Page 109 of A Wolf in the Garden

I’m sick of being sad.

It’s more than that. Yes, there’s been some wonderful moments in the last five days since the full moon. Van and I have had romantic picnics, drunk plenty of wine, binged movies on the couch, cooked dinners together. We’ve had moments of fun.

We’ve also been living under a cloud of anxiety, waiting for his parents to return, feeling stuck both literally and figuratively. In both werewolf and wolf shifter cultures, a mating bite is the equivalent of marriage — stronger, even, since there’s no going back. We should be planning our future together, but it’s as if we’ve been too scared to look beyond the next twenty-four hours, trapped in this awful limbo of waiting.

“Babe,” I say from my seat at the breakfast bar, and Van glances at me over his bare shoulder, though he doesn’t stop ladling pancake batter into the hot pan in front of him. I mentioned this morning about how much I love looking at his bare ass and joked that it would be great if he could just wander around naked all day, so now he’s cooking breakfast in the nude, his body looking far too good in the morning light. I’m very tempted to drag him back to bed.

“Hm?”

“I want to talk about moving in together. I want to plan it with you, today. I know there’s a lot going on, but I’m sick of worrying about all of that stuff. I’m not even going to mentionthose peopleby name. I don’t want to think about what happened on the weekend; I want to think about next week, next month, next year instead.”

The excitement that lights up his face tells me I’ve made the right choice. I’m sick of being sad and anxious, and looking to our future is an easy — albeit temporary — solution. “You want to talk about moving in here?”

“Let’s face it, I live here already, and I’ve totally accepted that,” I laugh. “And it’s a wonderful thing; this house is beautiful, and living on a vineyard is like a dream come true. You know I love going to sleep and waking up in your arms. So yes, let’s talk concrete details about moving in. And I want to help you unpack the last of your boxes, today. You have those fancy art pieces to set up too, don’t you?”

“Yeah, they’re still in bubble wrap in the garage.”

I stop myself from making a snarky comment on the fact that he has two small sculptures worth a total ofhalf a million dollars sitting inbubble wrapin his garage. He told me he’d bought the pair at a charity auction — the most typical story of excessive wealth that I’ve ever heard. “Well, let’s figure out where we’re going to put them.”

“You haven’t even seen them yet, what if you think they’re ugly?”

“Darling, they’re worth the same amount that I owe the bank on my mortgage. They could look like piles ofpooand I would be displaying them, not leaving them sitting on the garage floor. To do anything else is a waste.”

Van’s laughter echoes in the kitchen, and I grin back.

I guess I did say it. Whoops.

* * *

“I’ll move them,” Van says, picking up the bubble-wrapped lumps off the concrete floor, one in each hand. “They’re deceptively heavy; I don’t want you to hurt your back.”

“What are they made out of?” I linger in the internal doorway to the garage until he passes me, and then follow him down the hall. He’s wearing pants now — another pair of grey sweatpants — and the way his biceps bulge as he carries those things shows that they really must weigh a lot.

“They’re bronze sculptures,” he replies, setting them down on the floor in the living room before sitting down on the shaggy white rug that dominates the space. I sit opposite him, the sculptures between us, curious to see what’s underneath all that wrapping. He’s been oddly vague about them.

“Can I?” I ask, reaching for the one closest to me.

“Yeah, go ahead. Start unwrapping.”

I pick and tug at what feels like endless strips of tape, but finally I’m able to unravel multiple layers of packaging, and the shape beneath is revealed. Made out of one solid piece of bronze, at first glance it looks like a dinner plate standing on a display stand. “It’s… the moon. It’s lovely.” It’s beautiful. It took a second for me to process what I was looking at; the shapes of the craters are all upside down, the version of the moon that the northern hemisphere sees, not the face of the moon that I’m used to.

Van nods. “It’s the full moon.”

“What’s this one then? A crescent moon? No, it’s the same shape, it can’t be,” I commentate as I tear into the wrapping around the second one. “Is it the Earth?”

“No.”

“Is it a portal?”

“No. Just open it.”

There’s something about his voice that makes me pause for a moment; something tells me he’s doing his best to hold back some pretty big emotions, and when I glance up at him he doesn’t meet my eye.

“Open it, Ellie,” he whispers.

I test the bond as I pick at the last piece of tape, and get nothing, which means he’s purposefully blocking me from sensing what he’s feeling. He only figured out how to do that yesterday — we hadn’t wanted to try doing anything withmymagic, including pushing the boundaries of the bond, but Van’s been shifting into his wolf at least once a day and we figured it was safe enough for him to try and practise blocking. Once he figured it out, it became apparent that it’s a fairly easy technique.

The final bit of bubble wrap comes away, and I tilt the heavy sculpture in my hands. “It’s another full moon. Wait, it’s the moon I know, it’s the opposite to that other one.”

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