Chapter 18: Growling

Dominic

All day. All day long, the nagging pain, the feeling like my heart has been pierced, the longing to be with Amelia, the knowledge that only being with her can take it away.

I finish servicing all the cars, twice over. I take a long walk in the woods outside their compound. I finally run out of things to do, and go upstairs to my room to try to take a nap.

How long is her bloody meeting going to last?

I lay here on the bed on my back, staring at the ceiling, while the afternoon sunlight streams in through the window. All I can think about is Amelia. I fantasize about figuring out where her meeting is, bursting into the room, and claiming her right there in front of everybody.

Then I laugh at myself. That’d go over well. It might be a one-way trip to join the rogue pack in the woods.

Somehow, I manage to drift off to sleep. I don’t realize it until the door opens, waking me up, and when I open my eyes I see Evan coming into our room.

“Hey,” I say, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. I glance over at the clock on the nightstand. It’s after five o’clock.

“Hey,” he says, dropping some things from his pockets onto the dresser. He sits down on his bed and takes his shoes off. “We just finished the meeting,” he tells me.

“Meeting?”

“Yeah, you know, the one with the leaders, about the proposed pack alliance. The whole reason we came. We weren’t just here for a ball.”

Um, yeah, I guess. I’m just a mechanic, just a wolf, I’m not privy to that sort of information. But Evan is? I realize that I’ve never even asked him what his job is. We didn’t have a chance to talk before everything went down yesterday. “You were at the meeting? What do you do, anyway?”

He looks at me like he thinks I’m sort of dumb. Fair. “I’m Beta Nolan’s assistant,” he says, probably offended that I didn’t realize that.

“Oh, cool,” I say, not able to think of anything smarter than that to say. “Uh, sorry, I didn’t realize.”

He shrugs, and leans back on his bed. “Amelia was there too,” he mentions. That gets my interest. Of course, she’s the Gamma’s assistant, and I knew she had to go to a meeting with him. Evan got to spend the whole day with Amelia while I languished all sad and alone and with a constant twinging pain?

I’m pretty sure that I’m staring at him indignantly. He chuckles at me. “She’s very cool,” he says. “Real smart. I can understand why you wanted to spend time with her last night.”

Ah. Apparently he’s put that together, too. “Uh, yeah,” I say. I can’t add anything, our secret is still under wraps.

He’s looking at me with a kind of tentative expression. “Dinner starts in about an hour. The leaders are all going to eat together in their dining room, but the rest of us can get food in the kitchen, same place we had breakfast.”

I nod.

“And, uh,” he goes on, “I’m wondering if you were planning to eat with Amelia? I mean, if you aren’t, like, officially dating or anything, I’d like to ask her to join me for dinner.” He looks at me, eyebrows raised, apparently thinking that I’m going to tell him to go for it.

Instead, I hear an actual growl starting low in my chest, like my inner wolf is literally speaking from within me. My eyebrows have gotten so low as I scowl at him that I can barely see out from under them. Sheesh. I’ve never felt such possessive anger before, but I am having this intensely protective urge, and if Evan says one more thing that makes it sound like he has any plans with my mate, I am going to go full wolf on him.

His eyes widen. He hears the growling. He lifts his hands in the air. “Jesus, dude, calm down! Fine! I didn’t realize you were that serious about it - that’s why I asked. I won’t ask her to dinner!”

He gets up off the bed, staring at me. “I’m, uh, just going in there,” he says, and sort of backs away into the bathroom, leaving me alone in the room, growling on my bed.

Holy cow, I need to calm down, don’t I? I feel like I was ready to bite his head right off, and all he was doing was asking a very considerate question. He had realized that I spent time with Amelia last night, and was polite enough to ask me first before he tried something. He doesn’t know our secret, nobody does, and I shouldn’t blame him for trying.

But I might murder him for it if he really did. Try, that is.

Evan

Well, that didn’t go as well as I had hoped. I mean, one night together does not a mating make. I figured they were probably about as serious about each other as the girls at the dance were last night about me. They probably just had a fun fling, I assumed. Tonight I wanted to shoot my shot with Amelia as well. I asked him first, just to make sure I wasn’t breaching the bro code, but from his reaction you’d think I had tried to steal away his girlfriend.

Amelia didn’t say anything about it today, she just seemed super focused on the meeting. I wonder if she’s as serious about him as he apparently is about her? I saw no signs of that. I’ll have to watch tomorrow, see if she mentions anything. I’m not giving up hope yet, just because Dom is feeling all territorial. It’s up to her, after all, and it’s possible she’ll choose someone else.

After I quickly use the bathroom, I go out and put my shoes back on. Dominic is up, no longer laying on his bed, and thank goodness no longer growling. He sounded like he had shifted, for Christ’s sake.

“Um, sorry about that,” he says. “I know you were just trying to be polite. But for the record, yes, I plan to ask Amelia to have dinner with me tonight. I’d appreciate you finding someone else to eat with.”

“Oh, yeah, okay.” I stand back up. “See you down there, I guess.”

Awkward!

Well, when I get down into the dining room I don’t see her, but Theo is in there already, sitting at a table with some other guys, and he waves me over. “Hey Evan,” he says, “these are the guys that I surf with.” He tells me all their names, then adds to them, “Evan might be coming surfing with us in a couple of days.”

They all seem super friendly, so I grab some food and bring my plate over to join them. I might not be finding a girlfriend, but I’m glad to be making some cool friends. And honestly, surfing does sound fun. I’ve been teased most of my life, since about middle school, about how much like a surfer I look, but have never even tried it. I suppose it’s about time.