Page 29 of Wolf Bane (Marked #3)

Chapter Twelve

A t a Love’s Travel Stop outside of Timpson, Texas, Ethan tossed me the keys when he got out to pee. “I’m getting one of those disgusting energy drinks Tyler loves. Want anything?”

I shook my head. “I’m good. How much longer till we’re home?”

He shrugged, glancing at the parking lot, at the dark highway beyond. “Hour? Maybe house and a half? Traffic’s heavier than I expected. Need you to drive, though. I’m beat.”

Not waiting for a reply, he headed into the store.

A bank of semis retiring for the night rumbled across the lot, a car with its brights on parked at the pumps behind me, blinding me while I tried to watch Ethan head for the drinks section.

I could make out the top of his head as he paused in front of the display of Red Bull and Bang before shrugging to himself.

He disappeared behind a tall stand of Corn Nuts and the guy behind me finally shut off his damn headlights.

I couldn’t see Ethan anymore, so I fidgeted with my phone, checking to see if Justin had called back.

Instead, there was a text from Tyler, just a simple WTF asshole and nothing else.

I also had a long string of texts from Reba with suggestions for new peanut brittle flavors (cinnamon toast sounded promising, honey mustard not so much), asking if she could practice a needle stick on me at the office (no…

a thousand times no), and reminding me that I still needed to help her study for her gross anatomy exam like I’d promised.

I sent a quick reply, gently suggesting saving her more risqué flavors for a special run or something, get people used to her brand first, avoided the needle stick question, and suggested a few times for us to work on her flash cards after work.

I just left out the part where rescheduling might happen since I was in the midst of a crisis involving inhuman beings she had no idea existed.

Ethan appeared at the passenger side window, brandishing two bottles of water with an energy drink under one arm, his eyebrow raised.

“Shit, sorry,” I muttered, unbuckling and scooting over. Ethan climbed in without a word, setting the bottles down, cracking open the Coconut Lime Blast Tachycardia he’d chosen. “Sure you want to drink that? Maybe you can just get some rest?—”

“I’d be doing that if shit hadn’t gone to hell,” he said quietly, rolling the bottle gently between his hands. “I had plans for my time off this week, but…”

I waited.

“But what?”

“But they just didn’t pan out,” he said after the world’s longest pause. “Things have a way of doing that.”

“That doesn’t sound ominous at all.”

“Ignore me.” He sighed. “I’m just tired. Very fucking tired.”

I glanced at him as we pulled onto the freeway.

The sodium lights from the old lamps caught his face in a mix of orange light and shadow.

He looked, I thought, ghostly. Or more than that, like a mask of Ethan Stone.

The shape was there, the features, but it sat wrong.

It unsettled me in the worst ways, but not as much as his defeated air, the way he was just… there.

A few miles on, I bit the bullet, aiming for flirty but concerned. “So, I don’t even get an I missed you or Are you okay .”

Ethan took a final swig from his bottle, taking his time to recap it and set it in the cup holder between us before sighing. “I missed you, Landry,” he repeated dutifully. “Are you okay?”

Welp. Fuck this then . There was one of those sketchy rest stops ahead, the kind with the vending machine that hadn’t been serviced since the mid-eighties and a bathroom that was likely going to be featured on Dateline soon. I flipped the blinker on and headed for it.

“Landry.” Ethan sighed as I pulled into one of the dark, empty spaces beneath a wide-limbed cottonwood. “Please.”

“No. No, we’re gonna do this now because as soon as we get home, you’re going to run off to Chicago again. And right now we’re like…like…”

“Like what?” he demanded. “What are we like, Landry? I know what I’m like and I thought I knew what you were like. Was I wrong?”

I sat back against the door, glaring at him across the console. “For fuck’s sake, Ethan! We’re not seventeen anymore.”

“Then why are you acting like it? Landry, we talked about me taking this job for weeks before I committed, really committed. But ever since my first trip up to Chicago, you’ve been acting like this is somehow a personal affront. You’ve known there’s gonna be things I can’t tell you. Not yet.”

There was another little edge piece, I thought with a little pulse of mania. It settled into place and made the absolute chaos of the past week or so take a bit more shape, a little more definition.

“Was one of those things about Garrow?”

Please say no because if you say yes, I’m going to lose my absolute shit, and I don’t want to think you’d be able to keep something so big from me. Please say no…

Ethan pressed his lips into a tight, thin line.

“I didn’t learn about that until this afternoon.

