Werewolf Wedding Read Online Free PDF Page B

cars, that would involve just putting a key in the ignition and turning it, right?
    Oh but if you know anything about me, and I hope you do by now, you know that nothing in my life is ever as simple as it seems. Twenty-five thousand dollar doggie statues, being caught between growly, warring brothers; those are nothing compared to getting this eight ton wad of metal going when it’s cold.
    Holy shit it’s cold , I kept thinking. I’m not built for this .
    You’d think that with the extra padding I seemed to carry eternally on my ass, cold wouldn’t bother me quite as much as it does. As soon as the thermometer dips below, say, sixty-five? I’m an icicle. I shiver, I quake, and God help you if you’re sleeping with me, because my hands and feet are going to be in the warmest places on your body, sucking the heat out like a thermal vampire.
    I’m relentless in my search for body heat, which is probably why the way Jake’s fingers, his lips on my wrist, fascinated me so much.
    As I sat there in the non-running, black Cadillac, I imagined being wrapped up in a blanket with Jake, his naked body radiating heat through me, warming me down to the bones. I shivered, but not from the chill. The last of the remaining warmth drained out of me and into the leather seat, which convinced me that it was probably about time to get up and start the arcane, extensive process of getting Bertha – that’s what I named her when I got her partway through college – running.
    Oh, that’s the thing about Bertha – there is no ignition. I bought her for five hundred bucks in 1998. Yeah, she’s that kind of car. The third time I turned the old boat on, the key turned way too easy, the entire mechanism rotated and then promptly fell out. Ever since, I got to hot wire my own car. Still, she worked like a charm, more or less, once she got going, so I hadn’t worked up the gumption to replace her yet.
    And anyway, who needs a car payment they don’t need ? With the bills from the studio piling up, even with the twenty five grand, which put us back in the black for probably a month or two, dealing with more financial bullshit was approximately the last thing in the universe I needed to deal with. That’s not to say that I didn’t worry about it every single time I started the car though.
    Worry. Yeah, that’s a good word for my personality orientation. Worried, anxious, panicky .
    It wasn’t usually obvious, because I learned when I was a little girl to bottle all that up and never let the world see me be weak. It sounds very stiff-upper-lip, but for me it was survival more than anything. I didn’t have the option of trusting people very often. Hell, it took me like five years to tell Jeannie when my period was.
    I opened the door and Bertha sighed in hopeless resignation. God that sounds dramatic, but hell, when I’m as old as she is, being able to sigh in resignation will be a blessing, like taking a shower without my back wrenching, or being able to – I dunno, touch my toes without hearing fourteen different body parts pop.
    I sighed, but with irritation. The packed dirt parking lot was uncomfortable a I knelt on my spread out towel, but at least there was no gravel biting into my knees. I reached underneath the dash and found the wires. As my trembling fingers wrapped around the exposed ignition wires, I started thinking how nice it would be to have someone else do this for me.
    Not that I need anyone. Not really. I just... I don’t know, outside of Jeannie, I didn’t really have anyone to depend on, to trust. And laying all my bullshit on her wasn’t fair, so I was once again just bottling. Bottling it up until something, somewhere, popped. I knew it would happen, it was just a matter of time. And just like that, the cork began to slip.
    Some road noise from behind pricked my ears, particularly because there was hardly ever any road noise out this far from the schools, especially in the middle of winter, and especially after