I Don't Come Back to My Alpha Again novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The List

Tobin's face went still.

He nodded, fast.

He started to turn away.

"Hey." I caught his sleeve. "Look at me."

He looked.

"Not yet doesn't mean no," I said. "It means you're coming home. Not tonight. Not because the council said so and everybody's crying and the moon's up."

"Then when?"

"When we've both earned it."

His jaw worked.

Then he said, very quietly, "Okay."

Rhoda stumped over and hooked her arm through his.

"He's with me," she said. "The baker's got a spare room and a couch, and I've got five years of things to complain about. I need somebody to listen."

"I'm not sleeping on a couch," Tobin said.

"You're sixteen. You'll sleep on a fence."

He went with her.

At the truck he looked back at me over his shoulder.

I lifted my hand.

He lifted his.

It was three in the morning when Beck and I walked up the steps of the Pack House.

The double oak doors stood open. Somebody had left the lights on in the hall.

The great hall was empty now, chairs knocked over, a smashed water jug in the corner.

On the stone in front of the fireplace there was a dark scuff where I'd pinned him.

I stood there and looked at it.

"Jo," Beck said.

"I'm all right."

"You're swaying."

"I'm all right and I'm swaying."

He didn't argue.

He just walked beside me up the main staircase, one step behind my shoulder, the way he'd walked into the square.

I didn't go to the big front suite.

Ansel and Coral had slept there for five years. I could smell her perfume from the landing.

I went up one more flight, to the end of the third floor.

My parents' room.

Nobody had opened it since my father died.

The door stuck. Beck put his shoulder to it.

Inside, everything was under white sheets. The dresser. The chairs. The big shape of the bed.

The window looked out over the lake, and the Hunter's Moon was sitting right in it.

I pulled the sheet off the bed.

Dust went up in the moonlight.

Underneath was the dark four-poster my father had made the year he married my mother.

A moon was carved into the headboard, the twin of the one over the fireplace downstairs.

I hadn't seen it since I was a girl.

"I want a bath," I said. "And then I want to sleep in this bed."

"Done."

He ran it in the old claw-foot tub down the hall. Hot enough to steam up the mirror.

I sat in it until the water went gray with five years and three weeks of rock dust.

He washed my hair for me without being asked.

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