Page 34 of The Werewolf’s Study Date

When she pulls back and climbs off my lap, I drop my hands, feeling the cold air hit the front of my shirt the second she's gone. She grabs her backpack from the floor, still wearing my oversized gray hoodie.

At the door, she turns back. "Boone."

"Yeah?"

"For what it's worth..." She meets my eyes from the doorway, looking entirely like herself—stubborn, smart, completely real. "I don't think it's just the bond either."

She pulls the door shut, and the latch clicks into place.

The apartment goes silent.

I stay on the couch and don't move. Every nerve in my body is firing at once, screaming at me to get off my ass, tear the door open, and go after her. My wolf is pacing behind my ribs, frantic, demanding that I drag her back inside where I can see her and keep her safe.

I plant my hands flat on my knees, grip the denim of my jeans, and force myself to stay put.

I don't follow her.

If this is going to work, she has to come back on her own terms. Not because I cornered her in the hall, and not because the bond forced her hand. She needs the space to choose me for real.

I sit alone in the quiet living room, listening to the wind batter the window, fighting every instinct in my blood, and I don't move an inch.

CHAPTER 9

MAISIE

I wake up and immediately do something deeply humiliating before I've even brushed my teeth. I run an experiment on myself.

Here's the setup. Pretend Boone Kinkaid isn't my fated mate. No cosmic scent thing, no bond, no ancient werewolf biology quietly making decisions about my life before I got a vote. He's just some junior on the football team who got assigned to tutor me in Creature Bio, and somewhere between explaining mitochondrial inheritance with French fries and walking me back to my dorm four separate times, he started liking me. No fate. No destiny. Just a big, warm, annoyingly competent guy who forgets his own strength when he hugs me.

Would I still want him?

The answer shows up so fast I actually say, "Okay, rude," out loud to my empty room, because apparently my subconscious didn't think this deserved any deliberation.

Obviously I would.

I liked him before I knew a damn thing. I looked for him around campus before I understood why I kept finding him. I wanted to tell him about my ninety-four before I told anyone else—including Delilah, including my own mom. I kissed him first, in the clearing at the edge of the old quad under the maple trees, festival lights strung up behind us, cider still sweet on my lips, and nobody's biology made me do that. That was just me. Deciding.

I wore his sweatshirt because it smells like him and I liked smelling like him, which is a sentence I would've found deeply pathetic in high school and now just find true. Whatever. Sue me.

I climbed into his lap because I wanted his hands on me. Nobody's fate did that. I did that. My own two very human, very ordinary hips did that, on purpose, no regrets.

The whole exercise mostly just pisses me off because I even needed it in the first place. I spent an entire night hurt and confused, cross-referencing sixty pages of academic literature on werewolf courtship in a spiral of panic, when I could've just asked myself one honest fucking question and saved everyone the trouble.

I flop back onto my pillow and groan at the ceiling.

"You're doing the face," Delilah says from her desk, not even looking up from the herbs she's measuring out. She has a real talent for narrating me without eye contact.

"What face."

"The face where you figure something out and get mad about how long it took you."

"I hate that you have names for my faces."

"I've catalogued four of them." She sets down her glass vial and turns to me. "Tell me."

So I tell her. All of it—the experiment, the answer, the sweatshirt, the lap, the whole embarrassing inventory. Delilah listens with the patience of someone who's been waiting for me to catch up to something she figured out weeks ago.

When I finish, she leans back in her chair and looks at me flatly.