Mercy Thompson 06 - River Marked

jeans hurts less than eighty-dollar jeans.”
    He growled, and I really looked at him.
    The bright lights over our heads flickered and gave his skin a slightly green cast. That was the fault of the cheap bulbs, but the tension in his neck and the hunted expression were different. Too many strangers, too many smells, way too many sounds. A paranoid person—or an Alpha wolf—might feel like he couldn’t make sure no one blindsided him in a place like Wal-Mart.
    “Hey,” I said, coming to a stop. “How about I shop here, and you head over to the grocery store and grab some food. I’ll shop in peace, and you can pick me up in forty-five minutes?”
    He shook his head. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”
    “The only thing that wants to kill me is in the river,” I told him, trying to keep my voice down, but the woman pushing a cart past us gave me an odd look. “I’ve been shopping at Wal-Marts for most of my life, and I’ve never been assaulted in one.” I narrowed my gaze at him though I kept it focused on his chin. “As long as it’s not demons, fae, or sea monsters, I can also take care of myself pretty well. I’m not helpless.” And suddenly it mattered very much that he not treat me like some ninny who needed to be protected at all times, someone who would stand around waiting to be rescued.
    He saw it in my face, I think, because he took a deep breath and looked around. “Okay. Okay.”
    I stood on my tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
    He kissed me back. Not on the cheek. By the time I’d recovered enough to process information, he was striding out the door, and everyone in view was staring at me.
    I flushed. “We just got married,” I announced, then felt even stupider, so I hurried to escape in the aisles.
    The Wal-Mart in Hood River wasn’t as big as any of the three in the Tri-Cities. But it had jeans and shirts, and that was all I was worried about.
    I grabbed four dark-colored T-shirts and three pairs of jeans in the proper size and headed for the dressing rooms. I didn’t need to try on the T-shirts, but I never buy jeans without putting them on first. It doesn’t matter what size they say they are—some of them are shaped differently than others.
    The lady working the dressing rooms gave me a bored look, handed me a plastic “6” and a “1,” and sent me in. Apparently, they were out of “7”s.
    The only other occupant of the rooms was a harried mother and her teenage daughter arguing about how tight the girl’s jeans were. They stood in the larger area in the center of two rows of small rooms in front of the big mirror.
    “They are fine, Mom,” the girl said in the long-suffering tones used by put-upon teens everywhere, probably back to the dawn of time.
    “You’ll sit down and the seat will split, just like happened to your aunt Sherry when we were in high school. She has never gotten over it.”
    “Aunt Sherry is a . . . Well, anyway, I am not Aunt Sherry. These are mostly Lycra, Mom. They’re supposed to fit tight. Look.”
    I squeezed past the girl, who was doing deep knee bends.
    I found an empty room, then tuned them out. I don’t know about normal folks, but if I wanted to, I could have listened in on the conversations of everyone in the store. I’d had to learn early to ignore them or I’d have gone crazy. Adam paid attention to all that noise because he worried about safety, but I wasn’t worried enough to put up with the discomfort.
    The first pair of jeans had a puzzling bulge halfway down my thigh on the left leg. I tried turning around to see if it was just my imagination, but the left-leg bulge stayed where it was.
    The teenager and her mother had left the changing rooms when I went out to look in the bigger mirror, so I had the whole thing to myself. Unless I’d mysteriously gained a lump on the side of my thigh, there was a problem with these jeans.
    I went back into my room and pulled them off. Then I checked in the smaller mirror to make sure that I hadn’t suddenly mutated. To my relief, without the jeans, my thighs looked like a matched pair. The river mark was still curled around my calf—I’d have to remember to ask Coyote if he could get rid of that one, too.
    The second fit better, no odd bulges, and my butt didn’t look bigger than it ought to in them—but it had fake pockets on the front. I use my pockets. No-pocket jeans are only slightly less irritating than thong underwear.
    The third pair didn’t fit as well as