Page 46 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

The pen presses hard enough to tear the paper slightly. I stare at the question, Why?, and feel three hundred years of carefully maintained control crumbling at the edges.

Because you’re mine, I want to write. Because I pulled you from that wreckage and held you while you bled, and you called me pretty like it was the most natural thing in the world, and right then I knew the three centuries of waiting had all been for you…

I cross out everything I’ve written for this question.

Start again.

Because you called me pretty while you were bleeding, and no one has looked at me like that in a very long time.

***

I fold the paper carefully.

Tuck it back under the rock, exactly where I found it.

She’ll find it when she wakes up. She’ll read my answers. She’ll have more questions, she always has more questions, it’s one of the things I love about her, and maybe, eventually, she’ll ask question six again. In person. Where I can see her face, and she can see mine, and I can tell her the truth without hiding behind paper and ink.

Mate. She’s my mate. And she doesn’t know what that means, not really, not the way I do.

I should feel anxious about that. Terrified. Worried about her reaction when she finally understands.

Instead, I just feel hopeful.

She’s still here. She’s still asking questions. She left me a questionnaire, for god’s sake, with a drawing of a wolf on the outside and purple ink and a footnote about her inferior lying detection abilities.

She hasn’t run yet.

I’m rising to leave when I hear it.

The back door opening. Paper rustling as she picks up the FAQ. A pause, she’s reading, I realize, standing in her doorway in the early morning light, reading my answers while I crouch in the shadows, a lovesick fool.

Then: laughter.

Surprised. Genuine. Warm.

Best sound. Best sound I’ve ever heard in three hundred years of sounds.

And beneath the delight, threaded through her scent even at this distance, is a warmer note. One that spikes every time I come within ten feet of her, that clings to her doorway and the collar of the cardigan she wears three days out of five. She wants me. Her body has been broadcasting it for days, honey and lightning on every inhale, and being downwind of it is its own particular torture, and I would sooner tear out my own throat than rush her.

Patience. You’ve waited three hundred years. You can wait until she’s sure.

She laughed at my answers. She read about my age and my diet and my inability to stop watching her window, and she laughed. There was no mockery in it, no cruelty. Just delight. Amusement. The laugh of someone who’s discovering that the impossible can also be funny.

I want to burst through the shadows and make her laugh again. Want to spend the rest of my very long life learning what makes that sound happen.

Patience. Space. Let her come to you.

I force myself to retreat, to slip back into the darkness, to leave her to her reading and her processing and her slow, careful approach to the impossible.

And that’s when I hear the second set of footsteps.

They aren’t hers. They aren’t human.

There, on the ridge above her building, the same place I caught the shape before, movement in the trees. Pack. One of my own. Shadowing the woman I’ve sworn to protect, and doing it in secret, which means someone doesn’t trust me with my own choices.

Again.

My contentment drains away, going cold.