Free Longing for Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 5) by Roxie Noir Page B

they?”
    “Yeah.”
    There was another long pause, and Calder laced his fingers through Sam’s, warm and familiar. Calder looked down at their hands, then at Sam’s arm.
    “I’m scared that I’m the same,” Calder said. “I’m afraid that I left and did all these things that I thought would make me better, that would make me fix myself, and none of it worked.”
    He swallowed and looked over at Sam.
    “And then I got back, and I saw you, and you changed. You got through it and you did all this self-improvement, and now I feel left behind, in the dust.”
    “Calder,” said Sam.
    “You look different,” Calder went on. “Remember when I knew your body by heart? I don’t anymore. Not because I forgot but because I got left behind.”
    “I lived in our house for a year after you left,” Sam said. “I told myself I was going to live there forever. That I was going to die there, with all her things and all your things, and by God, I believed it. For a long, long time.”
    He swallowed, remembering that year. He’d felt like a ghost, like he haunted the world instead of living in it.
    “And then, one morning, I got up and I threw away a pair of her shoes.”
    Calder squeezed his hand.
    “Then I threw away more, and I learned to cook and I started an apprenticeship and, for fuck’s sake, I started meditating . I went to a shitload of therapy. I moved out of that house. And years went by. And one day I realized that I was never getting either of you back but maybe everything was okay anyway, that I could get by picking up blue-eyed men in bars and running a tattoo shop and reading thick Russian novels at night.”
    “And I showed up and ruined it?”
    “And I saw you holding a bunch of plates in a doorway and almost forgot how to breathe,” Sam said. The words were pouring out of him now, the pure, unvarnished truth.  
    “I’m never going to get over you, even if I never see you again. I hate knowing that, but it’s true.”
    Sam took a deep breath. Calder’s thumb rubbed over the knuckles of his hand, something Calder had always done automatically, without thinking.
    “I almost didn’t come to Greta’s wedding because I was afraid you’d found someone else,” Calder said. “I don’t know what I’d have done. I’d have walked into the sea. I’d have dug a hole and buried myself.”
    “Is that why you had to get shitfaced before you showed up at my door, you were afraid of what you’d find?”
    Calder smiled.
    “I could have handled that better,” he said.
    “You could have asked your sister,” Sam pointed out.
    Calder laughed. “It didn’t even occur to me to ask,” he said. “I just thought about that moment where you held the door open for me a thousand times, because I had all these crazy fantasies that I’d see you again and the stars would fall from the heavens and an orchestra would play and we’d kiss and then skip through a meadow or something stupid. And then I did see you and the stars didn’t fall. You held a door open and I just walked through it and I was on the other side, and that was all.”
    “The stars never fall,” Sam said. “You remember our first date?”
    “You mean the time we ate dinner together in the dining hall in college?” Calder asked, grinning. “The stars didn’t fall for you?”
    “Not even when my roommate walked in our ‘study session’ afterwards,” Sam said. “He didn’t talk to me for about a week after that.”
    They watched the river for a moment and Sam thought back to all those years ago, when he’d met another college junior in his psychology class with deep blue eyes and wild black hair. They’d both nearly failed the psychology class, despite studying together constantly.
    “It was stupid of me to think,” Calder said. “I’ve been reading too many books where that happens. Two people see each other, the world stops spinning. Fireworks explode, there are grand romantic gestures, someone says a bunch of pretty shit to