Chapter Two

WITH NIGHT falling, Leo stumbled home, still feeling slightly dazed. It had been a really weird day.

He shared a two-bedroom apartment with Mitch, a guy he’d found on Craigslist when Mitch had advertised for a “gay housemate but not like that.” Leo had been due to start his training at the hospital and still didn’t have a place to live, so he’d made the call and prayed he wouldn’t end up living with a psychopath.

He’d ended up with a werewolf instead.

Leo had been incredibly surprised when, at their first meeting, Mitch showed him around the apartment, then casually dropped into the conversation that he was a wolf. Leo had thought it would be a far bigger deal; everything he knew about wolves—which, admittedly, wasn’t a lot—suggested they were reluctant to let outsiders into their personal space.

He still wasn’t sure if that was true for some werewolves. They mostly lived in small communities around the world, sticking together for protection. They often homeschooled their kids or created werewolf-only schools, so even though Spokane had a fairly large werewolf community, Leo didn’t come into contact with them all that often.

Except Mitch, and he didn’t exactly behave as Leo had expected. Mitch was the least jealous, least possessive, least aggressive wolf Leo had ever met. And he was absolutely fine with sharing a living space with a human.

“Hey,” Leo called, dumping his bag by the front door and toeing off his shoes. He shed outer layers as he made his way through the apartment to where Mitch was mixing cocktails in the kitchen, dancing to some disco/techno music.

“You’re such a cliché,” Leo said. He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms over his chest, biting back a smile.

“It’s Friday,” Mitch sang.

“Bitch, it’s Wednesday.”

“Not for me. I’m not working the rest of the week, so I’m making margaritas.”

Mitch was not a psychopath. At least, Leo didn’t think so. When they’d first met, Leo had been intimidated by the amount of personality Mitch packed into such a small frame; Mitch was barely five foot five, which was unusual for a werewolf. They were typically bigger. There was nothing typical about Mitch, though.

For Wednesday night margaritas, Mitch was wearing Daisy Duke shorts and a sweater that had been cut in half, leaving his midriff bare. His pink baseball socks stretched up to his knees, hiding his skinny calves.

“I was thinking of ordering dinner in. I don’t think I have the energy to cook something,” Leo said.

“Eating’s cheating.”

“Not when I have work at eight tomorrow morning.”

“Boo. You whore.”

“Thai or sushi?”

“Tacos!”

Leo tipped his head back so Mitch couldn’t see his grin. “Okay. I’ll call for delivery in thirty minutes? I want a shower.”

“Okay. I’ll get your margarita ready for when you’re done.”

When Leo turned away to head to the bathroom, he finally let the chuckle out. As a roommate, Mitch was a handful. As a friend, he was a godsend.

For just a little while, Leo wanted to push down the stress burning his lungs and the terror clenching his gut and do something achingly normal. He’d spent the afternoon forgetting about the werewolf by composing songs with kids on the cancer ward, making them roll around with laughter. Beautiful, androgynous children with their shiny smooth skin and ugly hospital gowns, distracted for a moment by a song about boogers.

Leo was clinging to that distraction even as it rolled in his grasp like glass covered in oil.

He quickly made the call for dinner, then showered and changed into comfy clothes. He half stumbled into the living room, his body aching from all that time sitting on the floor, and fell into his preferred spot on the sofa. It looked like the food had arrived when he was getting changed; Mitch had already divided it onto two plates.

“What’s up with you tonight?” Mitch asked. He folded himself into an intricate pretzel in his armchair, balancing his cocktail in one hand and his plate on his knees. “You’re all….” He waved his free hand around demonstratively.

“I met….” Leo took a deep breath and shook his head. He hadn’t yet said it aloud. “I met a guy today. He’s a werewolf. And he thinks I’m his soul mate.”

Mitch made a noise that was very loud and very high-pitched.

“But you’re human! That’s so rare,” he said reverently.

“I knew it was a thing, but only abstractly, you know? It doesn’t happen often, right?”

