Page 15 of Sawyer

The clothes I’d given him were clearly too small—his T-shirt clung to his chest and arms, accentuating every hard line and muscle.

The sweatpants barely covered his calves, and that V-cut I had noticed earlier was even more pronounced.

I felt my eyes lingering on the sweatpants but quickly flicked them back up before Sawyer could catch me staring.

Coughing, I grabbed a bottle of water and took a long sip to steady myself.

"So, what did you two do to end up this dirty?" I asked, focusing instead on scrubbing the last of the mud from Benny's fur.

Sawyer shrugged, settling onto a nearby stool. "We took a run in the woods."

I glanced at the mud matted deep in Benny’s fur. It looked like he’d rolled in it, not just run through it.

"Must’ve been a pretty rough trail, huh?" I commented, rinsing off the soap.

"Yeah, well, that’s how it is in the pack lands," Sawyer replied casually.

My hand froze mid-rinse as I looked up at him.

Pack lands?

"You’re a shifter?" I asked, my voice quieter than I intended.

I glanced down at my arm, where the skin around the scar—hidden by my sleeves—suddenly felt itchy.

I resisted the urge to scratch, forcing my focus back on cleaning Benny and trying to shove the memories threatening to resurface back down.

But it was too late. The memory crashed into me, pulling me back to a different city over a year ago.

I could feel the cold, hard floor of my old apartment beneath me, the weight of a body pressing me down as I kicked, desperately trying to push it off.

The terror from that night surged in my veins again, as if I were still bolting out the door, clutching my bleeding arm, running as fast and far as my legs could carry me.

"Are you okay?" Sawyer’s voice broke through the memory like a lifeline, snapping me back to the present.

I blinked and looked up to find him standing in front of me, brows furrowed with concern. I must’ve looked more shaken than I realized.

My heart pounded so hard, I wondered if he could hear it. I met his gaze for only a second before quickly looking away, not trusting myself to hold eye contact for too long.

"I’m fine," I muttered, focusing intently on Benny, hoping that lathering shampoo into his fur would keep me grounded.

But something felt off. I was nervous, though not in the usual way I felt around shifters, even the nicer ones like Mrs. Hills.

With them, I always kept my guard up, a barrier I couldn’t quite lower, no matter how kind they were. But this... whatever this was with Sawyer felt different.

Honestly, it had never even crossed my mind that Sawyer was a shifter.

As I continued working on Benny, I felt Sawyer’s hand gently rest on my shoulder. I blinked, surprised.

Normally, I would’ve flinched at a shifter’s touch. My instincts would have been screaming at me, or my arm would be itching like crazy. But not this time.

Instead, I felt my heartbeat slow, the tension coiling in my chest easing.

When I found out he was a shifter, my initial reaction had been knee-jerk—a reflex born from old fears. But what I felt now was something else entirely.

Every time I looked into his dark blue eyes, I felt an inexplicable calm, as if I knew, deep down, that I could trust him.

It made no sense after everything I’d been through. Yet here I was, dropping my defenses without even realizing it.