When Ivan walked up to their usual cafeteria table, Cal — whose copper brown hair was messier than usual — smiled up at him enthusiastically.

  Ivan stared at him in weary suspicion. “What?”

  “Where were you? It was kind of boring here without you.” Cal stated pointedly, turning to Rohan, who was sitting across from him.

  “Maybe if you also did all of your unfinished homework…” Rohan tapped the textbook that he currently had open on the table with the chewed end of his pen. “You wouldn't be so bored.”

  Ivan placed his tray onto the table and sat down next to Rohan. “Plus you literally saw me this morning, and that was four hours ago.”

  Cal sank lower into the bench with an exaggerated sigh. “Four hours is too long. You are just an absolute ray of sunshine.” Ivan almost smiled at that.

  They heard a loud laugh behind them, and Ivan turned to the source. It was Leo’s table.

  Ivan stared at him, the rest of his friends at the table fading into his peripheral vision. He couldn’t erase what Leo had told him from his mind. Leo was gay. Like, actually gay. He had been so surprised when Leo had revealed that all he could mutter was “oh”. And what about all of the girlfriends he had had in the past? Did they know? Was it all just for show?

  Currently, his arm was wrapped low around the waist of the same girl from before. Ivan's view of Leo was momentarily blocked when Cal shifted his body in front of him, waving a hand in front of his face.

  When his eyes shifted back to Cal, the other boy put the hand he had been waving down.

  “What?”

  “Do you wanna go to Mei's party?”

  Not a chance in hell. He bit his lip as if in thought. “Uh…..sure, yeah,” he replied, looking over Cal’s shoulder to see if he could spot Leo again.

  Cal gave him a deadpanned stare. “At least try and sound more convincing. We need to go. This is important!”

  “Are you going?” Ivan questioned.

  “Yeah, and so is Rohan. You're coming too, no fucking excuses.” The other boy replied, folding his arms against his chest.

  Rohan raised an eyebrow at Cal in surprise. “I am?”

  Cal raised his hands in exasperation. “Did the conversation we had last night not happen? You said you were going!”

  Rohan raised a hand up to Cal and scoffed, “Yeah, right. Have you met my dad? And besides, I thought you were joking!”

  “When do I ever joke?” Cal asked, turning towards Ivan. Ivan raised an eyebrow at Cal and gave him a look.

  “Fine. When do I joke about parties?” Ivan gave him another look.

  Cal sighed and frowned at them. “Alright fine, but this time I'm being serious.”

  “Okay, you're not going.” He waved a hand dismissively towards Rohan. “You're coming through.” He added, giving Ivan a pointed look.

  “What if my house is on fire?” Ivan asked, seriously. His eyes were still trained on Leo from behind Cal. He and the other girl were now uncomfortably close to one another, his bare neck stretched to whisper something in her ear, to which she grinned.

  Even knowing what he knew, he wouldn't have been surprised if they started making out in the middle of the crowded cafeteria.

  He could see Rohan following his gaze and ignored the obvious look of confusion that overcame his features.

  “We're still going. Fire or not.”

  Cal was nothing if not stubborn. He was used to having his way, and he could be a little pushy when he wanted to be. He had been planning to go for far too long, and if he wanted it, they would all end up going.

  “I'm serious, Cal. I can't this time.” He needed to train, and they had a test in four days. If he were out for any other reason, his dad would repeat the mantra he had been repeating for years. You aren't working hard enough.

  Cal groaned, now clearly annoyed. “This is our last year, Ivan. We need to do this! We never do anything fun.”

  Ivan shook his head. Cal didn't understand how important this was. He would have a lifetime of opportunities to go to the party, but he only had one year to prove that he could be Beta.

  “Why do you keep looking over there?” Rohan suddenly said, snapping Ivan out of his thoughts. He found himself glancing mindlessly at the place where Leo had just been sitting, his spot now vacant. “Aren't you supposed to be enemies with this guy or something?”

  Ivan shrugged. He wished it were still that simple. “Not enemies. I just—”

  “Hate him? Despise him? Wish he died in a pit of lava one day?” Rohan offered from beside Cal. Cal smirked at this.

  Before Ivan could form a reply, he felt his phone buzz from inside his lap. When he glanced down at the notification, he frowned.

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  Ignore: Meet me in the storage closet after school

  Now

  “Who was it?” Cal asked curiously.

  When Ivan looked up from his phone, Rohan and Cal were glancing at him expectantly.

  “Just my mom. I need to go.”

  When he got up from the cafeteria table, Cal gently grabbed his wrist, holding him in place. “Will you just think about it?” Cal was biting the corner of his lip—a habit he hadn't outgrown from their childhood years—and the look on his face was softer than his usual scowl. He really wanted to go. He wasn't joking.

  Ivan glanced down at him, then blew out a breath. “Sure. Yeah.”

  Maybe he would think about it?

  — — —

  When Ivan stepped into the storage room, he immediately closed the door behind him, even though it had been fifteen minutes since school had ended and most students had either rushed home or were on the fields already. Leo, who had been walking around the room, paused and looked up at him. “I feel like shit again.”

  He ran a nervous hand through his hair. “Fifteen minutes wasn't enough.”

  Fifteen minutes. That's how long they had been together in the storage room last time. Ivan had been timing, and it seemed like Leo had too.

