Just then, there was a soft knock at my door and Jules was standing in my doorway, halfway in and halfway out of my room. He stood there for a few minutes, and we looked at each other without saying anything. I didn’t want to be the first one to say anything, and he didn’t seem to want to either. After a while, he came in and sat back against my dresser, fiddling on his phone until I heard the first strains of “You’re Still the One” by Shania Twain.

I rolled my eyes and started smiling despite how hard I was trying not to. It was an old song, but my parents loved it and I’d grown up with it. It was my ultimate guilty pleasure song. It’s a great song, okay? I’d loved it since way before I realized guys are meant to feel embarrassed about liking sappy love songs. No one in the entire world but Jules knew that about me. No one. He got a ridiculous look on his face and curled his hand up in front of his mouth, as if he was crooning into a mic. He started passionately singing along with Shania.

“There’s something very wrong with you, Jules,” I said, but I couldn’t help laughing. I was laughing so much my eyes were watering. When the song finished, we were silent again.

“Storm’s a great girl,” he said.

“I know.”

“It sucks that we both want her.”

“I know.”

“Maybe we should just . . . ask her to choose, you know, make her decide which one of us she wants. Then it’s on her, you know?”

My ears pricked up at that. I liked how it sounded. “And we accept her choice. We don’t get mad at each other. We accept it and move on.”

“Exactly,” he smiled.

We headed out that night, armed with that as our plan. We took Storm to a bar near her motel and took semi-civilized turns buying her drinks. The atmosphere between the three of us was still a little fraught, but nowhere near as bad as it had been. We had quite a lot to drink. More than usual. Jules was almost twenty-one, and I had just over six months to go before I could legally drink. It didn’t matter; no one had carded us in years. I guess we looked older than we were. Dalton didn’t mind us drinking. If anything, he encouraged it. Being shifters, we processed alcohol in a different way than humans did. We burnt it off quickly. It took an exceeding amount of booze to get us drunk. Still, by the end of that night, we had a nice little buzz going. I felt warm and abnormally chill as we walked Storm home.