Page 27 of Mates: Posy

"I over-reacted."

"It’s understandable. Your father pulled your hair out as a punishment, didn’t he?" He raised his eyebrows, and I nodded. "I will never punish you, and I will never pull your hair. I only want to play with it. Jay’s mom taught me how to when I was younger, and I used to practice on Jay all the time. He had really long hair until he got it cut last summer."

"Why?"

"Why did he get it cut?" He laughed. "He said it was too hot, but I think he just wanted me to leave him alone."

I shook my head with a frown.

"Oh, you mean, why did I learn? I wanted to know how to do it for our mate when we found her."

His smile melted my heart.

"Okay," I said. "You can play with it."

"I can? Like,right now?"

I nodded, and he jumped to his feet. His sudden movement made me flinch a little, but he either ignored it or didn’t notice.

"Oh, we are going to have so much fun! Where are your scrunchies and hair products?"

Dropping my eyes to the ground, I held up the two twist-ties I’d grabbed from the kitchen’s junk drawer before coming out here.

"You don’t haveanything?" he faltered, but recovered quickly. "That’s okay. While we’re shopping this afternoon, we’ll take care of it. I’ll get some stuff for now. Sit tight."

He was back in minutes with a tray of supplies and one of the kitchen bar stools. With one long arm, he picked me up and sat me on it like I weighed nothing. For the next half hour, he played with my hair, trying out different styles and rambling on, and I let him. Surprisingly, I enjoyed it as much as he seemed to.

"Has it always been one length? Have you thought about bangs? We’ll need to add a curling iron to our list. That way, whenever you wear it down, we can curl the ends to make it sexy."

My cheeks flared red at that comment.

Finally, he coiled my hair into two big knots on either side and pulled out a few baby hairs to frame my face.

"There! Beautiful! Next time, I want to try Dutch braids, if that's okay with you."

I didn't know what Dutch braids were, but, if he wanted to wear his arms out wrangling my mass of hair, I wasn't going to say no.

"Sure."

"Posy?"

"Hmm?"

"Can I ask you a hard question?"

I hesitated for a moment. Who knew what he meant byhard? However, there were only a couple things he could ask that I didn't want to answer.

In the end, I decided it wouldn't hurt to hear the question, so I nodded.

"Why did your father give you enough wolfsbane to put Lark into a coma?"

"Tried to escape." I swallowed hard, my throat suddenly dry as dust. "He caught me right as we were about to sneak out the back door."

"When was that?"

After I told him the date, we figured out that it was three months ago.

"You lived without your wolf for threemonths?"

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