7. It’s Un-fur-tunate
It’s Un-fur-tunate
Present Day
Cian
Mash Cassidy was about as agile and light-footed as you’d expect a six-foot-nine, built-as-fuck werewolf with size twenty-two feet to be. He crashed through my bedroom window, collided with my dresser, and knocked my lamp and artfully arranged coffee-table books to the carpet.
“Fucking hell, you moved your armchair. I was expecting a much softer landing,” he said, getting to his feet.
I pulled my eye mask and headphones off. The podcast had finished over thirty minutes ago, not that I remembered a word uttered. It wasn’t like I’d fallen asleep and missed it either, my mind had just wandered off on its own, churning over James Bradshaw and Dylan West and Howl Ya Doing and Byte Tech.
“Let me guess, there’s a woman in your bed and you need to camp out here until she fucks off?” Usually, Mash waited until the morning to ditch his dates. He must particularly disagree with this one.
“What? No, I haven’t had sex in like two m—days.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. I need your help.”
I sat up and pushed the covers off myself. Might as well get up and put the kettle on. Not as though I’d be getting sleep any time soon.
Mash threw the pair of jeans I’d laid over the back of the armchair towards me. “Get dressed, Bangers. I have a plan. Operation Save Mash’s Fucking Tail. You in?”
“What if I say no?” I tossed the jeans aside and stood up. “You want a cup of tea?”
“Bro, no. Well, maybe in a to-go cup. Coffee might be better, actually.”
“What’s going on?” I padded into the kitchen area, Mash following behind me. The kettle was still half full, so I flicked the switch, took two mugs from the cupboard, chucked a teabag into each, and heaped three sugars into Mash’s.
“I can’t get out of the Harvest Fest this year,” he said, leaning against the counter next to me.
This again. Every year it came up, and every year Mash wriggled free. Though he’d still return home for Winter Fest. But Winter Fest was three days max, Harvest Fest was like two and a half months.
“Can’t you just say—”
“No.” Mash closed his eyes. Shook his head. “Nana said she would come to Remy and . . . demand the dean give me the time off.”
“Fuck.”
“Mate, if I go, they’re gonna set me up with Dee-Dee. They’re always ‘Mash, don’t you like Dee? Mash, don’t you think she’s pretty? Mash, couldn’t you just see yourself with the perfect little family? Mash, don’t you want cubs some day? Mash, your babies would be so beautiful. You owe it to werekind to continue spreading these genes. Mash, don’t leave it too late, mind, Dee-Dee won’t be single forever. Mash, you’ve got to pin her down now.’
“First of all, she’s not a fucking sticky note that I can—” He made a pinning gesture, like pushing a tack into a corkboard. “And second of all, no. No. Fuck no. She’s practically my cousin.”
He’d spoken about Dee-Dee before and how he was sort of but not quite related to her, and how each time he saw his pack they became more and more insistent on arranging a mating between the pair. And I knew Mash. I knew he didn’t want to disappoint his pack, his family, but settling down for life with the same person wasn’t his bag.
“But if you got mated, you’d never remain faithful. Why can’t they understand that?” To any normal person, this question might’ve been offensive.
Mash wasn’t bothered in the slightest. “Right? But Nana and the betas say it’s different once you’re mated. Like, you literally don’t care about anyone else. She said once we swap mate bites, Lucy Stirling could walk past me naked and I wouldn’t give two shits.”
Were and shifters had different traditions when it came to mating. Shifters often chose a more human-centred approach—i.e., no mate biting—but werewolves still largely preferred the bite. It was kind of old-fashioned, because it was super permanent. I had heard of werewolves reversing the bite, but it was a difficult and arduous process, and because a warlock was needed to reverse the ancient lycan magic, it was often very expensive. Not totally unlike human divorce.
But even still, I couldn’t quite accept Mash succumbing to the shackles of matehood. His pack might’ve known him longer than I had, but I knew him better.
