32. Daphne

CHAPTER 32

DAPHNE

A l took his time in getting around to talk to me. He would drop off food and make sure everything in my apartment was working well, but he never hung around for very long. I had a feeling he wasn’t sure what to do or say around me, but after nearly a week of stunted conversations and no eye contact, I was sick of it. He came up to my apartment one morning when Rory was running some errands for me and tried to duck back out of the door almost as soon as he’d entered.

“I just came to drop off some leftovers from my dinner last night,” he said, keeping his head down the whole time. “There are also some ibuprofen in there, vitamin C packets, and a new ice tray because I know the one you’ve got in the freezer is on its last leg.”

“Thank you so much. Don’t rush off!”

“It’s okay. I don’t want to bother you.”

“Wait, wait,” I called after him. “I just made a pot of coffee. Sit down and have some.”

He waved. “Thanks for the offer, but I really should be getting back downstairs. You save some for Rory when he gets back. I’ll get out of your guys’ hair.”

Rory and I hadn’t explained the full story to Al yet, and I knew he must’ve been bursting with questions. He was just too polite to ask them.

“No, I insist,” I said. I beat him to the door and closed it, blocking his exit. “I feel like the two of us haven’t talked in forever. Can you please just sit down and have one cup of coffee? Then, if you want to dash away, I won’t try to stop you.”

He lingered by the door for a second, then sighed and walked over to the coffee pot by the sink. “Alright, but let me get it. You sit down.”

I was happy with those terms, so I took a seat. He brought two mugs of delicious-smelling coffee over to the table and sat down, putting the larger one in front of me. “Thanks.” I took a sip, even though it was too hot, and then breathed in the steam coming off the surface of the liquid. “Ah, that’s good stuff. Rory bought some expensive coffee the last time he was at the store. I was making fun of him for spending so much, but now I have to take it all back.”

Al took a sip as well and nodded. “That is pretty good.”

He still wouldn’t look at me.

“So listen,” I said, putting my mug down and staring at him. At least one of us was going to try for eye contact. “I know things have been strained ever since you found out that Missy had something to do with my disappearance, but I was hoping we could clear the air. If you have anything you need to ask me, I swear I will tell you the truth…”

I’d already decided I would tell Al that I was a werewolf. It would be too hard trying to keep such a secret from him, and I trusted that he wouldn’t use it against me in any way. That said, I wanted to go about this delicately so that I wouldn’t shock the old man.

“I—I don’t know that I have anything I need to ask you about…” He started to say. Then he laughed. “Well, that’s not true. There are a lot of things I want to ask. But before we get into any of that stuff, I just need you to know how sorry I am. I had no idea Missy was such an awful person, and the fact that I put you in harm’s way by letting her spend so much time around the house…”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“But still, I?—”

“You what? You’re mad at yourself for not being able to see into the future?” I clicked my tongue. “Al, don’t do this to yourself. You’ve been nothing but kind and supportive ever since I got here, and what happened with Missy had absolutely nothing to do with you. I never blamed you for even a second.”

“What about Rory?”

“He doesn’t either.”

“Why do I not believe you?”

“No, really. I swear to God. He knows you had nothing to do with Missy’s plan. Besides, you would know if he was holding any of this against you. He’s not exactly a subtle man. Not when he’s mad at someone.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Really, Al, I want us to be able to put this in the rear-view mirror,” I went on. “Because it’s not going to be good for either of us to keep dwelling on it. Missy is in jail; I’m safe, so there’s no reason things have to be awkward between us. I’m hoping to return to work soon, assuming you didn’t give my job away already.”

“Not a chance,” he said. “But I don’t want you to come back before you think you’re ready.”

“I’ll take another day or two, but I’m starting to get antsy just sitting around the house with nothing to do.”

He nodded. “I get that. I’ll try to come up with some easy tasks to start you out with.”

“Works for me.”

He brought his mug up to his mouth and drank, not even wincing at the heat. I wondered if his tolerance was from years of drinking hot, black coffee or years of drinking whiskey straight. Probably a little of both.

“Alright then.” He put the mug down and finally looked me in the eye. “Now that we got that out of the way, I would like to know exactly why it was that my ex-girlfriend drugged and kidnapped you. If you don’t want to talk about it, or if you’re involved in some stuff that you would rather not tell me, I understand. But I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t deeply curious. It’s honestly driving me a bit insane.”

“As it should be,” I sympathized. “I can’t imagine how confusing this all must be for you. I’m surprised you went this long without asking me.”

“I just wanted to give you some space.”

“Which was very nice of you.” I smiled. “But I’m ready to talk if you’re ready to listen. I have to warn you, though—this is a long story, and there are going to be some pretty shocking twists and turns.”

He got a little more comfortable in his chair and held his mug in both hands. “Okay, go ahead. I’m ready.”

It took some convincing to get Al to come around to believing in the existence of werewolves and shifters. I told him there was a psychic he could visit down the street who would give him more information, but eventually, all the details of my story came together a little too perfectly. He couldn’t deny that it all made a certain kind of sense. Why else would Missy try to kidnap me and sell me on the black market?

