You okay? he asked.
I didn’t need him to hold my hand, or want him to, for that matter, so I nodded.
“So, how come you’re the only female in your pack?” Ingrid asked, taking a seat across the table from me.
Lowering my backpack to the ground, I bit my lip, wondering if I was allowed to disclose this. I supposed it was no longer a secret. “Because of a fossilized tree root concoction they had the males in my pack ingest. It destroyed female sperm.”
Her eyes grew as round as the burger patty she’d put on her plate. Her sisters’ gazes widened too.
“Whoa,” Samuel said, ladling some creamed corn onto his plate and then onto mine without asking if I wanted any.
“We’re not going to have any females for another decade or so, since Liam’s generation took it,” I added.
“Unless you absorb the Creeks,” Ingrid pointed out.
“Unless that.”
“I hate those bastards,” Samuel said, adding three skewers of cubed meat to his plate. He deposited one on my plate too. “Well, not the whole pack. Just the OCs. You eat meat, right?”
“Yes.” I cocked an eyebrow. “Who are the OCs?”
“The Original Creeks,” Jane said.
“What about the Aspens?” I asked, spearing some corn onto my fork tines.
“The Aspens are chill-were chill,” one of the twins said.
I still couldn’t believe the Burleys were seven kids. No family in my pack had more than two sons. Was that because Boulder wives were all human? As I pondered this, I studied the other Rivers seated at the long table. Most of the people I looked at looked right back with just as much unabashed curiosity.
“But who knows what they’ve become. No one’s impervious to a bad influence,” Ingrid was saying.
“Do all of you live on the compound?” I asked.
“Yep, but we’re not all here,” Jane said.
“We’ll all be here tonight though. The Wolf Moon brings all the pack together.” Ingrid chewed on a bite of salad, then chased it down with a sip of something that smelled like sweet tea.
Samuel, who couldn’t seem to help himself from taking care of me, had poured me a tall glass of the iced brown beverage.
“Too bad more of you couldn’t make it down here,” Ingrid said.
One of the twins smiled brashly. “She’s just sorry August couldn’t make it down here.”
My vertebrae jammed together.
Ingrid shoved her shoulder into her sister’s. “Shut up, Poppy. Besides, he’s probably off in Iraq. I heard he enlisted again.”
August had never told me where he’d been stationed, but he’d told her?
I was clutching my fork so hard that I was probably bending it. I set it down before anyone could notice. “He did, but he came back early.”
Jane plopped both her elbows on the table. “Daddy wants to commission another building from them, so you’ll see him soon enough.”
“She’s totes whipped,” the youngest brother, Jack, said.
Jealousy sharpened my senses, or maybe it was the approach of the full moon.
“He probably has a girlfriend,” the other twin told Ingrid. “Dudes like him don’t stay single for long. Dudes in general. Seriously, men are like incapable of bein’ alone. Why is that, Sam?”
Samuel set down the skewer he’d picked clean. “Why you asking me? I’m on a break.”
“Since last week, and you’re already fillin’ up her plate.”
Sam flushed. “I’m bein’ a good host, is all,” he muttered around a bite of meat.
“So? Does August have a girlfriend?” Jane asked.
“Yeah,” I said slowly, hoping my voice wasn’t giving away all I was feeling.
Ingrid blinked in surprise. “It’s that girl Sienna, isn’t it?”
Had he cheated on Sienna with Ingrid, or had he slept with Ingrid before hooking up with Sienna? The chronology of August’s girlfriends was foreign to me, not that I had any desire to familiarize myself with his string of conquests.
“You guys know Sienna?” I asked in a wooden voice.
“We know of her. He mentioned her. They were casually seein’ each other the summer he came to install this building.” Ingrid tipped her head to the roof. “They weren’t serious or nothing.” After a beat, she asked, “Are they serious now?”
“No.””Is he dating anyone else?”
I wasn’t sure why, but instead of setting her straight, I said, “No.” And then I focused on my food even though my appetite had vanished.
After lunch, Jane led Liam and me to a cottage. She gave us a tour of the simply decorated space: one leather couch, two armchairs, a wooden coffee table, a stone chimney blackened by use.
In the bedroom, there was a queen-sized bed and a gray-tiled bathroom. Everything was clean and functional. There were no paintings on the wall, no books atop the mantle, no pictures on any of the side tables, no chemical smells, just the scent of sun-warmed animal hide and scrubbed pine.
“You guys can rest up.” She pulled open the front door. “We’ll come fetch you before the run.”
I spun around. “Wait, where’s the second bedroom?”
“We were told you’d be sharing . . .”
Did she honestly think I’d share a bed with a guy I wasn’t dating? “By whom?”
Liam placed a hand on my forearm. “We are sharing. Thanks, Jane.”
She gave him a dazzlingly bright smile.
Once she’d shut the door, I muttered, “I suppose you could stay with her. I bet she wouldn’t mind.”