“I think you’re being a little hard on yourself.”
“That’s just it. I don’t think I am. I think the human society lets me be too easy on myself. I have more responsibility to be a better person than what I’ve been in the past. Sure, I wasn’t horrible, but I wasn’t great either. Shouldn’t we all strive for great?” I thought of the dream with the Taupe Lady and my friend’s funeral. “Shouldn’t we all strive to make a difference? To impact the lives around us in a positive way? To make our experiences count?”
He watched me with a growing seriousness. “That is a lot of responsibility for someone so young.”
“See. That’s what I mean. No, it’s not. If we held each other to a higher level of accountability, if we raised our children with those expectations and guided them with our own examples of higher achievement, it wouldn’t be too much. We would be a better people because of it. Instead, we took a wrong turn somewhere and ended up on Excuses-Are-Like-Assholes Boulevard.”
He opened his mouth to comment, but I shifted my attention from him to the waitress carrying our plates. He turned, saw her, and sighed. I read the promise in his eyes to continue our conversation later; and inwardly, I cringed. I went from trying to convince him I cared to stepping up on a soapbox I didn’t know I had. And I still felt like I had more to vent. I blamed it on sleep deprivation, bad dreams, and his completely gorgeous hazel eyes.
The waitress set our food on the table and left after our assurances we didn’t need anything else. I kept busy with dousing my fries in ketchup, letting the silence build for a moment. “Can I ask why we can’t talk about us?”
He held out his hand for the ketchup. “It makes me uncomfortable.”
I surrendered the bottle and watched him neatly add it to his burger. “Not getting into details, but what part makes you uncomfortable?”
“All of it.”
That didn’t make any sense. He took a huge bite of his burger while I struggled with my frustration. Stubborn man.
He reached past me for the salt as I leaned forward for the pepper. His hand brushed the curve of my breast, and he jerked back as if scorched. His gaze locked on his hand, and he sat there frozen.
He hadn’t bumped into me hard. No damage done. It’d been an accident. So what was his deal? He continued to…just sit there. I ducked my head trying to make eye contact, but he avoided it.
His reaction to the incident was starting to offend me. “It’s a boob,” I bit out, annoyed. “I have two of them. They don’t do much. They just sit there. They definitely don’t bite, so stop acting like they’re going to come after you. Grow up.”
“Please stop talking about them,” he said in a stiff strangled voice.
I didn’t let up. “You know, sometimes it helps to name the things you fear. Let’s call the right one ‘Everest’ and the left one ‘Fuji’, two mountainous ranges waiting to be....” I never finished. He cleared the restaurant’s door in a few furious strides, leaving me sitting alone.
It felt good to get under his skin, to see him react in a way that wasn’t calm and confident. It bothered me that it was at my expense. What was so wrong with me that he freaked out at the slightest touch? Other than the fact that some other werewolves wanted to kill me and I had dreams that made me scream loud enough to shake the nearest window...I mean really, who didn’t have some kind of baggage?
He didn’t go far. My eyes tracked him as he paced back and forth before the restaurant’s front windows. His scowl didn’t let up, and I didn’t feel so frustrated anymore. Smirking, I shook my head and continued eating my fries. He cast an occasional glance in my direction but didn’t appear to calm down.
When I finished my fries and burger, I waited until he glanced at me to take a fry from his plate. His steps hesitated and his scowl changed to a frown as, with a challenging smirk, I ate the fry. I reached for his second burger. He stopped pacing and watched me through the window. His focused stare and complete stillness seemed a little spooky. The other patrons cast nervous glances at him.
Slowly, I lifted the burger to my mouth unable to stop my teasing grin. His eyes narrowed, and he reached for the door. I took a huge bite and hastily set the burger back on his plate.
In just a few steps, he stood by the table looking down at me, his expression carefully blank.
“Well? Did you lose your appetite or not?”
He slid into the opposite seat and pulled his plate toward him, not saying a word. His avoidance hurt a little. He didn’t want to talk about us, he didn’t want to talk about the trouble that was out there waiting for us, and he didn’t want to talk about my boobs—which was pretty much the same as talking about us. As I watched him eat, I had an idea.