Page 14 of A Brighter Yellow
Episode 8
Romeo, Oh Romeo
Anna
Anna stared up at the wooden beams on her ceiling, then she lifted her arm and checked her phone. It was nearly ten, and she still hadn’t heard the sound of the truck coming up the drive. She got up and opened the window, leaning out onto the tiny balconette. In her rebellious teenage years, she’d smoked out there. Which was stupid because it just put the smoke up higher and meant that everyone in the family could smell it even if they didn’t know exactly where it was coming from. On one of her periodic visits, her mother had rolled her eyes, which perfectly encapsulated their relationship. Her parents weren’t destined mates and had only arranged for a temporary alliance to produce children. By the time Anna hit puberty, her mother had wandered off.
Anna had watched her go. Trotting off down the drive, presumably back to her birth pack. Garrett had been angry and sullen for months afterward. And then everyone had begun to demand that Anna do the mom things. It wasn’t explicitly gendered. Baird had undoubtedly done his best to provide for them. Still, when it came to things like picture days at school, teacher appreciation day, or any of the random social obligations that greased the realm of human interaction, they had expected Anna to step up. Which Anna found bewildering and frustrating since their mother hadn’t ever done those things either.
Her absence and lack of interest in her children were considered very un-wolflike behaviors. Although usually, no one in the pack brought it up. Sometimes Baird would get drunk and claim it was because Anna’s mother was mixed-breed—an oblique reference to the fact that she was descended from a werewolf. But in retrospect, Anna thought it was more likely because her mother hadn’t wanted children to begin with. The expectation of producing children was tantamount to a moral obligation in wolf society. Anna suspected that once their mother considered her duty complete, she had retrieved her freedom like a piece of forgotten luggage and gone on about her way. Her children were well cared for, and Baird wasn’t destined to be her mate—what was there to hold her interest? The worst part was that the older Anna got, the more she understood her mother’s behavior. She knew Baird had received at least three letters of offer or intent to court her, not that he ever said anything. He had always made it clear that her decision to mate was up to her. He was old-fashioned, but he had immigrated for a reason. Freedom was essential to him.
The driveway was still empty. Anna left the window and went back to her bed. Flopping down with a huff of annoyance, she checked her phone again. Admittedly, she hadn’t told Ochre how vital the package was, but what the hell was he doing? He’d told Baird he was getting a beer. Beer didn’t take hours. The thought occurred to her that bar girls could take hours, and she restrained a growl from bursting out of her. He had kissed her! Or she had kissed him. She wasn’t entirely clear on that. But there had been kissing, damn it. She was pretty sure that she had previously been better at flirting. Just grabbing a man by the face and then telling him she’d leave the light on for him had the benefit of being direct, but she wasn’t sure it gave the desired impression.
She ran a hand over her breast and down the length of her body. She felt like the imprint of Ochre was still there. Surely everyone would be able to see him branded to her skin. And how he smelled… She groaned and forced herself not to lick her fingers, which smelled like summer and Ochre’s skin. She supposed if he’d been human, she might have found him overly stinky, but even with what was clearly at least a three-day stank, he’d smelled divinely like warm earth. Maybe all Fae species smelled like that? She didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure she cared. She just wanted him to come back. The intensity of her desire surprised her. What the hell had happened in the bunkhouse? Anna had gone there hoping that maybe she could talk him into helping her and—secretly, maybe, in the back of her head, never to be admitted in public—that she might utterly put to death any impression that she was interested in Liam Grayson. Only she’d looked into those damn greeny-golden eyes of Ochre’s, and everything had gone… Out the window. Up in smoke. Poof. Boom.
Definitely boom.
“Oh, for fucks sake.”
The sentiment was barely more than a whisper, and for a moment, Anna wasn’t sure where it had come from. After a moment, she heard a faint scrabbling noise from outside. Puzzled, Anna dropped her phone on the bed and went to the window. She leaned over the balconette, peering into the moonlit night. Ochre was climbing up the rocky wall beneath her. Within a few minutes, he was hauling himself over the railing and glaring into her face.
“You’ll leave the light on? You are four stories up!”
“You could have used the door,” she said. “I just meant to let you know which one was mine.”
“How am I supposed to use the door with your dad messing around in the kitchen?”
“Oh. Didn’t know that. Also, I do have a rope ladder in case of fire. I could have dropped it down.”
His face said that this was not welcome news. He slung his backpack down onto the floor, reached in, and pulled out a beat-up-looking cardboard box.
“Here’s your stupid package,” he said, shoving it at her.
“Well, you took your own sweet time coming back,” she said and saw his eye twitch. “But you did look very dashing climbing up,” she added hastily. “I’ve never had a boy try that before,” she offered. She looked over the edge of the balconette again. She couldn’t believe he’d actually done it.
“Dashing?” He sounded slightly mollified.
“I don’t know what else to call it. Do you swing from ropes and quote poetry to me too? It’s on the swashbuckling side.”
“I could probably do ropes, but you’re thinking of pirates, and they, much like myself, don’t do poetry.”
“Oh,” said Anna. “I feel a bit disappointed about that.”
He sighed and hung his head. “Fine. Here.
Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.”
She stared at him and tried to parse the poem that she was reasonably sure was a Shakespearean sonnet. Was he giving her all his love, and his love was hers before she’d even asked for it? Her heart was beating a million miles an hour, and she wanted to fling herself into his arms, except that would probably knock him backwards over the balcony. Her ears were hot, her fingertips were cold, and she had no idea what to say.
“You were right,” she said. “I was thinking of pirates.”
She wanted to bite her own tongue off. That was not what she should have said.
