The first thing I did after tapping my alarm off was to look and see if there were any new messages since I fell asleep. There weren’t, but that didn’t stop me from reading all of our text messages from the very first one over and over again, smiling like a fool. I didn’t even care. They made me happy.
My koala was a weird mix of happy and annoyed—happy because we’d found our mate, and annoyed because I had left him. I climbed out of bed and headed to the bathroom to get ready for the day, turning on the shower and throwing in some extra shower bombs in the hopes of settling my koala down a little. I hated that my mate didn’t know who I was, what I was, especially after he showed me so much of himself last night.
I wasn’t really sure how to handle that, though. Just announcing you can turn into an animal really wasn’t the way to keep someone by your side. If anything, it would scare them into either thinking you were having a mental health crisis or that you were going to harm them. People and animals were separate beings, as far as humans knew.
It was fear that was holding me back, but that didn’t prevent the guilt from seeping in. Hari thought we were flirting, getting to know each other, dating, trying to figure out if we had a place ineach other’s lives. As opposed to me, who already called him my mate in my head and wanted always and forever with him. And that was kind of not fair.
I got cleaned up, but the eucalyptus wasn’t really helping. Added to that, having the quiet time in the shower fostered too much overthinking. What was I going to do? I was no closer to an answer than I had been since I first scented him.
I had a meeting in half an hour, just enough time to put on a pot of coffee and make some toast before settling in for the day, which sounded like a great idea at the time. But then I poured my milk on the toast and plopped my butter in the coffee before I realized what I was doing. And yes, some people drank butter in their coffee, and that was fine, but it really needed to be on my toast. I threw my ruined breakfast in the trash, tried a sip of the coffee, decided it wasn’t for me, and poured another mug.
There were three minutes to spare when I finally sat down and started up my computer for the day.
The meeting went by in a blur, and when it was done, I realized I’d missed far too much of it. I called Steven, who had also been in attendance, and he picked up on the first ring.
“Hey, do me a solid. Send me some notes from the meeting. I kind of missed it.”
“Missed it? You were right there. I saw you. Oh, wait, did you do one of those AI ‘pretend it’s me’ people?”
It took me a half-second to realize he meant that I’d ditched the meeting and not that I spaced out. “No, I’m just… I had dinner with Hari last night.”
“Oh.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “You mean you wereup all night?”
“Jackass. No. I mean, yeah, I was up a lot last night, but not like that. I’m just having a hard time focusing today. My brain’s taking a lot of side trips down all the things I’ve been doing wrong since meeting him.”
“I’m sure you haven’t been doing everything wrong.” He had far more faith in me than I did.
“It feels like I am.”
“I’ll get you my notes. Don’t worry, we really didn’t decide much of anything. Why don’t we both take a long lunch and go out? You can tell me everything, and I can get away from the cologne.”
“Is it back?”
“Nah, I was just messing with you.”
According to my boss, the conversation went well, and he didn’t worry about it at all. Go, Kevin, go.
I got off the phone and put my long lunch on the calendar. Steven had clocked it right, I needed someone to talk to. We met at a food truck so we could grab some lunch and head to the park where we would have some more privacy. It was the middle of the day, and while the play areas were filled with kids who weren’t yet in school, the benches by the river were nice and quiet.
“You need to tell me everything.”
“Everything? You really want to know it all?”
“I am such a drama llama. Feed me.”
“Fine, you asked for it.” And so I told him everything, answering his questions about my beast and my feelings about Hari. How I felt imbalanced in my feelings, how I felt guilty for hiding things from him, but how I didn’t know what to do to make it better.
“Listen, I’m not saying you need to go and tell him today. In fact, it’s probably not the best idea. But this emotional up-and-down that you’ve been sharing with me because of your guilt? You can’t do that with Hari. You can’t let him feel like you're giving mixed signals, because in the end, he’s going to second-guess himself and think it’s his fault.”
“Why do you have to be so smart?”
“Smart? No. Able to read what you need? I’m not too bad at that.”
“How long should I wait?” Why wasn’t there an instruction manual about this?
“That, I don’t know. Waiting too long can backfire on you, but too soon can be bad in other ways. You need to find the sweet spot, and that sweet spot has to be kind of soon.”
He clarified, not at all.
