Page 68 of Bookish Girl’s Emergency Contact Is a Lycan King

We look at each other, my lips kiss-stung, his eyes gone molten at the edges, both of us breathing wrong, and I start to laugh, silent and helpless, my forehead dropping to his shoulder while he exhales the long, controlled breath of a man reassembling himself brick by brick.

“Later,” he says quietly, and it isn’t a question, and the word lands low in my belly with a weight I feel all the way home.

“Later,” I agree.

We spill out of the booth, flushed, with all the dignity of teenagers caught behind the bleachers, and the preteens file in with judgmental looks. The machine whirs and drops our strip into the slot.

Four frames. Him solemn, me laughing. Him laughing, me delighted. The kiss, caught right as it turned.

And the fourth: blurred, close, indecent-adjacent, my hand fisted in his sweater, his hand lost in my hair.

Orion looks at the strip for a long moment. Then he tears it, carefully, precisely, along the line between the third frame and the fourth, hands me the top three, and slides the last frame into the inside pocket of his coat, directly over his heart.

“That one’s mine,” he says.

I do not survive this. Somewhere on Main Street, under the string lights, holding a stuffed wolf named Mr. Darcy and a traumatized goldfish, Fable Larkin quietly perishes, and the woman who walks home hand in hand with a lycan king, laughing at something he says about the structural integrity of funnel cake, is somebody new.

The goldfish, we decide on the walk, is named Ishmael, because I own a bookstore and some jokes are simply required of me. He will live above the register at Fable Tales, on the high shelf Mario has never conquered, where he can supervise transactions and be kept alive out of pure spite.

“Call me Ishmael,” Orion says, deadpan, testing it.

“See? It works on every level.”

15

— • —

Fable

Three days after the festival, at closing time, the figure appears at the edge of my vision, and my heart stops.

Black coat. Head down. Walking toward the bookstore with a purposeful stride that makes every alarm bell in my brain start screaming. The streetlights haven’t come on yet, leaving the sidewalk in that uncertain gray between day and night, and the shape moving toward me seems to absorb what little light remains.

I freeze behind the register, hand hovering over the stack of receipts I was organizing, and watch the figure approach. The store has been closed for fifteen minutes, lights dimmed to half-brightness, CLOSED sign hanging in the window, chairs pushed in and register reconciled and everything done except me actually leaving.

It’s nothing. It’s just someone walking by. Not everyone in a dark coat is a threat. You’re being paranoid. This is Main Street in a small town, not a horror movie.

The figure keeps coming.

Closer. Closer. Head still down, face hidden by the angle.

My chest tightens. My hands start to shake. I’m reaching for my phone, to call someone, anyone, to not be alone right now, when the figure walks past.

Keeps walking.

Disappears around the corner without even glancing at the shop.

The air goes out of me all at once, and that’s when the panic attack hits.

It doesn’t come gradually, doesn’t build in stages. It’s just there, a wave of terror crashing over me, stealing my breath, making my heart pound so hard I can feel it in my teeth. My hands are shaking violently now. My vision is narrowing at the edges, the world reducing to a small bright point surrounded by darkness. My chest is so tight I can’t get air, I can’t breathe, I’m going to die, I’m dying…

Breathe. You need to breathe. In for four, out for six, that’s what Dr. Hale said, in for four…

I can’t remember how to count. Can’t remember how to do anything except stand here, frozen behind my own register, trapped in a body that’s convinced I’m in mortal danger.

It’s just panic. It’s just chemicals. Your brain is lying to you.

The rational thoughts don’t help. They never help in the moment, just float there uselessly while my body does whatever it wants.