“I can’t keep saying no. They’re getting to the point where soon they won’t accept no, and the choice won’t be mine any more. Arranged matings are very common amongst werefolk.” Mash flopped onto the bar stool. “Dee’s forty-five. Her pack is also just as keen to see her mated.” He sighed. “She’s a good person. She doesn’t deserve me. She deserves someone who would stand beside her and lea—no, no, it’s not me. I can’t be that for her. For anyone.”
“You said you had a plan?” I asked, trying to navigate Mash out of his funk.
“I do. I have a great . . . ish plan. But we need to break into the Howl offices.”
My face found my palm. After a few moments of semi-collecting my thoughts, I spoke. “So, okay. First off, I have a key card, we wouldn’t be breaking in. Secondly, I don’t wanna. Can’t we just stay here and drink tea? Come on, I’ll put Ruff Actually on and we can talk this through like grownups.”
“No. As much as I love Alf Stickman, no, we are doing this.”
“Mash, pl—”
“Listen, have I ever said no to you? Whenever you’ve asked me for a favour, have I ever said no? Remember that one time I pretended to be your bodyguard, and you were pretending to be a famous actor, and we crashed the movie premier of Bark Avenue Princess?”
“Oh my gods, that was your idea.”
“Oh, yeah. Well, that was a good idea. We’d’ve got away with it too, if that security guard hadn’t been standing next to that fake bush—but my point is,” he said, interrupting himself. “I’ve never said no to you.”
I faltered. He was right. I only had to have a crumb of an idea, and Mash would be on board. If this were the other way around, he’d already be out the door collecting supplies, no doubt.
“Urgh, fine, okay. What’s your plan?”
He scratched the back of his head. His cheeks grew pink. Mash blushing was the most adorable thing. He didn’t blush nearly as often as I wanted him to. “So, right, I was talking to Nana earlier, and she was, well, you know how she is?”
I’d met the woman once, a long time ago—nine, ten years perhaps—so I didn’t really know what she was like, not personally anyway. I knew from Mash’s stories, though. I nodded to keep the conversation moving forward.
“She was all Dee-Dee this, and come to the harvest that, blah blah blah. I said I couldn’t because of work, and she said—”
“She’d come get you if you don’t.”
“Right, so I didn’t know how to get her off my back, and I might’ve told a very teeny weeny, microscopic little lie.” He paused and waited for me to fill the silence. I didn’t. “I miiiiight have said I was seeing someone.”
“Okay?” I said it like a question because I hadn’t fully understood what Mash was getting at.
“Nana wants them to come to the Harvest Fest as my plus one.”
“Right?”
“But, here’s where it gets tricky. I might’ve—just a little bit—told her me and this imaginary woman were mated. Pre-mated.”
“Gods, Mash, you told her you were pre-mated?”
He bit his thumbnail. “Yeah, a little bit.”
I poured the water from the kettle into the mugs. “So, the rest of the plan?”
“Alpha’s not going to accept me not bringing my mate over, right?” he said. I gave him a look which plainly agreed. “The plan is, I get a girl to pretend to be my mate and go with me.”
I made to comment, but he held his hand up.
“That’s why we need to break into Howl’s offices, like now. I would just use the app, but as you know, I’ve been banned.”
It took me a few moments to formulate my response. “You’re suggesting we illegally hack Howl’s servers and what, convince some poor girl to pretend to be your mate for the ten weeks or however long Harvest Fest is for?”
“Exactly!” He play-punched me on the bicep. “You’re so smart.”
“Let’s start with the most obvious problems with this plan.” I fished the teabags out, added milk, then pushed Mash’s mug towards him. “Won’t your alpha be annoyed that you mated—pre-mated someone already without the pack’s consent?”
He screwed up his face. “Yeah, probably.”
“So, your fake mate is already facing a battle when she gets there? Like she’ll be interrogated? You’ll need to find someone who’s comfortable answering your pack’s questions, and someone who either already knows you, or is willing to take a Mash crash course.”
“Yeah.” He slurped his tea. “Fuck, that’s boiling.”
