Seducing My Werewolf Hockey Captain

Chapter 11: This Is My Life Now

~ Gwen ~

It had been just over a week since I made the decision to stop running and give RavenBane a real chance.

A week since Aunt Anne sat me down and dismantled everything I thought I knew about myself, my parents, and the quiet ordinary life I had been raised to believe was simply just — life. A week since I found out that the town I had moved to was not a town in any normal sense of the word, but something closer to a community built entirely around people who could grow claws and shift into wolves and apparently considered that completely unremarkable.

I was still not okay with it.

I wanted to be clear about that.

I walked out of the reporters club meeting with my notebook pressed against my chest, moving through the corridor beside Elodie and trying very hard not to stare at every person we passed and wonder which of them had a wolf sitting quietly behind their eyes. The answer, statistically speaking, was most of them. Which was insane. Which was something I was apparently just going to have to get used to.

"You still look terrified," Elodie said from beside me, looping her arm through mine without preamble.

"I mean — yeah," I said. "You can't honestly expect me to just act like everything is fine."

"I get it," she said. "But this is just life here. It's normal to us."

"It's not normal to me," I muttered.

She looked at me for a moment, considering something.

"Okay," she said. "Come to my dorm room."

I frowned at her. "Right now?"

"Right now. We're not doing anything useful for the next hour and you look like you need to sit somewhere that isn't a classroom and just breathe." She was already steering me down the hallway before I had agreed to anything.

I went anyway, because honestly she wasn't wrong.

************************

Her dorm room was warmer than I expected — not temperature-wise, but in the way it felt when you walked into it. There were books stacked at odd angles on the shelves, a string of lights above the headboard, a glass vase was leaning against the far wall beside the second bed, and sitting on the desk in the corner, completely out of place and entirely charming, was a phonograph.

An actual phonograph.

"I didn't know you were old-fashioned," I said, tilting my head at it.

"Well, now you do." She dropped her bag on the floor, crossed the room, and set the needle down with the practiced ease of someone who had done it a thousand times. A warm, unhurried melody filled the room immediately — the kind of music that made the air feel slower.

"Do you like it?" she asked.

"Yeah, actually," I said, settling onto the edge of her bed. "I used to put Beethoven on when I needed to focus back in Boston. Something about it just — cleared my head."

Elodie looked genuinely delighted by that. "Beethoven is something else. Have you ever listened to Mozart?"

"Not really."

"You should." She sat cross-legged on the other end of the bed. "Whenever I have a report due and I can't find the words, Mozart gets me there. I don't know how to explain it — it just opens something up."

"Inspirational," I said.

"Exactly that."

"I'll try it," I said, and I meant it.

She smiled and waved her hand like it was nothing, and I found myself looking around the room properly. The second bed across from hers was neatly made, a guitar pick sitting on the pillow like someone had left it there without thinking.

"You have a roommate?" I asked.

"Amber Nichols. She's the lead guitarist in the school music club — you've probably seen her around, she's always got her guitar case with her."

I thought about it for a second.

"Tall? Blonde? Was carrying her case down the corridor after music class on my second day here?"

"That's her," Elodie confirmed.

"She's also a —"

"Yes," Elodie said, before I could finish the sentence.

"Right." I nodded slowly. "Of course she is."

Elodie watched me for a moment. "What?"

"Nothing. I'm just doing the mental tally of everyone I've met here and realising I've only ever been in the minority category."

She laughed softly at that.

I turned to look at her more directly. "Can you control it? The turning?"

Elodie blinked, clearly not expecting that particular question, and for a moment I felt the heat of embarrassment crawl up my neck.

"Sorry — I shouldn't have —"

"No, it's fine," she said quickly, shaking her head. "You just caught me off guard. Nobody's ever asked me that. Because everyone around me already knows the answer."

"Which means I'm the first human you've actually talked to about any of this," I said carefully. Was I supposed to tell her? That the human thing was more complicated than it looked? That somewhere underneath all this ordinary skin there was apparently a wolf I had never met, buried so deep by my own parents that I had made it through twenty years of life without a single sign of it?

