“You can have sex, too, you know. As soon as you’re eighteen. Dalton doesn’t mind if we sleep with humans, as long as everyone is of age and no one gets pregnant. He called me in and told me so after my birthday.”

Just like that, it made total sense why Jules had waited. Dalton and his rules, and Jules and the way he liked to follow the rules.

“Is that why you waited?”

“Yeah, ’course. Isn’t that why you’re waiting?”

“No,” I said, though I did lower my voice considerably when I said it. Dalton and the whole pack had ears like a hawk. “I’m not waiting. You know why I’m not having sex.”

Jules looked confused. “Why not?”

“Because, you tool, I can’t talk to humans. You know that.”

“Ah, big boy,” he said, shaking his head as if I were quite the opposite of clever. “You don’t have to talk to them when you look like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know damn well what I mean. Guys that look like this—” he waved in my direction, “—don’t have to talk. Not when they’re all long black hair and ice blue eyes.” He sucked his cheeks in and dented his chin with his thumb. “Not when they’re all chiseled cheekbones and cleft chins. Come on, you know that.”

I knew full well how I looked, but I couldn’t see how that was going to help me, since it never had in the past.

“You don’t have to talk, Sully. You just have to smile. The girls are waiting for you. They’re dying for you. They just need an invitation. They just need to know that you aren’t as scary as you look.”

“I don’t look scary.”

“You look scary as fuck. You’ve got that whole snarly thing going. If I didn’t know you so well, I’d be scared of you, too.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“You shut up.”

“You shut up.”

He slapped me lightly on the chest. I punched him on the arm and the next thing, we were rolling around on the floor of our living room, knocking a mug and its contents off the coffee table and onto the floor. I was laughing helplessly and so was he. I let him pin me as usual. It was perfectly normal. It was just that when I did it, a flicker of something inside me stirred. Something that didn’t feel good. I let him pin me; it wasn’t that I didn’t. It was just that for the first time, I found it hard to do it.

My eighteenth birthday came, and with it, I got the same talk from Dalton that Jules had gotten.

“You’re eighteen now, Sully boy. You know what that means, huh?” He gave me a lascivious chuckle. Kevin and Llewellyn laughed as well.