Finding My Pack (23 page)

  Remy clears his throat, getting everyone's attention. He isn't crying, but his eyes are shiny. "Right, everyone out." They all make to leave us, except Reed. He holds onto me tighter.

  Before Remy can yell at him for not listening I bring my lips to Reed's ear. "Go on to your room Reed, as soon as I'm done here, I'll come find you, okay?" Reed clears his throat, standing. I yank the sketch book from his hand before he goes. I don't think he can handle what's in there. None of them can. Funny to think that I can do something they can't.

  Once they're gone, Remy asks. "So was anything missing?" I nod and tell him about the missing security tapes. "Did you ever watch them? Do you know what's on them?" He asks, looking hopeful.

  I shake my head. "I never knew how to look at them. I don't think anyone knew I had them, though. Just the guy who gave them to me." I say.

  Remy frowns. "What were you hoping to gain from them, Kitten? Just to know what your mother looked like?"

  "I'm not sure I ever really cared about her Remy, she threw me away. Mostly I just wanted to know how old I am."

  "What do you mean how old you are. You said you were sixteen." He's as white as a ghost. What's wrong with him now, I wonder?

  "I am sixteen. At least sixteen. I've counted sixteen summers, I just don't know how old I was when I started counting." I reply, tilting my head at his weird reaction.

  He blows out a relieved breath. "Okay then, that's okay. Kellan should be able to help you with that."

  "Okay." I get up and make my way to Reed's room.

  "Don't ever fucking scare me like that again Kitten."

  I keep walking. I don't know what he means. "Okay," I say again anyway.

I
  run up the stairs to Reed's cloud room and find him looking dejected slumped over on the corner of his bed. I need to make him smile again. I drop to my hands and knees in the doorway and slowly crawl towards him. He meets my eyes on my approach and my lips lift in the corners. When I make it to him, I nudge my face into the side of his leg, butting my head against his knees so he'll open them. I hear his intake of breath when I perch my head on the inside of his thigh. I blink up at him with half closed lids.

  "What are you doing Kitten?" Reed's voice sounds breathy and gruff. Probably from the crying, I think. His ever changing eyes stay on mine the whole time.

  "I'm being a wolf," I say simply. Apparently a bad one if he didn't get it.

  "Oh." Is all he says. I pout at him, I was trying to be funny, but I guess it didn't work. He tugs at the band in my hair, making it fall free to the floor. It was starting to give me a headache.

  I groan in pleasure at having my scalp set free. "That feels so much better."

  "Kitten, you are either the most naive girl in the world or the sneakiest," Reed says, finally giving me a smile. A small one, but it's a start. I, however, frown at him. What does he mean? That gets me a light laugh and a slightly bigger smile.

  "I suppose it's the latter then." He pets my hair and I pretend to wiggle my tail. Not that I have one, I'm just shaking my butt like an idiot. It works this time though, and his head goes back in a big laugh.

  I pull back at sit on my knees watching as my sad boy turns happy once more. I smile up at him, wishing he could stay this way. He looks down at me with what I think is an adoring look. Shaking his head slowly, he takes my arms and pulls me to standing.

  "Scoot over." I nudge him back to the headboard and climb up beside him, bouncing a little. "I've missed your cloud bed Reed. Can I stay here with you tonight?"

  "Of course you can. My cloud bed and I have missed you too." I lean in and kiss his cheek. Then decide to just stay there, pressed into his side with my head on his shoulder. It will be easier to talk about what we have to talk about if I don't have to look at him.

  "I don't want you to be sad because of me anymore Reed," I say quietly. His response is to kiss the crown of my head.

  "I mean it. I want to be around you more, talk to you and tell you things, do your yoba exercise. But it seems like every time I open my mouth you get sad and pull away from me. Tell me what to do here Reed. Do you want me to fake smiles and only talk about rainbows and puppies?"

