Chapter 5
Zed
Present Day
M y heart drops when I see Cari’s most recent post. The pawprint picture. The broken heart emoji. My feral form, whom I’ve made friends with in the fifteen years since I last saw Radar, roars his grief deep in my chest.
“Dude. I think her dog died.” My voice rasps with emotion.
“What? Whose dog?” Gabe spins around in his office chair to face me, brushing a swoop of his floppy hair out of his eyes.
“Cari’s. She just posted a goodbye message. Why else would she close her account?”
He shakes his shaggy head, lip curled disapprovingly. “Why are you even looking at her page, bro? You have got to stop stalking her. It’s weird.”
“I’m not stalking, I’m looking. It’s a public account.”
A growl slips out of him. “Give up , already. She doesn’t care about you. Anyway, you should be working on the new UI, not scrolling the socials of all the females you knew in high school.” Gabe spins around again and the sound of his keyboard clicks resume. Our company logo, a cloud with a happy face, stares at me from the back of his T-shirt.
I should listen to him. Even though our startup has taken off in recent years, we are still the only two full-time employees. He handles the back end, I do all the product side. Our division of labor works perfectly. He doesn’t have to talk to anyone except me, which he prefers, and I get to do all the fun stuff like dreaming up new ideas and going to conferences to pitch our products. We’re an amazing team, but if one of us slacks off, the business can’t run, so I need to focus.
I take a deep breath and work on composing my feedback the designer we contracted for the app’s user interface. She did a great job. A few tweaks to the color palette to better match our branding and some adjustment on the main menu, and it’ll be perfect.
“Less aqua, more sky blue,” I type. I add a few more notes and finally send it off, but it takes me twice as long as it should because my mind keeps slipping back to Cari’s post.
She must be devastated. Radar is everything to her.
“I should send her a card,” I muse out loud.
“The UI designer?” Gabe asks absentmindedly.
“No, Cari! I just can’t believe it. Radar seemed totally healthy last week when she posted all those videos of him running around on the beach. Tail wagging, ears flapping, tongue hanging out. How do you go from that to gone in seven days? Major whiplash. How is she even processing it?”
Gabe’s typing pauses. “Can we discuss your parasocial obsessions after five p.m., or should we take lunch so we can have this talk off the clock?”
“It’s too early for lunch. Not even ten,” I point out.
“And yet we’ve already had two conversations about a vague social media post from a human who probably doesn’t remember your name.”
I snort, and a little steam escapes my nostrils. “I Hulk-smashed her half-bath. I’m pretty sure she remembers me.”
He scoffs, drumming his fingers on the edge of the desk impatiently. “You keep making my point for me. Not trying to be cruel, but she doesn’t want to hear from you, Zed. You’ve spent way too long drooling over this girl, and she isn’t interested.”
My feral form flexes, offering to kill him for us. But my current form, the more logical, reasonable one who knows his best friend is right about this, too, just wants to cry. I’m in love with a memory of an eighteen-year-old girl. She’s thirty-three now. Probably a completely different person. After all this time, why can’t I let her go?
Mate , growls my feral form. It’s pretty much the only word he knows, though.
“I think she could be my alokoi,” I admit. Gabe has been around dragons enough to understand the significance, even if his kind don’t have fated mates. “I didn’t take the possibility too seriously back then because I didn’t know anybody with a human mate. But since then, four or five dragons have mated with humans, so it happens. Think about it. I haven’t identified anyone else, and I’m over thirty. That’s super rare.”
“Or maybe you’re just a super loser?” Gabe snickers. I punch him in the shoulder, and he clutches it, pretending to be injured until we both stop laughing. “Seriously, though. You’re so hung up on her, you might have overlooked someone else. You come in every day obsessing over the details of her posts. I feel like I’m stalking her, I know so much about this chick. It’s all I hear about from you. Please, get a different hobby.”
“Okay, sorry. I’ll shut up about it,” I croak, embarrassed.
But before I get back to the next item on my to-do list, I click over to the tab with the @SeeRadarRun account and reload to see if Cari’s posted an update. She hasn’t. And when I try and leave my condolences on the post, I notice comments are turned off.
I click the private message button, and the chat screen pops up. My last message to her, sent seven years ago, is still unread. If I give her my condolences here, she’s never going to see it.
I close my laptop with new intention. “I’m sending a card.”
