Page 26 of Wolves’ Midlife Reunion (Shifter Nation: Enchanted Over Forty #3)

Dex rested his hand on the newel post. It’d survived the battle, but it wiggled at his touch.

His eyes traced the railing upward to the broken spindles and the splatters of blood on the carpet.

The more he looked, the more blood he found.

Drops of it had been flung like paint against the wall.

The area rug closest to the door was dark with it, a mix of his own blood and Chris’s.

Chris took a deep breath. “I really am sorry, Dex. I wanted to fight you, but I never meant for anyone else to get involved—especially kids.” He cast a worried glance over his shoulder at the kitchen door. “Do you think they’re all right?”

“As much as they can be, after seeing that,” Dex replied soberly.

Anger still roiled in his blood, but it wasn’t the kind that could be solved with a punch.

“I never wanted a rematch, you know. I tried to tell you at the reunion. I tried to tell you here. I don’t have the time or space in my life to go throwing fists, especially for no good reason. ”

“No good reason?” Chris snapped, and for a moment, his fists curled once again. His shoulders tensed, and a bit of that rage Dex had seen on his face so often came back. Then he huffed out a breath and relaxed. “It felt like there was plenty of reason to me.”

Dex turned and sat on the staircase. “Not to me. I’ve been spending my whole life trying to put that fight behind me. That was a day I never wanted to live through again. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t forget about it.”

“Yeah, well, me neither.” Chris leaned against the open door and looked out into the night. “That was why I wanted to do it again, though.”

“I don’t get it.” Dex studied his rival. When Chris wasn’t trying so hard to impress everyone else, he was just a regular guy.

“You wouldn’t.” Chris shook his head and stepped onto the porch. “Maybe I should just go.”

“If you do, you should know I’m not doing this again. We’re not going to run into each other again in twenty years and start throwing fists. If there’s something we need to work out, we can do it right now. With words.”

Chris licked his lip and then sucked it in with his teeth. He hesitated in the doorway, clearly torn.

“I might understand more than you think,” Dex told him. He and Chris would never be friends, no matter how much they tried to work things out. But if this was a chance for them to finally put the past to rest, he wanted to take advantage of it. For his sake. For Sage’s.

After a moment, Chris began. “I wanted to put that fight behind me. I was pissed about it while I was recovering, angry that I could actually be wounded that badly. I blamed you. I blamed my parents. I blamed the school. Everyone.

“And then I just wanted to forget about it and pretend it’d never happened. I mean, me, the top jock in the whole school and—let’s face it—pretty much all of Salem, had been brought to his knees. That just wasn’t cool. That wasn’t how things were supposed to go. It embarrassed the shit out of me.”

“Enough to want to do it all over again?” Dex asked quietly.

“I knew you wouldn’t get it.” Chris threw his hands in the air in frustration, but he didn’t leave. “See, everything else that happened in my life went back to that fight. Every negative thing that I experienced was all because of one single day.”

Everything feels big when you’re a teenager, even when it doesn’t matter all that much in the long run. That was why schools were filled with so much unnecessary drama. Dex kept that to himself, though. He wanted Chris to talk.

Chris took a step back into the house. “I was a hell of a football player. I was at my absolute peak of physical conditioning. I healed physically after that fight—pretty quickly, thanks to my wolf—but I didn’t really recover.

I got depressed. I mean, I didn’t realize that’s what it was at the time, but I can see it now.

I didn’t want to do anything. Everything just got kind of meaningless.

“I couldn’t keep up with my grades. I started missing classes. Some scouts had come to the school earlier in the season, and I’d been promised a sizeable scholarship to a good school, and all I had to do was play football and get good grades. I lost out on that.”

Dex vaguely remembered hearing that Chris was going to play for some university, but he’d never checked to see if that had happened.

“My parents talked me into going to North Shore and at least getting a start on my education. There’s nothing wrong with community colleges, but it wasn’t what I wanted.

” He curled his hand in the air as though something had just slipped out of his grasp.

“It wasn’t what I felt I was supposed to be doing.

