Page 10 of Crave

Dallas Caldwell hopped up onto the sidewalk beneath our awning, swiping a strand of hair behind his ear, and ugh, I did not just check out the gun show.

Being a were meant keeping feral urges in check, the wolf’s need to fuck, fight, and feed flaring out of control every month when the moon was full. For just over a year, I’d been hooking up with Dallas’s brother Ethan, a series of one-night stands that had ended in a huge blow up after he’d kicked me to the curb in a text (because seriously, jerk of the year) to get back together with his longtime infatuation, Hayden Crowe.

For one stupid second, I had allowed myself to think there had been something there, that all those nights Ethan and I had been together had meant something. Maybe that was foolish, but when you’ve always been the girl who was good enough for right now, but never for forever, it was hard not to feel a tiny bit resentful when you showed up at five in the morning with a sack of peanut butter cookies, expecting the guy you’d been seeing to tell you the whole text thing was just a big misunderstanding, only to see another girl standing there in your place, wearing his shirt, giving you death-eyes.

And maybe that was my mistake. Thinking things could one day be different. Wanting too much. Sometimes it was better to just go with the flow and live in the moment. If you didn’t allow feelings to form, there was no getting hurt when everyone went their separate ways.

I was just rounding the counter, trying to drown out the sound of my mother delivering an oral ten-point presentation on the virtues of aerosolized holy water, when said best friend crashed head-first into my door.

And for the second time that night, I felt my stomach crater. Because as usual, just when I needed him, Dallas Caldwell was drunk.

History was a double-edged sword. It was a wild first kiss shared between two sixteen-year-olds on a starry summer night that ten years had never been able to erase from your lips. It was a vast canvas of stars swirling overhead as a girl and a boy held hands in the back of a truck. It was eyes the color of the morning sky seared into a memory that took years to form a scar.

The problem with history was that for those lucky few, it forged a bond no one new had any hope of cracking. See exhibit A: Ethan and Hayden. But sometimes roots grew so knotted and tangled it was impossible to break free without destroying you both.

Which was the other problem. History could be an addiction, too.

“I have to go,” I told my mother.

Dallas stormed into my kitchen like it wasn’t two-freaking-thirty in the morning, smelling of woodsmoke and Old Spice, a scent I should have hated more than I did. One look at the fire blazing in his eyes told me his shifter hearing had picked up enough of our conversation from out on the street that I was going to have some explaining to do.

I held up a hand. “Before you start—"

“The hell you’re leaving.”

“Okay. Good talk.” Snorting, I swiped a loose strand of hair out of my eyes. Why was it that model-hot guys always came with enough drama for an entire season of Scandal? “First? My aunt has been talking about selling—”

“Who says the new owners won’t keep you on? They’d be out of their minds not to.”

“Maybe. Or they find a buyer who wants to convert the place into a deli.”

“So you come work for me,” Dallas growled, continuing to stalk the length of my kitchen. No one could channel their inner hot brooding Viking quite like Dallas Caldwell.

I rolled my eyes, because we’d had this conversation before. “You don’t need a full-time baker—”

“The hell I don’t. You can make all our bread in-house. Homemade pies. Cupcakes—”

“You and I both know I was under contract when I came up with those recipes. They belong to the bakery, not me. I try to open up shop down the street, or sell my cupcakes from The Spoke, and the new owners can sue for breach of contract. They may not be interested in running a bakery, but they know having one across the street will drive down their profits. With a non-compete clause that’s good for two years, I won’t be able to bake anywhere in Blood Moon.”

Dallas cursed and slammed the flat of his hand into the wall. But it wasn’t like he didn’t make his staff sign the same paperwork. Trade secrets were gold in the restaurant business and Dallas had built The Spoke from a beat-up food trailer he used to drive around to work sites at lunchtime. After he’d spent four years up in Calgary learning to smoke meat in a smoker he’d made out of a busted-out filing cabinet. And by meat, think bighorn sheep, deer, elk, whatever he could catch in wolf form up in the Canadian Rockies. I still had the letter he’d sent home to West, describing that first night where the buzzards wouldn’t even touch his leftovers. How’s that for a one-star review?

But that was the thing about Dallas. Even back then, exiled from his family and two thousand miles from home, he got what so many others who failed and gave up didn’t: if you could eventually get a bighorn sheep to taste good, you could get all-natural black Angus prime to taste freaking amazing.

“You know that isn’t the real reason I’d be doing this.” I pushed away from the counter, going over to the cooling rack for one of the deep-dish sour cherry pies we both knew were his kryptonite. “My mom’s been getting worse. Some days she seems okay. She’s the one who will literally techsplain down to a room of corporate executives because her coding is that good. And then I’ll turn on the news and see there’s been a mass shooting. Or an abduction. Or a supernatural sighting in one of the major cities. And it’s like she completely shuts down.”

I stopped, taking in his expression.

“Sorry.”

He looked down. “Think I blame Juliet for hating me?”

Most people couldn’t lie without giving it away in their eyes. Dallas’s tells were all in the mouth, the way he tapped the bottom edge of his teeth when he was working out a new recipe, or how when he was nervous, his tongue poked out to wet the faint scar bisecting his upper lip, the one he never talked about that he’d had ever since he came back from Canada at twenty-one, completely changed from the carefree boy I once knew.

But it was this expression that had the ability to silently wring my heart to shreds, the downward twist of his lips that had spurred me to kiss him that fateful night nine years ago. It was the look he got whenever he was teetering on the edge of destroying himself, a sentiment I understood all too well.

There were probably relationships that could have survived everything ours had, the trauma, the separation, and come through unscathed. But you didn’t come back from something like that the same person you once were. And I hadn’t known how to begin to put me and Dallas back together when I barely recognized the man who’d gotten off the bus four years after leaving town. Not when some days, I’d barely recognized myself.

Dallas was my best friend, the one who snuck across the street at midnight and superglued all the phones in my aunt’s bakery. I signed for his delivery orders, sent him recipes I knew he would hate just so he would rage-text me back six times, and filled his Escalade with rubber spiders (because seriously, what self-respecting werewolf screamed like a total girl at the sight of spiders?)