Page 67 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

By dusk I’m carrying a wolf, a sheep, a goldfish in a bag that I have already sworn to keep alive out of pure spite, and a paper cone of kettle corn, and my face hurts. That’s the part that catches me off guard, somewhere between the pie contest and the bluegrass band. My face hurts from laughing. I keep trying to remember the last time that happened, my cheeks aching, my guard just, gone, misplaced somewhere between the donuts and the ring toss, and I can’t. I can’t remember the last time.

The string lights come on overhead all at once, the whole street igniting soft and gold, and everyone cheers, and Orion looks up at them and then down at me, and the lights are doing something to his face that should be illegal in several states.

“What?” he asks.

“Nothing. You’re just.” I gesture at all of him with the kettle corn. “Ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Objectively. You won a goldfish with physics. Your jaw is doing the thing. The lights like you. It’s a lot.”

“My jaw is doing what thing?”

“It knows what it’s doing,” I say darkly, and he laughs, that real laugh, the low rare one that I’ve started collecting the way I collect first editions, and the warmth behind my ribs pulls tighter, lower, more insistent, and I have to look at the goldfish for a second and remember how breathing is organized.

That’s when I spot the photo booth.

It’s ancient. It’s magnificent. It’s one of those genuine relic booths with a sagging velvet curtain and a hand-painted sign promising FOUR POSES, ONE DOLLAR, MEMORIES FOREVER, and I’m dragging him toward it before my brain finishes the thought.

“Absolutely,” I say. “Yes. This is happening.”

“I haven’t been in one of these since 1987.”

“You’ve been in a photo booth?”

“It was Theo’s idea. There was a bet involved. The photos are sealed by treaty.”

“I will find those photos if it takes me the rest of my life.”

The booth was engineered for two average humans, and Orion is neither average nor, technically, entirely human, so getting us both inside is a negotiation involving his knees, my elbows, Mr. Darcy, the sheep, and the goldfish, who gets the place of honor on the tiny shelf. By the time we’re settled I’m basically in his lap, my legs over his thigh, his arm the only thing keeping me from sliding off the bench, and the curtain drops and closes us into a small dim world that smells of dust and him, pine and woodsmoke and a warmer note beneath, and suddenly the booth feels a lot smaller than it did four seconds ago.

“Pose ideas,” I say, slightly breathless, feeding the dollar in. “Go.”

“I don’t pose.”

“Everyone poses. Smile like you’ve seen the sun before. It’s four flashes, Orion, survive it.”

The first flash catches him solemn and me mid-laugh, pointing at his solemnity.

The second catches whatever face he makes when I whisper, “Mrs. Patterson has a betting pool about us, and I know for a fact she has money on ‘kissing by the gazebo,’” which turns out to be genuine, startled laughter, head back, unguarded, and I feel it in my chest, a small win I immediately want to repeat.

For the third, I kiss his cheek. That’s the plan, anyway. Cheek. Wholesome. Suitable for the betting pool.

But he turns his head.

His mouth catches mine, and the third flash goes off at the exact moment the kiss stops being wholesome, and then nobody is counting flashes anymore.

His hand slides into my hair, tilting me, and I make a sound against his mouth that the booth absorbs discreetly, professional about it, clearly not its first rodeo. The kiss goes deep and unhurried, cider-sweet, his other hand splaying warm across my hip and pulling me more thoroughly into his lap, and I go, I go so willingly it’s embarrassing, my fingers curling into his sweater, the low pull behind my ribs dropping straight through my belly and catching fire on the way down. He kisses me until my toes curl inside my boots. He kisses me until I forget there is a festival, a town, a goldfish bearing witness from the shelf. The fourth flash fires somewhere in the middle of it, unnoticed, unmourned.

“Fable.” My name, rough, against the corner of my mouth. His restraint is audibly fraying, and knowing I did that, me, a disaster in a coat covered in kettle corn dust, sends a hot, giddy spike of power straight through me.

“Mm.”

“We’re in a public booth.”

“It has a curtain. That’s basically zoning.”

“It has a line,” he says, and I go still, and through the velvet comes the unmistakable sound of two preteens debating loudly whether the booth is broken because it’s been, quote, like ten minutes.