“And it doesn’t work to live as a leopard and shift human only occasionally, because I end up dirty and—well, like an animal.” Nina shuddered; Joel could feel the shiver of motion against his side. “So I had to find a way to live as a human. I started looking for work in rural areas, which was hard because there weren’t always jobs. And I wanted so, so badly to find other shifters, so I’d stick around for a while, see if I could hear anything about whether anyone had heard of shapeshifting people, and then move on.”
“Did you ever find any?” Joel asked.
Nina bit her lip. “A few times. But I never fit in, so I kept going.” She seemed to shake herself. “That’s enough talking about me. Sorry.”
“No,” Joel said, startled by the sudden shutdown. “I want to hear about it. About you.”
But Nina shook her head. “I don’t want to talk anymore. Maybe...later.”
Well. Joel couldn’t argue with that. And she’d told him enough already. Kicked out of her house at sixteen because of who she was? Having to live on the streets, scared of what might happen to her, wondering if she’d ever find her people. And then once she did...I never fit in, so I kept going. Joel bet that there was a lot more hidden behind that.
“What about you?” She squeezed his hand. “It sounds like you had a hard time as a kid, with your parents and all.”
And now the shoe was on the other foot. Joel suddenly understood I don’t want to talk anymore. When he thought about those times, he just wanted to shove them away and never think about them again. Not bring them back up and hash them over.
But he’d asked Nina to be brave, and she had been. The least he could do was the same. “I didn’t handle it well when my parents died.”
“I don’t know how any thirteen-year-old would handle that well.” It was Nina’s turn to talk in a soft voice, to grip his hand hard.
Joel laced their fingers together, looking down at their hands rather than into the depths of her gray-green eyes. “I was sad, and scared, and angry. Really, really angry, and that was what felt safest to let out, so that’s what I did. I was awful to Zach—he’s a freaking saint for putting up with me. I don’t know how he did it. He was eighteen, and his parents had just died too, and he was working two or three jobs all the time to support us, and I was just the worst little asshole the world had ever seen.”
“I understand being angry.” Nina’s voice was serious. “Sometimes, if you want to be able to do anything, you have to be angry. Otherwise, if you let yourself just be sad and afraid, you won’t even be able to move.”
“Yeah,” said Joel. “Yeah.” He was both relieved that Nina understood him, and furious that she understood this at all. That she’d had to go through so much.
“So I was angry,” he continued. “And it was like you said, I couldn’t just stay human. I had to move, I had to get out. So I would sneak away and shift. And I’d do it in stupid places, in dangerous places. I almost got caught a ton of times, I was such an idiot about it.”
“And something happened,” Nina said, with true certainty, like she already knew him well enough to know the answer.
Joel swallowed. “Eventually I did get caught. Not by police, or anyone who’d call the news. Just a bunch of kids. I was in the middle of shifting—it took me longer back then, I’d only started doing it a few weeks before my mom died. So I was half-human, half-leopard, still all blurred together—and they started throwing rocks.”
“Oh, God,” said Nina. Joel looked up. Her eyes were wide and horrified.
“It was okay,” he said quickly. “It was fine. Because Zach was out looking for me, and he found them and chased them off. But there was a moment—I wasn’t sure I’d be able to finish shifting. I thought I might just be stuck like that, halfway. Some of the rocks had hit me hard, so I bled, and I couldn’t focus—” He shook his head hard, as if he could knock the memory away.
Not a chance of that: it was burned into his brain forever.
“Anyway, that taught me a lesson. I was smarter after that, and I never got caught again.”
“But you were still angry,” Nina said. Joel blinked at her.
“Yeah, I was. I just held it back in. But it was still there. How’d you know?”
Nina shrugged. “I’ve been angry all my life. And you learn that it doesn’t work, it’s not helpful, you have to put it away. So I can put it away. But it never just vanishes.”
Joel closed his eyes. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. It’s still there. I’m angry at shifters, for exiling my parents like that for such a dumb reason. I’m angry at my parents for not making any kind of arrangements for if something happened to them. I’m angry at that stupid true mate system for forcing them to run away. And I’m still angry at Zach sometimes, for no reason at all. That’s the dumbest thing of all. He’s never done anything but help me.”
Nina pressed closer to him. Joel felt the touch with his whole body.
“That’s one of the reasons I want to move here, you know.” He’d never said this out loud to anyone. He’d barely admitted it to himself. “I’m angry at Zach for having a mate and just settling down and being happy, like none of that awful stuff ever happened to us. And that’s stupid and I know it. But I can’t just watch them be happy as mates, as though they’re not giving into this...controlling force that’s making them be together no matter what. I hate the whole idea of the mate-bond, because it makes them so vulnerable. Anything could happen, and they don’t even seem to realize that.” He shuddered a little.
Teri was the nicest person, but even then, it seemed crazy for Zach to be happy to have her forced so far into his life, to be so...intensely close, without any means of getting away. But he was happy. So it wasn’t Joel’s business to interfere, right? “So I’m taking myself away to let him be happy with Teri, and I’m not sure if it’s brave or cowardly to do it.”
Nina shrugged, a tiny motion that rubbed her shoulder against Joel’s arm. “Does it have to be one or the other? One thing I’ve learned over the years is that nothing is ever simple.”
Joel let out his breath in a sigh. “You’re right. I think it’s both. But I don’t know what that means. Whether it’s the right decision.”
Nina shook her head slowly, curls brushing Joel’s neck. “I don’t know. I never seem to know what the right decisions are.”