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Matthyw brushed by me and swept out of the room, his shoulders rolled back, head tilted forward. He didn’t even give Rianne a glance as he left.
When the door was clicked shut, Rianne jutted her thumb over her shoulder. “That was Matthyw, wasn’t it?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Ah. I didn’t realize he was back.”
“I found out this morning at breakfast,” I said quickly, turning to my bed. I couldn’t have her see the flush in my cheeks, the way my teeth wanted to start chewing my bottom lip. The very part he touched with his thumb.
“Well…I’m glad he’s back,” she said, though her tone seemed to imply otherwise. I knew Matthyw wasn’t Rianne’s favorite person, but I still didn’t understand why. It wasn’t as though Matthyw had done something that had personally offended Rianne…that I knew of, anyway. “He seems…well.”
I picked at the sheets of my bed, needing to give my hands something to do, needing an excuse to keep my back towards her.
“You said you needed to talk to me about something?” I asked, wincing when I heard my voice crack.
“Oh, um, well, I guess it’s not terribly important,” she said. “We can talk about it later. What’s…what’s wrong with your hand?”
How could I have forgotten about my hand? Had Matthyw distracted me so much where I had forgotten my hand had been injured in the first place?
Apparently so.
“Oh.” Suddenly, the pain twinged back to life, like it had remembered itself now that I was reminded of it in the first place. “Embyrlyn and I were assigned physical combat training.”
“Wow. I forget how strong she is, considering she’s so small,” Rianne said. “Did you break it?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I forced myself to flex my fingers, wincing at the pain. “It hurts like a bitch, though.”
Rianne chuckled.
“You okay?” Now that Matthyw wasn’t in the room, now that the tension between me and Rianne was gone, it was easier to look at her without being concerned she might find something telling on my face. “You seemed anxious when you got in here.”
Rianne waved her hand, her cheeks filling with a dark red color. I arched my brow. Rianne wasn’t prone to blushing; she was so focused on school that she didn’t seem to have time to be embarrassed, but now…
“Oh, it’s just, I got notified of an offer…”
“Offer?” I tilted my head to the side, dropping to sit on the side of my bed. “What do you mean? Like, a job offer?”
Rianne laughed, but it was so forced, it was hard for me to take it seriously.
“No!” she said. “A job offer? What would I even do? Anyway, um, so, look, I just found this out, but apparently, in order to prevent the Marriage Law from, well, you know, controlling who you’d marry, you can make your own choice. You can basically propose.”
I closed my eyes, trying to slow everything down. It wasn’t just the staccato tone or the nervousness. I was trying to make sense of what she said, and, simultaneously, trying to pair it with what Matthyw had mentioned earlier.
“Wait,” I said. “I thought the whole purpose of the new law was to marry human and wolf.”
“Yes,” Rianne said. “But, as I’m sure you know, there are those humans and those wolves who would rather, you know, not marry outside their own kind. And this is sort of a loophole that prevents the lottery of the Marriage Law to take place.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t know if it was the pain in my hand or everything with Matthyw, but I felt like an idiot trying to connect dots with stars. I wasn’t understanding what she was getting at. “And you’ve had an offer. I’m assuming it was made by a wolf?”
Rianne nodded more enthusiastically than the question deserved.
“You’re being weird.”
“I’m not being weird,” she insisted before holding up a hand. “Look, this is new to me, and I never thought…”
“Never thought what?” She wasn’t making any sense.
She grunted, running her fingers through her wolf, brown hair. “No, nothing.” She shook her head. “I know what I am. I may be a wolf, but to some, I might as well be a human. I accepted that not everyone would… I wasn’t anticipating receiving an offer in the first place.”
