Page 25 of The Werewolf’s Study Date

First, there's Tate outside the dining hall on Wednesday morning. He spots me before Boone does, and his entire face locks up—this intense, loaded look—before he forces a completely unnatural grin. "Morning, Maisie." Way too loud. Way too deliberate.

I filed that one away.

Then comes Thursday afternoon outside Introduction to Magical Species Interaction. I'm waiting near the doors for Boone when Priya, a girl from my lab section, walks up with an eager smile.

"It's so cute watching you two," she says, leaning in. "Especially since⁠—"

Her friend instantly grabs her forearm. Hard. Digging fingers in with a look that screams shut the fuck up right now.

Priya blinks, catches herself, and gives me a tight, panicked grin. "Especially since you seem so great together! Okay, bye!"

They scurry off before I can even open my mouth.

I stand there in the hallway, staring after them. Especially since what?

Twenty minutes later, I storm back to the dorm and drop my backpack onto my desk with a heavy thud.

Delilah takes one look at my face and quietly closes her laptop. "What happened?"

"Something's going on," I say, crossing my arms. "Everyone's acting like I'm the butt of some massive inside joke, and you're going to tell me what it is."

Delilah sighs, rubbing her temples. "Maisie..."

"Tate looked at me yesterday like I was a ticking bomb," I cut in. "And twenty minutes ago, someone almost spilled something before her friend physically gagged her. You know what's happening. Tell me."

"I suspect," Delilah says carefully, holding up a hand. "I don't know. And even if I did, it's not my place. I'm not copping out on you—if you were in danger, I'd drag you out of here myself. But you're not. This is a conversation you need to have with Boone."

"You could give me a tiny hint."

"You could ask him directly."

I glare at her, but she holds my gaze without budging. I've lived with her long enough to know when she's locked in on a principle.

"He needs to be the one," she says gently. "If I'm right about what he's doing, you deserve to hear it from him."

"Fine," I say, grabbing my laptop off the desk and zipping it into my bag. "If nobody's going to tell me, I'll figure it out myself."

I turn on my heel and head straight for the library.

Here's something I didn't fully appreciate about Creature University until I spent three hours in the research stacks. This school has been collecting, publishing, and archiving academic scholarship on creature behavior for nearly ninety years.

Ninety years.

That's a lot of published material. Including, it turns out, things like Olfactory Pair-Bonding Mechanisms in Lupine Fated Mate Recognition and Pre-Completion Courtship Behaviors in Werewolves: A Longitudinal Study of Proximity-Seeking and Protective Instinct Expression and my personal favorite, which I'm internally calling You Already Know, You're Just Not Looking: Human Partner Recognition Latency in Mixed-Species Mating Pairs.

That last one's real title is longer and less funny. I'm paraphrasing.

I started with a reasonable search. Werewolf courtship, general. The database returned about four hundred and seventy results in under a second. I narrowed by relevance. Read abstracts. Picked three sources.

By the second one, I was reading slower.

By the third, I had a notebook out.

The thing about academic writing is that it's dry and technical and precise, which means it takes longer than it should to realize you're reading a detailed description of your own life formatted as a peer-reviewed study. But eventually it registers.

Pre-completion werewolf partners demonstrate a marked increase in food-provisioning behavior toward the recognized mate, reads the first article, ranging from direct offering of food to ensuring the mate's nutritional needs are met through indirect provision. This behavior is instinctive rather than calculated and typically presents early in the recognition phase.

I write food in my notebook and draw a line to: brought extra lunch, ordered dinner without asking, got annoyed when I skipped breakfast, showed up to a study session with a bag of food that was somehow exactly what I wanted.