knew that she didn’t believe him. But before she could say anything, her phone buzzed in her pocket.

“Hey, Aunt Lynn,” she answered. And then her brow immediately furrowed down. “Whoa, whoa. Slow down.” Sarah listened for a second and then her face went white. “What? Are you kidding me? Here? In Boulder?”

From downstairs there was suddenly a pounding on Sarah’s front door and she jolted like an animal hearing a nearby gunshot.

Seth was next to her, an arm around her waist and wishing like hell he knew what was going on.

“I think, actually, he’s at my front door,” Sarah whispered, her eyes shooting to Seth’s. He’d only known Sarah for a little over a month, but he knew her well enough to know that there was only one person who put that look of fear on her face. Her father. “No, no,” she said into the phone. “Don’t come over. Seth is here with me. It’ll be fine. I’m just gonna go down there and send him away. Yes. I promise. No matter what he says. I promise. Lynn, Seth is here. I’m going to be okay. Seth would never let anything happen to me. Not in a million years.”

She’d wandered forward, out of Seth’s reach and he might have stepped forward to reach for her again if her words hadn’t damn near knocked him on his ass.

He felt as stunned as Sarah looked, reassuring her aunt on the phone. She trusted him that much? She knew that he would do anything before he put her in danger? He so badly wanted that to be true. And part of him, the part that loved himself, knew her words to be true. He’d been confounding himself with this horrible logic problem, that loving her was selfish because it put her in closer proximity to his wolf. But maybe, just maybe, it didn’t have to be that complicated. When she said it, it sounded so simple. That he would never let anything hurt her.

Did that include himself? Could he possibly include his wolf in that assessment? Was she right? Would he be able to protect her even from himself? Standing there, looking at Sarah’s back, Seth got a flash of a vision. More imagination than anything else, but there it was, clear as day, he and Sarah sitting in a patch of sun, Sarah’s face tipped to the sky and his head in her lap. One of her hands playing with his hair. Only, in this vision, Seth was in his wolf form. In the day. Snuggling Sarah.

He shook his head. Could that ever be? Was it even worth letting it float across his brain?

Then the banging on the door sounded again and jolted Seth out of his reverie. He could go down this rabbit hole an hour from now, but right now, Sarah needed him and she didn’t need him to be freaking out about their relationship status.

She hung up the phone and turned to face him, her face still pale, but her expression determined.

“I’m trying my hardest not to apologize right now,” she told him. “Because obviously my father’s actions are not my fault. But Seth, he’s not a nice man. He might get… very rude if you go down there.”

“If I go down there?” He almost laughed. “Sarah, I’m stoked to go down there.”

She shook her head with a small smile. “You wanna go flex your machismo all over my asshole dad?”

He weighed his head from side to side. “I mean, that’s not not part of it. But mostly I’m grateful to get to stand between you and something that shitty. No matter what it is. I don’t want you going through that on your own.”

She took a deep breath. “Right. Okay. Look, he’s probably not going to go away unless he talks to me. So, if you don’t mind, why don’t you answer the door, throw him off a little bit and then I’ll come down and together we can get him out of here fastest.”

“Great.” He stepped forward and pulled her into his arms. It was then that he realized how pliant and relaxed she normally was when he held her, because right at that particular moment, she was stiff as a board, and he could actually feel her heart racing against the back of her ribs where his palms rested.

“And Seth?” she stopped him as he stepped past her. “Don’t listen to anything he says. It’s all garbage. I promise. All of it.”

“You got it.” He leaned down and kissed her and then took the stairs by threes on his way down to the front door.

Adrenaline hissed through his system as he yanked open the front door just as her old man attempted to bang on it again. A very muscular older man stood in the doorway, about a head shorter than Seth. A look of surprise crossed his face to see Seth filling the doorway of his daughter’s house.

“Oh. Sorry,” he said in a gruff voice. “I must be at the wrong house.”

“You’re looking for Sarah.”

The surprise morphed instantly to suspicion on her father’s face. “Yeah.”

“She’s upstairs right now. Can I help you with something?” Seth knew that he normally had a very inviting face, but he channeled Jackson and put on the meanest expression he could muster.

“I’m her father.”

