“So . . . when Danny thought he saw Bigfoot out of his window the other night . . .”
He grimaced. “That was me. But to be fair, I wasn’t in Bigfoot form. I’ve been playing around with an ape-werewolf hybrid creature. You know, trying to keep things interesting. Nola’s helped me figure out that I’m more in control of my shifts when I’m not bored.”
“Could you maybe not do that where Danny can see you?” I suggested. “Or if you do, pick a non-scary, non-emotionally-traumatizing form? Like a giant bunny or something?” I asked.
“You don’t think he would find an unnaturally large bunny lurking outside of his house to be traumatizin’?” he asked, and when I gave him my mom look, he added, “I’m just sayin’!”
“I’m sending him to your front door when he has nightmares,” I told Jed.
Jed pursed his lips and nodded. “Fair enough. I’m gonna go get a beer. Shiftin’ takes it out of me.”
“Wait, Jed, what did you mean by werewolves?” I called after him. “Are werewolves a thing, too?”
He just smiled his adorable redneck smile and ducked inside the house.
“Jed?” I yelled. “That’s not an answer!”
“Man, when you throw a party, you throw a party,” Wade said, carrying a beer across the lawn. “Where do you even find a Sasquatch impersonator? And what kind of person makes a livin’ pretending to be a Bigfoot? That musta been an interestin’ Craigslist ad.”
“You’d be surprised what you can find online.” I chuckled awkwardly. “Look, I really appreciate you being so open-minded, bringing Harley here in the first place and then sticking around when you realized most of the guest list was, uh, pulse-challenged.”
“Hell, I told ya, I don’t care about that,” he scoffed. “You’re clearly crazy about your kid, and your friends seem nice enough. My family are all humans, and they can be a bunch of assholes.”
“I’m just glad you added more words after you said ‘crazy.’ ”
“We did kind of get off on the wrong foot, huh?” Wade blushed—honest to God, blushed—and even in the silver light of the moon, I could see the rich pink hue spread across his cheeks. The spread of blood through his tiny capillaries did strange things to me. I wanted to follow that blush’s path across his cheekbones with my tongue. I wanted to see how far it spread. Did he blush all the way down?
And he was still talking while I was ogling his circulatory system. I decided to tune in before I embarrassed myself.
“I’m sorry I was such a jackass when we met. School registration is always sort of hard for me. It’s like a punch in the face, seeing all those big, happy families. Signing all that stuff as Harley’s only parent-slash-guardian, it was like being reminded over and over that I’m doing this all alone. I got pissed off, and I took it out on you, and that’s not fair.”
“I can understand that,” I told him. “And that night at Walmart?”
“Well, you did compare my son’s name to chlamydia,” he noted.
“Touché.”
“It would be better, I think, if the two of us could find a way to get along, for the boys’ sake,” he said. “If nothin’ else, we could stop cussing at each other every time we make eye contact.”
“I would like that.” I stuck my hand out to shake. “Truce?”
“Truce,” he said, extending his hand with the rings. Then, remembering the silver issue, he switched and offered me the safer hand. His closed his fingers around mine and pumped my hand gently. His callused, warm skin felt heavenly against my own, like sliding into a bath with just enough heat to sting a little. He didn’t seem to mind how cool my skin was, turning my hand over in his.
“Huh,” he said, studying our joined hands.
I withdrew my hand from his, rubbing it against my denim-covered leg. “So do you have family around here?”
He cleared his throat. “Yeah, but I try to steer clear of them. My family are a bunch of screw-ups. Mostly on my mom’s side. My dad was a pretty great guy. He’s the one who was into motorcycles, showed me everything he knew in the garage. But he died when I was eight, and Mom ended up moving to Garden Vista. She brought home a bunch of ‘uncles’ who got more and more messed-up with every year. I got a couple of half brothers and sisters running around the Hollow. I try to keep them away from Harley, so they don’t try to borrow money off him. Hell, if they thought he had a twenty in his piggy bank, they’d take a hammer to it. And then call him a ‘selfish little jerk’ if he got upset over it.