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  Gathering her strength, she inched herself off of the bed. Her legs were freezing, as were her toes when they touched the wooden floor. She was wearing her t-shirt, but where were her pants? Looking down at her bare legs, she noticed they were covered in cuts and scrapes; presumably from her fall in the woods. The last thing she remembered was that wolf, or had it even been a wolf? She remembered falling, tumbling violently against the ground before landing hard on her back. The wind was knocked from her chest, and she stared up at the blackness surrounding her while she felt the rain pelt her face.

  Her pants were neatly folded on a small stool near a closet. She looked around the room. It was small, the walls made of thick wooden logs and not even decorated. The only sign of décor was a picture frame laid flat on a dresser. Mia walked over to it, looking towards the door to see if her captor, or Rowan, would come back. She turned up the frame and saw the smiling faces of Rowan’s parents staring right back at her. It was extremely outdated, one of those photos from an old photography studio, but Mia knew it was Rowan’s parents.

  Another loud noise, followed by a harsh curse came from outside of the room. Mia followed it, her heart pounding, and cut up knees aching with each step. She had waited years for this moment but never thought it happen like this. She shuffled to the doorway, barely containing her breath as she reached for the doorknob. All it took was one little turn of it to see Rowan again.

  With her eyes closed, Mia worried this was still a dream and that she'd see her best friend, fourteen years old, standing in front of her. She pictured the blood seeping from his torn clothes, pouring onto the floor and from his mouth. She had to force her eyes open in fear that it would be the truth. Finally, she yanked open the door as if she were ripping off a Band-Aid.

  The hallway was empty, but she could see that one door was open to her right, the sound of creaking pipes and rushing water faintly coming from it. Mia crept towards it. I’m in the wrong house, she thought, this is all just my imagination. But she thought of the quilt and the picture and knew that it just had to be the truth. She stood in the doorway, shocked at the sight of him staring at himself in the mirror, studying his own face.

  She couldn't feel the words rising up in her throat. They stayed put, forming a lump that she wouldn't be able to swallow. She didn't have to say anything. Rowan noticed her in the doorway and gave a sharp startled cry at the sight of her.

  "Mia!" the name sounded almost foreign from his mouth, but it was still familiar as it hung in the thick steamy air around them. Mia stood like a statue, her arms firm at her sides, as she took in the sight of him. He had just taken a shower and was half dressed. His skin was still dewy from the steam that lingered over his tight chest. Water drizzled over his glossy abs and his bulging arms. Rowan tousled his still-wet hair as he stared into Mia's eyes. The gesture alone was enough to bring Mia back to that place in the past. Rowan had certainly grown over the past fifteen years, and time had certainly been in his favor. The only things that stood out were the thick scars that covered his body. A flash of the horrible attack pierced through her mind like a sharp pinprick, but she shook it off.

  The moment lingered between them. What was she supposed to say after all this time apart? Rowan used to be a phantom, always floating in the background of her thoughts and her dreams. And yet, here he was in the flesh, living and breathing in front of her. She realized she didn't have any words, even though she had had so much time to plan them. Warm tears welled up in her eyes and she figured she wouldn't say anything. Instead, she walked towards him, wrapping her arms around his sturdy waist.

  It took Rowan by surprise. He was as stiff as an arrow as she held tightly to him. He was still wet, but Mia didn't care. She was with her best friend once again and closed her eyes in a strange feeling of relief. He was alive, and he was back in her life again. She felt his large hands reaching around her, clutching the small of her back so lightly as if he was afraid of touching her. It was a strange embrace, in which Mia realized that she had never seen Rowan this way before, and it gave her a strange prickling feeling in her chest, almost like lightning.

  “I missed you,” she whispered. “I missed you so much…”

  She pulled away, beaming. She expected him to do the same, but to her dismay his face was gravely serious now, studying her, not sure if she was real. She waited to hear him say the same words, but instead, he let go of her as he awkwardly took a few steps back, as if it weren't appropriate for them to be touching.

