Borrowed Beauty

Chapter Seventeen: Wet Dog

Renee

I hate shifting. I avoid it whenever possible. It's bad enough that the physical change is damn uncomfortable. (Try sprouting a fur coat in under sixty seconds, it's f*****g itchy.) But in my case, it's embarrassing. I’m an alpha, I’m supposed to be strong and fierce, but my wolf is small and ordinary. I’ve got an off-white coat that always looks sort of dirty. I always secretly thought that it was some kind of cosmic joke. I got the hot human body, but Olivia got the attractive wolf.

Nevertheless, I stripped out of my clothes and let my suppressed animal out. I let all of my higher thought processes submit to the most basic, primal, animal instinct, and I ran. I ran like the devil himself was on my tail. I left the well-worn trail and crashed through the underbrush, not caring about the twigs that whipped my face or the burrs that snagged in my fur. Yet I kept the lake always in my periphery. I didn't know exactly where the boundary for the pack fell, nor did I know if there were friends or foes or just a no-man's-land on the other side of that invisible line.

They say you can’t outrun your demons. But you can run until you are so damn tired that you just don’t care anymore. I stumbled down a steep embankment and waded straight into the cool water of the lake, plunging my face into the water up to my eyeballs as I quenched my raw and burning throat. I already smelled like wet dog, so I decided to make the most of it, and dropped down into the cool water, soaking my whole body up to the scruff of my neck. The water soothed my protesting muscles as it cooled off my body. If I wasn’t already so tired, I might have waded out into the deep for a little doggy paddle. Instead, I just closed my eyes and soaked in the quiet solitude.

Even my wolf consciousness couldn’t keep the shame from bubbling back to the surface of my thoughts though. That kid’s heartbroken screech was still echoing in my ears. It was just a stupid cake, I reminded myself. It wasn’t that big a deal. I could go to town and pick up a replacement at the grocery store. Problem solved.

Only it wasn’t, because I still felt like crying. Not because of the cake, or the kid, or even the smell of my mother’s cookies. There was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on. A deep feeling of wrongness that I couldn’t identify or express…like things were spinning out of my control. All I knew at that moment was that I was not okay.

I stayed in the water until my paws started to feel numb, and then reluctantly climbed back up the bank. I shook myself, sprinkling all the surrounding foliage with a shower of water, and then started walking slowly back in the direction of the pack house. My ears were flat against my head, and my tail was tucked tightly between my legs, and I followed the trail this time. Despite not wanting to shift in the first place, when I reached the spot where I had left my clothes, I wasn’t in any hurry to shift back.

Eventually, I huffed a big sigh and then took back my consciousness from my rather sullen wolf. I pulled on my clothes and started shuffling down the path again. I felt like I was walking toward my own execution, but if I didn’t go back, someone might come looking for me, and then I might be bombarded by a bunch of questions. I slipped my phone out of my back pocket, and swiped it open. There were still no calls and no messages.

Then again, maybe nobody even noticed I was gone.

When I left the treeline and started cutting across the yard, I noticed a solitary figure waiting out on the steps. Olivia. She was there, sitting with her elbows resting on her knees, and her chin resting on her hands. She watched me walk closer, but didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything either. I thought I would walk right past her, but her words stopped me.

“Are you okay?”

I froze, with one foot suspended over the next step, and my hand tightened on the rail. I swallowed hard. It was on the tip of my tongue to try and tell her how crazy I was feeling. I wanted to tell her how not-okay I really was. The impulse was so strong that my eyes started to water. For one second, I wished that we talked like that. But I gulped down the words I couldn't say and only managed a terse “I’m fine,” as I forced myself to meet her eyes.

I saw the concern there, but it was slowly eclipsed by something else. Disappointment, maybe, and then irritation. “Thomas is just a kid, Renee.”

I ground my teeth together. “I know that.”

“And he’s had a rough time of it. His mom’s an addict.”

I didn’t know that. Although Olivia didn’t say the rest out loud, I put the pieces together in my head. There was something off about the kid, he’d probably been affected by his mom’s drug use when he was in the womb. Great. So I’d been picking on a disabled kid. If I didn’t already feel like a monster, that sure clinched it.

“I know he can be difficult sometimes, but he really just needs a lot of patience–” She was talking to me in that kindergarten teacher voice again, and I couldn’t stand it. Why couldn’t she have just stopped at telling me about the kid's mom? Why did she always have to keep going - - like she was always fishing for a reaction? I couldn’t just feel bad. I had to show it.

Fuck her.

“I know what you are doing here, Livvie,” I said snidely, purposely using the nickname I knew she hated. “Baking cookies, making cakes, you are just trying to make me look bad while you suck up to the alpha.”

Her eyes flashed and her brows knit together, and I’m sure she had something nasty to say back at me, and I was ready for it. I was spoiling for a good fight. But before I got the satisfaction of seeing her good and riled up, I noticed the alpha in the doorway.

Shit, how long had he been standing there?

Did he know what I’d done to the stupid cake?

I felt my face burn with shame all over again as I stomped up the rest of the steps and brushed past him before he could say anything. I could deal with Olivia scolding me, but if the Alpha chastised me, I was sure I would cry. As soon as I was inside the door and out of their line of vision, I bolted for the stairs and went straight into my bedroom, locking the door for good measure.

I needed to shower and put myself back together before the twins returned from wherever they had disappeared. I was just passing the vanity when I noticed there was a slice of chocolate-frosted yellow cake sitting there on a glass plate, neatly covered with plastic cling wrap. It looked perfect, with no sign of the mess I’d made in the middle of it.