LITMIR.BIZ

       I follow Friend in the woods. Trees can be woods. Trees can be oak. Can be willow. I like willow trees. They pretty. Both words for the same thing. My head is so big with words. But many words left to find. When will I? Friend wants to run and play but there are words I do not have. Friend run fast, I run fast. I scared to be just me in the woods. I scared I need word I not find yet. I scared. I wish I had word for why but that one hides. All words hide. I find. Dig up from inside my head, from ground, from sky. Words hide but I find. I find them all. Then I not scared no more.

      * * * *

      The day after shifting into wolf form could be rough. It depended on how much water we drank before we shifted and if we were stupid enough to drink alcohol.

      Murphy and I hadn’t planned to shift, it had happened organically after a bottle of white wine and two hours of intense sex. Vaughn had gone out drinking at the pubs on Beacon Street and we’d had the condo to ourselves for a change.

      It had been Murphy’s idea to shift. The wine had been my idea. Sex had been a mutual decision.

      It was April and spring had definitely sprung in Boston.

      The three of us sprawled on a wooden bench beneath a willow tree on Boston Common. The branches dipped into a small pond where four ducks quacked indignantly to cover up their innate fear of us. We were Pack and they knew it, although in human form we wouldn’t touch them. Wolf form? Yeah, they would be smart to avoid us.

      Vaughn had his long legs stretched straight out in front of him as he consumed a foot-long hotdog smothered in chili. The smell of it nauseated me, and I tried to breathe through my mouth to dilute the scent.

      On my other side Murphy watched joggers run past. One girl was seasonally optimistic in a pair of bright red shorts with white piping. Her legs looked cold to me but Murphy obviously found them attractive. He tracked her with his dark eyes but then I noticed him grin because he was aware I watched him do it. I swore that man loved to fuck with me.

      I stretched my legs out and ignored him. They ached like a bitch. I sucked water from a huge plastic bottle but it was too little too late. A limping retreat back to the condo seemed more and more likely.

      Vaughn ignored the jogger. He ignored all the Others—regular humans. He semi-ignored us too, but only because he was so engrossed in his damn chili dog.

      “That’s disgusting.” I was unable to keep silent anymore. “How can you eat that, Vaughn? It smells awful.”

      “But it tastes great,” he said around a mouthful.

      Murphy chuckled and I wanted to elbow him in the ribs but I was too sore.

      The three of us idled in the spring sunshine, happy despite all the bullshit that had taken place three months previously when Vaughn’s bond mates had died.

      Callie had shot herself in the head when it had become clear she would be exposed as a conspirator in the underground movement within the Great Pack that attempted to scare us all back to the old ways. She’d murdered their bond mate, Peter, with a fatal dose of narcotics that he’d thought had been pain medicine for a migraine. She hadn’t wanted him to know she’d helped murder my bond mates, Grey and Elena, in a rigged car crash nearly three years ago.

      Vaughn had been left behind. He and I had both watched Callie kill herself and still had nightmares about it. After their funeral, Vaughn had come to stay with me and Murphy in Boston. He’d left Riverglow, but he wasn’t in exile. As soon as he found a bond mate he could rejoin a pack, but it had been barely three months and a new bond mate was probably the furthest thing from his mind.

      Murphy and I belonged to Mac Tire, the largest pack in Great Britain. Technically, we were supposed to live in Dublin, but our Alphas, Padraic O’Reilly and Fiona Carmichael, had given us leave to stay in Boston while Murphy and I worked on my wolf.

      My wolf was not as evolved as others. I’d kept her deliberately childlike and free, but now I sought for her to catch up with everyone else. It had proven to be a long and difficult process. Paddy and Fee had nearly lost patience with us, and now we had Vaughn as another excuse to avoid going to Dublin. I was in no rush to see him leave, although I wished his suffering would ease. I hated to see him grief-stricken and in pain.

      I heard him sometimes through the bedroom wall. Heard him jerk awake with a strangled scream. Heard him swear. Sometimes he punched the wall. Sometimes he cried. The nights where he cried I got out of bed and went to him and he clung to me like a child.

      He hadn’t cried in nearly three weeks, and I hoped the worst was over.

      Vaughn wadded up the remains of his chili dog and tossed it and a bunch of paper napkins into a nearby trash can.

      I reached up to touch the soft leaves above my tilted face. I was worried about my wolf. Since Vaughn had come to stay with us, Murphy and I rarely found the opportunity to have sex, let alone shift. Last night my wolf had been stubbornly reluctant to come out. For the first time since we’d started to shift together, Murphy had finished his transformation before me. Then my wolf had spent the entire time on a search for words for different types of trees. No playing. No fun.

      The willow leaves were soft as they brushed my face. “My wolf knows willow tree. She knows oak and birch and maple too.”

      Murphy gave me a look that on anyone else’s face I would have called infatuated, but since it was Murphy who looked at me, I didn’t know what precisely to call it.

      Maybe the infatuation was for my wolf. That made more sense anyway.

      I glanced at my watch. “It’s nearly two o’clock. Kathy said she’d get to our place around two thirty, so we’d better start getting back.”

      Tortured resignation stole over Vaughn’s face. “Oh, Jesus, I forgot she was coming.”

      “How can you forget lemon squares?” Murphy demanded, in shock. “Or brownies. Or those goddamn delicious cookies with the stupid name?”

      “Snickerdoodles,” I supplied. Murphy snorted the way he always did when someone said snickerdoodles. He thought the word was funny, but what was really hilarious was the way he snorted laughter every single time he heard it. And the way he wolfed them down almost without chewing.

      “That woman is weird. Always smiling. Does anyone ever have anything that good going on that they’d smile like that almost every single second?” Vaughn said smile the way most people would say cockroach.

      “She brings baked

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