Wolf at the Wedding

The dress fits too well for something that's supposed to feel like a costume. I stand on the little round platform in Marguerite's back room, arms out like a scarecrow, while she kneels at my hem with a mouthful of pins and an opinion about every inch of me. The mirror in front of me shows a woman I mostly recognize — same dark hair, same stubborn chin my mother apparently gave me before she wasn't around to take credit for it — but there's something off in my own face that I can't place. Too bright. Too aware. Like I've been running even though I've been standing still for forty minutes. "You've lost weight," Marguerite says around the pins, not really a question. "I've been stressed. It's called planning a wedding." "Mm." She doesn't believe me, but she's paid to alter fabric, not psychoanalyze brides, so she lets it go and tugs the waist in another half inch. I don't tell her that it isn't stress. Stress doesn't make you wake up at three in the morning able to hear the refrigerator humming two rooms away like it's shouting. Stress doesn't make coffee smell like it's trying to peel the skin off the inside of your nose. I've been chalking it up to nerves for two weeks now, the same way I've been chalking up the dreams — always trees, always running, always that feeling of my own skin being one size too small — to pre-wedding anxiety that every bride is probably entitled to. Three weeks. Then I'll be Elena Reyes instead of Elena Marsh, and Tyler will stop looking at me like he's waiting for me to say something I haven't figured out how to say yet. The bell over the shop door jingles, and I feel it before I hear it — a shift in the air, a pull low in my stomach that has no business existing for anyone other than the man I'm about to marry. I turn my head, and it's Damon. He fills the doorway the way he's always filled every doorway he's ever stood in, like the architecture made room for him instead of the other way around. Dark hair a little too long, jaw set in that permanent almost-scowl, eyes finding mine across the shop before he's even fully stepped inside. He's got a suit bag over one shoulder — his own fitting, probably, best man logistics — and he stops dead the second he sees me on the platform in unfinished white. Something moves behind his eyes. Something he swallows so fast I'd have missed it a year ago. "Wrong door," he says, voice rough, like he hasn't used it yet today. "Sorry." "You're not wrong," I say. "You're twenty feet early for the men's fitting next door." "Right." He doesn't move. Marguerite, still on her knees with a mouthful of pins, glances between us with the particular patience of a woman who has fitted a hundred wedding parties and seen every version of this exact moment. She doesn't say anything. She just keeps pinning. I don't know what to do with my hands, so I fold them in front of the half-finished bodice like that'll hide anything. Damon hasn't been back in town in almost a year — some job out west he was cagey about, the way he's cagey about most things — and I'd told myself I was fine with that. Easier, even. Tyler's best friend since college, my fiancé's best man, a fixture at every barbecue and holiday for four years, and I have never once, in four years, managed to be in a room with him and feel like the air is the right temperature. "You look —" he starts, and then stops himself so hard I hear his teeth click. "Ridiculous. I know. It's not finished." "That's not what I was going to say." The way he says it — low, flat, like it cost him something — makes heat climb up the back of my neck that has nothing to do with the overhead lights. "Well," I say, too brightly, "you'll have to save the review for the actual day." Something flickers across his face. Not quite pain. Something adjacent to it. "Right," he says again. "I'll — the men's fitting. Sorry to interrupt." He's gone before I can say anything else, the bell jingling twice, and I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. "Friend of the groom?" Marguerite asks, entirely too casually, from somewhere around my ankles. "Best man." "Mm," she says again, and this time it means something completely different. Damon I make it exactly to the sidewalk before I have to stop and put a hand flat against the brick, because my lungs have apparently decided breathing is optional now. Four years. Four years of holidays and backyard barbecues and being handed beers by Tyler like we're just friends, like I haven't spent every single one of those gatherings positioned so I can see her without looking like I'm watching her. Four years of telling myself the vow I made isn't a cage, it's a promise, and there's a difference, even when it doesn't feel like one at three in the morning with my hands shaking and my wolf clawing at the inside of my skin because she's twelve miles away and breathing without me. I wasn't supposed to see her today. I had the schedule memorized — men's fitting at eleven, her fitting done and gone by ten-thirty. I got the time wrong, or Marguerite's assistant got it wrong, or the universe just decided today was the day it wanted to remind me exactly how much rope I have left before it runs out. White doesn't even suit most people. It suits her like it was woven for her specifically, which — considering what I know about her and don't get to tell her — might not be as much of a metaphor as it sounds. I should not have come inside. I should have turned around at the window and waited on the bench outside like a person with functioning self-control. Instead I stood in that doorway and watched her go still and pale and then flush, and I felt it too — that pull, sharper than it's ever been, sharper than it has any right to be for a woman who is marrying someone else in three weeks. That's new. The sharpness. I've spent eleven years learning to live with a constant, low-grade ache where she's concerned, the way you learn to live with an old injury. This isn't that. This is different — this is the ache waking up and stretching and reminding me it was never actually dormant, just patient. I pull my phone out and call the one person who might actually help me stop spiraling in a strip mall parking lot. "Marcus's scouts," I say, the second Roan picks up, no greeting, because I don't have the patience for one. "Anything?" "Two sightings near the county line. Nothing confirmed close to town yet." A pause. "You sound like hell." "I saw her." "Yeah, well." Roan's voice goes carefully neutral, the way it does whenever this subject comes up, which is more often than either of us would like. "You were always going to have to be in the same town as her for the wedding, Damon. That was the job." "She's changing," I say, and it's not something I meant to say out loud, but it's true, and saying it makes it more real instead of less. "I could feel it. Just standing near her. It's stronger." Silence on the other end, long enough that I know Roan's doing the math I've been avoiding for two weeks. "If it's stronger for you," he says slowly, "it means it's starting for her too." I close my eyes and lean my head back against the brick, and somewhere behind that dress-shop window, twenty feet and one closed door away, Elena Marsh is trying on the last dress she'll ever wear for a wedding I'm not supposed to want to stop. Three weeks. I don't know anymore whether that's enough time to keep my promise, or not nearly enough time to break it.