I nodded. “That’s how I knew your sister’s name. She stays in wolf form, but she’s almost always there.” I smiled at the thought of the little wolf pup who wiggled when you scratched just the right spot behind her ears. “She’s happy. Alex is… Alex. He worries about me and you and everything that’s going on out here in the living world, but he still smiles like an idiot at the drop of a hat. I think if it wasn’t for us, for all this crazy mess with the Alphas, he would be very happy and at peace there, too.”
Liam closed his eyes. “Thank you.” His voice was husky. My heart cracked straight down the middle at the sight of him. I wanted to wrap my arms around him to offer comfort, but thought he wouldn’t want it. Although, if I knew he would be kissing me less than twenty-four hours later, I would have chanced it.
Chapter 14
The whole sitting-by-the-bathroom-so-no-one-will-sit-near-us thing worked out pretty well most of the trip. The problem occurred when we changed busses in Minneapolis, and to be perfectly honest, it was mostly my fault.
Okay, okay… It was all my fault.
The thing about taking a bus across the great nation of the United States of America is it takes forever. Like an infinite amount of time, plus one more day. Sure, you think it’s going to be no time at all since there are only 3,000 miles from one coast to the other and you’re not doing any overnight stops, but what you are doing is a million and a half little stops. Thirty minutes in this small city, an hour or two in this big city, and ten minutes in every little town in between. So, by the time we got to Minneapolis we had been on the road for over twenty hours. I was tired. Cranky. And my stupid wig was so hot and itchy I considered asking the spaced out chick with evident track marks on her too skinny arms if she had any Xanax to share.
As far as mistakes go, what we came to call The Minneapolis Incident was one of my more idiotic screw-ups, but I still contend that an insanity plea should be accepted considering the circumstances.
I was in the bathroom at the terminal. I thought I was alone, but honestly I wasn’t really paying attention. All I knew was my head was going to explode if I didn’t take off the wig and the plain black knitted hat I had replaced my UK hat with back in Indiana. So, I did. I sat them both carefully on the ledge of the mirror, leaned my head over the sink, and ran some gloriously cold water over my head.
When I straightened back up an older woman was staring at me.
“Hi,” I stammered out. She didn’t say anything. She just kept staring at me, and I could almost see her matching my face and hair with the picture they flashed on TV for weeks. “Looks awful doesn’t it?” I grabbed a handful of paper towels and started rubbing them over my wet head so I could put the wig back on. “They said it would look different after it started growing back in, something about the chemo and chemicals and hair follicles and stuff, but no one said it would look like this.” Her expression didn’t change, so I just kept on rambling. “My mom won’t let me dye it yet because she thinks it’ll make the cancer come back or something crazy like that, so I’m still stuck with the wigs.” I lifted mine up to demonstrate. “I really thought I would be able to throw these away by now, but there is no way I’m going around with my hair looking like this.”
The old lady turned around and left the bathroom without saying a word. Once I got everything back in place, I went in search of Liam.
It didn’t take long since he was waiting for me on the bench just outside the restrooms. It wasn’t nearly enough time for me to finish my internal debate over whether or not I was going to tell him what happened. On one hand, we were trying this whole new honesty thing on for size. On the other hand, Liam was scary when he was mad, and this was really going to piss him off good.
On a third hand, or perhaps a foot, he still hadn’t told me why we were going to Fargo, so we weren’t really doing very well with that open communication thing yet, anyway.
Yeah, there was really no need to tell him.
The bus was crowded, more so than any of the others had been. Liam and I got on first and took our customary stinky seat. It wasn’t until almost everyone boarded that she climbed on and sat directly across from us. She settled herself into the seat, placed her bag of knitting supplies in the empty seat, and then turned to stare at me again.
“Liam?” I said as quietly as I could without moving my lips. His lifted eyebrow told me to continue. “See that lady across from us?” A slight nod. “She may have seen me without my wig on.”
Liam rolled his eyes to the heavens and took in a deep breath through his nose and then let it out slowly through pursed lips. “Follow my lead,” was the only warning he gave before grabbing onto my face and placing both thumbs over my lips. Then he leaned in and placed his own lips on the other side of his thumbs.
What the Hades…?
It took me a second, but I realized the wet smacking noise was coming from Liam’s mouth, which was separated from mine by less than half an inch. When he moaned out my name I knew he meant it as an admonishment for not joining in quickly enough, so I grabbed onto his shoulders, tilted my head, and attempted to make my own make-out noises.
At first it was awkward and weird because, come on, I was fake making out with Liam freaking Cole. But then something changed. I don’t know what it was, but one minute I was feeling more than a little ridiculous and the next my heart was going all pitter-patter. Occasionally the corner of Liam’s lip would brush against my flesh and it would cause little electrical storms of sensation to travel from that spot all over my body. Being that close, his smell, which Wolf Scout has always appreciated, completely encompassed me. I found myself flicking out my tongue to see if his skin tasted as good. And then I might have sort of tried to suck his thumb into my mouth. Fortunately, somewhere between opening my mouth and actually doing something stupid, I realized what I was doing and jerked back.
“She’s gone,” I croaked out through my now too small windpipe.
For the record, Liam looked like he just finished changing the batteries in a remote control. “Good.”
I pressed tightly up against the window. It was too bad I couldn’t pull a Kitty Pryde and phase through the side of the bus. Sure, we were running seventy miles an hour down the Interstate, so there were some risks involved there, but I was willing to take them if it meant getting the Hades away from Liam.