Page 26 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“I don’t…” I push the pasta around my plate, suddenly not hungry. “I don’t really want to talk about that.”

“Okay.”

That’s it. Just okay. No pushing, no follow-up questions, no attempts to pry open the door I just slammed shut. Just acceptance, simple and clean.

Who does that? Who respects boundaries without being asked twice?

“You’re weird,” I tell him.

“So I’ve been told.”

“I mean it as a compliment.”

“I’ll take it as one anyway.”

We finish dinner in comfortable silence, and I help him clean up, or try to, anyway, until he physically removes the sponge from my hand and points me toward the couch.

“Rest,” he says. “That’s the whole point of bringing you here.”

“I’m rested. I’ve been sitting on a stool for three days.”

“You’ve been worrying on a stool for three days. That’s different.”

He’s not wrong. He’s annoyingly, infuriatingly not wrong.

I sit on the couch. He hands me a blanket, soft, expensive, probably made from the wool of ethically raised alpacas or something, and I wrap it around myself while he finishes in the kitchen.

“Stay for dinner,” he says, and it’s not a question. More like a statement of fact, delivered after we’ve already eaten dinner, which should be logically impossible but somehow isn’t.

“I already stayed for dinner.”

“Stay for tomorrow’s dinner. And the one after that.”

“That sounds like an invitation to move in.”

“That sounds like you’re avoiding the question.”

I am. I absolutely am.

“I have a concussion,” I say. “I’m not supposed to make important decisions.”

“Is having dinner with me an important decision?”

“It feels like one.”

He’s standing at the edge of the living room now, backlit by the kitchen lights, and his expression is doing something complicated that I can’t quite parse. A look like hope, or want, or maybe just patience wearing thin.

“Stay,” he says again, softer this time.

I open my mouth to answer, to say yes or no or something in between, when a sound cuts through the quiet.

A howl.

Long, low, mournful, rolling down the mountain in one slow wave, echoing off the windows of his perfect house. It sounds close. It sounds very close.

I flinch instinctively, pulling the blanket tighter. “What was that?”

“Wolves.” He says it calmly, casually, like someone commenting on the weather. “They live in the woods up here. Harmless, mostly.”