Chapter 8

Liam's POV:

I wasn't really sure what I was doing.

Walking through the forest at nine in the morning, my hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt, kicking a rock along the path in the chilly air. I knew my destination and my end goal of the day, but why exactly was I headed to Milo's house without Sage or Adriel as supervision? I wasn't sure. There wasn't much I could accomplish.

I regret a lot, I thought to myself as I realized I wasn't even halfway there. Sighing, I shifted into my wolf form to run the rest of the way; it would be a good way to stretch my legs and honestly, I hadn't been in this form for a week and I was beginning to miss it.

When I reached the area where the trees thinned and the path became easier to see, I shifted back, kicking some of the dirt off of my shoes (I may have strayed from the path a bit, it was hard to tell) and running a hand through my hair to catch tangles. I wasn't sure why I cared so much, but for some reason, today felt important.

As I'd guessed, Milo was outside, sitting on his knees as he worked over his carrot plants, the few that still remained stretching rows and rows down. I stepped into the clearing where his house sat and stood there silently for a moment or so, wondering if he'd heard me approach.

Sure enough, he turned around, his eyes narrowed for a moment before exhaling and swallowing. "Hi," he muttered, turning back around to his garden to pull another carrot.

"Hi." My voice sounded so much louder in the silent forest. "You seem a bit stressed."

Milo shrugged.

"Do you... want help?" I gestured to the rows.

"No," he mumbled, so quietly I could barely hear before he took a deep breath and said, "You can help if you want."

I nodded, feeling as though it would be more awkward to leave now that I'd arrived than to stay and help out, so I sat down a little ways away from him and stared at the job, wondering if this was the wrong time to mention I had never harvested carrots before. He made it look easy enough, pulling them out with ease, so I figured I might as well try and attempt to pull one out.

Milo's quiet laughter was enough to tell me I'd messed up. I looked up at him, my eyebrows raised, holding up the half of a carrot with dirt hanging off the end as he tried to stifle his laughter by pressing a hand over his mouth.

"That's not how you do it," he said quietly once he had gotten over the laughter.

"Okay, how do you do it?"

Immediately he blushed and looked away and I realized I'd cornered him into teaching me something he obviously didn't want to do. Yet he sighed and stood up, walked the few feet over and crouched down on the other side of the row, the next carrot over. I watched with keen observation as he grabbed on to the base of the greenery adorning the orange flesh, wiggling it around in its hole for a moment or so before twisting it out of the ground, plucking it out with what seemed like uncanny familiarity.

"So you're saying you don't just yank it straight up," I asked in a deadpan tone, though I was smiling.

He looked away. "No."

A half hour later, we had been working in silence for much too long, in my humble opinion, and I was bored of it. So I turned my head towards him, who had gotten much further than I had in the time we had, and tried to spark a conversation. "What's your favorite song, Milo?"

He visibly flinched, curling even more into himself then he was already. I silently cursed myself as he seemed to think.

"I don't know," he whispered, "I don't listen to a lot of songs. Except the ones Adriel sings."

"Is he good at singing?"

"Very."

"What kinds of songs?"

Milo shrugged. "I don't know. Lullabies?"

"Does he sing you to sleep?" I asked, grinning, expecting a harsh negative like what Sage would undoubtedly give.

Instead, Milo just stared at the ground. "Sometimes."

That wasn't the answer I'd been expecting, and I wasn't quite sure how to lead off of it. So instead we just lapsed into silence, since I didn't know what to say next and he didn't seem keen on talking in the first place.

"What's your favorite color?" He shrugged. That was honestly about what I'd expected. I probably would have answered similarly. "Why do you grow carrots?"

"I just always have."

"Do you like carrots?"

"They're okay."

"What do you like to eat, then?"

Milo shrugged again. "Not much."

I stayed there, helping him out and asking questions, trying to learn more about my mate as we finished the carrot patch and went inside to wash them off in the sink. It was smaller than I'd expected for someone who grew carrots, so we took turns, rotating between washing off the dirt and drying them. I hadn't known that Milo had a pet chicken named 'Bubbles' who ran around our feet as we worked. Milo picked them (the gender was never mentioned) up sometimes to stroke their head, which caused me to smile.

"I find it strange that you don't have any pets," he said, smiling a bit as he carried a towel full of carrots to the table, where I was drying another batch. My heart melted a bit at the sight.

"What? Why?"

"You seem like the kind of person who would really like animals," he continued, taking my place as I took ten more carrots out of the basket we'd gathered them in and carried them to the sink.

"I do," I admitted, "but my mom refuses to let us get a pet. She thinks it'll just be a huge mess. Which is probably true."

"Hmm," he hummed in response. I was the slightest bit disappointed that I wasn't getting another full-sentence answer, but I was proud of my progress. Perhaps getting to know him better was helped by long periods of time one-on-one without anyone else to move the conversation along.

