Change For Me (Werewolf Romance) (The Alpha's Kiss) (5 page)

“Wow,” I whispered. How cool would that be? Picking stories to run in the biggest and, well maybe one of the only, papers left.

Ms. Evers laughed again. “It’s not as crazy as it sounds.” Both her voice, and the practiced non-regional accent started to loosen up, probably to get me to relax a little more. “Basically I’m in charge of the weekend thing that tells people which shows to go see and which movies suck. And call me Jolie. I can tell I like you already. Okay,” there was another few seconds of shuffling papers. “Graduation’s coming up pretty soon, huh?”

She was filling time.

“Yeah,” I said. “Or well, it was last weekend.”

“Oh!” more shuffling, “congrats, then. Have you picked out a college?”

I bit my lip. That was the question I learned to avoid at all costs. “No, well, there are a few that I’m looking –”

“It took me a few tries. I went to Rutgers for six weeks, stopped going to class, the old story. Eventually I ended up in New York, took some community college credits and finished a degree at NYU. But, it took a whole lot longer than it was supposed to. I was on the seven year degree track.”

I liked her.
Really
liked her. She had this cadence that was nice. And, Jolie’s quick then slow then quick rate of talking was a lot like mine, so that made me feel right at home.

“You have no idea how nice it is to hear that.” I had somehow relaxed, and I never relax on the phone. “I’m not gonna lie, it feels like everyone expects me to go to college because I’m not like... a giant lunk, you know? But I just don’t really know.”

“Well, if it helps, I can tell you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. Morons don’t send – okay, that’s not true. Plenty of morons send story ideas to us, but they aren’t
this
cool. I swear I had my notes around here somewhere, I’m sorry to waste your time like this.”

I couldn’t tell her how nothing had been such a waste of my time as sitting around and pining for Damon had been. This short and strange little conversation was really welcome. Just a couple of minutes on the phone with this lady had me almost half-way back to normal. Or, normal for me, anyway.

“Oh shit, here they are. Sorry. I swear out of the blue a lot too, another of my better features.”

I couldn’t help but laugh a little. “Happens to me all the time. Grandpa says I remind him of some of his army buddies.”

“You live with your grandpa out there? What’s that town called?” She asked.

“Fort Branch, and yeah, I live with my Grandpa Joe. My parents died about ten years ago and he fought for me. One of my aunts wanted to raise me – she’s got a bunch of kids – but he wasn’t going to have any part of that.” I stopped for a second. “Sorry, I’m just going on and on about shit that doesn’t matter. Oops. See?”

It was her turn to chuckle. “No, not at all, this is all great stuff. Your story idea was about the desert folk legends and the magic and mysticism that your grandpa tells you about.” I heard tapping, like she was taking notes or maybe writing a distracted email. “The story is as much
your
story as it is about werewolves and ancient spirits and all that. So, no, this is important.”

I didn’t really know what else to say. It’s easy for me to babble when I’m nervous, but suddenly, my nerves weren’t on edge so the words didn’t come so easily. “What else do you need to know? Oh and what was it that you thought was so cool about the story? You never said.”

“Ah,” she sighed. “Yeah, I do
that
too. I can’t find... oh, okay here we go. Right, what hit me about this is how real it is.”

“Real?” I said. “They’re just stories.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. Most of the things like this that come across my desk are from whackjobs with an agenda. Yours is very, uh, earnest? By real, I mean it’s about real people and real things, not necessarily that the subjects of the folktales are real. Make sense?”

“Yeah, I think so. You want to run my story?” I was getting so giddy I had almost started vibrating.

More tapping on her keyboard, then Jolie said, “Yeah, but you gotta get it written first. Now, the way this works is that you write the piece and send it to me by the deadline. I look over it and tell you if there’s anything that needs re-writing, like if something doesn’t make sense, or whatever. Then we run it past our editing team who fixes comma splices and a bunch of other things I don’t care about, and we run the story.”

“Wow,” I said again in another whisper. “I can’t believe this.”

