Mated to My Step-brother and His Best Friend novel · Chapter 30 of 32

Chapter 30: Under the Moon

I stood there in the cold and laughed until I had to hold on to the trailer.

"What?" Bowie said. "Is it the spelling?"

"Stay there," I said.

"I'm a wolf on a cinderblock. Where would I go?"

I went back up the road to the clinic.

Deacon was still on the porch, exactly where I'd left him.

"Come with me," I said.

"Where?"

"You'll see."

I walked him down to the trailer by the hand.

Bowie saw him coming and stood up with the sign.

Deacon saw the sign.

They looked at each other.

"You didn't," Deacon said.

"You didn't," Bowie said.

"I asked her on the porch."

"I asked her on the step."

"I asked first."

"Did you have a sign?"

I stood between them in the frost and put a hand flat on each of their chests.

"Yes," I said. "To both of you. At the same time. Now neither one of you gets to be first."

Bowie looked like he'd won the lottery.

Deacon looked like he'd been hit by a truck.

It was the same look.

The Hunter's Moon came up the next night, orange and huge over the tipple.

They put lanterns along the clinic porch and down both sides of the street.

The Lovett trucks parked along the creek.

The whole town came out in their good coats, and the whole pack came down the mountain in theirs, and nobody could tell anymore where one crowd stopped and the other started.

My mother and the cook had made me a dress in two days.

Dark green wool, plain, with long sleeves because it was October in the mountains.

I wore the Alpha's ring on my thumb.

The Elder stood on the clinic steps with a length of red cord.

Abner stood beside him.

Deacon stood on my right, in a white shirt and no tie, because he'd tried four ties and Bowie had hidden all of them.

Bowie stood on my left in a borrowed jacket with his white hair combed, for once.

The boy from the ridge road held the lantern.

The Elder looped the cord around my right wrist and Deacon's left.

He looped it around my left wrist and Bowie's right.

Loose.

Deacon looked down at the cord on my wrist.

I watched him remember.

Then he turned his hand over under it, open, so the cord lay across his palm and not across me.

"Say your words," the Elder said.

Deacon went first.

He didn't have it written down.

"I held your wrist once," he said. "On a floor, while you begged me to stop. I'll never hold you like that again. I'll hold the door. I'll hold the coffee. I'll hold still when you need it. And I'll hold on when you say so. Never before."

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