Midnight Moonlight (13 page)

Jasper furrowed his brow, as if none of that had ever occurred to him. “You’d turn me in to the authorities if I let you go?”

She backpedaled fast. “Of course I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do anything like that. I was saying that you must think that I would. But the truth is, I wouldn’t. I’d keep quiet for the rest of my life. I swear to God. Please, please, I didn’t mean for you to think…”
Damn it.

Why did she let her mouth run faster than her head like that? She shouldn’t have said anything at all. She was beginning to feel like she’d just signed her death warrant.

Jasper was giving her a funny look.

“Don’t kill me,” she murmured. “Please, don’t.”

“I don’t make a habit of killing people,” he said.

“Well, you’re a werewolf.”

He glared at her. “We’re not all like the PSAs, you know. Those are bitten werewolves. They change without a pack structure, without an alpha to keep them in check. They’re the real wild wolves, even though they call genetic werewolves that.”

She didn’t really know what he was talking about. She’d never given much thought to whether or not wolves were born or made or anything. As far as she was concerned—werewolves were werewolves, and they were all dangerous. Still, the other day when Jasper had shifted, he hadn’t hurt her, so that was something.

She returned to her sandwich.

“I’m not a monster, okay?” said Jasper. “I just want to try to help my brother, that’s all.”

Ryder was lying next to them, on all fours again, like a dog, his legs tucked up next to him. He was eating his food with his mouth, not using his hands at all.

Jasper shook his head. “I keep feeling like maybe he’s getting better, but then I see him like this. I don’t know if what you’re doing is even working.”

“I told you I couldn’t—”

“Just keep trying, that’s all.”

“Well, what if nothing—”

“
Keep trying
.”

She popped the last bit of the sandwich into her mouth and crumpled the paper it had been encased in. She didn’t look at Jasper. “He was talking last night.”

“What?” said Jasper, looking at her sharply.

“That’s how I know the man’s name,” she said. “Right after he started talking, he said that he needed to take care of something, and then he went out of the tent and started yelling for Leroy.”

“The tent?” said Jasper. “What was he doing in the tent?”

Calla felt hot all over. She couldn’t admit all of that, could she?

“You’re making this up too, aren’t you?”

“I’m not,” she said. “He started talking, and then he stopped. But he was almost… human. Like he was completely fixed.”

Jasper pointed at her, his expression fierce. “Don’t mess with me, lady. I might not be a monster, but I’m no saint either. If you try my patience…” He let the sentence trail off meaningfully.

She winced.

It was quiet.

Jasper got up. “All right, look, I’ve got some food for you two for the rest of the day today. It’s all in the cooler.” He gestured to it. “I won’t be able to come back until tomorrow morning, because I’m working the late shift at the carnival.”

“You’re leaving us alone for a whole twenty-four hours? But that Leroy man is—”

“Enough about that.” Jasper’s expression was enough to silence her.

* * *

After Jasper left, Calla spent hours with Ryder, trying to get him to talk.

At first, she tried to cajole him into speaking, kneeling down in front of him and speaking in a quiet, friendly voice. “Come on, Ryder. I know you can talk. Just give me a couple words, okay?”

But this approach produced no results whatsoever. Ryder just gave her quizzical looks. He didn’t say a word.

Then she decided to try something else. She’d get him to imitate her. She started with sounds—just going through the alphabet, trying to entice him to repeat after her.

But Ryder wouldn’t.

In fact, after she got to the letter D, and had been
d-d-d-d-duh-ing
in his face for several minutes, Ryder grabbed onto her and tried to kiss her.

Horrified, she pushed him away. “No, stop it, Ryder. I know that last night, I let things get… carried away, but that won’t happen again. Please don’t.”

She went back to trying to teach him sounds.

He wouldn’t practice the sounds, but he did try to kiss her several more times.

She rebuffed him every time, but she was beginning to become more and more aware of his body. He was such an attractive man, and she couldn’t help but admire his massive shoulders and the rippling muscles in his upper arms. He was a hulking man, so large that he made even a sturdy woman like her seem small next to him. She remembered the way it had felt to be underneath him last night, how the hard, male part of him had prodded her.

It made her feel uncomfortable. Her leggings started to seem overly tight in the crotch area. She tried to push thoughts of Ryder out of her head. She didn’t want to see him as a sexual being. He didn’t even have the brain power of an idiot. Wanting him sexually was like wanting a child. It was shameful, and she wouldn’t give in to it.

Still, he was so positively luscious, wasn’t he?

And, of course, he would pick that time to try to kiss her again.

All of her emotions converged, and she mostly felt angry. She began to yell at Ryder, scream at him to leave her alone. She called him names—called him an idiot, called him a beast. She shoved him away. She kicked him.

Ryder, looking wounded and confused, retreated to the other side of the campsite and began to lick himself between his fingers.

The obvious animal activity only served to further infuriate her. She balled up her hands in fists. “Why are you doing this to me? Why are you acting like an animal when I know you’re in there somewhere?”

Ryder only whined, ducking his head down, looking ashamed of himself.

Calla wanted to cry again. She felt as if her emotions were riding at a fever pitch these days, always heightened. She started to yell again, really scream something out.

But then she remembered Leroy.

He wasn’t gone for good. He was out there somewhere. She’d already been making quite a racket. Immediately, she went still and quiet. She turned in a circle, looking for some sign of him. What kind of an idiot was she? How could she have completely forgotten about Leroy and his threat? It was as if the conversation with Jasper had almost convinced her that she really
was
crazy. But Leroy was real, and she was frightened of him.