“Yeah, I remember when I got my first story run. Wait. Is this your first one?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Well I worked on the school paper, but nothing like this, ever.”

“Good. Okay well first of all, there’s nothing to worry about. We don’t have any space for your piece for like three months, so there’s no rush. How about we put the deadline at the end of the summer? That way we’ll be able to go back and forth and get it just perfect before it goes out to millions of readers across the planet.”

When she said that, my stomach at once tied in a knot, fell, and landed about a quarter-inch above my bladder. A heavy feeling settled right above the lump in my gut. And for all the stupid times for my mind to swerve back to Damon, it just
had
to be right then.

More than once, when I’d been in a bad mood, or I wrote something that I thought sucked, he always told me it was good. There was one time that stuck in my mind when I spent like a month writing an article about water usage in the desert that I was sure was the most boring thing on earth. He sat there and read it, and actually asked questions afterwards. For all his weird distance, he never made me feel bad about anything I wrote.

“Uh-oh,” Jolie said. “I didn’t mean to freak you out. You okay?”

My phone beeped. A text came through, but I wasn’t about to stop paying attention to this for a text from anyone. As soon as I was able to realize that I didn’t have a future, I’d started fretting. That was about two years ago. Jolie, calling me from the
Times
, about to run my story, was the first time I’d actually felt like maybe there was a way out. If I did a good job, maybe they’d run another and another... maybe end up in New York? I had to snap myself out of that rabbit hole.

Again, my damn phone beeped and again I ignored first the second, then the third obnoxious little chiming sound, and blinked hard. I had to focus. This was the opportunity I’d wanted for as long as I could remember.

“No, sorry, someone keeps sending me texts so my phone is making that noise. To be honest though, when you said millions, it kinda hit me that this whole thing was actually real, you know?”

“Ha, yeah, I get that. It’ll be fine, I promise. That’s why I want to make sure you’ve got plenty of time for editing and everything. Now what I’m going to need from you is...”

Jolie told me all about the deadline, the word count and everything else she required from me, but the whole time all I could think about was the strange stuff that happened with Damon, despite my attempt to pay attention.

I was just... a mess. I was sitting there on the phone, listening to the biggest opportunity of my life and I couldn’t make myself pay attention to her. She kept going on about werewolf this, ancient magic that, but none of it could get through the feedback loop in my head.

Damon and me, that’s all it was, all that went through my mind. The way he kissed me after so long, and those words he said – that he wanted to tell me, but just couldn’t to protect me – and asking about Devin. It was all just so confusing and so strange.

I shook my head, starting to get annoyed with myself.

“And that’s all there is to it. Any questions?” she asked.

God did I ever have questions. So many I hadn’t the first clue where to start. So instead, I just said, “No! That all sounds great. You’re emailing me all the instructions, right? I don’t want to miss anything.”

More like ‘I haven’t been listening to you for the past five minutes’.

“Yeah, and I’ll send you the contract, too. It's standard stuff. We just have to write up a thing that says you understand that if someone wants to publish it in a book or whatever, it will go through us. You’ll get the five-hundred bucks on publication of the article, and if it
does
end up going into a book, you’ll get half of the proceeds and we get the rest.”

“Fine, yeah, that’s all great,” I said. My head was a thousand miles away.

I started feeling hot, then cold, then hot again, like some kind of energy was passing through me, radiating from the middle of my body to my fingertips and my toes. I had no idea what was going on, but it was vaguely pleasant, if a little frightening.

Jolie said something else, and we both said our goodbyes. I’m sure mine sounded very distracted, but with the way I was feeling, I needed to sit down, and
fast
. The weird sensation inside me wasn’t letting up. It just kept getting stronger and stronger until I had trouble keeping my breath going.

When I finally made it back inside and flopped on the couch, I sat there for a second before reaching for the coffee I had poured right before Jolie called.

My hand is... it’s shaking. What is going on with me?

I wrapped my fingers around the handle of the mug, squeezing until they were still. I braced myself against as a wave of force slammed into me – a force with nothing to see. There was nothing visible, nothing to hear or taste or smell, just energy pounding against my stomach.

