Page 59 of The Good Boys Club

Present Day

Mash

Earlier, I would’ve sworn there was too much food for everyone. Granted, there were in excess of a hundred attendees, but over the evening we’d somehow munched our way through an entire ocean of fish. It was delicious. Chargrilled bass and trout with tomato and caper sauce, and creamy potato salad, followed bycakes, and cookies, and special brownies only offered to the grownups.

Overhead, the lights we’d strung up with Zach and Kai twinkled, and the waxing gibbous moon shone brightly through a cloudless sky. A local band, Echo and the Howlers, played acoustic folksy tunes and people danced and drank moonshine. It was the type of music Cian would cream his jeans over.

A few hours ago he’d kissed me, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. It had been all for show—because I’d asked him to—but it’d felt so real. Something sparked in my chest when we kissed, and resparked every time I remembered it. I wanted to kiss him again.

I wanted to kiss my best friend, and not in front of an audience. Wanted it to be like the time at the ravine, before the owl spoiled it. But if we were to kiss again, I guessed I would settle for doing it as part of a bigger scheme.

I danced with Mam, and Nana, and Clem. Then I danced with Juno, and my other sisters, and lots of girls, including Riley. And it was nice, for a change, not to be hit on by every single woman.

They knew I was spoken for, Cian’s scent on my neck a constant reminder I was no longer an option.

He hung around the edge of the makeshift dance floor, chatting to the more introverted wolves like Sean and Kai. Occasionally, I saw his eye follow Dee-Dee’s path, but every time I mouthed, “Go to speak to her,” he closed his eyes and shook his head, resolute.

When the young cubs had disappeared off to bed, and the edibles in the brownies had lowered my already ground-level inhibitions, I grabbed Cian by the arm and dragged him onto the dance floor with me.

“Let’s find Dee.” The music was so loud, I had to get right up to his ear and shout.

“There’s two months of the Harvest Fest. She’s in the room next to ours. We have ages yet,” he yelled back.

“Okay, you win.” Not that I minded. It meant we could just enjoy the rest of the night. I wrapped a hand around Cian’s waist and tugged him towards me, crotch to crotch. He made a surprised little squeak. “So dance with me then.”

He tried to push away from me. “I don’t dance.”

I gave himthatlook. The one that said,stop fucking lying to me, Cian. I know your parents sent you to theatre school, and paid for modern dance, tap, and ballet lessons until you were sixteen.

“We’re in love, remember?” I shouted into his ear.

He laughed. “Yes, we are.”

And we spent the rest of the night hip to hip, laughing until our faces felt numb, spinning each other until we were giddy, sweating through our dress shirts, shout-gossiping about other wolves, eating the leftover hash brownies, pissing into the trees.

Nobody dared interrupt the happy couple. Nobody barged into our dance or stopped us to chat. Gradually, people left the party and headed back to their camps. Tomorrow, they would lie in as long as they could in an attempt to preserve energy for the full moon. It would be a late one, especially for the youngsters who’d be waiting on the fringes to see if it would be their first ever shift.

Cian grabbed my face. Sloppily, drunkenly. “Mash, I need to go to bed. I think I’m gonna throw up.”

So I bid everyone who still hung around the party goodnight. The band had packed up and the music now blasted through a set of speakers connected to someone’s phone playlist. The only people remaining were the teenagers and twenty-somethings, and one or two older, hardier wolves. All the Cassidys had retired a while ago.

“I’m gonna hurl,” Cian said as he fell face first onto my bed. He still had a tail and ears, and I wondered how long he’d spent practicing his partially shifted wolf form.

I fetched him a bucket, just in case. It was actually an old popcorn bucket from a Harvest Fest party about twenty years ago.

“Let’s get your clothes off,” I told him. I began unbuttoning his shirt. His unfocused eyes brushed over my face. “You can shift back to your human form now.” I whispered so Dee-Dee and Riley wouldn’t hear me through the walls.

Cian said nothing. He morphed into his beautiful, original self, crying out like it caused him pain. “What if I get stuck with werewolf ears for the rest of my life?”

Isshedhim.

“But what if I spend so long with these fucking ears and this tail I can never go back to human ones?”

“Well, I guess it would solve some of future Mash’s problems,” I whispered.

“Huh?” he said.

I pulled his dress shirt off him and threw it onto the chair in the corner. Cian usually slept in a T-shirt, but it was too much hassle to even think about finding a clean one, so I tugged his shoes off his feet and started unbuttoning his belt.

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