A while of drying later, we finally finished. Milo washed his hands first, and when he moved over to dry his, I took the spot at the sink. He sighed as he noticed the time on the clock on the wall. It was eleven-thirty.

"Do you want to stay for lunch?" he asked with a soft smile. "Sorry, I didn't think it'd take that long..."

"Sure, I'll stay," I said quickly before I could change my mind. "And I'm the one who interrupted you, not the other way around."

"Well, it was nice to have company, I guess," he continued, crouching to open up a cupboard. "What do you want?"

"What do you have?" I countered, unwilling to face the awkwardness of asking for something he didn't have.

"Umm..." He moved away for a second to open up a second cupboard and I saw that the first one was mostly empty, save for a half-empty loaf of bread on the second shelf and a stack of paper on the lower. "Well, carrots, for one. Bread and peanut butter, and tomatoes, and some other vegetables. There's probably something else in one of these other cupboards, but it's probably gone bad by now," he said, his cheeks turning red.

"Peanut butter sandwiches sounds fine," I said. Milo nodded and started unwrapping the bread. "Do you want help with it?"

"You could feed Bubbles," he said, turning and pointing at an unopened cupboard. "She gets one scoop of her feed and you can put a few cherry tomatoes at the bottom to incentivize her."

I followed his instructions, but when it came to the tomatoes, I added an extra few just because. When I turned around, Bubbles happily feeding, Milo was staring at the bowl with a wrinkled nose. "Seriously," he muttered, turning back around.

"Hmm?"

"Adriel does that too. Bubbles does not need that many cherry tomatoes."

He didn't seem upset, really, so I laughed and mostly disregarded his words. I was surprised that Adriel would do that; he didn't really strike me as a nurturing person, but then again, I had never really spent much time with him. We had been on the school soccer team for a year or two in the first-grade era but that had been over a decade ago. People change, after all.

"How did you get Bubbles in the first place?" I asked as he handed me a sandwich on a plate, keeping his eyes down. We sat down at the table and I had started eating before he responded.

"Daniel raises and butchers chicken," he said after casting a glance over to the feasting Bubbles, as if to make sure she couldn't hear. "I got attached to her when she was a chick and never let him kill her."

"So she's pretty old, then?"

"Seven or so."

"Wow," I commented, staring in awe at the chicken.

We ate in silence for a moment, Milo taking only a few bites before standing to scrape it into the trash. I was very tempted to ask but decided against it, remembering Adriel's strict warning. He picked up Bubbles from where she had been sitting, watching us and sat back down in his chair, staring down at her and stroking her head. In the silence, I could hear the thumps of all three of our heartbeats, theirs perfectly aligned and mine half a second or so behind. It was soothing, like a constant beat that the melody could play on top of.

"What do you think you want to do next year?" I asked, my plate empty.

Milo shrugged. "Plant carrots?"

"No plans?"

"Planting carrots isn't a plan?" He smiled. "No, not really. I'm not planning to go to college or anything. Just kinda stay here and sell carrots."

I nodded; I hadn't really expected anything different. I watched his hand stroking Bubbles' head and smiled before looking further up towards Milo, who appeared to be staring at me, also.

For a moment, neither of us moved, I stared into his eyes and he looked back at me. Time seemed to stop, but all too soon, it started back up again and he looked away, red brushing his cheeks.

"I should probably get going," I admitted, looking at the clock again. "I still have that Spanish assignment to work on."

"Buena suerte," he said as we stood.

"Huh?"

"Maybe you should go work on that Spanish assignment."

"Maybe," I agreed, and I waved him good-bye as I left the house.

-

It was a full hour later when I returned home. My heart had long since stopped pounding but my head was filled with constant thoughts of Milo and every aspect of him: his smile, his scent, his eyes and the soulfulness that had pooled inside. The dark brown was a color I could get lost in forever, and while I knew I could probably find a similar hex color online somewhere, I was sure it wouldn't have the same effect. Even though my mind was still full, I couldn't avoid my home forever, so I decided to hell with it and walked back through the town.

"Liam," Dad intercepted me as I entered the house. I turned around to greet him and quickly became aware of the cast around his arm and not-yet scabbed over cut on his forehead.

"What happened? Are you okay?" I asked, the second question slightly redundant because of course he was okay, he was walking and talking and he was a werewolf, for crying out loud.

"Your aunt Eva and I, along with a few training warriors, invaded a small pack of rogue wolves this morning."

"Is she okay?" I asked, mystified, as I followed him upstairs to his office.

"Doing perfectly fine. I suppose they just wanted to do a number on me before their deaths."

"So they're out of the picture?"

"Very much so. But that's not what I want to talk about." Instead of leading me to his office, as I had been expecting, he led me in the other direction, towards his bedroom.

"What do you want to talk about, then?"

"You and your mate," he said, shutting the door behind us. "Let me grab something."

I sat on the bed, crossing my legs as he went into the closest and returned after a few moments, carrying a small box. "What's that?"

