“Don’t be a dork. Just get in,” he said, pulling the covers back for me. He was wearing sleeping shorts and was shirtless. I got into bed quickly. The bed was smaller than my bed at home and felt more than a little crowded. To say both of us had grown a lot since our last sleepover would be an understatement. The bed springs must have been past their best because the mattress squeaked under my weight and the entire thing seemed to rock when I moved. I lay on my back and then rolled over onto my side, facing away from him.

“You’re taking up too much space,” he said.

“I can’t help it. I’m right on the edge.”

“You’re on my side.”

“That’s why I offered to take the sofa. I said we should take turns.”

“Sully’s on my side,” he whined in an exaggerated childish voice.

I realized he was teasing me. It was one of the stupid things we used to fight about as kids. I gave him a tolerant chuckle. “Night, Jules.”

We were both quiet. I thought he was drifting off, but then he said, “Too bad we don’t have a girl here, huh?”

His words hit me hard. We usually didn’t talk about sharing women. We just did it. The fact that we were in bed together and he was thinking about sex made me so horned up, my gums and skin tingled with something that felt way beyond a normal level of arousal. Way, way beyond it.

It took me a while to fall asleep, a very long while. I spent the whole time willing myself not to move and begging myself not to think of him naked. It felt even more wrong than usual to do it when I was lying so close to him. When I finally fell asleep, it didn’t take long for the shifting dreams to start. I managed to jolt myself awake a few times before they got too bad, but as the night wore on, I got too exhausted to fight it and eventually fell into a deep sleep.

The dream was different that night. I was still partially shifted. Just claws and canines. I was running in the woods. The woods at the cabin, not the woods back home. Jules was running with me. We were both breathing and snarling. Our feet were hitting the ground so hard and so fast, the mountain was shaking. We weren’t just running; we were being chased. We weren’t hunting; we were being hunted. We were the prey. At some point, I lost Jules. I looked around for him. I could only see the wood and the trees. Branches and leaves. I was frantic to find him. I was out of my mind. My heart pumped in fear, and that fear turned to rage.

Rage.

Red hot rage.

“Sully!”