CHAPTER TEN: LUNA'S REACTIONS

The house was quiet when they pulled up.

Not the empty kind of quiet, Lily had spent enough time in genuinely empty houses to know the difference, but the waiting kind, the specific quality of silence that accumulated in rooms where something with good hearing had been listening for the sound of a particular car for the last three hours. She recognized it before she even had the truck door open, and she felt the small, warm anticipation of it, the knowledge that in approximately fifteen seconds something was going to be very glad to see her.

She was right about the fifteen seconds.

She got the front door open and Luna hit her like a wave.

Not dangerously, Luna had learned not to jump on people after the third time she'd knocked Lily's mother into the doorframe and spent two days performing elaborate, guilt-stricken apologies, but with the full-body commitment of a wolf who had been alone since seven in the morning and had opinions about that, front paws landing briefly on Lily's hips before dropping back to the floor, tail going at a speed that seemed structurally inadvisable, a sound coming out of her that wasn't quite a whine and wasn't quite a bark but lived somewhere between them in the register of pure, uncomplicated joy.

Lily grabbed her face with both hands and let Luna press into her, warm and solid and smelling like the particular combination of fur and the cedar of the living room couch cushions, which meant Luna had spent the day on the couch, which she was technically not supposed to do and absolutely always did the moment Lily left the house.

"Hi," Lily said into the top of her head. "Hi, hi, I know. I know. It was a long day. It was a long day for both of us."

Luna made the sound again, lower, pressing harder. She weighed sixty-two pounds and was not shy about distributing them.

Lily let herself be pressed against, her laptop bag sliding off one shoulder, her jacket half-on, just standing in the doorway and receiving the greeting with the specific kind of gratitude she could only feel after a day of managing her face. She hadn't realized how much she needed to be somewhere she didn't have to manage anything until this moment, until sixty-two pounds of uncomplicated love was pressing into her sternum and she could just…

Luna froze.

It happened between one breath and the next. The tail stopped. Every muscle in Luna's body went from fluid to stone in the span of a single second, her nose going up, her ears going forward, and Lily felt the change in her before she saw it, the quality of Luna's stillness was different from a moment ago, charged with something different, and she knew without turning around what Luna had scented.

Derek had come to the door.

He'd been a half-step behind her, she'd known he was there, she'd been aware of him the way she was always aware of him, that low constant signal her nervous system had taken up running in the background, and he'd stopped when she stopped, she thought. He was in the doorway but not over the threshold, backlit by the porch light, and she turned and looked at him and then down at Luna.

Luna was looking at Derek.

The hackles were up, not all of them, not the full display, but along her spine and at the back of her neck the fur had risen in the particular way it rose when she wasn't sure yet whether to be afraid or to act, the body preparing options. Her ears were forward and then back and then forward again. Her nose was working.

Then she made the sound.

It was low, and it was not the sound she'd been making ten seconds ago. It came from somewhere in the chest, below language, below thought, the sound a wolf made when it was looking at something it didn't know what to do with, when instinct was running faster than reason and what instinct was saying was unknown, unknown, unknown.

Lily's hand went to Luna's back without deciding to. She felt the raised fur under her palm and kept it there, not pressing, just present.

She looked at Derek.

He had gone still in the doorway. Not backed away, she noticed that specifically, filed it, the fact that he hadn't stepped back, but still, the way he'd been still in the cafeteria this afternoon right before he'd brought his hand down on the table. The total, deliberate quality of it, every movement suspended, making himself as unthreatening as something his size and nature could make itself. His backpack was in his hand and he'd let it lower slowly, very slowly, to hang at his side.

His eyes were on Luna.

"She's a rescue," Lily said. She didn't know why she said it. Information, maybe. Context. "She was, it took her a long time to trust people. She's not aggressive, she's…"

"I know," Derek said. Quiet. He wasn't looking at Lily. He was looking at Luna with a focused, patient attention that had no performance in it. "She doesn't know me."

"She'll…" Lily started.

"It's okay." Still quiet. "Give her a minute."

She gave her a minute.

Luna growled again, low and continuous now, and her weight had shifted back slightly, the weight of something deciding, and Lily kept her hand on her back and watched Derek not move.

Then Derek crouched down.

He did it slowly, the whole thing was slow, measured, a body in careful conversation with another body's fear, until he was down on one knee on the porch, at Luna's eye level, and he held out his hand.

Palm up.

Not reaching toward her. Not beckoning. Just held out, open, offered. The way you held your hand out to a dog that didn't know you yet, the patient grammar of here, I'm not a threat, take your time.

Luna's growl went up in pitch.

She moved forward two inches on stiff legs, the whole of her body tight with the effort of the conflict, the smell of wolf on him was something she understood, Lily thought, and the smell of alpha was something her instincts had opinions about, and neither of those things was the smell of a wolf she knew, and Luna's world was organized almost entirely around the smell of things she knew. What she knew was Lily. What she knew was Lily's mother. What she knew, now, was Kane, after two weeks of careful, patient introduction that had involved a lot of high-value treats and three separate sessions of Kane sitting on the kitchen floor and reading reports while Luna circled him from a distance before deciding he was probably fine.

