Chapter Text
Lara Jean’s first kiss is Peter Kavinsky when she’s 12. Gen drags her to the party, promising it’ll be fun, and when Lara Jean looks to her dad unsure, he dad shoos her out the door.
“Margot won’t be back from debate until later anyway,” he says.
Is this how other kids live? Lara Jean thinks, sitting on the brown carpet cross-legged, looking at all the other kids. They sneak into houses without adults and break the rules? It wasn’t very romantic.
But still, the thought of a kiss, her first kiss? That’s thrilling.
When the bottle points at Peter, Lara Jean first plays it off because she knows wolves can be particular about this. Their sense of smell making them particular about who they let close enough to kiss.
Peter just shrugs. “Let’s just do it,” he says.
He crawls across the space between them, nudging the glass Cola bottle aside with one palm. He leans in, and he draws close enough she can see all the colors of his eyes, olive and sparkling.
She can feel his breath, and then just as his lips near hers...
She imagines she can feel a connection between them that will span oceans and continents, but to her embarrassment, she’s so flustered, she changes forms.
Looking up at Peter from her new vantage point, much lower to the ground, she lets out a growl of frustration. She’s never going to live this down. By their age, most of her classmates have stopped changing forms when faced with large emotions.
Peter gives a large grin, and even though he’s painted in shades of black and white now, he’s even possibly more beautiful. And then he changes forms as well, now a wolf to her lynx.
He huffs once, and then sniffs the spot behind her jaw where her scent is strongest. He thumps his tail, and then bumps her nose with his.
It might not be a traditional kiss, but it’s still the most intimate she’s been with someone outside of her family, and she will spin numerous daydreams from this moment.
Then their friends’ whooping and laughter, jolts her out of the moment, and she changes back into a girl. Peter follows her, and once he’s back on his side of the circle, situated far away from her, she catches his eye one last time.
She thinks she might see her future in them.
But those dreams of running in the park and holding hands and more kisses are put on hold, because the Kavinsky family breaks apart shortly after. And when Mrs. Kavinsky leaves Portland with her two sons, she takes Lara Jean’s fantasies with her.
Years later, the whole shifter community knows the Mrs. Kavinsky and her sons are coming home. Mrs. Kavinsky had wanted a fresh start once her husband had left her and the kids for another woman, and a wolf at that. That had been a bridge too far for her.
But here she was, same last name, sans the husband, returning to town so her two sons could get much needed mentorship from the Portland wolf pack.
The first glimpse of Peter Kavinsky is on the first day of class. The other shifters are ribbing someone. It’s the usual posturing, but something feels off to her. She tries to peek between the crowd of bodies, leaning up on tiptoe while holding the straps of her backpack. When that doesn’t work, she changes angles until she finds a gap she can see through.
Lara Jean doesn’t recognize him at first. He’s taller, and his body’s grown broader, baby fat giving way to the easy muscles boys seemed to have. But she catches the sunlight on his eyes, and she knows that color. Peter Kavinsky. And although it’s been years since she saw him, she can read the tension in the set of his shoulders, the easy smile not as easy as it should be.
She focuses on the conversation. The boys in their varsity jackets, shifters ranging from bear to deer. “Long time no see Kavinsky! You still wolf, or have you been human too long?” They ask, knowing his mother deliberately moved to a community where there weren’t any shifters.
It’s a dumb question. He was equally both, perfect just as. And no amount of time spent away from the Portland pack could ever take his shifter heritage from him. It reminds her of the way people view her and her sisters for being too much or not enough because she was mixed.
She looks around the crowd again, and they’re just watching Peter be welcomed back into the pack with stupid questions. No one’s standing up for him, and it’s wrong.
Pushing through the crowd, she squeezes through the tight spaces between people until she’s next to him. It puts her uncomfortably close to the jocks and the popular girls just on the wings, where Gen is certainly watching, but Lara Jean does her best to shove that knowledge out of her mind.
Wanting to let him know he’s not alone, she takes his hand. She doesn’t like being seen like this, but it’s worse to let him be alone. He startles. he really must be overwhelmed by all the people to have not noticed her approach. He looks down at her, eyes wide.
Giving his hand a small pulse, she says, “You’ll be okay.” And that’s as much attention as she wants today, and then lets his hand go to push her way back out of the crowd.
Later, once she’s home, she tells Kitty about it. Kitty, smart as always, says, “It sounds like he’s touch-starved. That’s terrible.”
That stops Lara Jean in her tracks. She thinks of the way she and her sisters pile into bed together when one of them has a bad day. Sometimes, they all shift into their lynx form. And if it’s really bad, and settle into the side of their dad. Even at school, it’s not uncommon to give someone a hug or squeeze their hand when they’re having a tough time. But that comfort was borne of having grown up together, and Peter, Peter had been gone, hadn’t grown with them.
“Lara Jean?” Kitty asks, hands still weaving a braid crown into Lara Jean’s hair.
“Oh, keep going,” she says, but she’s thinking. It is terrible, and no one should have to be alone like that. She thinks of Peter standing alone in that sea of people, like the heroine in the romance books she likes to read standing alone in a field of poppies.
No shifter should be deprived like that, so Lara Jean decides to do something about it.