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I groaned. “Seriously?” One thing I had forgotten all about was the way that wolves could smell everything. My dad could scent that I had sex. Vincent could, too, apparently. Gross, and so, so embarrassing.

“Sorry he slipped past me. Should have figured he went to you. But then he was out at Opal’s celebration of life potluck extravaganza at Hank’s old place, and he didn’t arrive that late. Must have been a quickie? Did he bite you?”

“Tried,” I said. “Luckily, we were interrupted.”

“Fuck.” Vincent opened the door to his cabin wider. “Do not be alone with him again, okay?”

“Yeah, well, he said the same thing to me,” I said, stepping inside. It was nicely decorated in here, but it had that bland, Airbnb sort of vibe, where everything is gray or shades of muted browns. Everything seemed very nice but very understated. We were in a living room which was connected to the kitchen with the ubiquitous breakfast bar.

I went over to it. “Is it a required law for every single one of these cabins to be set up with a combined kitchen/living/dining room?”

He laughed. “Maybe?” He went around me into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. “So, I mentioned I wanted to drink. When you said you’d be here in twenty minutes, that was you acknowledging that you also wanted to drink, right?”

I laughed. “Okay, okay, sure.”

He handed me a bottle of beer, something from a brewery a few towns over.

“Thanks,” I said trying to twist off the top.

He took it back and used a bottle opener on it and then handed it back. He leaned into the breakfast bar, grinning at me with this affectionate look on his face, and I remembered how he used to often look at me like that. It used to make me feel like maybe he was my big brother, too. I didn’t have any brothers, but I’d been with Damian so long when we were teenagers that his family had seemed like my family in certain ways.

Vincent had always been protective of Damian, and he hadn’t always liked what the scent match had done to the two of us, but he’d never blamed it on me or treated me as if I was the problem.

“Did he really say that? That he didn’t want to be alone with you?” said Vincent.

“Well, no, he came by and begged me to go on a walk with him.”

“Oh, right, a ‘walk.’” Vincent air-quoted it.

“It was supposed to be a walk, but then…” I sat down at one of the tall chairs in front of the breakfast bar. “I don’t even know how it happened, really, but once it was happening, it was going to happen and neither of us were going to stop it.”

Vincent sighed. “Yeah. I had forgotten about all of this, about what this is like with you guys.” A pause. “But then how did it get to you two not being alone together?”

“Well, after we were interrupted, he said maybe we shouldn’t be alone.”

“At least he’s being a little bit responsible,” said Vincent.

“Why aren’t you staying at his place? He’s got room,” I said, looking around the cabin. Damian and Opal had a big house as the cyning and cwen of the pack. Then, I answered my own question. “I guess you don’t want to impose after he’s been through so much and everything.”

“He and I aren’t exactly on great terms,” said Vincent.

I tilted my head to one side. “No? What happened?”

“It’s been this way for a while,” said Vincent. “It’s why I left Riverside.”

I raised my eyebrows. “What is?”

Vincent scratched the back of his head. “Well, uh, right after he bit Opal, uh, he was going to see you, and she knew, and I guess she thought that I’d be the best revenge, so…”

“So, you were sleeping with Opal?”

“It wasn’t like we hadn’t slept together before,” he said. “And you know how I was back then. I just didn’t think things through.”

I surveyed him. “So, you think things through now?”

“I guess I started realizing that some of the bad shit that was happening to me was my own fault. If I wanted a better life, I should stop doing things that would only lead to me being miserable.”

“Oh,” I said. “Were you miserable, Vincent? You always seemed so happy.”