“Problem number two. Won’t they be expecting to see a mate bite mark? How can you fake that? Makeup? But won’t they smell that it’s not real?”
“No, because pre-mating is what you do before the bite. It’s like, uh . . . what’s the word?”
“Engagement?” I offered.
“No, yes, but like, what was it called in the olden days?”
“Betrothal?”
“Yes! Betrothals. A lot of werewolf betrothals are quite lengthy, so they wouldn’t expect to see a mate bite.” Mash dragged a hand down his face. “There are ways that couples basically promise themselves to one another before the mating. Like with a human engagement, they have rings, yeah? Were don’t need rings, we’ve got other methods.”
No part of me wanted to know what Mash’s “other methods” meant, so I breezed right by that. “What’s in it for her?”
“Huh?” he said, a genuine look of confusion on his face.
“The fact that you’re a doctor is wild. Why would this mysterious mate agree to go with you into the middle of nowhere and pretend to be your girlfriend for ten weeks?”
“Oh.” He smiled, then laughed. “I’ll pay her. Plus all the no-strings fucking.”
“You plan on fucking her?” Of course he did. Of course. Why had I assumed otherwise?
“I have to fuck her. The pack will need to smell me on her. They’d know something was off if we didn’t.”
I nodded. It was getting worse and worse by the second.
“I mean, it’s not a deal breaker. If she doesn’t want to fuck, we don’t have to. There are other other ways to mark my mate. It’s just that in my experience, they rarely say no.”
Again, I didn’t need to know. “Let’s just pretend for a second that you’ve found a woman—” I began.
“A werewolf woman,” he corrected. “Because . . . ya know.”
I exhaled loudly. Pack speciesism, super fun. “You’ve found a werewolf woman who’s willing to pretend to be pre-mated to you, take ten weeks out of her schedule, frolic around with you in the woods, maybe have sex with you, find out everything she can about you so she can pretend to have been dating you for however long to fool everyone in your family, presumably sleep in the same bedroom as you . . . ?”
He nodded.
“To do all of that, and not want more? I might not be an expert in women, but I can say with some degree of confidence, if you ask someone to spend that amount of time with you and become so intimately acquainted, they’re probably gonna fall in love.”
“A-ha! I’ve thought of that,” he said, which didn’t surprise me in the slightest. Mash was well versed in letting down heartbroken girls who’d somehow seen past all his red flags and fallen in deeper than either of them would have liked. Heck, I was well versed in letting them down on his behalf.
He leaned forward on the stool, pulled something out of the back pocket of his shorts, and smoothed it down on the counter.
“I’ve prepared a contract,” he said.
I took the note from him.
I hereby promise not to fall in love with Mash Cassidy.
Signed _______________
“Yeah, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say this isn’t legally binding.”
He shrugged. “I’ll type it up.”
A few moments went by where I gave Mash my most cutting, this is a stupid idea look, and Mash responded by noisily slurping his tea.
“If I don’t go, or if I go without a fake mate . . . they’ll mate me off. I won’t get a say. I’ll just have to do it for the pack, like my grandparents did. They don’t care about my feelings, they only want what they think is best for the pack. They want me to continue the lineage.”
“But you have so many siblings. Can’t they continue the lineage? Wait, Clem has kids. You’re already an uncle.”
“Yes, but they’re not . . .” He trailed off. Peered into his mug. Swirled the dregs of tea around the bottom. “If they mate me off to Dee-Dee, I’ll have to move back to Howling Pines. Permanently. We’ll . . .” He never lifted his eyes from the bottom of his mug. “We’ll never hang out any more.”
I watched him for a few seconds, my mind a distortion of white noise, a thousand thoughts all at peak panic. Not seeing Mash any more was unthinkable. Even if hanging out with him was often torture, I just couldn’t . . . not see him every day.
“Fine.” I hopped down from my stool. “Let me get dressed.”
“Love you, man,” he said.
I replied the same way I always did. “Yeah, I know.”