His Mate Hated Me, So I Went Home to the Humans, but His Wolf Followed novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Harlow Creek

Darian finds Calla at a diner four days later and apologizes badly, then says Joan has collapsed.

Four days later I was carrying three plates of eggs across the Harlow Creek Diner when the bell over the door rang and the whole room went quiet.

Humans can't smell an Alpha.

They can still tell when something large has come into a room.

Darian stood inside the door in a flannel shirt that was buttoned wrong, with mud on his boots and his hair standing up.

He looked like he had not slept since I left.

I put the eggs down in front of a trucker and said, "Enjoy."

Then I walked past Darian to the coffee station.

"Cal."

"Sit anywhere," I said. "The special is chicken and waffles."

"I don't want the special."

"Then you'll want the door."

Mack looked up from the corner booth, where he had been eating his lunch break in his clinic fleece with a textbook propped on the ketchup.

I had slept on his couch for four nights.

He had asked exactly one question, which was whether anyone was looking for me.

"A tall guy," Mack said now, very quietly. "Looks like he'll bite."

"He won't," I said. "Probably."

Darian took the stool nearest the pass.

He put both hands flat on the counter, a careful distance from my elbow, and I felt it again, the old gap.

"You walked nine miles in the dark," he said. "I walked behind you."

"I know. I saw you at the bus stop."

"I should have driven you."

"You should have done a lot of things."

His jaw moved.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry about the dinner. I'm sorry about the chair, and the room, and about walking in..."

He stopped.

"Walking in on you?" I said. "I'm the one who walked in on you."

"Cal."

"You told me to wait. You said it was important."

"It is."

"It was important for an hour and a half, Darian."

A waitress behind me dropped a spoon.

I picked up the coffeepot because I needed something in my hands.

"What was it?" I asked. "The important thing. I've been thinking about it for four days. Tell me."

He looked at me for a long moment, and his throat worked.

"It can wait," he said.

I laughed.

It was not a good laugh.

"Right," I said. "It can wait. That's what everything about me does."

"That isn't what I meant."

"What did you mean?"

"I meant it's not the kind of thing you say across a counter."

I poured coffee into a cup he had not asked for.

My hand was steady, which surprised me.

"Delaney is your mate," I said. "Congratulations. I mean that, the way I meant it at the border. You found your person, and she needs the chair, and I have a job and a couch."

"She isn't..." he started, and then he pressed his lips together.

"She isn't what?"

"Nothing." He rubbed his eye with the heel of his hand. "I don't know what I'm saying. My head's been wrong since the border."

"Wrong how?"

"It feels like a fever, and it's been six days."

That sounded exactly like what Joan had called it.

Mate fever.

I looked at his hands, still flat on the counter, not reaching.

"Why are you here?" I said. "You walked in my diner in a shirt you buttoned in the dark. Say it."

"Come home."

"No."

"Cal."

"No. I'm not the guest anymore, Darian, and I'm not the girl who sits on the end of the table and waits for you to hand me my own seat back."

He took it without arguing.

That was worse than if he had argued.

"All right," he said.

I had expected a fight, and I didn't know what to do with an Alpha who simply nodded and stood up.

He took a step toward the door.

Then he turned back.

His face had changed.

"I didn't come to ask you for me," he said.

The coffeepot was suddenly heavy.

"Then for whom?"

"Aunt Joan collapsed this morning in the kitchen," he said. "The healer says it's her heart, and she's awake and she won't let anyone near her. She keeps saying your name."

He swallowed.

"She said to tell you it's the oil."

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