I walk in and follow her through the house to the main living room. There, in front of a blazing fireplace are all three boys, and Romulus, and her.
“Sabrina!” Kaleb pounces up off the floor and jumps over Marlowe’s outstretched legs to run toward me. When he reaches me, he picks me up and spins me around before planting a solid kiss on my mouth. I don’t even have time to react.
Out of the corner of my eye, Romulus looks like he’s going to gag. Lydia laughs and pats Kaleb on the back before going to sit down in the chair next to her husband. She’s the exact opposite of Romulus sometimes.
I look over at the others as Kaleb takes my hand and brings me down to sit with them.
They have more photographs spread out across the floor alongside glasses full of something intoxicating-looking. A deck of playing cards is left abandoned in the middle of a game to their other side.
I can’t help but feel like the intruder here. The girl looks altogether too comfortable as she leans her back against Rory’s chest and sips from her own glass while laughing over one of the pictures Marlowe has slid her way.
That nasty, thick pang of jealousy hits me squarely in the stomach as I see this glimpse of them here, together.
Not only is this girl as absolutely gorgeous and all-too friendly with the boys as I remember, but she seems to know them better than I could ever hope to. Unlike me, she’s one of them.
Something I’m supposed to have given up on.
How can I compete with someone like that?
I thought I was jealous of the wolf girl before, and all that girl ever did to me was try to kill me. Right now, I’d rather that again.
Rory looks up as I approach and smiles with me as if there isn’t another girl sitting against his lap. I don’t t
hink I’ve ever seen him so relaxed. The look on his face, his posture, the easy sprawl of his legs … it’s so unlike him. I want to both throw-up and run away at the same time.
Marlowe is also grinning from ear to ear, just as oblivious as the rest of them.
“Sabrina, we’re so happy to see you!” he says as if things couldn’t be more normal.
I sit down on the floor alongside Kaleb, uncomfortably near the strange girl.
“The rest of the pack just left to go back to the open territory across the river, and we were just getting ready to come and fetch you tonight,” Marlowe explains, much to my growing doubt. “Oh, and this is Vivian,” he adds as an afterthought.
Marlowe waves his hand toward the girl and she looks over and smiles at me—acknowledging me for the first time.
“Hi Sabrina,” she says. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
I muster a smile in return but can’t think of anything to say.
Nothing that won’t get me immediately kicked out of their house for insulting a guest, anyway.
Vivian stares at me for an unnaturally long moment before going back to looking at the photographs in front of her on the floor. She sits up and reaches for one across from her and she and Marlowe get into a conversation about where it was taken. When she sits forward off of Rory’s lap, he leans over to me and whispers in my ear.
“You shouldn’t have just come up here on your own, Sabrina. You know it could have been dangerous for you,” he says.
Kaleb hands me a glass of something sweet-smelling that Romulus has just poured. I take a sip of it before I turn to look Rory in the face, unsmiling. Our faces are so close together that our noses nearly touch.
“What do you care?” I say quietly, knowing no matter how carefully I keep my voice down everyone in the room is going to overhear, anyway.
Damn wolf ears.
“I’ve been wandering all over the woods the past few days,” I say, even though it’s a lie. I’ve barely left the house except to go to school, but I hope the thought of me alone in the woods makes him squirm. “You’ve been too preoccupied to even notice, so don’t go telling me what I can or cannot do when you don’t even really care.”
I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone look so alarmed in my life.
It’d be funny if I wasn’t so angry.
“You’re wrong,” Rory says as a look of intensity fills his eyes and his warm breath seems to fall heavier against my lips. “Just because you don’t see me watching over you, doesn’t mean I’m not.”