The Moonlight Shifters

Erica Young The door to my hippie bus flies open with enough force to make everything inside rattle, not the least of which is me. Everything in me has been coiled tight since I parked. Heck, since I decided to drive here. And now the moment I’ve been both dreaming of and dreading for seven years happens, and seeing him? I’m rattled to the core. The look on his unbelievably handsome face? The furious, accusing eyes touching me? Together they make pain radiate through every single shaking cell in my body. Barely leashed fury crackles as his eyes give me a once over from head to toe. Urges war within me. Run toward him? Hide? I can’t run to him. Absolutely not. This is going to be agony. More anguish. Part of the price; it’s time to pay. Though really, it feels like I’ve already been paying for nearly seven years. My entire body is a heartbeat, thumping, aching to touch – no, aching to fuse with him. The cozy interior of this van suddenly feels even smaller. He can only stand in here because the overhead bunk is popped up and he takes up a lot of space with his height, his muscle. His presence. His fury. He’s pulling the door shut, towering over me as I sit on the bench seat that takes up the majority of the back of the van. I clench the patchwork quilt that covers it. Coincidentally, I’m gripping the piece of fabric from the shirt he wore the last time I saw him. He doesn’t know how important this quilt is to me. How important he is to me. How my sisters found that shirt dangling from a tree branch days after it all went wrong and brought it to me. I slept with it for months until I put it in this quilt and have slept with it nearly every night since. He doesn’t know I’ve kept him close to me in the only ways I could for the past seven years, despite the fact that my mistakes cost us both so much. He’s even more handsome than I remember. And I never forgot just how easy Riley Savage is on the eyes. But the handsomeness I saw back then looks hard now. And it’s down to me that there’s no light in his green eyes at this moment. The set of his more-than stubbled squared jaw is hard. He hasn’t shaved in at least a week, maybe two. His dark hair is a mess, long enough there’s a curl to it. It looks like he’s been raking his fingers through it in frustration. And I can feel the rage shuddering inside him, as if rattling his rib cage, ready to burst out. He's even more muscled, even more deliciously built. He’s got a few sexy crinkles around his eyes. Has he laughed much? Or have I given him those faint crow’s feet due to stress? It was a given he’d mourn the perceived loss of me, but has he held others, gotten pleasure from others? Sought comfort? Because I haven’t. I wouldn’t. I have so many questions and no right to ask any of them. There’s something strange in my chest, something elusive. It feels like I can almost reach out and touch the soul of him with mine, but his is caged by an invisible wall. A wall I built. My aches and fears shift into need. Stark need. Vivid desire. The need to feel him. The desire to be touched by him. The pulsing ache not only in my heart and my soul, but also in that forbidden place I’ve been saving for him. To show him how much I love him, to have him understand that I never meant for any of this to happen. I wish I could touch him. I’ll never forget the way it felt when we had that first kiss. The last one, too. I don’t even get to make a move toward him. It’s like he senses the intent before I’ve done more than flex a muscle in my foot and his hand flies up to halt me. “Do not take one step toward me, witch,” he shouts, his voice coming out guttural, filled with emotion so raw, so visceral, it can only be described as loathingly. The way he says witch is as if it’s the gravest insult he can hurl at me. Danica told me when he smelled me in the Drowsy Hollow covenstead, there was significant fall-out. And I knew it was coming, knew last Fall when I dug deeper than ever to help Holden and Isabella with their problem that this could come at any moment. I knew I had no control over when it would happen. I gave it to fate. And now I guess fate is showing me that I reap what I sow. I f****d up so epically.