“Zed! Stop!” Gabe throws up his hands in frustration at yet another interruption, spinning to face me again. He runs his hands through his long facial hair. “Listen. You sound nuts right now. You don’t even know her address.”
Not for lack of trying. Gabe’s heard me complain plenty of times over the years that Cari’s not listed anywhere. “I’ll hire someone to find it. A private eye.”
His eyes widen and bushy brows lift. “Are you being serious right now? You’re going to pay someone to stalk her for you?”
I nod. “This is…I don’t know. Radar was my last connection to her. I’m not trying to get back in her life. I just want her to know how sorry I am…about everything. Maybe that’s the closure I need to finally move on.”
Gabe levels me with a serious look. “So you’re not going to bug her. You’re just going to send your condolences and apologies, and if she doesn’t respond, that’s that? You’ll lose her address, never talk to her again?”
“Yeah. I guess.” My stomach twists at the thought, but what choice do I have?
He nods. “Okay. Then I’ll find her for you.”
My eyes bug out at the offer, and I suck in a breath. “You can do that?!”
He wiggles his fingers. “I have my ways. But if anyone asks, it didn’t come from me.”
While he taps his keyboard and clicks through windows, I push up from my office chair and pace back and forth in the small office, tail flicking and every muscle tense with anticipation. I’m going to learn her address. I’m going to learn where she lives .
Gabe spins around in his chair. “Done.”
My phone buzzes with a notification. Swallowing hard, I open a message from Gabe. Caroline Stanley. Address in San Drogo, California. A beach town. I knew it.
“Married name?” I ask, voicing a fear I hadn’t yet acknowledged.
Gabe pauses, then gives a slow nod. “Sorry, man. Married with kids.”
She’s married. In love with someone else. Carried his children. My chest tightens, squeezing my heart harder and harder until I force myself to breathe. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Doesn’t change anything. Thanks. Appreciate it.”
“No problem.” He spins back around, resumes working.
I try, but for the rest of the day, I just compose stupid letters in my head.
Dear Cari, So sorry to hear about Radar’s passing…
Dear Cari, I wanted to say how sorry I am for everything…
Dear Cari, I’m a sorry excuse for a dragon who didn’t contact you until it was too late to do anything about my fifteen years of unrequited feelings…
That night at the hive, it’s like I’m in a fever to get it all out on paper. Writing and rewriting, crossing out. Pacing around and talking to myself. Talking to her .
I forget about dinner until someone knocks on my door with a plate of leftovers. I thank them and get back to work. Barely notice what I’m eating. By one o’clock in the morning, I have a five-page letter that says everything I want her to know: My condolences. My regrets about the past. My genuine hopes for her happiness and health.
I leave out the crushing disappointment, the acid jealousy burning in my guts, the rage that has my feral form vibrating to murder the male lucky enough to call her his.
I seal it in an envelope, address and stamp it. After placing it carefully on the table by the door to mail tomorrow, I curl up in my nest and close my eyes. But even though I’m exhausted, I can’t sleep.
Behind my lids, I see Cari getting the letter.
She’s surprised. Maybe a little confused. She shows it to her husband and explains I’m just some guy from high school who had a crush. Hasn’t thought of me in a decade or more. Drops it in the recycling bin.
Why even send it? I fist the sheets and try again.
She gets the letter. She presses it to her heart. She hides it from her husband and reads it in secret, tortured by what might have been. She cries over losing me.
Yes , my feral form gloats. Mate. Mine.
No. Damn it. That’s not what I want, either.
She gets the letter. She’s comforted by it. Happy. A little wistful, maybe. Wishes she could call me to reminisce about old times with Radar.
I push up out of bed, rip open the envelope, scribble my number at the bottom under my signature. Seal it in a fresh envelope and address it again. I pick at the stamp on the torn envelope with one claw so I can salvage it.
It rips.
Patience shot, I incinerate the old envelope and stamp. Put a new one on the re-addressed envelope. Go back to bed.
She gets the letter. She calls me. We video chat. She looks beautiful. Happy to see me. Our conversation helps her through her grief. “I wish I could give you a hug,” she says.
Yes. That’s what I want. How many days until my letter gets there? Mailed tomorrow, maybe three, four days? It’s so annoying that it takes the postal service trucks half a week to drive a distance I could fly in one night.
I pound the mattress with my closed fist, debating. I promised Gabe I wouldn’t bother Cari, but…
Fuck it. I’ll deliver it myself.