Page 65 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

“You’re scandalized,” he observes as we walk. “I can tell. You keep looking back at the store.”

“I closed early. People will talk.”

“People are currently watching a man in a corn costume lose a footrace to a nine-year-old. Your register is safe from public scrutiny.”

“Mrs. Patterson will notice. Mrs. Patterson notices everything.”

“Mrs. Patterson,” he says calmly, “is by the cider stand, and she’s been photographing us for the last two minutes.”

I follow his glance. Mrs. Patterson lowers her phone with the speed and subtlety of a startled cartoon. Then, accepting she’s been caught, she simply waves, beams, and mouths something to the woman next to her that is definitely, one hundred percent, the word finally.

“Great,” I mutter. “By Monday we’ll be engaged. By Wednesday I’ll be pregnant with triplets.”

“The Hartsgrove information network is remarkably efficient.”

“It’s terrifying is what it is. It’s surveillance with casseroles.”

The first food stop is nonnegotiable, because I can smell the cider donuts from half a block away and my body is already walking there without consulting me. Orion buys a dozen. When I raise my eyebrows at the box, he says, “Data suggests you’ll want more than two, and I refuse to stand in that line twice,” which is either romance or logistics, and with him there’s genuinely no difference.

The donuts are so good I make a sound that startles a passing dog.

“Good?” he asks.

“I want to be buried in these. That’s my updated will. Cider donut mausoleum.”

“Noted. I’ll have the paperwork drawn up.”

We work our way down the street, and it turns into a gauntlet in the best way. Kettle corn. Caramel apples, he watches me try to bite one with the fascination of a nature documentarian. Cheese curds of questionable provenance that squeak against my teeth while he explains, unprompted, the microbiology that causes the squeaking, and I eat four more just to make him keep talking, because there is something deeply unfair about how attractive competence is. A man should not be able to say casein matrix and set off a slow, warm pull behind my ribs. And yet.

You have a problem, my brain observes.

I’m aware, I tell it, and hand him the rest of my caramel apple so I can watch his jaw work.

Halfway down the block, his phone buzzes.

He glances at the screen, and for one second, half a second, a change crosses his face. A shutter. The line of his shoulders acquires a new weight, the kind I’ve learned to notice, and then it’s gone, smoothed over, and the phone disappears into his pocket unanswered.

“Everything okay?”

“Nothing that can’t wait.” He looks at me, and whatever was on that screen loses. It visibly loses. “Today is spoken for.”

File it, my brain says, and I do, in the folder that’s getting fuller by the day, the one labeled things he isn’t telling me. But his hand finds the small of my back, warm even through my coat, and the folder can wait too.

The games section is where things get out of hand.

It starts at the ring toss, which every human alive knows is rigged. The rings are barely wider than the bottles. The bottles are angled. Nobody wins the ring toss; that’s the ring toss’s whole personality.

Orion studies the booth for eleven seconds, a general before a chessboard.

“The rings are undersized,” he says.

“Yes. It’s a scam. It’s traditional. You pay three dollars to be humbled.”

“The bounce is the problem. If the ring arrives with no rotational energy and lands dead…” He pays his three dollars, weighs a ring in his hand, and tosses it with a flat, unhurried flick.

It drops over the bottle neck and stops. No bounce. No drama. It simply obeys.

The carnival worker stares at it.