  "You, um, your pants…" Rowan said as he looked down at her lacy underwear, almost covered up by her t-shirt. Mia's face grew hot as she pulled her shirt down further over them. Rowan averted his gaze to the floor, finding his t-shirt and covering up his rippling abs and jagged scars.

  She wasn't expecting a reaction like that from him and had only pictured the Rowan from her dreams. Then again Rowan had never seen her like that before, with so few clothes.

  "Sorry," Mia said. "It's just, it's been a long time, hasn't it? You look good." A thick awkwardness stood like a wall in between them, and Mia's first reaction was to get out of the bathroom.

  "Have, uh, have you eaten yet?" Rowan asked. His voice was cool and quiet as if he wasn't used to speaking. Mia shook her head as she stepped out of the room, feeling a strange pang of what felt like guilt or embarrassment she couldn't tell. She'd pictured meeting Rowan over and over again in her mind, and this moment was nothing like any of those encounters.

  Mia watched Rowan, sitting in the dusty chair as he stirred a pot on his outdated stove.

  "These are just leftovers," he said. "I hope you don't mind."

  Mia shook her head. "Are you seriously asking if I mind, after all those times I've been to your house on leftovers night?" She joked. Surprisingly, Rowan almost chuckled, a small crack in the corner of his mouth almost turning into a smile. Mia was slightly relieved now. The same Rowan was still in there somewhere.

  He stood stiffly by the bubbling soup.

  "It's ready," he said and waited. Mia stood, about to serve herself, but Rowan stepped forward. "Wait," he said. "Sorry, how rude of me." He reached into a small cupboard and carefully ladled a serving of steaming vegetable soup before bringing it to the table. The rest of the table was set as if he had been expecting her for a visit. There was fresh bread in a basket and a glass of water from a speckled tin cup.

  "You have a nice place out here," Mia said. "Very…secluded." She gazed around at the bare walls. "I don't really get guests," he said as he sat in the chair in front of her. The word ‘guest' made Mia feel strange as if she were just passing through in his life instead of being his former best friend.

  The food smelled delicious, but Mia wasn't hungry. She kept eyeing Rowan as he ate quietly.

  "How did you find me?" She asked.

  Rowan looked up from his food and calculated his answer carefully. "I was coming back from town," he said. "I saw you in the ditch and pulled you out." Mia didn't believe him. She hadn't seen a single soul on the streets earlier, and she had fallen too far down the ditch for Rowan just to see her casually.

  "You found me all the way down there?" She prodded. His eyes darted away from her again as if he were afraid to look for too long. Mia decided to go right for it, the question she'd been longing to ask for fifteen years. "Rowan…where did you go?" She hadn't spoken his name for a while. It lingered on her lips, tingling over the tip of her tongue like it was a magic word.

  Rowan tore into a piece of bread. Mia noticed his hands were shaking slightly. He winced as he took a bite, tucking the food into his cheek.

  "Well, there was the accident," he said plainly. "I remember being in the hospital for a few days, and then we moved to another state." It sounded so rehearsed as if he had told everyone this. But Mia wasn't everyone else, or so she had thought.

  "I went to your new house," she said sadly. "I couldn't call you. I didn't even get a letter or anything. I didn't even get to say goodbye…I thought something terrible had happened
to you."

  “I didn’t have a phone,” Rowan said, and Mia wondered if he had heard any of her words.

  Another painful silence hovered in front of them, Rowan putting up an invisible wall. He sighed deeply, and Mia noticed his foot was bouncing up and down, something he often did when he was nervous.

  "I mean, I had tried to reach you," he said, his voice slightly shaking. "There were a lot of things that got in the way." Mia realized something was terribly wrong.

  "Like what?" She asked. Rowan jerked his head up, visibly distressed.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I think I just need a second."

  Mia wanted to ask where he was going, but he was too quick. The wooden chair squealed against the floor as he stood up and walked outside into the pouring rain.

