Cold Chicken

Beck POV I felt like s**t. I hadn't meant for her to see me. I had closed the bar and told myself I was going for a run, the same as I had told myself every night that week, and every night the run had ended at the same tree line. Tonight was her night off. There was nobody to walk home. I came anyway. I was only going to look at the house. Then she came out of it barefoot, in the middle of the night, hauling a bag of his bottles across the yard. I stood there like an i***t and put my foot down on a stick. Now she was on the ground and bleeding, and I had done it. I could smell it, bright and sharp over the wet grass. It looked bad from where I was. The cut was long, and she was holding the arm away from her body like it hurt to bend. And I was sitting. I want that understood. I am the Alpha of Cedar Ridge. I have not taken an order since my father died. Grown wolves look at the floor when I walk into a room. Then a human pointed at me from flat on her back and said "sit," and my ass hit the grass before she had finished the word. A human. A very sexy human, in very small shorts, but a human. I would have liked to blame the wolf. He was no help. He was delighted. His mate had told him to do something, and he had done it, and as far as he was concerned, it was the best night of his life. I needed a better look at that arm. I couldn't stand up. Standing up was what had scared her. So I got as low as I could and went forward on my belly, one paw at a time, as slowly as I have ever done anything. I stopped every few inches to check her face. I thought I was being subtle about it. "I can see you, you know," she said. I froze with one paw in the air. She looked at me. I looked at her. There was all of me, flat in the grass, with nowhere to hide. Her mouth twitched. "You're not very good at this, are you?" No. I wasn't. She let out a long breath, and some of the fear went with it. She sat all the way up, with the hurt arm tucked against her stomach. Then she held out her good hand, low, with the fingers curled under, the way you're supposed to with a dog you don't know. "Okay," she said softly. "Come here. Easy." I went. I crossed the last few feet on my belly, because I had started that way and it seemed worse to quit, and I put my nose to her knuckles. Soap. Honey. Cardboard. Her. "There you go. Look at you. You're just a big baby." I let that stand. "Let's see if you belong to somebody." Her hand slid up over my muzzle and into the thick fur at my neck. She was feeling for a collar. She worked her fingers down through it, all the way around, careful and thorough. There was nothing there for her to find. It was the first time she had ever touched me. I had thought about her hands on me every night since Alder Lane, in more ways than I could count. Not one of them had looked like this. I had four legs and a tail, and she was checking me for tags. I didn't care. I pushed my whole head into her palms and shut my eyes. She laughed, quiet and surprised. Her thumbs rubbed behind my ears, and I felt it all the way down my spine. I had no right to it. She thought she was petting somebody's lost dog. She didn't know whose head she was holding, and she had a man who would be home by seven. I knew all of that. I stayed right where I was. "No collar," she said. "Who do you belong to, huh?" You, the wolf said. I told him to shut up. She winced then, and looked down. The blood had run to her elbow. "Okay. I have to go deal with this." She got her feet under her, stood, and pointed at me again. "Stay." I stayed. I watched her through the window over the sink. She ran the tap over the cut and hissed through her teeth. She wrapped her forearm in gauze, and she held one end of it in her teeth to pull it tight, because there was nobody there to hold it for her. There should have been somebody there to hold it for her. She came back out with a mixing bowl of water in her good hand and a paper plate balanced on top. She set them both down in the grass. It was cold chicken. She had pulled it off the bone for me. "Go on. You look hungry." I had eaten a steak at six o'clock. She sat down on the back steps and watched me with her chin in her hand, hopeful. So the Alpha of Cedar Ridge ate cold leftover chicken off a paper plate in the dark, and his wolf wagged the whole time. When it was gone, I backed off to the middle of the yard, where I couldn't scare her. I lay down with my head on my paws. I should have left. I should have gone back into the trees and stayed there. She pulled her knees up and wrapped her good arm around them.