“Do you want to go get a glass of wine or something?”
“Oh God yes.” We hooked arms and stalked into the ballroom. Ben followed, amused.
After acquiring wine and staking out territory at one of the white-cloth-draped tables, we caught up. Sadie had gone to school at Northwestern, then law school, returned to Denver to work for the legal department of an environmental non-profit, which was exactly the kind of thing she always said she’d do, if maybe not exactly the way she thought. She’d had dreams of riding Greenpeace Zodiacs to save whales, which I was just as glad she never did. This was safer. She and Ben instantly bonded over law-school anecdotes and seemed relieved that their areas of expertise were so far apart they’d never had to meet professionally.
As for me . . . I didn’t have to explain much because Sadie said she listened to my show sometimes. As soon as I’d gotten a website with a contact form she’d thought about sending me a note. The reunion finally prompted her to do it.
I couldn’t explain why I hadn’t ever reached out to her. “I . . . had a rough couple of years there. And then I figured you’d be too angry to want to hear from me.” It sounded stupid now, and her frown of reprimand told me that yes, it was stupid.
“So,” she said, idly running a purple-painted nail around the base of her wineglass. “You talk to Jesse at all?”
Jesse Kramer. Another set of memories crashed over me. Part of the old life, again. I shook my head. “I haven’t talked to him since graduation.”
“Ah,” she said suggestively.
Ben caught the tone. “And who is Jesse?”
“Just a guy,” I said, pretty sure I was blushing. I didn’t want to talk about this. Ben arced a brow.
“Her boyfriend senior year.”
“Oh really?” Ben’s brows went up. “Any chance I’ll get to meet this guy?”
“I doubt it,” I said quickly. “He moved away right after graduation.”
Sadie leaned in. “They broke up right in the middle of prom, it was amazing.”
“You’ve never told me any of this,” Ben said admiringly.
Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about it until now. It hadn’t been very relevant to the post-werewolf life.
“He won’t come to this,” I said, almost pleading with Sadie to agree with me. She shrugged expansively.
“So, Sadie, you have any embarrassing pictures of Kitty I should know about?” Ben asked.
I blanched. “We don’t really need to go looking—”
She grinned. “They’ve got some old yearbooks at the front table if we want to go check.”
The place filled up, and I recognized more and more people, and somehow we all looked completely different than we had, and we hadn’t changed a bit, both at the same time.
“Hi, Kitty?” An upbeat woman with her dark hair in a ponytail, wearing a silky pantsuit, came up to me. “I don’t know if you remember me—”
“Amanda, we worked on yearbook together,” I said and accepted a quick hug. We did the one-minute update of the last ten years of our lives, and I repeated the same exchange with a dozen other people. Wolf slowly settled; these weren’t strangers, we weren’t in danger, even though this definitely didn’t feel like our territory. It helped that Ben was looking out for us. He patiently let himself be introduced over and over. This is my husband, Ben. And what do you do, Ben? Lawyer, criminal defense. Yeah, that got a couple of stares. And a raised eyebrow when one of the old marching band crowd asked him for a business card.
“You were on yearbook?” Ben asked, incredulous.
“Yup.”
“I had no idea. I’m learning all kinds of things about you. I suppose you were all over spirit week and went to all the football games?”
“I was practically normal, back in the day.”
“Before,” he said.
“Yeah, before.”
He squeezed my hand and kissed my cheek.