Page 134 of Stags

He reached out and touched her shoulder, gentle. “None of us are perfect. I don’t want you to be perfect, Tawny.”

“Sure, you do.”

“No. I just want you to be with me.”

“You’ll handle my flaws if I promise to handle yours?”

“Deal,” he said.

She looked up at him. “It’s like, all this time, I was thinking I needed to be better to attract a better man, but what I should have been doing was looking for the kind of man who would put up with me.”

He laughed. “Fuck, Tawny, it is an honor and a privilege to put up with you.”

She dashed at the tears that were coming out too fast. “Yeah? You mean that?”

He kissed her.

She wrapped her arms around his neck.

“I will put up with you as long as you let me,” he said against her lips.

“Well, good, then,” she said. “Let’s put up with each other for a long while, then.”

EIREN PUSHED THROUGHthe crowd at the club. It was late. They had just called last call. She had been going out too late every night, ever since she’d left Lyall’s house. She usually compartmentalized well, and she kept these impulsive elements to the weekends, away from her work time, but she’d been staying up too late, drinking too much, and then forcing herself to complete all her work anyway, forcing herself not to let her work suffer, burning the candle at both ends.

She had known, after she left, she wouldn’t hear from him. Despite the fact that he was a wolf, and their interaction was always a level of his chasing her, he only chased when he knew she wanted him to.

He didn’t text her.

She didn’t text him.

She couldn’t tell anyone about the situation, because it sounded batshit insane.My casual fuck buddy, with whom I am obsessed and who I think about constantly, told me he loved me and said we should move in together, and I ran off on him.

She couldn’t tell anyone because she did not know why she didn’t want that. She did not know why she could not tell him that she loved him too, because she did.

She didn’t know, and ergo, drinking every night.

Just to distract herself from all of it.

But now, as she pushed through the crowd, her new drink spilling a little as she was jostled here and there, she saw him.

Lyall was lounging against the wall, looking out of place in his stupid flannel shirt and his jeans, like some kind of lumberjack wolf in a nightclub. He did not belong here.

She stopped in front of him. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“No idea,” said Lyall, giving her a toothy grin. “But it’s a public place, so I have just as much right to be here as you do.”

She looked him up and down. Why did he have to look so good?

“You could run away, of course,” said the wolf lazily. “You know what happens when you run from me.”

“Is that a threat?” she said.

His grin widened.

Her stomach turned over and she was flooded with that feeling this man always gave her, that feeling of fear and desire all mixed together. “We are bad for each other,” she said to him.

“You know what I think is that you’re bad foryourself,” said Lyall. “I think you’re bad for yourself, and I’m actually good for you.”

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