“Don’t forget the good chocolate!” I shouted at his retreating back. Greylen was a total chocolate snob. If Orsen grabbed the cheap stuff, we would never hear the end of it.
It took a few more minutes of digging, but eventually, I found the small packet of campfire starters.
“Victory!” I shouted to no one in particular as I held them in the air. With my prize in hand, I bounded out of the room, all the way out of the den, and toward the clinic. I was going to get our mate, and we were going to have a fun night.
Maybe I could convince Rowan to have a little snuggle by the fire.
“Rowan! Where is the prettiest, smartest, and most wonderful healer in the world?” I asked in an overdramatic fashion as I entered the clinic.
“I don’t even have to ask who that is!” her sweet voice shouted from the little office.
My mate’s location discovered, I leaped forward into the room. She sat at her desk, and the dark circles under her eyes were even more prevalent than usual. She needed more sleep; maybe a better bed would help. I made a mental note to buy her the fanciest mattress money could buy. If anyone deservedit, it was our mate.
“Nix! I could have had a patient with me!” she admonished.
“The door was open,” I said, looking behind me pointedly.
Rowan rolled her eyes at me. “What do you want?” she asked, but her tone was soft and playful.
“Don’t go to dinner tonight! We are having a campfire.”
“We? A campfire?”
I bobbed my head. “Clan campfire! We are going to make s’mores and cook hot dogs. It’ll be a good time. Please?” I batted my lashes at her innocently.
Rowan thought about it for a moment and was tapping her chin when the door opened again. “That will be my next patient,” she explained. “I'll come to this campfire if you leave me to do my work.”
“Done! One of us will pick you up here later? About seven?”
“That sounds perfect. Thank you.”
I practically skipped out of that room with the biggest goddamn smile on my face.
For the first time in a very, very long time, I felt truly optimistic about the coming weeks.
“It needs to be bigger!” I insisted, grabbing more firewood.
“Any more wood, and this is going to be a bonfire, not a campfire,” Orsen said, but still, he picked up more logs and added them to the pile.
We were standing in a small clearing near the den, quiet and somewhat isolated. It was the perfect place for the evening’s plans.
Greylen and Bastian moved several large wooden planks we used as makeshift benches while we prepped the fire.
“Okay, I think that’s it!” I declared, placing one last log on the fire. “Okay, I’m going to grab Rowan! Bastian, you want to light the fire?”
He knelt in front of the pit. “It’s crazythat dragons, fire-breathing creatures, need to use fire starters…”
“You wanna get naked and shift to light it?” Greylan asked Bastian with a laugh before turning to me. “Wait up, I’ll come with you to the clinic.”
“Fun! Adventure time!” I crowed, jumping up and down as he strode across the clearing to me.
“You’re lucky Rowan seems to appreciate your endless energy.”
We walked down the small path to the clinic while talking.
“Well, now that things are getting back to some sort of normalcy, we can put that energy to good use,” I said, waggling my eyebrows suggestively.
“Maybe give her a little time to settle in first. She’s running herself ragged, cleaning up Jenkins’s mess.”
