Sliced Trees and Dead Words

9 - Prove it.

- LUNA -

I can't believe Wolfe wants to go see Dalen's parents.

It almost seems an insult to his memory that he is even considering it. Actually, it is an insult, especially after the last time Dalen saw them . . . That I knew of at least, and I assume he would have told me if he went back after that last time we were there.

He swore to me he wouldn't . . . Though he also swore to me that he would never leave me and that promise is clearly out the window now, isn't it?

I didn't wait for Wolfe's reply, turning and walking inside my house, and leaving the front door ajar behind me as I did. I really couldn't care less if he stayed or what the hell he did, but there was no way I was letting him take Dalen back to his parents. They lost that right a long time ago, and his death doesn't change anything in my mind. I meant what I said to Darren Rivers when I drove Dalen from their house last. "So long as I live, you will not lay so much as a finger on my best friend again."

If Wolfe planned on getting in the way of that, I'd tell him where to go just as quickly and then some, just for putting me through that stress.

It makes me question how close he actually was with Dalen if he's wanting to do this. Anyone who knows what went down between Dalen and his family shouldn't want to have anything to do with them like me.

I'm so mad. I had actually softened a little when he told me about how Dalen spoke of me to him, and how he guessed to look in my salon for me. But this has done even more damage to the already questionable footing we started off on.

I followed my usual routine getting home, pulling out the large pitcher of honey-sweetened iced tea I make every day before I leave for work, filled with lemon and lime slices and fresh cut strawberries for extra sweetness, pouring myself a large glass, gulping it down and pouring another before I even realised Wolfe was standing against my kitchen wall watching me.

I reached into the cupboard and poured him a glass, sliding it across the laminate countertop without a word and opening the fridge to see what I could make for dinner, not that I had any kind of appetite with the emotional flux my heart seemed trapped in the past twenty-four hours. Wolfe, however, looks like a man who likes—and needs—to eat, and I'm not that much of an inhospitable cow to starve him. Not yet, anyway.

I pulled out a few things to make a quick stir fry with rice, and had begun chopping when Wolfe pulled up next to me, his hand touching and immediately stilling my own—the one currently wielding a huge blade.

"Luna, no offense," he said, my body going stiff beside him. "But I trust you about as much as I do Medusa with a knife this big while you're crying in anger. Let me do it."

"You don't even know what I was making," I retorted as he pried the knife from my madly shaking hand. Which is completely irrelevant, Luna, when you have a guy with arms like those touching you and offering to take over cooking in your kitchen. Also, when did I start crying? Or probably more to the point, when was the last time I stopped in the past day?

"I'm sure I can figure it out," he dismissed me, nudging me out of my own kitchen with his big arms as I wiped tears from my eyes . . . with fingers that were just cutting raw onion.

Cristo santo. For fuck's sake.

Trying desperately to stop the uncontrollable leaking from my eyes and of course just making it a thousand times worse, I stood watching Wolfe chuckling quietly at me as he chopped veggies far more fluidly than I ever have.

"Why did you say that before? About Dalen's parents?" he asked, easily finding a wok in the cupboard like it was his own house and tossing his ingredients in, setting the gas flame alight. He looked back at me cautiously like he really was oblivious to what I meant when I implied it would be over Dalen and my own dead bodies that Dalen be forced to return there. Maybe he really never told him?