When Waltrip called to tell me, he was on his way to get you.

” He sighed, scrubbed his hands over his face and leaned his head back.

For a moment I thought he’d finally caved and fallen asleep.

“Cullen says he didn’t know either, but I’m not sure. ”

Relief swamped me, pressing tears I hadn’t realized needed to be shed perilously close to the surface. “Okay,” I rasped. “Okay.”

Ethan shifted to face me, his expression stricken. “Landry, did you honestly think I’d keep something like that from you? Jesus…”

I shook my head, unable to look at him for a moment because good God the look on his face made me want to cry, sending spikes of guilt and confusion firing through my bloodstream.

“It’s been so weird. I know there are things you can’t tell me.

That’s not it. It’s the way you’ve been acting,” I finally admitted, peeling back that awful scab.

“Ever since you started with the council, you’ve been distant.

Not I can’t talk about work bullshit,” I said before he could, “ distant . Like it’s a chore to be together.

Even when you’re home, you’re… aloof. And I was worried that maybe…

” Maybe you’re tired of me. Maybe this is too much.

Maybe I’m too much. Maybe you want to move to Chicago, and leave the clan to Tyler, and not look back.

Maybe you deserve to because you’re ready for bigger things and you spent so much of your life taking care of everyone else.

Brows pinched in deep concern, Ethan leaned forward, catching my chin in his palm and turned my face towards his. We were so close, his breath teased my jaw, our lips dangerously close to touching when he spoke.

“I’ve been scared spitless,” he said softly. “Not because of the council, or Garrow, or even clan bullshit. It’s because I…” He froze, eyes searching my face for a long moment. “I…”

“You what?” I insisted, whispered. “What?”

He blinked, glancing away like it hurt to look at me.

“I was… am… afraid you’d say no. That everything was too much, and you’d say no, and I’d have to act like everything was okay and I understood.

Because, Landry, you’ve been the center of pretty much everything for me since high school.

Even when we weren’t together. Not a day went by when I didn’t think about you, wonder how you were, hope you were happy even if it was with someone else. ”

Whoa, whoa, whoa… What’s going on?

“Ethan, what are you talking about?” I was shaking, a fine tremor that felt like electricity on my skin. “Why would I say no? What are you talking about?”

“Fuck.” He sighed, leaning back, dropping his hand.

I wanted to grab it and put it back. It was the most contact we’d had in weeks, at least while awake, and the sudden loss of it hit me harder than I expected. Maybe it was the concussion, maybe the way my body was in overdrive healing my arm, but it was all too much at once.

“This entire day has been a nightmare. Shit. Is it still Saturday? What day is it?” I muttered, glaring at the blue numbers on the digital dash clock. “Does that say one? Or is it eleven? My contacts are jacked.”

“Landry,” Ethan said quietly, straightening. Whatever he’d been chewing over, he’d found the guts to spill.

“Maybe that’s ten,” I continued. Because if I kept talking, he wouldn’t and whatever he’d been thinking of saying would just sort of fade off and mush down, and we wouldn’t have a possibly too-much conversation at the worst possible time.

“It’s one. And today is Sunday. We’ll be home soon,” he said slowly, weighing each word. “And I was afraid you’d say no to getting married.”

Buzzing swelled in my ears. Everything froze, time seeming to dilate as I stared at Ethan’s uneasy expression across the narrow expanse of the truck’s cab. “What?”

“I was afraid you’d say no,” he repeated. “That you wouldn’t want to take that step. Which is… it’s fine.”

“That sounded painful,” I offered softly. “Saying that.”

“It wouldn’t be fine. It’d suck out loud. But I was afraid to ask because, well, we’d only talked about it once or twice and…” He huffed, raking his fingers through his usually ordered hair, sending it awry. “It felt like the right time at first.”

“And then you got scared.”

He smiled wryly. “I prefer cautious , but yes.” Reaching out, he caught my hand in his and gave my fingers a squeeze.

“Everything’s been changing lately, and our world has been an absolute shit show outside of our relationship, and if I keep talking you can’t tell me that this is the wrong time or a bad idea, or that you don’t want to get married, or?—”

“Or,” I interrupted gently, squeezing back.

“I’m not gonna say any of that. I am gonna tell you that I love you.

Like a stupid amount.” Ethan smiled faintly at that, his laugh a breath.

“And I’m also gonna say that this is the least romantic proposal in the history of proposals.

” His laugh that time was a little more true.