“No, hardly ever. You lucky bitch. Girl, what’s he like?”

“Straight. So I’m not feeling particularly lucky right now.”

Mitch gasped dramatically. “Are you sure?”

Leo had long since learned that Mitch didn’t overreact to anything. That was just his way of responding to life. In a way, Leo was jealous. Everything Mitch felt, he experienced with his whole body, not repressing or holding back. Leo imagined it must be so liberating.

“Yeah.”

“What happened? Tell me everything. Don’t leave out a single detail.”

Mitch shoved his taco into his mouth to show he was done talking. For now.

“I ran into him. Literally. I was rushing to an appointment at work and checking my phone, and he just, I don’t know, bumped right into me. It wasn’t exactly romantic.”

“You expected romance from a straight guy? A straight guy werewolf?”

“No, I expected the overture from Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet,” Leo said drily. “Rose petals falling from the sky. A single beam of golden light.”

“Ugh, you know I love it when you talk dirty classical music to me.” Mitch made a “carry on” gesture as he took another bite.

“He—I don’t know his name, by the way—he stopped and looked at me like I was something totally horrifying. So I gave him my card and ran off to my appointment.”

“What does he look like?” Mitch asked through a mouthful of food.

“Tall,” Leo said, picking at the edge of his taco bowl. “Taller than me. He has really chiseled features. His face is… dramatic. In a good way. He looks like he could be a movie star. A bit like Ryan Reynolds with a beard.”

Mitch stared. It made Leo uncomfortable enough to keep talking.

“Like… now I know he’s a werewolf, I can see it, you know?”

“Big ears? Fangs? Claws and a snarl?”

Leo resisted the urge to throw something at him. “No,” he said emphatically. “You’re the one with pointy ears.”

Mitch hated it when Leo mentioned his ears. They weren’t ridiculously pointy—they were actually rather cute—but Mitch was sensitive about it, and Leo wasn’t above using Mitch’s weaknesses against him.

Sometimes it was easy to tell if someone was a werewolf. There were the usual stereotypes of course: strength, dominance, the shape of their pupils—if you could get close enough to study them. Most of it was bullshit, though. Wolves had lived among the general population for hundreds of years now. Some people held prejudices… but Leo thought that would probably always be the case for anyone who coded as “different.”

There were all sorts of theories as to why wolves occasionally found their soul mate in humans, from widening the gene pool to the idea that the human had wolf ancestry way back somewhere. But it wasn’t an exact science, and Leo had never known a mated werewolf, so he hadn’t been able to ask.

He took a bite of his taco, not really wanting it but not sure how to keep talking. Mitch picked up the hint.

“He’s straight and a werewolf, and you’re his human mate. It’s like Jessica and William on Days of Our Lives!”

Leo tipped his head back and laughed, thankful in that moment for a friend who could take a serious situation and make it okay.

“That storyline ran, what, fifteen years ago?”

“Oh my God. I had the biggest crush on William.”

Leo grinned. “Of course you did.”

“It was so romantic, Leo. She was all swooning and delicate and pretty, and he was this big hulking werewolf. And she decided to say a big fuck you to society and run away with him because she loved him no matter what her parents said.”

“It was an incredibly problematic storyline, is what it was. And Jessica and William weren’t soul mates. She was using him to rebel against her parents. Which is gross.”

“You know what I’m getting at.”

“I don’t know that I want to be the Jessica in this situation. Though I’m pretty sure my parents will take it about as well as hers did.”

Mitch looked lost in thought for a second. Then he shook his head. “Girl,” he said, and paused to slurp his margarita. “Girl, I don’t know what to tell you. You didn’t even get his number?”

“I barely heard him speak,” Leo said. “He was too busy gaping at me like a goldfish. I really didn’t have time to stick around and wait for him to freak out on me some more.”

“What was it like?” Mitch’s voice had dropped to a breathless whisper. Like all of this was the biggest secret in the world. “Did you just know?”

