Page 34 of The Girl Who Cried Bigfoot

I burst out laughing. There’s nothing graceful about the wheezing, helpless sound that comes from the sheer absurdity of being hunted by my own biology while a forest god is having a nervous breakdown over it.

“It’s not funny,” Rowan snaps, his voice echoing off the trees, his eyes now glowing like embers in a draft. “You are leaking life, Wren. Tell me where the damage is so I can seal it.”

“Rowan, stop,” I say, clutching my stomach as another wave of laughter hits me. “I’m not dying. I’m not even injured. This is... it’s a scheduled event. A monthly maintenance report.”

He freezes, his large, bark-skinned hand mid-air. “Maintenance?”

“It’s my period, Rowan. I’m starting my period early because, apparently, my uterus wants to join in on the chaos of the last twenty-four hours.”

He’s still in that half-shifted state, looking like a very tall, very confused tree. His head tilted. “Your... period. The cycle of the moon?”

“Close enough. It’s a human woman thing. Every twenty-eight days or so, we... well, we bleed. It’s not an injury. It’s just how the machinery works. You’ve been a Guardian for centuries, how have you never noticed this?”

Rowan slowly returns to his human form, his shoulders dropping, though he still looks deeply suspicious of the entire concept. “I have stayed away from humans, Wren. And when I have observed them, it has been from a distance. I have never been... this close. I have never been tuned to the specific frequency of a single life before.”

He says it so plainly, with such a lack of artifice, that the laughter dies in my throat. The man just realized he’s spent three hundred years missing the fine print. He looks at me with a mix of awe and lingering terror, his hands finally dropping to his sides.

“So you are not in pain?” he asks softly.

“I mean, my back hurts and I’d currently kill a man for a bag of salt and vinegar chips, but no. I’m not in danger. You can stand down, soldier. The forest is safe from my rogue hormones.”

Rowan lets out a breath that sounds like a gale moving through pine needles. “They always say man vs. bear. Nobody ever mentioned Bigfoot.”

I snort, wiping a stray tear from my eye. “To be fair, the bear would have probably just eaten me and called it a day. You’re the one trying to perform emergency surgery on a hormonal shift.”

He doesn’t move, his eyes searching mine for any sign that I’m lying. The panic is gone from his face, replaced by a quiet, intense curiosity that’s somehow more intimate than what we shared the night before. He takes a step toward me, reaching out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. His fingers are warm, the callouses familiar now.

“If it is a cycle,” he says, his voice dropping back to that private, heavy register. “Then it’s something that can be managed.”

I lean into his touch, the ridiculousness of the moment settling into something warmer. “I have Ibuprofen back at the lodge, Rowan. I’ll be fine.”

“You said something else,” he reminds me, a slow, dangerous smile touching the corners of his mouth. “In the shelter. About needing a refill of a prescription.”

Heat climbs up my neck, my own words from the night before coming back to haunt me. I was trying to be funny then, trying to deflect the intensity of what we’d just done, but now, standing in the middle of a damp forest with the man who’d seen every version of me, it doesn’t feel like a joke.

“Orgasms help,” I quoted, throwing his own clinical observation back at him with a grin. “That was the professional opinion of the mountain’s primary caretaker, wasn’t it? I wouldn’t want to ignore expert medical advice.”

Rowan’s eyes darken, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw. “I’m always available for a consultation, Wren Cassidy.”

“Good to know. But first, we need to get back to the lodge. I have a feeling Marge is about to send out a search party, and I really don’t want to explain to Walt why I’m returning from a storm with a seven-foot conservationist and a sudden need for chocolate.”

Rowan nods, his hand sliding down to catch mine. We walk like that, hand in hand, back down the trail, his pace matching mine. Every few minutes, he stops to move a branch out of my path or to check the footing on a particularly muddy slope, his guardian instincts still humming, but directed now.

We reach the lower ridge just as the sun breaks through the clouds, turning the wet leaves into a million tiny mirrors. The lodge is visible in the distance, a small, stubborn patch of brown wood against the vast green of the Cascades. It looks smaller than I remember, more fragile, but for the first time since I’ve come home, I don’t feel the urge to look away from it.

“The bridge is still there,” Rowan says, pointing toward the creek. “The water went over it, but the anchors held. You will be able to cross.”

“And you?” I ask, stopping at the edge of the clearing. “Are you coming in? Marge will have coffee. And probably questions.”

Rowan looks at the lodge, then back at the forest. “Not today. I have... territories to monitor. And I suspect I have a great deal of research to do on the human female reproductive system.”

I laugh, a genuine, tired sound that feels like it’s clearing out the last of the storm. “I’ll send you some links. Or better yet, I’ll just tell you. It’s less terrifying when you have a guide.”

He squeezes my hand before letting go. “I’ll find you, Wren. When the world gets too loud.”

I watch him fade back into the trees, the concealment magic slipping over him like a veil until there’s nothing left but the shift of shadows and the sound of the wind. I stand there for a moment, my hand still warm from his, then I turn and walk back to the lodge. My back is aching, my boots are ruined, and I’m pretty sure I’ll have to burn my father’s old hiking socks, but as I look at the Cassidy Lodge sign leaning five degrees to the left, I realize I wasn’t in a hurry to fix it anymore. Some things are better when they’re a little broken.

As soon as I walk into the lobby, I’m hit with the smell of Marge’s bacon and the relentless pinging of the Bigfoot Hotline. The digital dashboard is a sea of red notifications, a hundred voices from the internet demanding proof of the impossible. I sit down at the desk and start deleting. I don’t need the world to see what I found. I just need to make sure I was ready for the next consultation.