I looked up at him, my expression making very clear that I didn’t believe him.
“Do you meditate?” he asked me, then.
“No?” I had no idea why that was relevant.
“They didn’t tell you to meditate or do mindfulness or deep breathing exercises?” It was Elliot’s turn to sound surprised, his dark eyebrows rising.
“No?”
“Fuck’s sake,” he muttered, running a hand over his ponytail. “Whatdidthey tell you?”
“To eat twice as much as I was used to?”
“Is that it?” He sounded a bit horrified.
I thought back. My brain had still been pretty fuzzy when they’d released me from St. Cyprian’s. “I—I’m honestly not sure,” I admitted. “I don’t remember a lot of what they said to me.”
“Did they have you do deep breathing while you were there?”
“Some? I guess?” I went back to studying his toes. “There was a nurse who sat with me at first. He told me to take deep breaths when—” It was hard to talk about, even to Elliot, although I’d already said a lot more to him than I had to Noah. I still felt guilty about that. I swallowed the lump in the back of my throat. “So that’s what I started doing. Whenever things get… hard.”
“That’s good,” he said, nodding. “Deep breaths help. But you should practice even when you’re not under stress—not afraid or emotional or… turned on.”
“Practice?”
Elliot nodded. “I find meditating helps. But some people do yoga or chant or some other means of centering themselves. Dad called it ‘grounding.’” His expression became distant. “I remember he used to go out and sit with Mom under the birches out back.” He gestured toward the arched open doorway that led to the living room—you could see the patio doors through the arch. “Mom always went outside to sit with nature—she would weave out there, or read, or just sit. Dad went out even after she died, sitting under the tree, his palms on the earth. Grounding himself.”
“And you… meditate?” I’d honestly never thought about it. Or yoga. I knew people did those things, of course, but it had just never occurred to me to be one of them.
Elliot nodded. “I do. It helps.”
I studied him, uncertain. “But you’ve been a shifter for… a while.”
His lips quirked. “Thirty years,” he replied.
He’s forty-one. Huh.I would have put him closer to my own age—not that it really matters once you pass twenty-five or so, but I’d literally beenbornwhen he’d become a shifter. That was… I wasn’t sure what it was, but it made me think. And then I realized that he’d just given me something personal. Something he wouldn’t have shared with me if I’d asked four months ago when we’d first met.
“And you still meditate?”
He nodded. “Sometimes I do what Dad did,” he said softly, his face turned toward the arched doorway, light playing on his cheekbones. “And sometimes I just sit where I am—bedroom, living room, wherever.” He drew in a breath, then seemed to pull himself away from something, refocusing on my face. “Point is, meditation is useful—it helps you understand your responses—fear or anger or any emotion—and keep them in check. Channel them into something productive, or save them for when it is appropriate to shift.”
“Do you shift a lot?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I don’t know about ‘a lot,’ but I do intentionally shift sometimes. If I need to clear my head or work out something that’s bothering me. Dad grounded himself under the birches—I ground myself by digging.”
“Digging?”
“As a badger.”
“Youliketo do that?” I didn’t mean it to sound as incredulous as it did.
Elliot’s lips quirked. “I do,” he said softly. “I like what I am. I like being a badger. It helps me feel like I know myself, being in both bodies.”
I had no idea what that must be like—to be as comfortable as a wolf as I was in human form. And yeah, okay, as Elliot had pointed out, it had only been three months. I’d had thirty years in a human body—Elliot had spent those same years in a shifter body. Ofcoursehe was more comfortable in it than I was.
But I also wasn’t sure I wanted to be that comfortable in a shifter’s body.
Was Noah equally comfortable being a wolf as a man? I didn’t actually know the answer, and I found that a little odd. I guess that meant that Noah and I didn’t share as much as I’d thought. I wondered if he thought I wouldn’t care. Or maybe just that I wouldn’t have understood—which I wouldn’t, at least not until three months ago.
