Page 81 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

The road winds higher, and the snow is starting to stick, a thin white skin forming over the asphalt ahead of me. My headlights catch a deer at the edge of the trees, frozen, watching, and my heart stutters, but the deer bounds away and nothing happens. No crash. No impact. Just the road climbing on into the storm, and me climbing with it, racing the weather to the top.

“I’m going to tell him,” I say to the darkness, to Mario, to myself. “I’m going to tell him about Mom and Dad. About where I was going that day. About why I couldn’t drive.”

Mario meows.

“I know. I know I’ve never told anyone. But he told me his secrets. He trusted me with the wolf thing and the mate thing and all of it. I have to trust him back.”

The trees thin. The road levels out. And there, through the swirling white, lights.

His house. Warm yellow glow spilling from the windows, smoke rising from the chimney to be torn apart by the wind. He’s home. I made it up ahead of the worst of it, though the snow is falling thick enough now that I can barely see the path.

Of course he’s home. Where else would he be?

I park. Turn off the engine. Sit in the silence for a long moment, breathing.

You drove here. You chose this. Now finish it.

I get out of the car. Grab Mario’s carrier. Walk up the path to his front door on legs that feel steadier than they have any right to feel.

I raise my hand to knock.

The door opens before my knuckles touch wood.

Orion stands in the doorway, wearing a sweater I recognize and an expression I don’t, something raw and wounded and desperately hopeful all at once. His eyes go from my face to the car in his driveway, to the keys still clutched in my hand.

“You drove,” he says, and his voice is wrecked. Broken. Like those two words contain everything he hasn’t let himself feel for the past two days.

18

— • —

Orion

Two days.

Forty-eight hours, if we’re being precise, and I am always being precise, since she said give me time and I watched her taillights disappear down my mountain.

I have honored every word of her request. I have not gone to her window. I have not stood in the alley behind Fable Tales listening for her heartbeat through the brick. I have not used the pack to check on her, though Theo volunteers information anyway, unprompted, in the carefully neutral tone of a man leaving food outside a locked door. She opened the store on time. She reorganized the poetry section. She looks tired.

She looks tired. I have done that. I have made her tired, and I am not permitted to fix it, and the not-fixing is a physical sensation, an itch under my sternum that no amount of pacing relieves.

I pace anyway.

At night I run the boundary of her block in lycan form, twice, exactly twice, because she said don’t follow me and don’t show up and don’t check on me, and the boundary is none of those things. The boundary is a perimeter. If I cannot guard her happiness, I will guard everything else. I stand at the property line she doesn’t know exists, close enough to know the town is quiet, far enough to keep my word, and I do not cross it. Three hundred years of discipline, and all of it goes to holding one line on one street for one woman who asked.

The first night, I drafted a message.

I drafted nine messages. I’m sorry was too small. Please was unfair. The seventh draft was four paragraphs and cited historical precedent, and I deleted it with particular violence. In the end I sent nothing, because she asked for time, and a message is a hand reaching into her time and turning it toward me.

Her list of questions is still in my desk drawer. The original, eight questions in her looping, hurried handwriting, the paper soft now at the folds from how many times I’ve opened it. Question six sits in the middle of the page. What’s the deal with the “mate” thing I keep reading about online? She asked. She stood in her kitchen and asked me to my face, and I stirred a sauce that did not need stirring.

I have been alive for three centuries. I have negotiated treaties, buried friends, outlasted empires. And the worst thing I have ever done is stir a sauce that didn’t need stirring.

On the second morning, Theo lets himself into my kitchen and sets a covered dish on the counter.

“You haven’t eaten.”

“I ate.”