Yesterday had been the strangest, longest, and best day of her life.
She ran her hand down the smooth planes of Cooper’s back, tracing the outline of his shoulder-blades. It seemed impossible that there had ever been a time when she hadn’t known him, when he hadn’t been as familiar to her as the feeling of her own heartbeat in her chest.
She had never felt anything like this before.
A couple of times in her life, she’d experienced a kind of magical, instantaneous click. Right away, she had known that Martin, Colby, and Theo were slotting into important empty spaces in her heart: they’d felt like family from the word go.
But they had filled gaps in her life. They hadn’t... they hadn’t transformed her.
Right or wrong, sane or insane, she couldn’t argue with what she knew to be true. Cooper Dawes hadn’t satisfied some craving or taken a seat in some empty chair in her mind, filling out her life and enriching it. He had changed her, not into something new but into something true. Being with him wasn’t just better than being without him, it was also right, and it made her better—it made her into a woman she could only think of as GRETCHEN as opposed to mere Gretchen.
Honestly, the closest thing she could really compare it to was how she felt about the job. There was a passion embedded deep in her soul that only Cooper and her work had ever unlocked. He had shown her who she was, and he had let her love him back.
She loved him, and she trusted him.
So there was no way in hell she was going to take him to Bergen.
She stretched out, careful not to wake him, and felt the stiffness in her body loosening.
She felt good. Way better than anyone would think she had a right to feel, given that yesterday, for her, had mostly been made up of a long, cramped car ride followed by some hypothermia.
I guess this is what sexual healing feels like.
Her mouth curved against Cooper’s shoulder, and she pressed a little kiss there.
Seriously, though, she felt—different. And not just because she was in love.
The feeling she’d had her whole life, the feeling that some important part of herself was like an idea just on the tip of her tongue, had finally disappeared.
Without noticing it, she had started tracing the shape of her scar. Was it her imagination, or did it feel like some of the ancient, lingering puffiness there had finally died down? It didn’t hurt to touch it anymore. She’d always had the idea that that pain was more in her head than anywhere else, but it was still bizarre to not feel anything but the soft touch of her own hand. Some of the feeling was creeping back there, too.
It was hard to get a good look at it without a mirror, but she contorted herself to try.
Doing so woke up Coop, who’d deserved more sleep than that, dammit. He rolled over and caught her trying to crane her neck to stare at the scar close to her collarbone.
His hair was rumpled from the pillow, and his eyes were warm and sparkling. It made her mouth dry up just to look at him.
“Good morning, pretzel girl,” he said.
She gave up on trying to get a good look at the scar and just kissed him instead. “Morning. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”
To her surprise, he just pointed slightly in the direction of her scar and said, “That looks better. Not that it looked bad before. I just noticed it because...”
Instinctively, Gretchen somehow knew that what would most make him trail off like that. He was thinking of those awful minutes when she’d been hovering between life and death—and then, like a flash of lightning, she knew exactly why he’d noticed the scar.
He’d noticed it because he’d briefly thought about giving her another one.
The chill of those old memories came back to her, but at least now she had Cooper to press up against. He was warm and reassuringly steady; he wouldn’t let her get mired in her past.
“It wouldn’t have worked,” she said quietly. “I’m a fluke.”
He put his arm around her, hugging her close. “You’re not a fluke.”
“I literally am, though. I’ve asked around, and if a shifter bites a human, they either become a shifter or they die. There’s not supposed to be a third option where you just wind up with a nasty scar and a week in bed that costs your parents a fortune.”
“You were a kid?”
“Thirteen. I bribed my little sister into biting me, even though our parents had apparently been telling everybody for years that they couldn’t.” She knew they’d only been trying to protect her, but somehow a trace of bitterness leaked into her voice anyway. Maybe you never got over the whiplash of finding out that the people around you had been keeping secrets from you. “It... didn’t go well, obviously, and I felt like a real jerk for convincing her to do it. I think she still has nightmares about almost killing me.”
Cooper covered the scar with his hand, pressing his palm against it like he could blot it out. “I’m sorry you both had to go through that.”
He did sound sorry, but even more than that, he sounded confused.
“What is it?” Gretchen said.
“I don’t know if there are any other cases of a human resisting the turning process without dying.” She could hear the sound of him choosing his words carefully. He knew that this was important to her, and she could tell that the last thing he wanted was to get it wrong. “Most
