Teri and Zach exchanged a look that seemed to speak volumes, and then Teri nodded. “Thanks, love,” she said to Zach, and he smiled and dropped a kiss just behind her ear. Nina looked away, full of a hopeless longing. She remembered Joel kissing her softly, just last night. Could it only have been last night? Would it ever happen again?
Teri sat down next to Nina at the kitchen table. “I wanted to ask you something,” she said.
“What?” Nina was nervous, suddenly—what could Teri want to know about her?
“Leaving aside everything we’ve been saying about wanting you to stick around,” Teri said, “and leaving aside whatever Joel’s said to you, I don’t know what any of that was. Leaving all that aside. What do you want?”
“What?” Nina said again, although this time it was fainter, more of a reflex than a real question.
“What do you want?” Teri repeated. “You haven’t been in town for very long, so you probably came here for some kind of reason. I don’t know if you were planning on sticking around before all this happened,” she waved a hand, indicating the whole messed-up situation, “or if you wanted to go somewhere else. We’re happy to have you here, we want to get to know you, but what do you want? What would make you happy, here?”
“Did Alethia tell you to ask me this?” Nina asked, still feeling a little stunned. This was twice in the space of a couple of hours that she’d been asked this question. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had really wanted to know the answer.
Teri shook her head. “Nope. But it sounds like she and I are on the same page. So? What do you want?”
When Alethia had asked her, she’d said Joel. And that was still true, no question. But there was another answer, a larger answer. Part of what her best self would be.
“A family,” Nina breathed out. The answer seemed to hang in the air. Her whole body tensed at the sound of it, like she’d said something dangerous.
But nothing terrible happened. Teri just smiled at her. “I’m glad,” she said. “I hope we can make that happen.”
Me too, Nina thought, but it was too much to say out loud.
They had lunch. Zach moved around the kitchen with confidence, cooking for all three of them without any trouble; they ended up with grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, and salads. Comfort food, Nina thought as she ate, trying to ignore the aching hole in her chest where Joel was supposed to be.
Zach and Teri brought the conversation back to light topics, and didn’t pressure Nina to participate, just letting her eat. But it still seemed almost oppressive, the amount of domestic happiness surrounding her. Nina had said she wanted a fam
ily, but she tried to imagine living here, in this house, with these people, and just...couldn’t. It seemed impossible.
Maybe she’d been alone for too long. It felt like she’d been starving, and suddenly someone had seated her down at a five-star restaurant and put a seven-course meal in front of her. Nina wanted to say, I can’t eat all of this. My stomach can’t handle it.
But it looked so good.
She remembered thinking that she could see herself living in Joel’s cabin so easily. That small space up in the mountains, with just the two of them alone and wilderness all around, was much easier to imagine than this neighborhood, this house, this family.
If she could live in the cabin with Joel, but visit this house with Teri and Zach...could that happen? That sounded so perfect. A place to get away, to be alone or with her mate, out in the wild where she could be her leopard. But also a family waiting for her, a place to sit in a kitchen and have grilled cheese and soup together, and talk about their lives.
Was it possible? Could something like this ever happen?
Nina’s instinct was no. It felt like she was being given this little tantalizing taste of the future, and waiting for it to be snatched right away again.
But she remembered what Alethia had told her. Just because she’d hoped in the past, and it hadn’t turned out the way she’d wanted, didn’t mean that that would happen again. This was now. This was not then.
It all depended on Joel.
Nina was suddenly, furiously angry with Joel for leaving her without any answers. Why did he have to do this? What was wrong with her—or with him, that he didn’t want this?
But she had to remember what he’d said about his past. How he’d always blamed the mate-bond for keeping his parents away from their families, from any help they might have gotten.
She understood. But it hurt so much.
***
Joel stared at the rangers’ headquarters building, not entirely sure why he was here.
He needed to talk this over with someone. It couldn’t be someone who was mated, because he didn’t trust them to be objective about the situation. So that let out his usual confidant, Zach.
And it couldn’t be Nina, because Joel didn’t trust himself to be objective when he was talking to her.