Page 40 of Lost Touch
Random little insignificant human? I bit my lip hard, letting up when I realized I’d probably punctured it.Tell me how you really feel, Alyssa. There was something else there, something she’d said, teasing at the edge of my brain. But it fled when Drew started shouting.
“Then he shouldn’t have fucking invited them! And pack war my ass, they’ll try to do a hostile takeover of one of Boyd’s companies. It’ll be a war between law firms, not a real one!” I cringed, my ears ringing. “Fuck, sorry, I didn’t mean to yell in your ear,” he added, at a much lower volume.
“You should apolo—”
“I was talking to Ash, not you.”
The long silence down the line had a deadly, “face about to be ripped off with red-manicured claws” kind of quality to it.
“Ash is listening to this conversation,” she said at last.
“I’m about two inches from him, so yeah, he is.”
“You really are an asshole.” Her tone could’ve shredded Drew’s face on its own, no claws required. “Especially because they’re going to need to see him, too. And you could’ve maybe told me so I didn’t say…shit. You should’ve broken this gently. Too late for that. Get him a tux, Drew. They’ll be here in three days, and you’re not getting out of this.”
“I’ve already told you that’s not—fuck!” He flung the phone halfway across the room, the bed jolting with the force of his movement, and it landed with a crack against the hardwood floor. “Fuck. She hung up.”
No answer to that sprang immediately to mind.
I mean, what did you say to any of that? I’d already known they all wished I was dead.
Get him a tux. They’re going to need to see him, too.
“You’re shaking,” Drew said worriedly, leaning down and nuzzling the side of my head, his arm snaking under me again to hold me tight. It didn’t comfort me at all, and it didn’t stop the shakes, either. I just vibrated in a more compressed way, my lungs laboring.
“Let me go.”
Drew froze. “I’m sorry,” he said, sounding horribly tense and formal. His arm withdrew, and he propped himself up again. “Excuse me. My knot’s going down. It’ll be a minute, I’m sorry.”
“You were making it hard for me to breathe,” I whispered into the pillow. Moisture gathered at the corners of my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Drew repeated, this time a lot more softly. “I guess the last thing you want is me trying to—we’ll figure this out. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. I’ll get my uncle off my back. And if I can’t, we’ll leave.”
Maybe I didn’t know much about how werewolf packs worked, but my ignorance didn’t make me an idiot.
“No, we won’t. Because it sounded like there’re really good reasons why you can’t, even though…” And then the thought that’d flown away half-formed while they were on the phone spun back around and smacked me upside the head like a boomerang. Drew wouldn’t sit around letting his uncle manipulate him out of inertia, or because he couldn’t stand up for himself.All of us are caught up in this. Which meant… “Even though you haven’t told me. Damn it, Drew! You said you’d told me everything!”
He went rigid, as stiff as the cock still buried in me, and the long breath he blew out made me shiver as it cooled the sweat on the back of my neck.
“I didn’t want to—”
“If you tell me one more time that you didn’t want to worry me, or it’s not my problem, I’m going to take you up on that baseball bat you offered me to beat you with that one time,” I gritted out through clenched teeth.
“Fine,” Drew said, his tone as strained as mine. “Fine. My father works for my uncle, and he’s a gambler. Blew three years’ salary on a horse race once. He owes my uncle his fucking soul, my mom’s addicted to shopping, and then Alyssa.” He stopped abruptly, his chest heaving against my back. “Alyssa won’t leave Mom,” he added at last, low and grim. “Says she owes her for when Uncle Boyd wanted to mate her off and Mom took Alyssa’s—and I know it’s more because Alyssa’s afraid to make her own way in the world than anything.Fuckmy family,” he growled. “Fuck them all. Except Alyssa. And fuck her too for not having the balls to walk away. If she did, I could too.”
Jesus. I digested that for a minute. If I had a family—well, I might, but the less I dwelled on that the better—would I buckle under to demands like Drew’s uncle’s to take care of them? Even when it sounded like they’d brought all their problems on themselves, essentially?
I could tell Drew that I thought he should run after all, reverse my previous stance. Which hadn’t been based on much anyway except my desire to support him. Even though I hadn’t known what I’d been supporting…my head would’ve hurt if it could’ve.
But obviously that wouldn’t be happening, no matter how many times he tried to protest, to himself more than anyone, that it could or would.
And even if I could convince him, I couldn’t convince myself that it’d work out any better for him than staying in this mare’s nest of a family.
If he left them, his uncle would tell all his clients to ditch him. His company would fold, and his parents wouldn’t ever speak to him again, with his sister left to deal with the fallout. Not only would it hurt me—in the soul-deep way, not the physical injury kind of way—to say all that out loud to him, knowing how guilty and conflicted and torn he already felt…well, I could hardly even bring myself to think the very last part, let alone say it.
The end result of it.
What would he have left if we picked up and scurried off like rats abandoning a sinking, dysfunctional ship?
