“Is that… normal?” I asked Elliot, then.
Elliot shrugged. “What’s normal?” he countered. “I know a handful of other shifters, other than Dad. Some like to shift and run through the woods, some don’t. I don’t think there’s a right or wrong way to be a shifter, if that’s what you’re asking me.”
I let out a long breath. “So I should meditate?”
“You should do what helpsyouto focus,” Elliot answered. “Maybe that’s meditating. Maybe it’s yoga or weight lifting or something else.”
“Hiking?” I suggested.
“Hiking we can do,” he replied. “Hot as fuck right now, but we can go tomorrow if you want.”
I gave him a look.
“What?”
“This isn’t hot as fuck,” I told him. It had been in the mid-eighties. Richmond—I’d looked—had hit a hundred and two. “Virginia in the summer is hot as fuck and swampy to boot. This is warm.”
Elliot snorted. “You aren’t recommending your home state,” he told me. “Even if it does have good tomatoes.”
I shrugged. “Is there a park near here? Somewhere with trails?”
Elliot gave me a look I couldn’t quite interpret. “Oh, baby shifter. This house sits on twenty acres, most of it woods. I have my own trails.”
I gaped at him. “You… have your own trails?”
He nodded. “I’ll show you tomorrow.”
3
Elliot Crane
Get ice cream.
Seth Mays
Any particular flavor?
I will eat anything with chocolate.
The more, the better.
What time will you be back?
A little after noon.
Lunch, then hiking?
Sounds great.
I was doinga grocery run because I wanted to make dinner for Elliot—I needed to demonstrate that I had actual use value while I was working on getting myself a job so that I could get my own place. I hadn’t looked for apartments because I had no budget to speak of, so putting caps on rent was meaningless until I had some sort of income I could budget around.
I was making stroganoff with ground turkey and mushrooms, as those weren’t terribly expensive, assuming I could find vegan sour cream in the grocery store in this tiny-ass town.
I was in luck—not only did the grocery store have plant-based sour cream, but they also had cashew ice cream, so both Elliot and I could have dessert. One of many irritating things about alpha-gal was the fact that if I wanted things like ice cream, I had to spend a lot more money on a little pint than I did one big carton of the regular stuff for Elliot. Same thing with the vegan sour cream.
I also got bread, garlic, and splurged on the not-store-brand olive oil so I could make an olive oil dip for the bread. It was a thing Noah liked to do when he had Lulu over—fancy bread and dipping oil instead of old-school garlic bread. Don’t get me wrong—I love garlic bread. But this stuff was good, too, and it felt like the oil would go better with stroganoff.
I didn’t see Elliot when I got back, so I took the food to the kitchen and unpacked, putting the cold stuff in the freezer and fridge. I took out the various containers of vegan not-M&Ms, mixed nuts, sesame buds, corn nuts, raisins, and dried pineapple, then found a giant bowl and mixed it all together into what my mother had always called “gorp.” She’d never put dried pineapple in it, but I loved the stuff, so I was more than happy to have an excuse to eat some.