  Mia stared at her food, desperately wanting to cry, though she didn’t know what for. She had been woven so tightly into his life. Now she felt like a loose thread waiting to be pulled out and tossed aside. He’s not the same, Mia thought. He’s just a shell of what he used to be.

  CHAPTER 7: THE PAST

  He told her she could stay, but he wasn’t sure if she did. Rowan woke up on the floor of the bathroom, as he sometimes did when he shifted through the night. He was cold against the linoleum, but he felt the warm fibers of a knitted blanket over his naked body. Pulling it closer, he recognized it was the one his mother had made that was draped over his bed. Rowan looked down at his hands, covered in mud and shredded bits of leaves. He sat up to pull the blanket from his feet. They were also caked with a crusted layer of dirt. Rowan sighed, his lungs aching from the cold air of his nightly run through the woods.

  He cursed at his mistake of the previous night. It all had gone as horribly as he always feared it would. Brian had been wrong about everything. He stood to get into the shower, which was almost his second home at that point. He really needed to get the wolf under control. He knew shifters had their triggers, and Rowan struggled with the possibility that Mia just might be his after all. Either that or the overwhelming stress that swallowed over him as soon as he saw her. Rowan had always felt like he wanted to protect Mia, and it crushed him when he realized he was only pushing her away when she was trying to get closer.

  Something skittered on the floor as he picked up the blanket. He bent down and his heart thundered in his chest as he held it in his hands. He ran in thumb in the small dents of the half circle made of clay. ‘st, dies' was clumsily painted on the ornament, and he held tightly to it. His throat tightened as he flipped it over. Mia's name was written in pen, along with the date the ornament was made. Just a few days before he had been attacked.

  Rowan pictured fourteen-year-old Mia at the art table, concentrating as her hands pinched carefully at the lump of clay. Of all the things she could have made, she decided to make something for both of them. Rowan clutched tightly to it, wishing for some kind of power to come from it. But he needed the other half for his wish to come true. He could have told Mia everything last night when he had the chance, but the wolf inside was screaming to get out again.

  He had to apologize to her somehow. After all, she had been so excited to see him. Why hadn't he felt the same? Especially when he had held her. It had all felt so strange to him, as if he wasn't supposed to be a part of her life anymore. He walked towards his bedroom, reaching for the doorknob. He pictured her sound asleep, wrapped comfortably in his sheets. He'd make her breakfast, maybe try all of this again. Maybe then he could answer all of her questions.

  But she wasn't there. The sheets lay twisted into crooked layers on an empty bed. Rowan felt hurt now. He had ruined everything, and all it was all the monster’s fault. He pulled at the empty covers. The bed was cold. It must have been hours since she had left him. Rowan felt himself shaking again, but he wasn’t about to let himself shift again. He wouldn’t give the wolf the satisfaction of coming out, not after what he had done the night before.

  Instead, he grabbed the alarm clock on his nightstand and hurled it across the room. It crashed against his closet door and burst into pieces. He shook his head, trying to regain his composure as he picked up the clock regretfully and tried to put it together. He looked up at the closet, full of secrets and things that weren't supposed to be looked at ever again. But he felt the need this one time just to look. It would only be for a second. There was only one thing he needed.

  There was a box with a few things from when he ran away. He sifted through a handful of action figures, old notes and addresses from his time away, and a folded up picture that was slightly ripped at the edges. He didn't even want to look at the letter, the one that said 'Mia' on the front in crooked letters. His hands brushed against something smooth. He lifted out the other half of the clay ornament and frantically shut everything back into the closet.

  Rowan stared down at the two halves in each of his hands. One was certainly not like the other. No matter how hard he had tried, he couldn't remove all of the blood from his half. The stain had lingered, seeped into the clay permanently. It had been in his pocket after all, while the monsters tore away at his limbs, sinking their teeth into his side. He could feel the sting of them on him now, their breath hot against his face as they growled in fury at him, hiding his terrified screams.

