AllFreeNovel
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Pitching it to my best friend wouldn’t go over well, but I had to try. For both our sakes.
“I got the rum and the glasses,” I said, passing Ansel in the kitchen. He’d let his beard and hair grow in the last year and, despite living with him, sometimes the new look surprised me.
“I’ll be out there in a minute. Start the fire?” he asked.
“I’m on it.”
Walking outside, I drummed up the different scenarios of how this conversation would go. Once I told him about the things I had been seeing, he would admit it, of course. Ansel had always been honest to a fault but not so good at expressing things, especially frustration and anger. He and I had grown up poor. Butter-on-Saltines-for-dinner poor. We’d started a business in our third year of college. Turned out that despite our studies in computer science and psychology, we were damned good at investing and flipping properties. We started with a tiny two-bedroom cottage we refurbished ourselves and went up from there.
Before long, we had built a corporation, restructured it, and sold it off for many times our start-up capital.
We retired in our late thirties.
With a flick of a switch, I turned our propane fire pit on and chuckled at the simplicity of our lives. I’d once helped my mom start a fire for her to cook dinner over because the electricity had gone unpaid when my dad got laid off from his job.
While I watched her stir that cast-iron pot, I promised myself that I would do better.
“It’s almost too easy, huh?” Ansel asked. He sometimes complained about how work-free everything in our life had become.
For two people who had been completely owned and driven by our desire to make our business successful, not having a goal or something to work for was a problem.
A big one.
We’d simply swept it under the rug for decades, while we placated ourselves with trips and vacations and, of late, anything adrenaline-inducing.
I chuckled at his antics. “Something like that. How many fingers? I asked, poising the glass bottle of rum above the two glasses.
“Four.”
He would be chatty sooner rather than later.
Rum made for loose lips.
He had brought out a spread of meats and cheeses, along with some of the cheesecake bites from the night before. “Wanna talk about what’s got your fur in a tangle?” I asked.
“There are no tangles in my fur,” he laughed, taking his first sip.
“Briars? Thorns? Talk to me, Ansel.”
He blew out a breath, tipping his chin up until he faced the stars above us. “It’s too late for us to have a mate.”
Right on the money. My bear let out a low rumble from his side of my consciousness. “Do you really think that? A few hours ago, you said you hadn’t given up.”
“I haven’t, but we’ve searched everywhere for her. Yeah, we were on vacation and once-in-a-lifetime trips, but I had my eyes open the entire time, hoping to find her. I know you did too.”
I had. No reason to deny it. “There’s nowhere in this world we haven’t been. So where could she be that we haven’t looked already? I refuse to entertain the other options.” While we didn’t speak them out loud, there was always the chance she had been mated to someone else—someone who wasn’t her fated. Or had married a human. Or that she was human and hadn’t found us. Humans didn’t share the same instincts about mates as shifters, hence the divorce rate.
The other possibility was perhaps our mate had passed away. I shook my head, not wanting to entertain that for even a millisecond.
“My bear aches for his mate. It physically hurts me now.”
I nodded. I had felt the same anvil in my chest, the otherworldly tugging at my consciousness to find the missing piece of our lives.
“Then let’s try something unconventional. There are all kinds of ways shifters find their mates these days.”
“Like what?” he asked, sitting up with a gleam in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in a hot minute.
“There are matchmaking services. Private firms who seek out your mate. Then there are the apps.”
