“Come in, sweetie, come in.” She ushered me into the kitchen. “Marsh is off on his annual fishing trip with the guys, so it’s just going to be you and me.” She beamed at me. “Val says you’ll feel more comfortable sleeping on the futon downstairs, but you can sleep in his old room upstairs if you want.”
“The futon is good, thank you, ma’am.” Sleeping in Hart’s old bedroom? Nope. Way too weird. This was already weird.
She patted my arm. “Okay, sweetie. Just down those stairs. There’s a full bath down there, so you don’t even have to come up here to shower in the morning.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“No need to ‘ma’am’ me, sweetie. Judy’ll do just fine.”
I wasn’t sure I could manage that, but she was calling me ‘sweetie,’ so I was going to try to make her happy. Especially because this might be the most mothered I’d ever been in my life, and it had been about a minute and a half. It was going to make me even more emotional than I already was, so I tried not to think too hard about that. “Okay,” I told her, then went down the stairs.
The whole bottom level was one open room, with the exception of a small bathroom near the back. A set of privacy screens—the whitish wood-framed kind you could get at someplace like Target—had been set up around a futon that had already been pulled out and given bedding.
I had to swallow down more tears. I hadn’t gotten all weepy about Elliot putting me up, but Hart’s mom making up a futon for me was apparently hitting me a lot harder than you’d think.
It wasn’t something my mother would have done. I didn’t have friends over as a kid. I didn’t really have friends, period. Noah’d had a couple, but he definitely wasn’t interested in bringing them back to the house, because our father would have seen it as an early inclination toward fornication. That was a phrase that had been used a lot more than once in our household.
It had been fine for me to hang out with guys at school, but not Noah. Even though Noah only wanted to hang out with them, and I—well, I did, too, but as I’d gotten older my definition of ‘hanging out’ had taken a bit more of a PG-13 turn.
When you’re raised by radical evangelicals, you don’t really go farther than PG-13 as a kid because your survival instincts won’t let you.
I let out a deep breath. That was quite enough thinking about my parents for one day. More than enough. I was already in a bad place after my not-really-a-fight-but-kind-of with Elliot.
Needing distraction, I set my stuff beside the futon, then went back upstairs to offer to help her clean up the kitchen or something. She’d clearly been washing up when I’d walked through.
“Hello, sweetie!” She sounded weirdly happy to see me when I came back upstairs. “Did you have something to eat?”
“Oh, I’m fine.” I was hungry and hadn’t had dinner, but I was trying not to be a total leech.
Hart’s mom eyed me. “You look like you aren’t eating enough for that shifter metabolism of yours,” she told me. “Let me fix you a plate.”
I blinked. “Hart told you I’m a shifter?”
“Mmhmm.” She didn’t sound like she cared. Then, again, her son was an elf and both his best friend and fiancé were also shifters, so I guess she’d had plenty of time to get used to being around Nids. “Do you like potatoes?”
“I—Yes.” I gave up and let her pull various containers of leftovers out of the fridge. She looked really happy doing it, so I didn’t want to burst her bubble. And I was hungry.
Except I’d forgotten that I was in the damn dairy state. “Oh. Um. I can’t have dairy,” I mumbled, my neck heating.
“You’re vegan?” she asked, immediately putting several containers back into the fridge.
“No, ma—No. I have alpha-gal. I can’t have anything that came from a mammal.”
She pulled out some roast chicken. “Broccoli slaw? Do you do bacon?”
“No pork or beef,” I answered.
“Bacon bits? That aren’t real bacon?”
“I can do that,” I told her.
A scoop of something that looked safe enough went onto the plate. Then a dinner roll, then a second one. She swapped out those containers for three more. One had a fruit salad. Another some sort of mayonnaise-dressed pasta salad. The third she closed and returned to the fridge before I saw what it was.
“You used to work with Val in Richmond?” she asked, putting the pasta and fruit on my plate.
“Yes, ma—Yes.” I caught myself.
“And he said you came out here for the same reason he went down there?”