  He pieced them together, scowling when they didn’t quite fit the same. Each half was chipped in some way, preventing them from completely touching, though the message was still clear, ‘Best Buddies.’ Rowan placed them carefully on the bed. He wondered if he should find her, but something clawed at the back of his mind that Mia didn’t want to be found.

  He went to the coffee shop instead of the diner that day. He figured she'd be working with Louise. Even though he’d said she could stay, he still felt guilty about what had happened between them. And then there was this other horrible nagging thought, this need to mate that was growing stronger each day. The wolf wouldn’t give up until he was satisfied. His mind presented him with flashes of how Mia had looked, standing in front of him. She was so vulnerable, so delicate in that pair of underwear. Rowan clenched his teeth as he grabbed his black coffee from the counter and found a seat. How could he possibly think of that at a time like this?

  An old man offered him a seat.

  “You the guy that lives out in the woods?” He asked casually. Rowan nodded. The rest of the town knew about him. They whispered strange ideas about him at first, that maybe he could be a killer out in hiding. They weren’t completely wrong. He was hiding from something, the darkness that chased him everywhere, though he had told everyone a carefully innocent narrative. The old man tossed down a floppy newspaper onto the table. “Hope you got yourself a gun out there.” He tipped his baseball cap as he left.

  Rowan took a seat and stared down at the newspaper. The headline glared up at him: ‘Teen Girl fully Recovered after Wolf Attack.’ Rowan’s stomach gurgled inside of him. He skipped over the written interview with the victim. The rest of the article went on about the local hunting groups, spreading out and hunting wolves to protect the nearby towns. He stared down at the picture of the girl, so young. She was smiling, but her eyes looked tired and sunken in.

  They were so wide with terror when he had attacked her so long ago.

  Rowan tossed the paper over to the other table. Somehow it had found him again, even after running for so long. He had forgotten that face; had forced it from his mind. He could still see it in his nightmares though; her screams flooding his ears while his teeth sunk into her shoulder. No, he couldn't think of that here. His legs were shaking and he pressed them hard against the tiled floor, otherwise, he'd take off again, shift again, and cause even more havoc and suffering. He thought of the wolves howling the other night, the sound spreading through the forest like thin fingers, ready to pluck him out from his solitude. They were looking for him. They wanted to bring him back to them, but Rowan couldn't bear to face them after what had happened.

  He had wanted to tell Mia about this monster inside of him last night, so badly, just
to feel close to her again. When they were younger, she always had a way of comforting him, as if she could read his mind and know just the right thing to say. But what would she say if he told her how he had attacked that girl? How she had screamed and tripped over a fallen branch, the keychains on her backpack jangling onto the dirt as he jumped on her. It was all an accident. He knew it was because his abilities weren’t under control.

  And as the vision of that young girl shifted into that of Mia in his mind, Rowan feared they never would be.

  CHAPTER 8: CONNECTIONS

  Mia carried her duffel bag with her as she finished her very last shift at the diner. It was the shortest amount of time she had ever worked anywhere, with her past record being about two weeks. It was all because she had made the mistake of asking Louise about the loft, only to be told that the repairs were going to take about a week to complete.

  Mia wasn’t used to letting her emotions get the best of her. Because of Grey, she was more prone to hide her anger and her outbursts, in fear that he would do something horrible to her. But Grey wasn’t here anymore, at least that’s what she had hoped. She hadn’t meant to make a scene, but her painfully awkward reunion with Rowan combined with the fact her home was basically a huge question mark was enough for her to explode. Louise stared at her in shock, and in an instant, Mia wished that she could take it back, somehow. But it had was already too late. The entire diner had heard, not to mention the kitchen staff, their mouths agape.

  It was possibly the worst impression she could have left in Birchton, but Mia didn’t care. She was used to moving around, ever since she had left home after high-school. One could only listen to talk being a disappointment to their family for so long. Mia went from party-hopping to couch-hopping in a matter of weeks, until she ended up on Grey's couch, or his bed to be exact. Sure, she had friends, but even in those rough times, they didn't understand the pain that she carried, and that there was this strange gaping hole that had stuck with her since she was younger.