Page 72 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

I come apart.

The orgasm rips through me, and I’m sobbing his name into his shoulder as my body clamps down around him, milking him deeper. He follows me over a moment later, groaning, shaking, spilling inside me with a final deep thrust that makes stars burst behind my eyes.

We collapse together. Tangled. Breathing hard. Rain still drumming against the glass.

“Stay,” I whisper when I can form words again.

“Always.”

He rolls us so I’m tucked against his side, his arm wrapped around my waist, and I feel the tension slowly drain from his body, all except his hand, which moves to my neck and presses there, right over my pulse point.

There’s no pressure in it. His hand is just… present, his palm warm against the spot where his teeth grazed me earlier.

His eyes close, and there’s something almost painful in his expression. Like a man dying of thirst, pressing his hand to a glass of water he won’t allow himself to drink.

I don’t ask what it means.

I’m not sure I want to know.

16

— • —

Fable

The pack barbecue, three days later, is chaos in the best possible way.

I drove here. Myself. In my own car, no less, back from the body shop for a week now with a rebuilt front end and new glass, smelling of upholstery cleaner and fresh paint. Orion had it inspected before he’d let it anywhere near me. Twice. By two different mechanics who don’t know about each other.

It was a whole production: the laminated checklist on the visor, the pre-drive ritual performed twice, and Orion’s SUV a patient shadow in my rearview the entire way up the mountain, because I only agreed to try if he promised to follow. Baby steps. My hands shook for the first mile and then, somewhere around the third switchback, they simply stopped, and when I parked in the meadow he got out of his car wearing the expression of a man watching someone summit Everest.

“Don’t make it a thing,” I warned him.

“It’s a thing.”

“Orion.”

“It’s an enormous thing. I’m planning a commemorative plaque.”

Orion’s backyard, which is less a backyard and more a sprawling meadow that probably qualifies as its own zip code, has been transformed into a festival of controlled mayhem. Smoke rises from an enormous grill where Theo stands sentinel, flipping burgers with the focused intensity of a surgeon performing a triple bypass. Folding tables covered in mismatched cloths sag under the weight of potluck contributions, casseroles and salads and at least three different kinds of pie. String lights crisscross between the trees even though it’s barely four in the afternoon, and somewhere someone has set up a speaker playing music that I can only describe as “mountain folk crossed with something that has too much bass.”

Children run between adults’ legs, shrieking with laughter, and I watch in fascinated horror as a little girl with pigtails shifts mid-sprint into a tiny silver lycan, yips excitedly at a butterfly, and shifts back without breaking stride.

Because for them, this is normal, I remind myself, white-knuckling my drink. This is just Tuesday for these people.

I have my laminated checklist in my pocket. The socializing one, not the driving one. Orion doesn’t know I made it. It says things like remember names and ask follow-up questions and do not mention that you saw Mrs. Delgado’s husband buying romance novels and he made you promise not to tell.

Mario is in his harness, which I insisted on because I wasn’t sure how he’d react to a yard full of lycans. He’s currently perched on my shoulder, a furry orange parrot, surveying the chaos with the disdain of a tiny emperor forced to mingle with peasants.

“You’re doing great,” I mutter to him.

He flicks his tail against my neck. This is not agreement. This is tolerance, and barely.

“You must be the human!”

I turn to find a woman I don’t recognize beaming at me, silver-streaked hair, laugh lines, the kind of face that suggests she knows every piece of gossip in a fifty-mile radius and isn’t afraid to deploy it.

“That’s me,” I confirm. “The human one.”