Pack Dynamics by Julie Frost Page B

here?” she asked.
    “Round the corner on the left,” Alex said, pointing.
    “Thanks.” She made her escape.
    Megan gave her a few minutes and followed, finding her sitting on the floor in the hall with her knees pulled into her chest and her arms over her head. “How’re you holding out?” Megan asked gently.
    Janni didn’t look up. “It’s hard, you know? Seeing him like that? And I don’t like crying in front of him because that makes things even harder on him than they already are.”
    “I know.” Megan sat beside her. “I’ve seen Alex hurt like that plenty of times. And I have to take care of him, because he won’t take care of himself, and there’s no one else to do it but me.” Of course, most of Alex’s wounds were self-inflicted—which didn’t actually mean they were easy to deal with.
    Janni looked at her from under her arm. “But you don’t love him. You say.” She scrubbed at her hair with her fingers. “It’s different.”
    “I don’t love him, and, yes, it’s different,” Megan acknowledged. “But I like him, and so it’s still hard.” Maybe if she could get Janni talking, it would ease the knot in her own chest. “How did you meet?”
    “Dad left us when I was four, and Mom moved us here from Texas when I was five. Ben and I went to high school together.” Janni huffed out a strangled laugh. “Not sweethearts or anything, just friends with the same people, and we weren’t even that close. After we graduated, he joined the Army and went to Afghanistan, and I went to college and majored in theater and English, of all the stupid-ass things. I was waitressing for a high-end caterer—still am, waiting for my ‘big break,’ like that’ll happen. I do some work at the PI firm on the side sometimes; I think my mom would like me to take over when she retires, honestly. I don’t know if I will.” Janni seemed to realize she was rambling and wrenched herself back on topic. “So Ben came back just devastated because his parents got nailed by a drunk driver while he’d been held prisoner by insurgents.”
    Megan flinched, and her wolf whined. “That … had to be hard on him.”
    “You could say that. I didn’t find that out until later. So some mucky-muck or other puts on this big dinner for returning vets, hires my boss to cater it, might have been Alex, in fact. And I’m there, waiting tables, hadn’t thought about Ben in months except in passing—you know, ‘Gee, I wonder how old what’s-his-name is doing’ sort of thing—and there he was. Barely holding it together. You could see the effort he was making to not collapse and lose his shit at this thing, because it was too much, too soon. He’d only been back for something like five months, and he’d been a prisoner for seven.” She rubbed her arms. “And he managed it. I have no idea how, I would have been hiding under the table making blubbering noises, but he did it.”
    “Tougher than he looks,” Megan said.
    Janni nodded. “Oh, yeah. But he’s a lot more fragile than he looks too.…”
    O O O
    Janni had been the last one out of the reception center that night. The live-in owner locked up behind her, and she walked across the parking lot to her car. The familiar strains of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” made Janni look up from fumbling for her keys, and she felt a moment of disquiet when she realized that hers wasn’t the only car left in the lot.
    She shaded her eyes from the overhead lights and saw that whoever was in the beat-up yellow Jeep was resting his forehead on the steering wheel with his shoulders slumped. She tilted her head and frowned, debating if she should get involved. She’d been on her feet in high heels for three solid hours and just wanted to go home to a hot bath and a movie script. She had an audition the next day.
    But she wasn’t completely heartless, so she decided to make sure the guy was okay and then go. She took a couple of steps toward the car, squinting, and realized