  He laughs lightly. "First off it's called yoga, not yoba, and secondly, no, I would never want you to be fake around me Kitten." He sighs heavily. "I just hate so badly what you went through. The kind of life you had to live. It's sad and it's heartbreaking and it tears me up inside. When I look at you I see a beautiful girl with a beautiful heart and the deepest, purest soul. You have deserved so much better than what you have gotten."

  I smile, he's sad because he cares. "Kitten, do you know how many people walked by those goldfish at the fair? How many people played that game and took one of them home or threw it in the trash because they got tired of carrying it?" He asks.

  "No."

  "Thousands, if not tens of thousands. Your very first time there, you not only refuse to support the game, but you chose to do something about it. Not after you got fed up with it, but immediately. That's such a rare thing Kitten, you have no idea. Then on the roller-coaster you thought you were right and you were willing to defend your belief, even though we told you it was wrong. You're just so...." Reed releases a huge breath, obviously not able to think of the right word.

  I save him from having to think about it. "Reed, do you think I would be the goldfish rescuing, belief defending person that you seem to admire so much if I didn't live the life that I did?"

  He moves me so he's right in front of my face. "Yes, I do Kitten, I think you'd be just the way you are no matter what. You're perfect." I close my eyes against his words. I can't wrap my head around how this attractive, sensitive, and all around good guy thinks I'm perfect. He has a cloud bed in a cloud room for crap's sake. He's the perfect one.

  "You're wrong on both counts Reed. Without pain there is no pleasure, without sadness there is no happiness, without knowing what it is like to go without you cannot appreciate when you have enough. I know that you know that Reed. I'm not perfect. I'm not anything. I'm just me."

  "And to me, you are perfect," He says. O...Kay. We're going in circles here.

"I guess you are entitled to think what you want, and so am I. You don't know everything about me."

Reed leans his head back on the headboard. I guess he's getting frustrated too. We are, after all, arguing about something that doesn't matter. "I know enough," He whispers to the ceiling.

  "Enough to what?" I ask.

  "Enough to know that I could love you for eternity Kitten Whatever-your-last-name-is."

  Holy crap! Did Reed just say he loved me? Well...not technically but yeah...sort of, he did! "Oh, Reed....no, you can't say that. You can't know that." I plead with him.

  Reed smiles widely, rocking his head side to side. "See, any other girl would just say it back. Hear me telling her I think she's perfect and agree. But not you. You try to convince me otherwise. Perfection." He says.

  I grab a pillow and hit him lightly with it. "Whatever. You still don't know me." I mumble.

  He scoots down on the bed until he's lying on his side, one arm propping up his head. I follow his lead, doing the same. "All you could do is tell me in words about you when you've already shown me in actions. But I still want you to tell me. Tell me about you Kitten, the REAL you."

How does one respond to that? I chew on my bottom lip, thinking hard for the right thing to say. I'm drawing a big fat blank. "Ask me a question, a non-vague one," I tell him.

  "Okay, what's your first memory?" Hmm...to tell the truth or not. He told me not to be fake.

  "I remember feeling sick. My tummy was upset. The crazy cat lady shushed me and told me to drink my milk. I didn't want the milk. I remember thinking that all I ever had was milk. I tried to tell her that my tummy hurt and she slapped me and told me that cats don't talk." I answer, hoping he won't be sad.

  Reed closes his eyes and shakes his head. "How old were you?"

  "I don't know. It was before I started counting my summers."

  "Counting your summers?" He questions.

  I nod. "Yes, I've counted sixteen summers so far."

  His eyebrows lift at this. "So you might be one to three years older?"

  "I guess so, I can't remember when I started counting. The librarian told me once that I looked around four years old. I accepted that as my age at the time, but I don't know for sure."

"Is the librarian the one who taught you to read?"

  "Yes and no. I had a theory when I was younger. The bigger the building, the less I got noticed. The library downtown is a pretty big building. I stumbled in there one day because it was raining and cold. I loved the smell of it instantly." I smile remembering. "I heard someone reading out loud in a colorful corner, I followed the voice and saw other kids staring at a lady with a book. I had discovered story time. I went every other day and listened to the different people reading. Sometimes they gave the kids their own copies of the books to follow along. I made sure I always got a book and picked up a lot of the words that way."