Derek was not fine. Derek was in her doorway at nine thirty at night smelling like alpha and like school and like whatever it was Derek smelled like, something that Lily's own nose had made particular note of and was not going to think about right now, and Luna had not had three sessions of anything with Derek.

Luna bared her teeth.

Derek didn't flinch.

He stayed crouched with his hand out and his eyes low, not looking away from her, not dropping his gaze entirely, just angling it, the careful language of I see you, I'm not challenging you, I'm here, and the porch light caught the side of his face, and Lily saw something.

She almost missed it.

She'd been watching his hand, watching Luna, tracking the distance between them in case she needed to intervene, and she almost missed it, but she caught it in the light, the particular expression that moved across Derek's face while he waited.

It wasn't patience. Or it wasn't only patience.

He wanted this.

Not performing calm, she knew what performed calm looked like, she'd been performing it all day herself, she knew the specific quality of a face holding an arrangement it had been told to hold. This was different. This was the face of someone who actually, quietly, badly wanted a scared animal to decide he was safe, and who understood that this was not a thing you could make happen but only a thing you could wait for or not receive. There was something almost humble in it.

She hadn't seen anything like that on Derek Stone's face before.

She filed it, not knowing what to do with it yet, only knowing it was the kind of thing you filed.

Luna snapped.

Not at his fingers, not quite, at the air near them, a warning, the last communication before the conversation ended, I don't know you and I don't want to know you and this is my house and that's my person and I am telling you with this mouth that I have not made up my mind about you, and then she wheeled around on the hardwood floor and bolted up the stairs with the particular thundering urgency of a wolf who had said her piece and was now removing herself from the situation before she had to say it louder.

The sound of her paws on the upstairs landing. Then silence.

Derek stood.

He did it in the same measured way he'd crouched, everything slow, everything deliberate, and he straightened to his full height in the doorway and looked at the stairs for a moment, and his face had gone back to what his face usually was. Surface. Still.

But she'd seen it. Before it went back to what it usually was. She'd seen it.

He looked at Lily.

"She's fast," he said.

"She has feelings about things."

"Yeah." He looked at the stairs again, briefly. Something moving in his expression that wasn't quite readable, gone before she could name it. "I'll smell different to her eventually. Once she gets used to me being around."

"It took her three weeks to get used to Kane."

"Okay."

"She circled him for a week and a half."

"That's fine."

"She knocked his coffee over twice."

The corner of Derek's mouth moved. Slightly. "I'll remember that coffee is a liability."

Lily looked at him for a moment. He was still looking at the top of the stairs, and in the porch light he looked, she searched for the word and couldn't quite find it, landed eventually on younger and then immediately didn't know what to do with that either. Not younger in the way of inexperienced or uncertain. Younger in the way of someone who was briefly, accidentally, not performing anything.

"She didn't bite you," Lily said.

"I know."

"That's actually, for Luna, that's a significant act of restraint. The first time she met my aunt she bit her coat sleeve."

Something shifted in his face. "Did your aunt deserve it?"

Lily thought about it. "Probably a little."

Derek's mouth moved again. This time it almost got there, not quite a smile, but something close enough that she could see the shape of what a smile would look like on him, and she filed that too, because she was apparently keeping a file, because her brain had decided that Derek Stone was a thing it was going to document carefully and without her consent.

"I'll be patient with her," he said. And it sounded like a simple statement of fact, but it landed with a weight that suggested it was also something else, a promise, maybe. Small, and not made to Lily exactly, but made in her direction, in Luna's direction, in the direction of this doorway and whatever it represented.

She didn't know what to do with that either.

She had, she was noticing, an expanding collection of things she didn't know what to do with.

"Okay," she said.

"Goodnight, Lily."

"Goodnight."

He turned and went back down the porch steps to the truck. She watched him go the way she'd been watching him all evening, not meaning to, just doing it, the same involuntary tracking her nervous system had apparently assigned itself as a full-time task, and then he was in the truck and the headlights were on and she turned and went inside and shut the door.

The house settled around her.

She stood for a moment in the front hall, laptop bag on one shoulder, jacket still half-on, looking at the empty stairs.

Then she went up.

Luna was on the bed. Not under it, under was for serious fear, for thunder and the time a car had backfired on the street outside, but on it, curled in the approximate center with her nose tucked under her tail, occupying as much of the available space as her sixty-two pounds could occupy, which was, empirically, quite a lot. She looked up when Lily came in and made the whine-bark sound again, lower this time, the debriefing version.

"I know," Lily said. She sat on the edge of the bed and Luna immediately relocated to press her head against Lily's thigh. "He's going to be around a lot."

Luna made a sound.

"I know. I don't entirely know what to do about him either."

Luna pressed harder.

Lily put her hand on her head and looked at the dark window and thought about a face in porch light, turned toward the stairs, wanting something it couldn't make happen. Waiting for it, patiently, with his hand held out.

She thought about I'll be patient with her.

She thought about the forty seconds she'd counted in her head while he crouched there, measured without meaning to measure, filed without meaning to file.

She thought: I don't know what to do with any of this yet.

Luna sighed against her leg, the long, gusty sigh of an animal who had also had a complicated evening and was now ready for it to be over.

"Yeah," Lily said. "Me too."

She reached over and turned out the light.