Page 80 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

My eyes are stinging. I blink hard.

“What if I’m wrong?”

“Then you’re wrong. People are wrong about relationships all the time. That’s not a fate thing; that’s a life thing.” She pulls me into a hug. “But Fable… you drove home from that barbecue with steady hands. Six years of white-knuckling every drive, and you did that one calm. Something in you has changed. And I don’t think that’s fate. I think that’s love.”

The word sits between us.

I don’t argue.

I can’t.

It’s dark when I get in the car, and the first fat flakes are already drifting down under the streetlights, the kind that mean business. The forecast has been threatening a storm all day. If I’m going to do this, it has to be now, before the mountain roads close.

Mario is in his carrier on the passenger seat because I couldn’t leave him behind, he’s been mourning too hard, staring out windows, meowing at shadows. He deserves to see Orion again even if I don’t know what I’m going to say when I get there.

If I get there. I might die on this mountain road. I might chicken out and turn around. I might…

“Stop,” I tell myself out loud. “We’re doing this.”

The keys are cold in my hand. I slide them into the ignition and listen to the engine turn over, that familiar sound, the one that used to make my stomach clench with terror. Tonight it just sounds like a car.

Checklist.

But I don’t reach for the laminated card clipped to my visor. Instead, I just… breathe.

“Meds taken,” I say out loud, because the ritual still helps even if I’m not reading it. “This morning, with orange juice. Phone in the glovebox…” I reach over, tuck it away. “Mirrors adjusted.”

I adjust them. The rearview shows my own face: brown eyes too wide, hair escaping its clip, a smear of something on my cheek that might be tears or might be wine.

“You look like a disaster,” I inform my reflection.

My reflection does not argue.

“Seatbelt.”

Click.

“Music off. No distractions. You’re just driving. You’re a person who drives.”

My voice doesn’t crack this time.

I put the car in gear and pull out onto Main Street, and I point myself toward the mountain, and I go.

The road is dark, and the snow is coming harder now.

I forgot how dark it gets up here, no streetlights once you leave town, just the tunnel of my headlights carving through the black, the flakes rushing at the windshield in dizzying streaks. The wind has picked up too, buffeting the car on the exposed curves, and the trees press close on either side, their branches already going white. The curves come one after another, and I take them slowly, carefully, wipers working, hands steady on the wheel.

You’re doing this. You’re actually doing this.

“We’re fine,” I tell Mario, who is expressing his opinion of the drive through a series of increasingly dramatic meows. “We’re totally fine. This is fine. This is just driving. People do this constantly.”

Mario does not believe me. Mario thinks I’m taking him to his death.

“You’re going to see your favorite person,” I remind him. “The big furry one who you hate and also love. Remember him?”

A yowl that sounds like accusation.

“I know I’m not him. I’m sorry I’m not a giant supernatural creature with comfortable fur. I’m doing my best.”