Page 91 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“Now you know everything. Every terrible part of me. And you’re still here.”

“The terrible parts are actually my favorite parts,” I tell him. “The obsessive organization. The lock-checking. The way you can’t let anything be imperfect.” I reach up, grab the front of his sweatpants, tug him closer. “I love your terrible parts.”

His breath catches. “You said the word.”

“What word?”

“Love.”

I freeze.

I did say it. I didn’t mean to, it just slipped out, woven into the list of things I find annoying and endearing about him.

“I…”

“Don’t take it back.” His voice is urgent now. “Please. Don’t take it back.”

“I’m not taking it back. I just…” I swallow. “I wasn’t planning to say it like that. I had a whole speech.”

“You had a speech?”

“I practiced it in the car. Before the storm. It was very eloquent.”

“I want to hear the speech.”

“I can’t remember the speech now. You made me say the word early and now my brain is short-circuiting.”

He laughs, actually laughs, warm and surprised, and sinks down onto his knees in front of me so we’re at eye level.

“Fable.” His hands find my hips, thumbs stroking slow circles against my skin through the fabric of his shirt. “I love you.”

My heart stutters.

“You’re just saying that because I said it first…”

“I’m saying it because it’s true. Because I’ve wanted to say it for weeks and I’ve been too afraid to scare you.” His eyes are bright, gray shot through with gold, the way they get when he’s feeling something too strongly to hide. “I love your sticky notes. All of them… the ones on your mirror and the ones on your register and the ones you leave yourself in random places and then forget about.”

“That’s ADHD.”

“I know. I love that too.” His thumbs keep moving in those slow circles. “I love your pep talks. The ones you give yourself in the stockroom when you think no one’s listening. ‘You’re fine, everything’s fine, you’re a person who does things.’ I’ve heard them all.”

“That’s embarrassing.”

“That’s brave. That’s you being brave every single day, talking yourself through the hard parts.” He leans forward, presses a kiss to my knee. “I love the way you shelve books wrong on purpose to see if I’ll notice.”

“You noticed?”

“I noticed every single time. The Duke’s Inconvenient Bride in the mystery section. The cozy vampire romance in literary fiction. The entire Sue Grafton alphabet arranged in reverse order.”

“That last one was an accident.”

“Was it?”

“…Maybe not.”

He’s smiling now, and it transforms his face, makes him look younger, lighter, less like a three-hundred-year-old king and more like a man who’s just found something he didn’t know he was looking for.

“I love you,” he says again. “I love every chaotic, impossible, beautiful thing about you. And I’m going to keep loving you for as long as you let me.”