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We walked through the forest quietly. I was reminded of how many times we had done this in our lives and why all of this happened now.
“Good thing I didn’t ask her out again,” Dante finally said and heaved a sigh.
“I’m sorry, buddy. Maybe you’ll find a nice werewolf lady.”
I kept turning around, seeing things out of the corner of my eye and more than one duende on our tail. None of it was threatening but definitely distracting. I don’t know how I thought the forest was quiet. If I brushed past a tree, I could feel it singing in my skin. There were other sounds that I couldn’t place. Whispers, soft songs, the echo of laughter.
“You okay?” Dante asked.
“Yeah, it’s just there are a lot of things in here that I wasn’t aware of.”
“You aren’t going to explode, are you?”
“Don’t think so.”
We fell silent again and I looked up at the trees and thought I saw something with wings whiz by. I wanted to point it out, but I wasn’t sure if Dante could even see the things that I could see.
“What are we going to do?” Dante asked, jerking me out of my observations.
I blinked and looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Us. This. We don’t- whatever we do, we don’t have to help them, you know. From what I have gathered, you are only obligated to the wolf that bit you. You weren't even bitten. The one that bit me is dead. We could..." Dante trailed off and shrugged.
“I don’t have a choice. I already owe them. And Artie is the only one that I know that can give me answers,” I said.
Dante was quiet.
“Why don’t you want to help them?” I asked.
“I don’t know. They haven’t been anything but kind to me, but it feels like we got adopted into one of the weirdest families ever.”
“You don’t like Celia because she dumped Marcus,” I accused.
“Marcus may be my brother but he probably deserved it,” Dante said.
I couldn’t argue that. Marcus was one of the biggest assholes I had ever come across in my life and he was actually nice to me. He had a lot of anger against Dante for some unfathomable reason. I could only guess that it had something to do with all of this we just discovered.
“It feels like the three of them are their own thing and we are our own thing and we got smooshed together,” Dante finally blurted out. “Like when we aren’t around, they are really who they are and we are only who we are when we aren’t around anyone else.”
Although my friend wasn’t terribly articulate, I understood what he meant. Sometimes it felt like we were intruding on something that we were never meant to see.
“Maybe with them we could be ourselves, too,” I suggested.
“I’m only me when I’m with you,” Dante muttered and kicked a rock. We watched it fly far past our field of vision.
“Aw, buddy. I love you too,” I said.
“You know what I mean,” he said.
And I did, just like I always did. Even when I was little and Dante’s vocabulary hadn’t caught up to mine, I was able to understand what he was trying to say and worked as a translator, more often than not. There wasn’t a point in my life when I didn’t have Dante around. My mom liked to talk about the day we were born and how our bassinets were side by side in the hospital. From the very start, I had him and he had me.
It made dating damn near impossible, but that was something that we had to learn to deal with.
I loved him like I would have loved a twin brother. I didn’t know a world without him. I’m not sure I would have been able to understand a world without him.
“Let’s think about it. We’ll go home-”
“To the dorms? Where Savannah knows where we are and where you might explode and I might break the building?”
“We’ll go back to mom’s house and think things over there. It’s been three days for you. I woke up this morning.”
Dante nodded. “I just don’t know about jumping in with them right away.”
I didn’t disagree. He had a point. The only problem was, I didn’t know what we would do without the Ortegas.