Without warning, the strangest damn thing in the world happened. I heard static – no, I
felt
it. My nerves and my mind both went a little hazy, like I was right on the verge of fainting, but instead of slumping over and blacking out, a voice broke through the interference. But... no, calling it a voice isn’t right. It was more like a feeling put to words.

Slowly, I sipped my coffee, but my hand was shaking so hard a little spilled on my chin and I gave up.

“What is this?” I said out loud to no one, “what’s happening to me?”

Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard a wailing sound, high-pitched, off and on, like a voice that I couldn’t understand. But then, just when I thought there was nothing else that could surprise me, an incredible feeling of peace overcame me just as I saw his face.

Damon.
I reached out, like I could possibly grab the hallucination, and to my shock, I felt the stubble on the vision’s cheeks. I caressed him with the back of my hand and stroked his bottom lip, letting the warmth of his being course through me.

And then, just like that, it was gone.

My pulse was a short thud set against the long, unchanging, droning sound in my head. It was real though, the sound was real.

I turned my head left and right looking for some kind of anchor, something to hold. I felt like my being was slipping away.

“Leroy!” It was Grandpa Joe coming through the clattering screen, his voice distant.

And then everything went black.

––––––––

“Y
ou took quite a spill,” Grandpa said, dabbing my forehead with a cloth. “Seem okay now, though. What happened?”

“I...” I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hands. They were wet from the cloth.  “I don’t know. How long have I been out?”

He checked his watch. “Not very long. Couple minutes maybe? I came in just as you were checking out.”

Grandpa wiped my forehead again and sat down in front of me, watching closely. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I just... I dunno, felt all weird and then passed out. It was like my head was humming, and then I saw what I guess was a dream or something, like when you’re half asleep, you know?”

“Hmm,” he leaned closer. “What was it?”

“The image? It’s kind of embarrassing, but I saw Damon’s face right before everything started vibrating or whatever. I tried to... coffee. I had coffee, where is it?”

Grandpa shook his head. “No coffee that I saw. No nothing.”

“No, that’s impossible. I poured a cup of coffee, then the woman from the
Times
called and as soon as I got off the phone with her, I sat down and all that stuff happened.” I chewed my lip.

There had to be some way to know whether it was all yet another stupid hallucination. Ever since Damon had apparently vanished right after leaving the house, it was hard to prove anything was real. “Could you hand me my phone?” I tried to sit up, felt weird again, and then just pointed. I hated being helpless, but it was better than splitting my head open.

He handed it over, kind of grimacing as he did. “You were really pale when I came in. Maybe that’s not a good idea?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I grabbed it and unlocked the screen.

The first thing I did was check to make sure the call from Jolie wasn’t a hallucination. Immediately after ascertaining that I wasn’t totally insane, I flipped to my texts.

It wasn’t just the two messages I thought I missed, there were eight of them. Every single one, of course, was from Damon. The weirdest thing though, is they all said the same thing.
“Forget about me, Lily, I’m sorry I went to your house the other day, I never should have done that.”

Eight times, he sent the same message. Strangest of all is that I know he sent it eight different times, because the time-stamp was thirty seconds apart on each one. Like he pushed send on the first one, then just sent the rest of them one after the other.

While I sat there with the phone in my hand, it buzzed again. Closing my eyes, I pushed the button to open the message. When I looked again, it was the next in a line of really bizarre surprises.

“Caitlyn?” I said out loud. “What the hell do you want?”

She’d been dating Devin off and on for what seemed like eternity, but the last thing in the world I expected was for her to text me asking if I’d seen him. Briefly, I considered sending some snotty
‘of course I haven’t you smug bitch’
message, but very quickly chose not to be quite so awful.

Then, just when I was about to send back a diplomatic ‘no’, Damon’s strange questioning from last week struck me. When I told him that Devin had been at graduation he’d been both confused and a little irritated looking, but he never expanded on his question. Never told me why he asked.