"A box of memories, from the day your mom and I found out we were mates up until now," he said, smiling down at it as he sat opposite me. As I watched, he opened it with a small key he retrieved from his sock drawer and took out a stack of items and paper. "This is a photo from an article written about us the day after I turned eighteen." The photo was an image of my father standing on the same stage I had and my mother, looking quite confused as well as embarrassed, standing next to him. "We couldn't escape like you and Milo did before the journalists caught up."

"Sounds awful." I examined the photo.

"It really was," he laughed. "She didn't speak to me for a week after that."

I reached for the next item on the stack. It appeared to be a letter in my mother's handwriting. "What's this?"

"A letter," he said slowly before his expression cleared and he smiled, his eyes nostalgic with memories. "This is a letter she wrote me after I went on a dangerous mission without telling her telling me that she couldn't bear to be my mate if she never knew if I was going to be dead or alive the next day. Then, when I saw her again, she threw a boot at my face," he laughed, rubbing his cheek as though he could still feel it. "Goddess, I miss those days."

"So what are you trying to say?" I asked, examining him closely. He was usually really good at getting straight to the point; it was a bit unnerving that today was different. It showed a crack in his usually flawless exterior; he was uncomfortable.

"Liam, Milo's got a lot to work through. We've known this for a long time." I nodded. "I know that it's come as a surprise that your mate is a male and you've only had a few days to work through it for yourself, but he's quite important in this equation, too. And I'd wager he's more shocked than you are."

That would certainly be an assumption that would make sense, I thought to myself.

"So I know we can't force you to love him, or care for him like a mate, or even mate him at all, but even without that, Milo is still a part of the pack, and as a future Alpha, it's your job to ensure the comfortability of the entire pack, including the omega. So basically, don't ignore him and don't love him just for the sake of having a mate. He's more important than that."

"I know, Dad," I smiled. "Be nice, got it."

Dad laughed light-heartedly, and I could tell that he was glad to be out of the serious conversation. "Come on, kid. Let's go downstairs. I'm sure Paisley would love to have help finding the new hiding place for the chocolate."

"She found it?" I gasped.

"With a little bit of help, yes." He winked. "I let her have about fourteen pieces before I reconfiscated it."

"Well, dang it," I sighed. "I was sure I'd be the one to find it. Never too late, I guess."

"Go find her, I think Caleb's over too. You can have some good old cousin bonding time."

"Sounds fun. Bye." I waved as I left the room, closing the door behind me, but I didn't go straight downstairs. Instead, I walked to the large window facing the rest of the town in the hallway. It was opened today, the openings too small for a small, curious child to fit through but enough that I could breathe in the fresh air without leaving the house again. I stared out with my chin propped up on my hand and tilted my head.

People walking down Main Street, shopping and laughing and talking. Children in the park, giggling and shouting and playing. I tried to busy myself with counting them, wondering what they were talking about, watching. But I couldn't focus. Again, all I could think about was him.

I shouldn't see him again that day, but Goddess help me because I was already feeling the pull.

-

That night, I left home wearing a sweatshirt and sweatpants to deal with the rapidly chilling air. It was ten, fairly early but also late enough that Paisley was already in bed and wouldn't ask questions. Mom saw me leave, but simply raised an eyebrow and turned around to continue talking on the phone with Aunt Eva.

My journey through the town was fast. I stared at the ground mostly, only raising my head whenever I passed someone to smile and say 'excuse me' and whenever I reached an intersection, because even though I was a werewolf and could probably survive being hit by a car, it would still hurt like hell and I was very much not wanting that.

Once I reached the forest, I shifted and ran, focusing solely on my destination and not at all in it for the enjoyment. I couldn't smell Adriel, which was a good indicator he wasn't at Milo's house, but his own scent was rapidly increasing.

I stopped running when I reached the edge of the forest, still far enough in that I couldn't be spotted without active searching, but close enough that I could catch a good glimpse of my mate's face in the illuminated window.

His dark hair was toustled as he sat there, staring up at the sky, at the stars. I could hear the faint cluck-cluck of Bubbles, presumably at his feet. "The stars are pretty tonight," he murmured, so quietly I could barely hear it. Then his expression shifted and he quickly pulled the window down, closing the curtains from the inside, cloaking his room in a patchwork fabric from my point of view. A few moments later, the light turned off and I heard the faint noise of a stool being pushed back into a corner. Finally, silence.

"Goodnight, Milo," I murmured under my breath and turned to leave, completely unaware of the boy inside who heard me and stiffened.

--

oof

honestly, I never know what to say here. I really like this chapter, I dunno. Let me know your thoughts I guess

Also, I'm pretty sure I made up a few words in here (spellcheck says reconfiscated isn't a word, I don't see why not), but eh.

have a good day :D

-bloom (the author)

(obviously)

(i'm an idiot)

(just skip to the next chapter already)

(okay bye)

(i'm enjoying this bit way to much lol)