“I thought we’d have more time,” Ryan said, almost to himself. He dared a look at me but wrenched his eyes away again, particularly as Haze revealed more and more skin. “I intended to spend some time to get to know Riley again.”
“What’s to get to know?” Haze asked his brother but stared at me. He slid his hand down the side of my neck. “She still has that crooked little grin.” The pad of his thumb touched the side of my mouth. “She still has that funny little snort when she laughs at things too hard.”
“I’m sorry, what?” I replied, knocking his hand away.
“She probably still does those terrible farts when she’s had ice cream and blames it on the dog.”
Haze’s grin was wide now—the one that was always a precursor to some fuckery.
“This is the shit you say when you wanna get laid?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow, but he just spun me around to face his brother, working expertly to keep unbuttoning my shirt.
“You want to get to know this Riley? Kiss her, brother. You can say and do all sorts of shit, but when you kiss her? Something shifts. It’s like nothing’s changed at all and everything has, all at the same time. I know you fucking want to.”
“Of course I fucking want to,” Ryan rumbled. He strode over to us, his long legs eating up the distance before stopping just short of me. “But what do you want, Riley?” Haze growled at that, but his brother charged on. “Do you want to kiss me?”
There was a vulnerability now in his face that I’d never really seen before. The Ryan I’d known had loped down the halls with all the cocky confidence of the rest of the boys. Since he was taller, stronger, harder than some of the others, people rarely messed with him, especially when his role as fixer of Fen’s problems became clear. He was a power to be reckoned with, one who would rise to prominence in the pack, so people afforded him the proper deference. I wasn’t standing here in front of a role, though, I was in front of a man.
One whose face I knew all too well. My hand rose, stroking down the side of his face, feeling the sharp plane of his cheekbone, pressing a fingertip to the small scar on his chin that came from when we’d fucked around in the creek as kids.
We’d been young, too young to be playing down there, as the alphas made clear later, but that hadn’t stopped us. We’d brought jars and buckets down to put frogs in for me.
I’d been reading about frog dissections, and it was the only science thing that actually interested the guys, so Fen had the bright idea that we should go and find our own ‘specimens’ in the creek. Like always, we’d followed him down there, walking through fields of long grass that in hindsight, were likely to have been full of snakes. We’d followed the dirt track, passing paddocks of mildly curious cows, until we reached the creek proper. There, we’d clambered over mossy rocks, clinging to tree roots as we lowered ourselves down onto the banks. We’d pored over the area, too bloody noisy by half for frogs, I was sure, until we found ‘the one.’
“Oh my god!” I had shout-whispered, pointing my finger to the big brown frog sitting in amongst the rocks, obviously assuming his dull skin colour was enough to mask him from our eagle eyes. The boys had clustered closer like the young wolves they were, forming a pack once the hunt was on.
“If we come this way, we’ll scare him,” Fen said, taking one step into the water, and sure enough, the frog moved slightly as a result. “We’ll have to flank him.”
I’d learned what this meant later in history class, but to them, this was essential knowledge. I watched the lot of them, a tribe of ten-year-old boys, fan out across the riverbank, moving like ghosts through the trees and the shrubs, leaping over the creek further upstream before closing in.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked Fen, glancing at him, then the frog longingly. “He’s so perfect. We could—”
“Shh…”
He had it back then, that alpha command, but he’d known better than to use it. His fathers had been strict as hell about their sons abusing their power. Later, I found out through study that many alpha packs had ruled through barked orders and an oppressive system of coercion, but weirdly, maintaining that level of control over a whole community was as difficult for the alphas as it was for the community to bear it. Right now, Fen deployed his gift as he was supposed to—for the benefit of the pack.
I watched Blake, Ryan, Colt, and Haze emerge out of the trees, moving on silent feet, my eyes narrowing at Haze. That grin of his, always too sharp, too wide, often meant he was about to do something stupid, but in the end, it wasn’t him that did.
They glanced at each other, communicating silently, hands held loosely at their sides as they dropped down into the creek as one, forming a semicircle around the frog, which wasn’t a bad tactic except for this—the gaps between their slender legs were more than big enough for a wily amphibian to jump through. In his bid for freedom, he leapt with all of his might, and that was when the hunt began.
Boyish voices filled the air as they all shouted instructions, feet and hands slapping in the water, trying to catch the frog. He jumped and he jumped with all his might, not knowing what we intended but fairly sure he wouldn’t like it, their grasping hands confirming that.
“Fen…” I said, wrapping my hand around his arm.
“I know, Riley, I know.” His eyes jerked back to his brothers before he barked, “Catch that bloody frog!”
Ryan was just doing as he was told, throwing his whole body after the frog, hands outstretched, fingers closing in, every muscle straining to try and stop it from escaping.
He got it, his eyes going wide for a split second at the feeling of the slimy frog fighting against his grip, but of course, what goes up must come down, and for Ryan, it was onto an unforgiving bed of river rocks.
It came back to me then, that moment where Ryan had to decide—let go of the frog and put his hands out to break his fall, or hold on to the frog for me and let the chips fall where they may.
In that split second, I was faced with a very adult problem my selfish little child mind struggled with. I didn’t want Ryan hurt. I knew what falling down felt like and it sucked, but I also wanted that frog with all the single-minded obsession a kid like me could have. What happened next seemed to resolve all of that.
I saw the moment Ryan realised what was going to happen, the world feeling like it slowed down, going quiet as his eyes went wide, right before his chin hit a rock hard.
Blood. Shouts. Legs tensing then springing into action, buckets tossed aside as I went running across the stream, my feet dancing over the rocks to get to him.
“Ryan?” I called out his name as I saw the blood flow, as I saw how pale he was. “Ryan?” I dropped down beside him, not even sure how I got there so fast, trying to rake his wet hair back from his forehead, then hissing at the steady seep of blood.