Page 77 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

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Fable

Two days after the barbecue, the bookstore feels wrong without him.

I didn’t expect that. I expected relief, or at least the blessed numbness that comes with distance. I expected the space I asked for to manifest as peace, quiet rooms, clear thoughts, the gradual return of the person I was before a supernatural creature started showing up with color-coded groceries and opinions about my organizational systems.

Instead, every corner of Fable Tales echoes with his absence. The chaos shelf is still alphabetized, and I can’t bring myself to mess it up because he touched every one of those spines. The laminated checklist hangs by the register, and I trace the edges with my fingertips approximately seven thousand times a day. The back door still has the better lock he installed after the break-in, and sometimes I stand there and stare at it like it might have answers.

Mario has taken up a permanent position in the front window, perched on a display of new releases he’s slowly crushing with his considerable orange mass, and he stares at the woods, a Victorian widow waiting for a ship that sailed away and might never return.

“He’s not coming,” I tell him, for approximately the fifteenth time today. “I told him not to.”

Mario ignores me. Mario has been ignoring me since I drove home from the barbecue and he realized that his favorite furry mode of transportation wasn’t lurking in the shadows behind the building anymore.

He’s respecting your boundaries, I remind myself, reorganizing the same shelf for the third time because my hands need something to do. That’s what you asked for. That’s what you wanted.

Except it turns out that getting exactly what you asked for can feel worse than not getting it at all. Because if he was showing up, doing his creepy guard-dog routine, leaving wildflowers on my doorstep, being his usual obsessively protective self, I could be angry about that. I could have something to push against. I could feel like I was in control of this situation.

Instead, there’s just silence.

And my own thoughts, which are terrible company.

The bell over the door chimes, and I look up with my customer service smile firmly in place, the one that says I’m fine, everything’s fine, please buy something and don’t ask about my personal life…

“I leave for THREE WEEKS,” Millie Vance announces, dropping her bags in the middle of the store with the finality of a planted victory flag, “and you get a SECRET BOYFRIEND?!”

I burst into tears.

“Okay, okay, okay.” Millie installs herself on my couch, a general establishing a command center, wine in one hand and her phone in the other, and levels me with the look that’s gotten confessions out of me since we were nineteen. “Start talking. And don’t you dare summarize. I’ve been on a boat with marine biologists and no internet for three weeks, sustained entirely by your unhinged cryptic texts, and I require everything.”

So I tell her the shape of it. The crash. The wrong phone number scrawled while concussed. The unfairly hot stranger who showed up at the hospital anyway, drove me home, and then simply… kept showing up, alphabetizing my chaos shelf and laminating my anxiety checklist like that’s a normal thing a person does.

“That last part is actually kind of sweet,” she admits.

“I know.” My voice goes small. “I know it is.”

She studies my face, and whatever she finds there makes her set the wine down. “Fable. That’s not the something. You’ve got a whole other thing behind your teeth, I can see it. Spit it out.”

I’ve been dreading and craving this for three weeks. My best friend, in my apartment, close enough to tell.

“The something was sex,” I say. “That’s part of it.”

“I KNEW it…”

“But that’s not the thing.”

“Yes.”

“On a couch?”

“The first time.”

“THE FIRST TIME? There were multiple times?!”

“There was also a bed. During a rainstorm. It was…” I struggle for words. “Intense.”