“I guess so. I looked at him, and it was like… the world shifted on its axis. Like putting glasses on when you didn’t even know you needed them to read, and suddenly everything comes into focus.” Leo shook his head. “I’m human; I wasn’t prepared for this. I don’t even know his name.”

His name was important. Such a big deal, Leo was actively trying not to think about it. The implications of the whole situation were huge; it would affect his parents, his friends, his job. He’d seen enough of the world to know there was still prejudice against werewolves, even though it wasn’t considered polite to air those opinions in public anymore. Living with a werewolf as his roommate would have been extremely taboo even thirty years ago; now Leo had to deal with the implications of being one’s soul mate.

Leo knew werewolves considered their soul mates almost sacred; it was one of the most pure and intimate connections they could form. But what that actually entailed? What would be expected of him? Leo didn’t have a clue.

He was pretty sure he was going to fuck it up.

Mitch looked over and studied Leo hard. “Do you think he’ll call?”

Leo shrugged. Because wasn’t that just the crux of it? What happened if he didn’t call?

HE DIDN’T call. He turned up.

Leo pulled into his assigned spot in the hospital parking lot—because yeah, his job didn’t come with very many perks, but his own parking spot was one of them—and the guy was waiting by the door to the staff entrance. The staff entrance wasn’t easy to find if you didn’t know where to look, which meant maybe his wolf was a doctor. Or someone else who worked at the hospital.

Though Leo was desperate to check his face in the rearview mirror before going out there, he resisted. He’d spent all night googling the phenomenon of human-werewolf mates, and it had been a long and dark rabbit hole to fall down. He was sure the exhaustion was written all over his face.

From health class in high school, Leo had been vaguely aware it was a possibility, but wolves almost always mated with other wolves, if they mated at all. It wasn’t a given. The more he learned, the more Leo was intimidated by the possibility of being thrown into their world. Especially when he would almost certainly be treated as an anomaly.

He grabbed his backpack from the passenger seat and carefully locked the Prius as he walked over.

“Hey,” he said softly. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

He looked cold, Leo thought. It was a cold morning, crisp and bright, and he was only wearing jeans and a dark red hoodie. He looked good, though. Leo thought he’d be an idiot not to find a man who looked like that attractive.

“Hey.”

Leo stopped a few feet away, not wanting to crowd him. He had dark bags under his eyes, like he hadn’t slept well.

Well, Leo hadn’t exactly slept like a baby either.

“So, uh, I don’t even know your name,” Leo said, choosing to focus on his beat-up Adidas rather than his wolf’s very conflicted facial expressions.

“Jackson. Jackson Lewis.”

“Nice to meet you, Jackson,” Leo said, keeping his voice carefully even. “I’m Leo.”

He looked up then, and found whiskey-brown eyes that looked tired and tormented.

“You’re my soul mate,” Jackson—thank God, Leo had his name now—said, his voice rough.

“It seems so…. Yeah.”

His words didn’t appear to make Jackson feel any better. If anything, he looked sick.

“Look,” Leo said, stepping forward and gently squeezing Jackson’s arm. He ignored the little thrill of touching him. He could dwell on that later. “I get that this probably isn’t what you expected. That’s okay. Before we make any decisions about anything, I’d like to get to know you better, if that’s okay with you? I have a lot of questions,” he finished with a soft laugh.

Jackson ran his hand over his face roughly, effectively dislodging Leo’s grip.

“Can I… can I have a few days to think about it? I’ll call you, I promise, I just need… I need some time. I have your card.”

“Okay.” Leo ignored the discomfort churning through him now and tried to make his expression calm. Nonthreatening. “Please do call, though.”

“I will. I’m sorry for ambushing you at work like this.”

“It’s okay. I have some time before my shift starts.”

Jackson nodded and stepped away.

“I’m sorry, Leo.” Leo looked at him blankly, and Jackson shook his head. “You deserve better than this.”

Before Leo could ask what that meant, Jackson had turned on his heel and rushed away.