I decided not to. Not yet.

"Yes," Elodie said simply. "To answer your question — yes, I can control it. Mostly." She laughed, then caught my expression and stopped. "You're not laughing."

"I'm processing," I said.

"Fair enough." She leaned back slightly. "You'll get there. I know it doesn't feel that way right now."

I said nothing, because I didn't want to lie to her.

The song on the phonograph came to its end and the room went quiet. Elodie got up, reset the needle, and sat back down.

"I saw your conversation with Yates yesterday," she said, in the careful tone of someone who has been holding something in and decided now was the time.

I kept my face neutral. "It was nothing."

"It didn't look like nothing."

"It was nothing, Elodie."

She studied me for a beat. "Okay. I'm just going to say this once and then I'll leave it alone." She straightened slightly. "Yates and Fanny have been together since before any of us started here. They're not a casual thing — she's going to be his Luna when he takes over as alpha of the pack. It's basically decided. And Fanny is not someone who lets things go quietly when she thinks her territory is being challenged."

I stared at her.

"First of all," I said, "nothing is happening between Yates and me. Second — he is genuinely one of the most insufferable people I have ever met in my life, which is saying something. Third — I couldn't care less about Fanny's Luna status. And fourth —" I pointed at her — "you said *our* pack. You're in his pack?"

Elodie smiled like she'd been waiting for me to catch that. "I'm from the beta family. My father is Yates' father's second."

I sat back. "Wow."

"Surprised?"

"Devastated, actually," I said.

She burst out laughing, and despite everything I smiled a little too, the tension in my chest giving way just slightly.

"I have to actually accept that this is my life now," I said, pushing my hair back from my face with both hands.

"It gets easier," she said. "I promise."

The door swung open before I could respond and a tall blonde walked in with a guitar case in one hand and a biology workbook tucked under her arm, stopping when she saw the two of us sitting there.

"Hey," Amber said, eyes moving between us.

"Hey," Elodie and I said at the same time.

"Bio 101 is still running," Amber said, resting the case against the wall. "Why are you both here?"

"Ditching," Elodie said simply.

"I came to grab my workbook and drop off the guitar." Amber set the book down on her desk then turned to look at me. "I'm Amber Nichols."

"Gwen Casteel," I said.

Something crossed her face at that — quick and unreadable. She opened her mouth.

"Casteel, isn't that —" She stopped. Elodie had coughed, pointedly.

Amber recovered smoothly. "You smell very —"

"Human. Yeah." I gave her a small, resigned smile. "I'm starting to think that's going to be my permanent introduction here."

"Sorry," Amber said, and she actually looked like she meant it.

"Don't worry about it," I said.

She grabbed her workbook, tucked it under her arm, and headed for the door. "I'll see you both later."

"Bye," we said together, and she was gone.

I turned back to Elodie. "She seems nice."

"She is," Elodie said. "Just don't get on her wrong side. She's a completely different person when she's in a bad mood."

I looked at her. "As in she turns and —"

"No!" Elodie started laughing properly this time, and it was so sudden and genuine that I laughed too — nervous and unpractised, but real. "I mean she's just — difficult. She's the kind of person who will give you the silent treatment for three days over one wrong word."

"Okay," I said, relieved. "I can work with that."

"Come on." Elodie stood and switched off the phonograph. "We should get back."

"Didn't you just tell Amber we were ditching?"

"I changed my mind." She slung her bag over her shoulder and grinned. "Bio 101 is genuinely the best class in this building, and everything else is unbearable. So we're going."

I grabbed my bag and followed her out into the corridor, the two of us falling into easy conversation about the coursework as we walked.

And somewhere between the phonograph and the laughter and Elodie pointing out the fastest route to the biology building — I caught myself thinking that maybe, just maybe, this didn't have to be impossible.

Not fixed. Not fine.

But it is possible.

That felt like enough, for now.