Page 19 of Loup Garou

“So, are you going to tell me any more about your first crush?” He ran his finger over his spoon as he looked out from under thick black eyelashes. “I’m curious as to what I’m up against.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Sorry, but no guy wins over him.”

“Really?”

“Yep.” I took a sip of my diet soda and nodded. “Filling his shoes is a big task. I cried myself to sleep for an entire year after we moved. It’s pathetic, I know, but I did. I can assure you that has not happened with anyone other than him, so don’t fear me stalking you.”

He looked so sexy sitting there that I wanted to crawl into the booth beside him. I held back.

“That’s good to know. Do the two of you still talk?”

“No.” I forced a smile to my face even though the subject wasn’t one of my favorites. “For a while, right after I moved away, we wrote letters back and forth and talked on the phone every now and then. He’s almost three years older than me and I think he got to the dating stage before me. Plus, he sort of lost interest in our friendship.”

Exavier’s brow furrowed. “Why do you say that?”

“For a variety of reasons. I have a childhood lumped full of let downs. I was ten and my parents told me I could spend a month with my grandparents back west. I called his house, so excited that I’d get to see him again—keep in mind that we moved when I was seven and I hadn’t seen him in all that time. His mother answered. I left her a long message for him and when I got to my grandparents’ and tried to get ahold of him, his mother told me that he’d decided to go away to some boy’s camp and must have forgotten it was the same time I was coming home. I get that he was thirteen then and had better things to do. It just hurt a little that he’d forgotten. No biggie.”

Liar.

Exavier’s jaw tightened. He cleared his throat and took a sip of his soda before looking at me. “Hmm, if you two were as close as it sounds like you were, I’m surprised he’d forget something as important as you coming home. Did you try to reach him again after that? He might not have gotten the message.”

I nodded. “I did. I left so many messages for him that it hit me just how pathetic I was being so I stopped. We were friends when we were little but that’s it.”

“You don’t sound very convinced.” Exavier tipped his head slightly. “Is that all there is to the story?”

“Pretty much.”

“You never tried to contact him again?”

I rolled my eyes and let him have another pathetic snippet of my obsession with a childhood friend. “I sent him a gift for his eighteenthbirthday.” I tapped my fingers on the table, doing my best to stay removed from it all. Why I even felt the need to tell Exavier all of this was beyond me. “I was hanging out with my girlfriends. You met them, Gina and Myra. Anyway, we walked past this shop that had the coolest looking black guitar in it. It had the eye and part of the nose of a wolf airbrushed on it. I saw it and immediately thought of him. Please don’t ask why. I have no clue but I did. I bought it, had it packaged up and Myra actually mailed it for me. It was only after it was long gone that I found the card I’d gotten to go with it lying half under Myra’s bed.”

Exavier snickered. “So the guy got a guitar in the mail with no card attached?”

“Yep. It gets better.” I rubbed between my eyes and laughed. “Myra put her return address on it. She’s, umm, different at times—she can sense things and was adamant that he would not get the gift if my name was anywhere on the packaging. She seemed to think someone would keep it from him or something. I don’t really know. That’s why she took it and mailed it. I don’t argue with her. She’s scary.”

“Ah, so he got a guitar with no card and some girl’s name on the packaging that he didn’t know.”

“Yep. And I’m guessing he never in a million years suspected it was from me. He hadn’t seen or talked to me for almost ten years at the time. I did try to reach him the summer after that. I was headed in to spend the entire summer with my grandparents and was hoping to at least see him for a couple of minutes. Didn’t happen.”

“Why’s that?”

Shrugging, I took another sip of my drink. “I drove over to his place and got to visit with his mother but that was all. She informed me that he’d met a really nice girl at college and decided to spend the summer there with her. She was fairly sure that he was planning on proposing to the girl. I left a note with her letting him know that I was happy that he was happy—sounds lame. I know. But I was, am, happy for him.” I traced the edge of my glass, collecting condensation as I went. “I left, ran into the ass end of some guy’s car with mine. He got out. I fell for him. We hit it off and dated the entire summer. The daybefore I left we watched the sunset and talked about things that we’d sort of forgotten to talk about over the three months we were together. He brought up one of his close friends, Xavs, and I couldn’t breathe.”

“Why is that?” Exavier asked, his face a mask of nothing.

“Because as much as Xavs didn’t want to see me, I still wanted to see him. But the idea of seeing him, knowing I’d just lost my virginity to one of his best friends, didn’t seem as appealing any more. I never tried to contact him after that and he’snevertried to contact me so that was that. Now, it’s your turn. Tell me about your first crush.”

He just sat there, staring at me but not saying a word. Harly came out carrying our food and easing the awkward moment between us. He set a platter full of thick-cut fries and a cheeseburger in front of Exavier and a matching one in front of me.

“There you go, you two. Behave yourselves.”

“Thanks, Harly.”

“You can thank me by making us uncles, darling.”

My appetite instantly dissipated. I nodded at him and let out a soft laugh.

“We are dying to get to shop for a little one. And we want permission to take the baby for long walks. You’re our only hope of getting to be uncles.”

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