  Reed grins at me. "You were such a smart little girl."

  I shrug again. "Maybe, or maybe I just loved the stories so much that I grew impatient."

  He laughs heartily at that. "I could see that being true."

  "Yeah, so I just consumed book after book after that. I grew tired with the children's books quickly as I never recognized anything in them and it frustrated me." I giggle. "I now realize that children's books are all about imagination. That concept was just too hard for me then. I had asked the librarian for something else to read and she turned me onto books about States and Countries and Presidents, things like that. I asked her what a word meant once and she gave me a dictionary. If I didn't understand a concept she'd give me another book, explaining what the other book meant. To me, it was a game. I thought it was fun."

"You have that in common with Finn. He likes to learn everything about everything. Social wise he's a bit of a dummy but if it's in a book then he probably knows it." I smile at that. As a wolf, he once pushed me into a library.

  "We're talking an awful lot about me, when do I get to hear about you?" I ask hopefully.

  Reed shakes his head. "Two more questions then I'll tell you my story. Deal?" I nod my head eagerly. There's so much I want to know. "Tell me how you managed to survive out there Kitten, I know your heart is big but your body is small and you had no real guidance. It seems impossible that you've made it this far with so little help."

  I understand why this is so hard for him to accept. I've seen many a street kid fall from their path. Either from drugs and prostitution to joining gangs and doing bad things out of desperation.

  "Well, you know about the crazy cat lady. I left her to escape the milk feedings and punishments. The first place I ended up finding was the hospital. No one really looked at me there. The cat lady had beaten into my brain the fact that social services people were evil and to stay under their radar at all costs. At the hospital, food was easy to come by. There would be trays of it in sleeping people's rooms all the time. I learned quickly when meal times were around there and made sure to be there. If I got caught, the sick people or nurse who caught me just thought I was a kid who wondered off but that I was supposed to be there."

  "How long did you do that for? Surely someone noticed that you were there every day." Reed chimes in.

I smirk at him. "The cat lady had me stealing food as soon as I could walk. She wouldn't give me any of it, but still, it was a skill I possessed. Hospitals are big and people are busy, as long as I moved around, from ward to ward, and didn't get greedy nobody noticed me. They even had toy areas in some of the waiting rooms. I'd sit and play for hours on a rainy day."

  "That's where you learned to count isn't it?" It's Reed's turn to smirk now. My eyebrows go up in question. He rolls his eyes. "I've been dragged to a lot of hospitals over the years with Kellan, every single one of them have those rings you slide across the bar in different colors."

  I giggle. "You're right. I still count in color to this day. One is green, two is purple and so on. I saw a kid doing it once and then I did it."

"Just once?"

  I bite my lip, hating to tell people this about myself. He'd probably learn soon anyways. "Yeah, just once. I found out later, with the help of the librarian, that I have a photographic memory. Images are stored in my head like a real life flip book. I can call on any file in there when I want or need it." I peek up at him, ready for him to say I'm a freak.

He doesn't though, he just has an awestruck look on his face. "That's amazing Kitten. That explains a lot actually."

  I'm not sure what he means, but I continue on, not wanting to dwell on this. "So yeah, the hospital. I stumbled upon a children's burn unit at some point. They had the best toys in the hospital. The other kids in there didn't judge me and I ended up making quite a few friends. They'd give me their Jell-O which was the best thing ever in the whole world. I spent my time there playing with them and trying to cheer them up. I hated when they were sad too." I pause, giving Reed a meaningful look.

  "Things were great then, but of course, it couldn't last. Anywhere else in the hospital I fit in, but there I stood out like a sore thumb. A nurse found me once and dragged me into the hallway. She told me that I was dirty and had germs and I'd get my friends sick if I kept showing up. I didn't want to hurt them so I never went back.