I didn’t last long, and I dropped out. I had a few jobs here and there, but they were dead ends.

They weren’t going anywhere, and neither was I.

“So, I ended up working for my uncle. I think he just felt sorry for me.” Chris’s head drooped. “Hell, I feel sorry for myself most of the time. I’m not in a good place, Dex, and it all goes back to that one day.”

Dex waited a moment, giving Chris’s story space and time. His throat was raw from the fight. His joints were achy. He longed to get Sage back in his arms so he could promise he’d always protect her. But he had to do this before he did anything else.

“My life since then hasn’t followed the same path, Chris, but I’ve been affected more than you might think—more than I want to admit most of the time.”

Dex closed his eyes. The images had flashed through his mind during the battle, and they were still so fresh.

“My grandma was the only other person in my family with magical abilities.

She told me to be careful with them. Like any teen who thinks they know everything already, I just promised her I would and moved on.

“I never would’ve used them against another person, but I felt desperate.

Cornered. I felt like I was dying. I wanted to teach you a lesson.

All of that is true, but it’s not really an excuse.

” That was the thing about magic. Even if it felt justified, there was always a price to pay.

“I only dropped you because I lost my concentration. I never meant for it to get that far.”

Though Dex hadn’t been sure he would, Chris seemed to really be listening. “I didn’t know that.”

“I thought I’d killed you,” Dex choked out.

He’d said those words to friends and family when it came up, but he’d never said them to Chris himself.

“It changed something inside me. It made me determined to make up for it. That’s why I went into emergency services.

If I could save lives, maybe I wasn’t a killer after all. ”

Chris scoffed. “That doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. At least you have a real job, one with responsibility and respect.”

“Yes,” Dex acknowledged, “but I also stopped using magic almost entirely. I didn’t trust myself with it anymore. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it, especially if I was only going to cause more harm than good.”

Walking over to the coffee table, which was still out of place in the pathway of the room, Chris nudged the heavy leg of it with his foot. “You must not have given it up completely. That little girl of yours is pretty talented.”

“That’s not all thanks to me.” Dex frowned as he thought about Tina and Sage and the connection the two of them had. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes.”

“I see.” Chris nodded. He was silent for a moment, still bumping the toe of his shoe against the coffee table. Then he looked up. “How about we call a truce?”

“No.” Dex got up from the stairs and came to stand in front of Chris. “Not a truce, because that means the fighting is just going to start up again. How about an end to this instead? I say we truly bury the hatchet and leave all this in the past where it belongs.”

Chris stuck out his hand. “Agreed.”

Dex shook it, and as he did, he felt a weight lifted from his shoulders. “Too bad we couldn’t have talked all this out in the first place.”

“I don’t know that I would’ve been willing to,” Chris admitted. “It was the kids getting involved that really made me wake up and see what was going on. You and I were just kids, and we let one day run our lives. I don’t want that to happen to anyone else.”

Dex’s gut hollowed out. Chris was absolutely right, of course. They couldn’t base their whole future on one incident. But was he trying to base Sage’s future on something that happened to him long before she was even born? “Me, neither.”

“I’ll get out of here, but again, I really am sorry. If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

“Okay.” Dex glanced at the kitchen door. “I’ve got to go make some apologies of my own, though.”

“I’ll see you around, Dex.” Chris paused as he turned toward the door. “It looks like you need a good construction company. I know a guy.” He brushed his fist against Dex’s upper arm and walked out the door.

The battle was over, but the rest of the war had yet to be settled. Dex steeled himself for something much harder than a physical fight or even a magical one. He pushed through the kitchen door.

All the witches looked up at him in an instant.

They’d said they were going to make some snacks for the kids, but it looked like they’d emptied the entire contents of the fridge onto the kitchen table.

The children ate ravenously even as they gave him curious looks, undoubtedly exhausted from the fight.

“Is everything all right?” Maeve asked carefully.

“Yes. Chris and the others are gone. I’ll pay for all the damages. I’m truly sorry that this happened the way it did.”

Maeve gave him a generous nod. “Would you like anything to eat?”