Still, I knew he was probably going to need to see some visual proof at some point. I would ask Rory to shift for him when he got back, assuming Al seemed up for it. I also told him the truth about my family and where my parents were hiding out. Those details were necessary to divulge once I started telling him how I was turned into a werewolf in the first place.

At least that stuff he understood and didn’t pry too much when he could tell I was getting a little emotional about missing my sisters.

“Have you spoken to either of them since you got back to the States?” he asked, sipping from his mug, which I was pretty sure was empty at this point.

I shook my head. “No. Dorothy has no way of contacting me, and Diana doesn’t know that I’m back.”

“Do you know where she is? Diana, I mean.”

“Maybe. I have it on some semi-reliable authority that my younger sister is still living back in our hometown. At least she was not too long ago. I got a hit on her name from some article about a local bookstore in Silverleaf. But in order to confirm my suspicion, I will have to go out there and see for myself. Things have been so crazy lately, I completely forgot about my plan to go track her down.”

“What’s holding you back now?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, why haven’t you packed up your stuff and headed across the country in the last week?” Al said. “You were saying you’ve been feeling a lot better for days now. Is there some reason you are sticking around here when you think she might be back home?”

I shrugged. “One or two, maybe.”

He waited for me to elaborate.

“I just don’t know what I’m going to be walking into, that’s all. Dorothy and I chose to go with our parents when they ran from the law, which meant we had to leave our baby sister behind. Yes, it was her choice to stay, but I still felt like we were somehow betraying her. I don’t know how she feels about the whole situation now, but I wouldn’t blame her for holding a grudge.”

“You’re never going to know if you don’t go and talk to her…”

“Yeah, well… maybe I’m better off not knowing.”

“You don’t believe that.”

After a few seconds of contemplation, I nodded. “You’re right. I don’t. I’m just scared. But I’m going to go find her. There’s no doubt in my mind that she and I need to have a conversation, and if there’s even a chance—however slight—that she might want to have me back in her life, it would be really good to have at least one sister that I could talk to.” I smiled. “Although I don’t think I will tell her about being a werewolf right off the bat. That revelation could probably be put on the back burner for a while.”

“I don’t know,” Al said with a laugh. “It could be one hell of an icebreaker.” He fixed me with a look that could only be described as paternal. “Does Rory know about this?”

“Yes. He said he would come with me to the West Coast whenever I felt ready to see her. Apparently, there’s a shifter community in that area as well, so he said he actually might know a couple of friends who live out there. Which is nice, because if the conversation with my sister goes south, I might not have anywhere to stay. Or if being back in Silverleaf is too difficult for me.”

“Bad memories?”

“Yeah. Some good ones. But a lot of bad ones.”

“I understand.”

I frowned at him. “You know something, your ability to understand a lot of the stuff I’ve been going through lately is a little uncanny. Almost as if you’ve got some stuff from your past that is maybe not so easy to talk about…”

He smirked. “I figure someone told you about my daughter?”

“We don’t have to talk about her if you don’t want to. I only made that comment so that you knew this line of communication goes both ways. If you’ve got stuff you want to get off your chest, I’m here to listen.”

He sniffled and cleared his throat. “That’s nice of you to say. I’ll keep that in mind for the future. But for now, I think my brain is a little too fuzzy to have that conversation.” He furrowed his brow. “Did you say there’s a shifter community? Meaning there are a lot of other people in the world that are like Rory?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“And they’ve just been living amongst us humans all this time? Without any of us knowing it?”

“Some people know,” I corrected him. “But for the most part, if you’ve only seen them in human form, you would have no way of knowing they were anything else.”

He huffed his exhale. “Wow. That’s really weird to think about.”

I grinned. “It is. Weird, but kind of exciting too.”

He got up from the chair and shot me a dubious look. “Daphne, we have two very different ideas of what constitutes ‘exciting.’”

Rory returned later that afternoon with bags in tow. He unpacked some goodies he picked up from the store, hung my dry cleaning in the closet, and then cleaned the bathroom, all while I was taking a nap. When I woke up, the apartment was spotless, and he handed me a glass of wine.

“Wow, I could get used to this,” I said.

“Good, because I could too.” He smiled. “I’ll never get used to how beautiful that smile of yours is or how you take my breath away every time you say my name, but taking care of you—somehow, that feels like the most natural thing in the world to me.”

I hiccupped with sudden emotion. “Now look who’s taking my breath away.”

“I try my best. Sorry I took longer than I said I would. There was a long line at the market, and then I went to fill the tires up with some air and the machine was broken at one gas station, so I went to the other one. It was a whole mess.”

I laughed. “Sounds like it. I’m glad you made it through without too much trouble.”

“Me too.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and I put the wine glass down on the table so that I could throw my arms around him. I breathed in his smell, closed my eyes for a moment, and sighed happily. “But I’m even more glad that you’re home now.”

He put his arm around my waist. “Same. What do you feel like doing tonight?”

“Hmm… I was thinking a whole lot of nothing. Maybe watch some TV and make out a little like we’re teenagers sneaking around. But other than that, I don’t really want to do a thing. I just want to spend time with you.”

Rory kissed the top of my head. “And I didn’t think I could love you any more than I already did. I was so, so wrong.”