She chewed on her lip, wondering if she should lock herself back in the freight container, just to be safe.

Ryder seemed to have noticed the change in her demeanor. He came close and rubbed his face against her hand—again, like a dog.

This disgusted her. How could he be trying to kiss her one minute and then acting like Fido the next? He was giving her whiplash with the changes. One minute he was a man, then next an animal. She hated that.

She decided that it didn’t make sense to get inside the container again at this point. She’d be uncomfortable in there—it would be quite hot, in fact. If she needed to run there, the door was open. Otherwise, she’d stay put.

She also gave up on trying to get Ryder to talk. No more modeling sounds for him. Instead, she raided the cooler for lunch. Jasper had left them store-bought sandwiches and potato salad. She ate hers and gave Ryder his, which he tore into with his teeth.

She tried to ignore him.

She wished that Jasper had left her something to read—a magazine or a novel would have made the day go by much quicker.

Instead, she watched the sun move across the sky and wondered if anyone had noticed that she was missing yet. It had been three days, which would have been plenty if she was still married, or if it was fall, and she was back to work. But it was summer time, and she was a woman alone. So, there was no job to wonder where she was, no husband to call the police in a panic. She hadn’t even been spending time with friends, not that she really had close friends these days.

Before Chad, she’d been close to a group of other single girls, and they’d all met up with each other and gone out to bars, trolling for men. Most of those girls were coupled up now, though, and most of them—gallingly—had children. When her friends had started to get pregnant, Calla had wanted to be happy for them. She knew that if she were to conceive, she would be thrilled and would want others to be thrilled as well. But Calla couldn’t summon happiness. Instead, she only felt jealousy.

Why them?
she would think.
Why them and not me? Didn’t I do everything right? Didn’t I have it all planned out perfectly? What’s wrong with me?

She’d tried everything, even a treatment with hormones and a round of IVF. But that had wiped out her and Chad’s savings, and he hadn’t been keen to try again when it didn’t take. He said they should just get used to it being just the two of them.

And then he’d promptly gone out, had an affair, and knocked up that skinny bitch Irene. Calla clenched her hands into fists, staring up at the sky, still feeling the betrayal of it.

The worst of it was because she knew that it was her fault. There
was
something wrong with her. She was the one who couldn’t get pregnant, couldn’t make her dreams of a child come true no matter how she tried. And staring that failure in the face, well, that was what made it impossible for her to be close to her friends once they got pregnant.

Instead, Calla withdrew. She stopped checking Facebook—too many posts about babies and small children and other things that Calla could never have—and she stopped reaching out to her friends or taking their calls. She tried to force herself to go to their baby showers, but she simply couldn’t handle it. The idea of watching all those women cooing over her friend’s swelling belly was too much. No, Calla just stayed home. She stopped talking to all of them, even the ones who weren’t pregnant, because they all seemed so happy, and she just felt miserable. She knew that she was no good as company. Her life revolved around trying to conceive. When there wasn’t that failure to keep her miserable, there was the soul-sucking nature of her job, in which she began counting down the days to summer right after she finished counting down the days to Christmas.

Teaching was thankless, and she couldn’t get through to her students. She settled for making them shut up, and sometimes she couldn’t even do that.

She wasn’t the kind of person who was much fun socially, and she knew it. The few times that she and Chad did go out, she soon found herself alone after she had complained to anyone who would listen. Everyone must have thought of her as a bitter woman. Perhaps they pitied her, but they didn’t want to be near her.

So, the upshot of all of this was that there wasn’t anyone checking up on Calla. She was fairly sure that no one had noticed she was gone. Even if someone did, they would probably think she’d gone on an impromptu vacation and simply not told anyone.

She wondered how long it would be before anyone thought that she might be missing.

Why, it might be as long as the middle of August, when she didn’t show up for work. She felt sick to her stomach. Would Jasper be done with her by then? He promised he wouldn’t kill her, but she wasn’t sure what he
would
do.

Hell, it might not matter anyway. Leroy might burst out of the woods at any second and put two bullets in her skull.

The hopelessness of it all choked her. She might have cried if it hadn’t seemed so pointless. Instead, she just felt herself hollow out, all of the will draining out of her. She was stuck out here, and she was probably as good as dead. Even if she wasn’t, what kind of life could she even return to?

“I don’t have a life,” she said out loud. “I’m no one.”

By the time evening rolled around and Ryder slunk back up to be close to her, she didn’t try to stop him from rubbing up against her. He might be a dog-man, but he was the only being out there who even remotely cared about her. She should take what she could get.

* * *

Ryder found the soft woman extremely confusing today. She was kind to him, and then she was angry. She wanted to be close, and then she drove him away. He had spent all day trying to get close to her again. He wanted to try the human mating ritual again, putting his lips on hers. He couldn’t remember the word for it anymore, but he felt certain that if he did it again, he would remember the word. He would remember that and much more.

But it was hard, because Calla wasn’t much like a wolf. She was a human woman, and she was very complicated. Things were simple when wolves wanted to mate. It was all communicated by smell, and he would feel confident doing what he had to do just because her scent told him the story.

But the human woman could smell as if she wanted him for all the world and still yell at him and push him away. She could still react angrily, and it confused Ryder very much.

All he could think was that the soft woman was feeling frightened of him. He knew about fear. When he’d first come home, he’d recognized Jasper as pack because he’d smelled him, but he had still been frightened of his brother. It had taken time, Jasper slowly coming closer and closer before finally Ryder began to completely trust him.