“Is she expecting you?” It went against the grain to be this rude to any person, he didn’t have a ton of practice at it, but it was equally thrilling. It felt good to not have to smile at the man who caused Sarah so much heartache in her life. Who’d starved her and emotionally abused her and ruined her chances at something she’d worked her entire life for.

“I’d like to see my daughter.” His face was growing red and Seth readied himself for some sort of physical altercation. Besides scuffles with Raph and Jacks, Seth had only been in three fights in his life. And he’d won all three of them. There was something about being a shifter, that in moments like that, your instincts kicked in extra hard. The Durant boys were wild when they fought. It was something that had always made civilized Seth uncomfortable. But right now, he was grateful for it.

“Hi, Dad.” Sarah came to stand beside Seth in the doorway, tucking herself into his side. Seth put his arm around her shoulder and brought her in close.

Her father’s eyes didn’t miss a trick. He took in their closeness, their obvious intimacy. Seth saw the moment the penny dropped. A sneer spread across the older man’s face.

“How long has this been going on?”

“You’re not even going to say hello to your daughter?”

He ignored Seth. “Is this why you quit? You found some pretty boy to shack up with and you’re just going to quit everything we’ve worked so hard for?”

Seth’s ire rose and his heart started to bang in his chest. He couldn’t believe this guy.

“No, Dad. I only met Seth when I moved here. And I moved here to get away from you. I quit because you were inescapably controlling.”

“Not this line again. Don’t be naive, Sarah,” he spit as his sneer grew. “No one gets to the Olympics with a nice coach. You may have gotten your feelings hurt a few times. But this is bigger than that. Do you have any idea how much money this tantrum has cost us?”

“Oh my God.” Sarah pinched her nose. “My feelings weren’t the only thing that was hurt. It was my blood pressure, and my freaking kidneys, and my musculature, and you know what? I don’t have to explain any of this to you. You lost that privilege the day you stopped seeing me as a human and started seeing me as a commodity.”

The man took a long breath, as if he were gathering the patience to explain a grown-up concept to a child. “Sarah, I get that you’re mad that I couldn’t be dear old Dad and cheer you on with a hand-painted sign in the family section. But this is who I am. I’ve always been more hands-on than other parents—”

Aaaaaaaand Seth had heard enough. Growing up in the family he had, with his mother, seeing everything she’d sacrificed to make the lives of her children better, safer, he knew a selfish parent when he saw one. And the man standing on the porch right now was the dead opposite of Elizabeth Durant.

“Hands-on? Hands-on?” Seth interrupted. “Jesus Christ, you sure know how to turn a phrase. Don’t for one second pretend that depriving your daughter of food, isolating her from people who wanted to help her, forcing her to objectify her body for your monetary gain had anything to do with being an involved parent. I know what involved parenting looks like. I know what it looks like when a parent will sacrifice anything for their child’s well-being, and this? It ain’t it.”

A familiar feeling was rising in Seth’s blood, but he was too fired-up to put his finger on it. It was a burning sensation, a twisting within him. Without realizing it, he’d taken a step forward, put himself between Sarah and this man who didn’t care if she was in pain or not.

The man’s eyes flashed with temper, but a strangely flat expression adorned his face as he peered around Seth and leaned in the doorway. “Sarah, would you mind calling off your dog so that we could have a civilized conversation?”

Seth’s temper flared yet again and the burning in his chest intensified. The word ‘dog’ clanged around in his brain and he realized, in one speeding trainwreck of a moment, that there was a reason this feeling in his blood was familiar. It was because it was the feeling he got before he shifted. He’d only ever in his life felt it on a full moon. But here he was, feeling it in the middle of the month, under a waxing moon, barely gibbous.

He took a deep breath as panic started to swamp him.

“Actually, Seth is one of the most civilized people I’ve ever met, Dad. For starters, he doesn’t manipulate me or force me to do anything. He actually cares about my well-being.”

Suddenly Sarah’s hand was on Seth’s back and whether she knew it or not, she was calming him. He felt a little of the metallic racing leave his veins and Seth took another deep breath. He knew he needed to leave this scene, to get away from these people who he could potentially injure if he were to shift now. But he couldn’t make himself leave Sarah alone with this man. Seth wasn’t going to leave until her father did. Which meant that he needed to get a lid on things right away.

