Page 53 of Aleko
“I bet Hudson that your old watch would have to fall apart before you wore the new one,” said Sebastian.
“It looked too fancy!” Alex complained for the third time, and Pellos laughed as he came out of the house with the roast.
“If I’d known I could be making Sebastian lose money, I would have pushed harder,” said Pellos, plunking down the platter. “Where you last Christmas, Lia?” demanded Pellos. “I could have used the assist.”
“I think I was swiftly exiting a midnight service,” said Lia, waving her hands to waft the scent of the meat toward herself, which was quite possibly the cutest thing Alex had ever seen.
“Really?” asked Colin. “I like to go for all the singing.”
“That’s what I went for,” said Lia. “That and it was indoors and warm. I thought I’d get a little of that... you know... the feeling of grace, I guess. Didn’t get that. What I got was a fifteen-minute sermon against gay people. On Christmas! I stood up and yelled that Christ loved gay people, called them hypocritical assholes, and then they threw me out.”
“You did what?” demanded Alex, laughing in shock and some amount of impressed horror. Sebastian was sitting frozen with a glass of wine halfway to his lips.
“Well, I’m sorry, but I have known too many people who attempted suicide because of that exact bullshit. I’m not standing for it. Someone has to say something. Other people can disapprove in silence all they want, but I’m not doing it anymore.”
She paused and looked around the table.
“I guess I don’t know how other... cultural groups might feel about gay people. If you don’t want to hear my rants, you’ll have to speak now.”
“Selkies don’t care,” said Trevor.
“Zero shits,” agreed Colin. “We think the rest of you are weird.”
“Wolves don’t care exactly,” said Alex slowly. “We all like sex, so whatever you want to do is fine. It’s just that everything in wolf culture tends to be about having children.”
“And if you’re not having children, what good are you?” asked Sebastian bitterly.
“Well, if they talked to my parents they would know that children are nothing but a disappointment, so maybe they should reevaluate their position.”
Sebastian had decided it was safe to take a drink, but at that comment, he choked on his gulp and then tried not to dribble wine down his chin as he aspirated wine. Alex thumped him on the back and tried not to laugh. Pellos and the others did not even try—they just laughed.
Alex wanted to kiss Lia. Simply by being herself, she’d won over Sebastian and Pellos. And if his pack was safe with her, then everything else was irrelevant. If he hadn’t loved her before, Alex would have fallen head over heels now.
The dishes were passed around, and conversation moved on, but Alex barely heard it.
Love.
He was in love.
Alex looked over at Eliandra. She was laughing at something Colin was saying. He felt like she was glowing. How had he not realized what this feeling was? Probably because he’d never felt it before. The only people he’d really loved before were his brother and his pack.
Alex looked around the table. Only Luca wasn’t participating—he was watching the conversation with his usual sardonic expression, fiddling with a knife, dangling it by the tip. Everyone else was smiling and chatting. Alex needed Hudson and Killian to come home, and everything would be perfect.
Dinner was over, and the Greens cleared the table, turning on music to turn the chore into playtime. Lia laughed as they shimmied their way through clean up, but she curled up in her chair, still nursing her glass of wine and leaning on his shoulder. Alex put his arm around her and rubbed his face into her hair, wanting to inhale all of her and cement her scent into his brain.
“I suppose we should go in,” she said, as the music changed inside to something softer. The table was clear and Alex suspected that Sebastian had changed the station with his usual disdain for anything with too much synthesizer.
“I suppose,” said Alex, without moving.
With a sigh she stood up and then she looked back at him, something glimmering in her eyes.
“You’re old,” she said, and he groaned. He didn’t want to hear about the distances between them. “So that probably means that you know how to dance.”
“Yes, I do,” he said, now not sure where this was going.
She held out her hand, and he thought she looked nervous.
“Dance with me? I don’t know how,” she said. “But I want to dance with you.”
