Epilogue #2
"Nothing. You're completely clean." She turned onto her back, looking at the ceiling. "I'm going in to the shop early. I have the Sandoval consultation at nine and I haven't finished building his baseline reference."
"I'll walk with you."
"You don't have to walk me to work."
"I want to walk you to work."
She was quiet for a moment, in the way that meant she was doing the thing she'd described to me once as letting something land rather than processing it immediately. "All right," she said.
I went down to the kitchen and made coffee while she assembled herself, which was a process I found genuinely fascinating — the precision of it, the way each decision was made deliberately, the way she smelled different when she was in the middle of her preparation for the day versus at the end of it versus right now, before any of it started.
I'd been cataloguing that the same way she catalogued me.
I didn't have her training and I'd never be able to build a reference system for it the way she built reference systems for everything.
But my wolf knew. That was the thing. My wolf had been cataloguing her since the morning the wind shifted and the scent hit me and my claws went into Grim's booth counter.
Every version of her scent across every hour of every day for eight months, stored in the particular way wolf memory stored things — not as language but as recognition.
I knew her the way my wolf knew the mountain. The specific, absolute knowledge of something that had always been there even before you'd found the words for it.
She appeared in the kitchen doorway in her working clothes — clean lines, the leather apron folded under her arm, the composition notebook already in her other hand. Her vial was at her neck.
I handed her coffee.
She accepted it without looking up from the notebook, which meant she was already in the composition, already building the Sandoval baseline in her head.
I watched her think for a moment.
"Celeste," I said.
She looked up.
"Marry me," I said.
She held my coffee mug and looked at me across the kitchen with those gray-green eyes that changed depending on the light and that I'd been reading for eight months with a fluency I wouldn't have believed possible the morning I'd first seen them at a festival booth.
"That was abrupt," she said.
"I don't know how to do anything slowly."
"I've noticed." She looked down at the notebook.
Then she looked back at me. The morning was coming through the kitchen window and doing the October thing with the light, and she was standing in my kitchen in her working clothes with her composition notebook and her vial of our combined scent at her neck, and she was the most specific and irreplaceable thing my wolf had ever found.
"Yes," she said.
Simple. Direct. Landed like a fact rather than a declaration, which was exactly how Celeste delivered the things that mattered most — not performed, just present.
I crossed the kitchen and kissed her and she kissed me back with her hands full, coffee and notebook both, and she laughed against my mouth and said, "Your wolf is going to be insufferable about this."
"My wolf is currently in perfect agreement with my entire nervous system for the first time in my life."
She put the notebook on the counter.
She kept the coffee.
We walked to her shop in the October morning, through the Main Street light that did something particular to fragrance, past Reese's studio and past the hardware store where the owner gave me a nod he'd been giving me since my second week in Ironridge, past the bakery where the couple said the street smelled better now and weren't wrong.
Celeste unlocked the shop door.
The jasmine moved out into the morning air.
My wolf ran a warm, satisfied circuit through my chest, and I stood in the October light outside a perfume shop in Ironridge and thought about the wind shifting at a fall festival and a scent I couldn't name and following it through a crowd to its source.
My wolf had known first.
That was the truth of it — the wolf had always known, from the morning the scent hit me like a key turning in a lock, while the human part of me was still doing the accounting, still running the inventory, still being careful.
But my heart hadn't been far behind.
She looked back at me from the doorway.
"Are you coming in?"
I followed her inside, into the amber light and the careful rows of bottles and the warm precision of her world, which was also my world now, and the jasmine that had settled into the morning air of a mountain town the way the things that belonged there always eventually did.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
My wolf agreed.
The vial at my neck caught the morning light when I moved — the pale gold of the combined fragrance, her and me together, which still smelled like arrival every time I uncorked it.
She was already at her worktable, notebook open, the Sandoval consultation notes spread out with the specific organized precision of someone who thought best when the physical objects of their work were visible and arranged. Her pen was moving.
She looked up once.
The gray-green eyes, the October light, the shop that was hers and also mine now in all the ways that mattered.
She smiled.
I stayed.