He took another deep breath and tried to get ahold of himself.

“Look, I can tell that we’re not going to be able to talk about this with your boyfriend looking like he’s going to rip my tongue out with his bare hands. So, just call me when you come to your senses, Sarah. I’ll be in town for a few more days.” Her father took a few steps back off the porch, obviously smart enough to know when to retreat. “We can still salvage some of these sponsorships, Sarah. Flopping during the Olympics did you a favor, Sarah. We have a comeback story on our hands now. You’re the best in the world, but somehow you’ve made yourself into an underdog. We couldn’t ask for better positioning if we’d planned it this way.”

Sarah stiffened next to Seth and he tugged her into his side. He was relieved that the man was halfway onto the lawn now, the space between them increasing.

“I’ll bet you did plan it,” Sarah said, her voice rough with emotion. “It never occurred to me before, but this is exactly how you wanted it to all shake out.”

With that, she took her front door and slammed it in her father’s face. She threw every lock on the door and turned to sprint up the stairs.

Seth desperately wanted to follow her, but there was still very much a chance that he could shift right now. So instead he strode to one of her dining room chairs and did something that Bauer had been teaching him over the last few weeks. Seth took deep breaths and pictured himself floating in a gray sky. He knew that the sun was just there, behind the clouds, but he couldn’t quite make it out. As he floated upward, Seth pictured the clouds starting to part, to break up, to puff away on the wind. And then he was through the clouds, and what waited for him? Nothing but perfectly blue, clear sky and the warm, shining orb of the sun. Seth let the sun shine on every part of himself as he was perfectly held up, surrounded by blue on every side, the clouds a distant memory.

When he opened his eyes from the meditation, a few minutes had passed and Seth was much more calm. The racing in his chest had stopped and he no longer felt even remotely close to shifting.

It had worked. Seth still had no idea how to voluntarily trigger his shift, but at least one of the techniques that Bauer had taught him worked well enough to stall out a shift. He wondered if there was any way that would work on a full moon. Probably not. On a full moon, the urge to shift was way more intense.

He scrubbed a hand over his face.

“Were you just meditating?”

He nearly jumped out of his skin as his eyes focused on Sarah standing in the doorway between him and the kitchen. She spooned something from a carton into her mouth.

“Um. Yeah.” He cleared his throat.

“Maybe I should take that up. I just went upstairs and screamed into a pillow. And then I came downstairs and am eating full fat Greek yogurt in defiance.”

He smiled and held his arms out to her. She immediately came over to him and snuggled her head onto his shoulder, setting her weight on his leg. His arms came around her and he smiled as she spooned a bite of the honey-flavored yogurt into his mouth.

I love you.

The words rose within him and he fought them back.

I want to be there for you.

I want to help you through the hard shit.

I want to be honest.

I want to be permanent.

I want you to know me.

I want you to know me.

I want you to know me.

“Seth?” she asked after a long minute of quiet, contented on her side and fraught on his side.

“Yeah?”

“You could tell me your secret.”

He froze. “What?”

“The secret that you’re always beating yourself up about. You could tell it to me and I would listen. I wouldn’t judge you. If you’re in trouble, I’d help you.”

“Sarah.” His voice broke and he couldn’t go any further.

“You get to protect me from the bad shit in my life.” She pointed her spoon at her now-empty front porch. “Why can’t I help protect you from the bad shit in your life?”

“I…” And for the first time since he’d met her, he simply couldn’t think of a reason why not. He knew the reasons were there, but his heart was beating loud enough to drown them all out. He couldn’t think. He could only feel.

He loved her.

His time was up.

“I need to talk to my family about it, Sarah,” he was shocked to hear himself answer.

“Okay,” she acquiesced immediately. Leaning forward, she kissed him roughly on the mouth. “Thank you for sticking up to my dad. Hopefully he’ll leave us alone.” She hopped off his lap. “Wanna go for a run, have sex, and then watch a movie?”

He laughed. “In that order?”

She soberly considered his question for a moment, her brow furrowing. Then she nodded. “Yeah. Definitely. That order makes the most sense.”

“Deal,” he agreed, letting her drag him out of the chair.