  He examined Leo. The other boy somehow looked worse this time; there were faint bags under his eyes, and his hair was a mess from running his fingers through it.

  “Maybe it's like a return on investment thing.” Ivan suggested, “The longer we stay together, the longer we can stay apart.”

  “Shit.” Leo groaned in exasperation and ran a hand through his black locks for what was probably the one hundredth time. “Why is this so complicated?”

  Ivan said nothing. He wished he knew the answer to that. He had considered going to their local library and looking up some books on mates, but there were way too many procedures involved in making sure humans never found supernatural books.

  “Your dad tell you about the meeting?” Leo asked in genuine interest.

  Ivan nodded.

  “That was weird right? Why would your pack need help from ours?”

  Ivan shrugged. They had never talked about this before. Never spoken to each other about anything — unless it was throwing insults at each other — before they found out that they were mates. Why start now?

  Somehow, word had gotten out to the other packs. Their conduit hadn’t been activated in over two hundred years, and now that it was, they were more powerful, which meant that other packs would try to take over their pack to gain access to their conduit and inherit their power.

  But over the years, their numbers had decreased significantly, and the majority of their warriors were middle-aged or older. They were vulnerable to attacks, and the other packs knew that. The Moons knew that, and they also knew that it could help them finally claim the neutral land after so many years.

  If they thought that witches had been invading and killing in their pack and weren't willing to join forces, then it meant that they knew their capabilities. That they were stronger.

  “Okay, fine. Don't tell me.” Leo said sulkingly. He grabbed one of the paint buckets and sat down, urging Ivan to do the same. Ivan followed and pulled out his phone. He typed out a message to Milena, then paused when he remembered that it wasn't possible.

  After sitting in silence for a few minutes, Ivan heard tapping from next to him. The rhythmic tapping continued for a long time — amplified in the silence — until finally, Ivan glanced at Leo in annoyance.

  “Will you stop?” He gestured to where the black-haired boy was vigorously tapping his foot against the tiled floor, and his foot grew still.

  A few minutes later, he began to knock his hands against the side of the paint bucket — even louder this time. When Ivan looked up again, he could see a slight smirk on the other boy's lips as he glanced down at his phone in feigned innocence.

  “You're truly an otherworldly level of annoying,” Ivan said dryly.

  “I'm bored.”

  Ivan looked up from his phone and turned to him, eyes wide. “No, really?!”

  Leo ignored him and blew out a breath, standing up. “Let's fill the time. We still have hours until I have to go.”

  I have to go. Not we have to go. Did Leo seriously think he had all day to just sit around and do nothing?

  And why did he want to talk? That last time had been… unusual. But it was a one-time occurrence. “This isn't becoming a thing.”

  “Come on.” Leo gestured for him to move closer, glancing overzealously at the unoccupied gap between their makeshift chairs.

  Ivan stared blankly at the gap, then at Leo. The other boy's face was as relaxed as ever, but there was a hint of eagerness buried under layers of guardedness.

  “What?—No.”

  Leo turned away dismissively, adding another layer. “If you don't want to, then fuck off.”

  Ivan shrugged, then began to stand up. “Fine, asshole—”

  “Wait, no!” Leo stood up, and his hand shot out. He clasped Ivan's wrist in a tight grip, holding him in place.

  When Leo's palm wrapped around the bare skin on his wrist, an unfamiliar heat shot to Ivan's arm. A buzz, like he was being flooded with a steady stream of current, zipped through his body. His heart began to drum faster, and an unsettling awareness of his own racing heartbeat overtook him.

  Leo quickly removed his hand from Ivan's wrist, holding it frozen in the air in a show of guilt. “Sorry.”

  Ivan took a step back and glanced down, wide-eyed, at his now bare wrist. He had never felt like that before. He lifted his gaze back to Leo, suddenly feeling out of breath. He sat back down on the paint bucket, a tingling feeling still lingering on his hand. “Is this what you felt like?”

  Leo nodded, watching him intently, like he was looking for something, before he looked away. “We could time it.” He pulled out his phone.

  Ivan gave him a questioning glance, his mind drifting out of his body. “What?”

  “You know—see how long it takes to stop working when we're actually touching.”

  Ivan paused. That made sense; it was just an experiment. They were just testing a theory. It couldn't hurt to try, right? “Okay.”

  When Ivan felt Leo's hand slip into his own, the foreign, less intense feeling almost made him retract his hand completely. Leo adjusted their hands and intertwined his fingers through Ivan's, locking his hand in a tight grasp. He gripped a little tighter, and the warmth of the other boy's surprisingly soft hands engulfed his. An instinctual flutter filled his stomach at the feeling. This was really weird.

  “This is really weird,” Leo said after a few seconds, but neither of them let go.

  Ivan felt a tug on their joined hands and turned to see Leo tilting their joined hands towards his face, angling Ivan's wrist to read the cracked face of his watch. “Twenty minutes.”

  They stayed in the storeroom for a total of thirty minutes with their hands joined in relative silence aside from a few comments shot at each other and some half-laughs from Leo. Neither of them pulled away. Ivan didn't even feel the urge to anymore. He had gotten used to the feeling, maybe too used to it. And when he announced that he had to leave, he could still feel a phantom of Leo's hand squeezing his own on the walk home.