Hunt Me! I Crave the Chase (Spooky Boys #3)

“The what?”

“Never mind.” Butters shook his head, frowning thoughtfully. “You can read, right?”

“Of course I can read,” I growled. He cackled. I could read. I wasn’t good at it, or fast. But I could read. Kind of.

“Hey! No shame,” he shrugged. “I just figured since you’re usually…hairier than you are right now…you might not be able to.”

“Can you read?” I countered, crossing my arms and feeling entirely out of my depth.

“Not really,” Butters shrugged again—like that didn’t bother him at all. “Never liked it. Never felt like I needed to. Mom tried to teach me but—” If Butters was telling the truth he was lucky. As an omega there were less expectations of him. Even though, as he’d so eloquently put it, I preferred my “hairier” form, I had never been allowed to skip reading lessons.

One day, if I survived, I’d take over the pack from Dad and that meant I had more training than Butters did. Though I could admit, I’d maybe need to brush up on my schooling again to do it.

“How did you pick your ice cream then?” I challenged, sure he was shitting me.

“There’s a picture, duh.” Butters shrugged a third time, tapping his chin thoughtfully before glancing at me with a frown. “So how are we going to tell if it’s the right one? If you don’t know what it’s called, and I can’t read.”

“I could read the bottles.” I winced, knowing that could take hours. Just looking at them now, it was hard to tell what was what. The text was tiny, and there were a lot of words I didn’t recognize or understand. And everything was in different colors and different fonts, and that only made things worse.

“That would take like a million years, dude.” At least I didn’t have to explain to him why this wouldn’t work.

“What if we sniff them?” I didn’t want to risk it, because my nose was still burning from the acetone incident, but…soon it would be too late to hunt Jeffrey down. He had work in the morning. And I had a plan. A big plan. That involved baskets, and sex—and spending a few more good nights with him before I needed to be tied up for the moon.

“Good idea!” Butters said, even though it was a terrible idea. A bit better than reading the bottles, but terrible all the same. By the time we found the only scentless soap in the entire store I felt like my nose was broken.

“What else should I get?” I asked, clutching the bottle to my chest triumphantly, my tail thumping happily.

“Uhhhh,” Butters scratched the side of his head, scooping ice cream with his other hand, and shoveling it into his mouth. Both cartons had started to melt, and he ate enough to feed an entire country most days, so he’d decided to finish the cartons and pay for them at the end—rather than waste them. “Snacks. Lube. Like I mentioned before.”

“What else?”

“What does he like?”

“He likes…” Hmm. What did he like? He liked music. That was one of the first things I’d learned about him. He had the voice of an angel. “Music? Cheeseburgers.” I racked my brain, trying to remember what I’d seen Jeffrey do over the last couple months. “Movies?”

“Yeah, we’re not going to find anything music or movie related here.”

“Why not?”

“Cuz this is a grocery store.”

“I don’t understand.”

Butters continued to scratch at his head as he thought. “Wait. Except…Oh. Oh yeah. That’s totally going to work.”

Thirty minutes later, I regretted all my life choices.

Butters and I sat on the curb outside the grocery store, our wolf ears missing, our scents contrite.

“You guys are so lucky I had my phone on me,” Harry glared down at us, his hands on his hips. “Assholes.”

“Sorry.” Shame crawled beneath my skin—not because of my nudity, but because of the lingering embarrassment left behind from the grocery store. When Butters had pulled chocolate-coated money out of his wallet, I had felt more out of place than I ever had in my entire life. I didn’t belong here, in Elmwood. The trees may be familiar, but that was where the similarities ended. To her credit, the cashier had just smiled at the both of us, unaffected, but I’d felt all of two inches tall as Butters counted out the rectangles to pay for his two empty cartons of ice cream, and my gifts.

Only…he hadn’t had enough money.

Which was why we’d been forced to call for help.

“What happened to your allowance?” Harry huffed at Butters. “I sent you fifty bucks last week.” Butters shrugged, just as embarrassed as I was. “If you spent it on that dumb app again, I am going to scream.”