Page 16 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

I close the door. Lock it. Unlock it. Lock it again.

Three times feels like enough.

Three times feels like insurance against whatever’s coming.

4

— • —

Fable

He appears the next morning with groceries.

Not just any groceries, groceries sorted by category, organized in matching reusable bags that look like they’ve never been used before, arranged with the kind of precision that suggests either military training or a very intense relationship with organization.

“You need protein,” Orion says, setting the bags on my kitchen counter with careful deliberation. “And vegetables that aren’t potato chips.”

I’m standing in the doorway between my tiny kitchen and my slightly-less-tiny living room, wearing yesterday’s sweatpants and a t-shirt that says I Like Big Books And I Cannot Lie, and I’m trying to figure out if I’m still dreaming or if a stranger actually just showed up at my apartment at eight in the morning with color-coded groceries.

“Chips are a vegetable,” I say, because apparently that’s the hill I’m choosing to die on today.

“They’re fried starch.”

“Fried vegetable starch. Potatoes are vegetables. Therefore chips are vegetables. It’s basic logic.”

He pauses mid-unpack, a carton of eggs in one hand and something aggressively green in the other. Looks at me. His eyes are completely serious, storm-cloud gray, but there’s something at the corners of his mouth that might be amusement.

“That’s not how nutrition works.”

“That’s exactly how nutrition works. I’m a bookstore owner. I read things. I’m very well-informed about the vegetable status of potatoes.”

“You read romance novels.”

“Romance novels are things. My point stands.”

We stare at each other for a long moment. Neither of us blinks. It feels like a contest, except I don’t know what we’re competing for or how to win.

This is a hostage situation. A very well-fed hostage situation. He’s holding me captive with eggs and leafy greens.

“Fine,” I say finally, because my head is still pounding and I don’t have the energy for a nutrition debate before coffee. “Put the vegetables in the fridge. But I’m not promising to eat them.”

“I’ll cook them for you.”

“You’ll what?”

“Cook them.” He says it like it’s obvious, like showing up at a stranger’s apartment to prepare meals is just something people do. “You have a concussion. You shouldn’t be standing over a hot stove.”

“I wasn’t planning to stand over a hot stove. I was planning to eat Pop-Tarts and feel sorry for myself.”

“That’s not a meal.”

“It’s a breakfast food. Breakfast is a meal. Ergo, Pop-Tarts are a meal.”

The corner of his mouth twitches, the almost-smile I’m starting to recognize, the one that means he’s amused but too controlled to actually show it. “Your logic is creative.”

“Thank you. I work very hard at it.”

He finishes unpacking the groceries while I watch, cataloging the contents with a kind of horrified fascination. Eggs, sorted by size. Bacon, arranged in neat parallel rows. Something that might be kale or might be the physical manifestation of my anxiety, I can’t tell. Bread, actual bread, the kind that probably doesn’t have enough preservatives to survive a nuclear apocalypse. Butter. Cheese. A container of soup that looks homemade.