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He doesn’t wait for me to respond before he shoves his phone in my hands and plucks mine away. His fingers fly over the keyboard. I sit up to see what he’s doing and find him writing Sean a text as me.
His phone sits like a lead weight in my hands. I trace my thumb over his screen. The phone brightens to life, and his screensaver picture makes me smile. It’s the view from the top of the little hill at Greystone. Feeling more grounded, I open his contacts, click on Gayle’s name, and then start typing. Hey, Gayle. I just got into Daybreak. I was hoping we could see each other?
I hand his phone back to him at the same time he offers me mine. I stare down at the text he composed. Hi, Sean. I’m back, and I need to see you.
I raise an eyebrow. “Well, that’s direct.” I glance over to find him backspacing through my text. “Hey!”
“We can’t act like it’s an option,” he explains. “You won’t have an option when they run you out of the pack.”
Well, when he puts it like that, I send the text Nathan wrote out for me. I used to text Sean a lot, but as time dragged on and more and more messages didn’t get answers, I stopped sending them. Currently, I’ll only ask him if he plans on coming to the mandatory meetings, which he answers with one word. Yes.
“Okay, ready to hit send?” Nathan asks. I glance over and realize he’s holding his thumb over the screen, jaw ticking. Several seconds go by, and he doesn’t move. I reach over and hit the Send button for him. He stills when the message says it’s going through, but then he peers over. “Thanks, I needed that.”
“There,” I tell him. “Now we wait.”
“Now we wait,” he echoes.
Nathan, however, doesn’t have to wait long. His phone vibrates in his hand a moment afterward. A pang of jealousy hits me, and I try to decipher whether it’s jealousy over Gayle returning his text first or the fact that she’s actually writing him at all.
“What did she say?”
“She says...” he licks his lips, “she can meet me tonight.”
“That’s...good,” I tell him.
“Yeah,” he mutters and stands, shoving his phone into his pocket. He doesn’t look back when he disappears into the bathroom and then closes his bedroom door behind him, leaving me alone. I sink onto the bed, already exhausted, and we only just returned to Daybreak.
A scream comes from somewhere down the hall. I jump out of bed, throw my door open, and step out into the hallway to find Alice. “My mate agreed to meet me.” She’s smiling from ear to ear, and her excitement is palpable.
“That’s great,” I tell her.
“Yeah,” Nathan agrees. He also must have run out of the room as soon as she screamed.
I take a deep breath and let it out, wondering if Sean is going to be the only one of our collective other halves who doesn’t agree to meet with me. The Sean I know keeps his phone on him all the time.
“You guys should come down here,” Robbie calls out.
Alice bounds down the stairs. Nathan and I follow, but he doesn’t so much as look at me. We maneuver next to Robbie, who’s standing near the island. He points out a white sheet of paper. “This must be the announcement sheet that Alpha Richard was talking about.”
I glance at the sheet of paper, which is formatted like a schedule, complete with Daybreak Pack letterhead.
Tonight, there’s a pack meeting discussing finalizing the Winter Solstice plans. No doubt my mother will be going to that. She loves to have her hands in the Daybreak socialite offerings.
My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I’m almost afraid to look at it. I have so much riding on this trip to Daybreak that it seems like every move I make should be calculated and thought through.
I turn, slipping my phone out. My heart crashes against my chest when I see that it’s a text from Sean. The tug in my heart starts again, and my wolf’s ears perk up. She’s as nervous as I am, but I have no doubt that as soon as she gets in Sean’s presence again, she’s going to have hearts for eyes. No matter how much our human minds try to get in the way, our wolves will feel the pull more acutely. At least, that’s my experience.
That’s probably a good idea.
Probably a good idea?
I don’t like basing my future on probably. When? I text back.
Working until 6. You want to meet me after?
Sure.
Everything I know about Sean now, I’ve only gleamed from the mandatory meetings. We don’t talk on the phone, we don’t call each other to see how our day is going. I only found out that he works for the pack’s legal office during one of our forced share times. In Greystone, I’m hardly ever doing anything fascinating, so I usually talk about my classes. Sean, however, took a few college courses, found out he really liked law, and is now job shadowing.