31. Lynn
— ? —
Lynn
The coast smells like salt and possibility.
I step out of the car, Milo’s unnecessarily fancy car, which has been making me feel like an imposter for three hours, and breathe in the familiar air of my childhood.
Seagulls cry overhead. The wind whips my hair into chaos.
And somewhere inside the beach house ahead of me, my entire family is waiting to meet my lycan king boyfriend.
Mate, Milo corrects through the bond. Lycan king mate.
If I introduce you as my mate, my mother will have questions.
Fair point.
He comes around the car to stand beside me, and I watch him take in the scene, the weathered clapboard siding, the overgrown garden, the wind chimes my aunt hung fifteen years ago and no one has ever removed.
“It’s smaller than I expected,” he says.
“It’s a beach house. They’re supposed to be small.”
“The compound’s beach house has twelve bedrooms.”
“The compound’s beach house is an abuse of the term ‘beach house.’”
He smiles, and some of the tension in my shoulders eases.
“Ready?” I ask.
“To meet your family for the first time as your official partner rather than an accidental TimeFace intruder? Absolutely.”
“That was ONE time.”
“It was three times, actually. I was keeping count.”
Before I can argue, the front door flies open.
“LYNN!”
My mother barrels down the steps and engulfs me in a hug so fierce I can’t breathe. She smells like lavender and sea salt and home, and I hold on tight, suddenly aware of how long it’s been since I’ve been back.
“Hi, Mom.”
“You’re too thin. Are you eating? You look tired. Are you sleeping?” She pulls back, examining my face. “You have a glow, though. Is that a glow?”
“That’s probably the three-hour drive.”
“No, it’s definitely a glow.” Her eyes slide to Milo. “And this must be…”
“Miles,” I say quickly. “He was my professor.”
From inside the house, I hear my aunt choke on something.
“Your professor?” Mom’s eyebrows climb toward her hairline.
“Former professor. Very former. As of two weeks ago.”
“And you’re… together?”
My mother’s voice climbs an octave. Behind her, my aunt has gone very quiet in the way that means she’s listening with her whole body.
“Yes.”
“As in together together?”
“Yes, Mom.”
She stares at him. Then at me. Then back at him.
“Well,” she says finally. “You’d better come inside. Your aunt is going to want details.”
The next hour is chaos.
My entire family has assembled in the small living room, Mom, Aunt Marge, Uncle David, my grandmother who insists on being called “Nana” even though she’s terrifying, and approximately six cousins ranging in age from twelve to thirty.
They all have questions.
“How long have you been together?” (A couple of months, technically, though it feels like longer.)
“Isn’t it weird that he was your teacher?” (It was weird. We’re past it now.)
“What do you do for work, Miles?” (This one makes Milo pause for exactly two seconds before he says “family business” in a tone that somehow discourages follow-up questions.)
But then Nana leans forward in her chair, fixes Milo with a look that has made grown men cry, and says:
“Tell me about her hamster.”
I freeze.
Milo doesn’t.
“Mr. Darcy is a Russian dwarf hamster with what I can only describe as an adversarial personality.” He says this with perfect sincerity.
“He enjoys sunflower seeds and running on his wheel at three in the morning. When we met, he waged open war on me specifically, through biting and defecation and what I still believe was psychological strategy. We have since reached an understanding. He accepts my tribute and merely pretends to die now.”
The room is silent.
Then Nana laughs, a real laugh, full and warm, and the tension breaks.
“I like this one,” she announces. “He can stay.”
After that, things get easier.
Milo remembers everything.
Every detail from every TimeFace he was “never supposed to be on,” the family dog who died last year, Aunt Marge’s knee surgery, my cousin Michael’s graduation, the ongoing saga of whether Uncle David should retire early.
He asks follow-up questions. He remembers names.
He acts like he’s been part of this family for years instead of hours.
“How does he know all this?” Mom whispers to me in the kitchen.
“He pays attention.”
“To your family?”
“To everything about me.” I shrug. “It’s either very romantic or very creepy, depending on how you look at it.”
“It’s romantic,” she decides. “Definitely romantic.”
What I don’t tell my mother is that watching him charm my terrifying grandmother, sleeves rolled up, the muscle in his forearms flexing every time he gestured, patiently answering questions about his intentions, did something to me that has no business happening in my childhood living room.
I spent the entire dinner running a filthy commentary in the back of my own head and smiling politely at Aunt Marge’s shellfish allergy story.
The bond, helpfully, relayed every bit of it to him. He didn’t so much as glance my way. But under the table, his hand found my knee and squeezed once, hard, a silent you’re going to pay for that later that I felt everywhere.
I couldn’t wait to pay for it later.
By dinner, he’s won them completely.
He helps Uncle David with the grill. He lets my youngest cousin show him her entire rock collection. He survives Nana’s interrogation about his “intentions” with grace and only minimal sweating.
And when he catches my eye across the table, surrounded by my loud, chaotic, wonderful family, he smiles.
Thank you, I think at him.
For what?
For being here. For trying so hard. For remembering that my aunt is allergic to shellfish and my cousin hates being called Mike.
I told you. Everything about you matters to me. That includes the people who made you.
I have to look away before I start crying into my pasta.
We leave the next morning with promises to visit again soon.
The compound has changed since I arrived.
Small changes, mostly. A reading nook in the great hall that wasn’t there before. A garden path that leads to a quiet spot by the river. Little touches that make the space feel less like a fortress and more like a home.
But the biggest change is waiting in the west wing.
“Close your eyes,” Milo says.
“Why?”
“Because I’m asking nicely and you love me.”
“That’s manipulative.”
“Is it working?”
I close my eyes.
He guides me down a hallway I don’t recognize, through a door that creaks slightly, and then-
“Open.”
I open my eyes.
It’s a library.
A real library, floor to ceiling shelves crammed with books, comfortable armchairs scattered throughout, windows that look out over the forest. There’s a fireplace in the corner and a desk by the window and a small alcove with a daybed perfect for afternoon reading.
“Milo.”
“The pack built it. Well, supervised by my mother, who has very strong opinions about organizational systems.” He’s watching my face, nervous in a way that makes my heart ache. “I know it’s not the campus library, but I thought-”
I kiss him.
It’s not graceful. I basically launch myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him until we’re both breathless.
“I take it you like it,” he manages.
“I love it. I love you. This is-” I pull back to look around again, tears pricking my eyes. “This is the most thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me.”
“You gave up your old life for me. The least I could do was give you books.”
“The least you could do was acknowledge my existence. This is - this is beyond-”
“Lynn.” He cups my face in his hands. “You’re my mate. My queen. There is nothing I wouldn’t give you.”
I kiss him again.
The library can wait.
It doesn’t stay just a gift, though. I don’t see that coming.
Within days I’m in there every morning, and I’ve stopped calling it reading, because it’s turned into work.
Real work. The Ashevale pack has been the goddess’s favorite for a thousand years and has written almost none of it down, the rites, the old language, the reason they do half of what they do, all of it living in the heads of aunties and elders and dying a little every time one of them does.
The historian in me can’t leave it alone.
So I don’t. I start asking the questions no one inside the pack ever thought to ask, and I start writing the answers down.
Not standing decoratively beside a throne.
Building them an archive, their myths, their history, sourced and organized by a woman who spent four years learning exactly how to do this.
Genevieve cries when I tell her. Elder Gray asks, careful, whether an outsider should be the one holding the pack’s memory, and I tell him an outsider is the only one who can see it clearly enough to save it.
He’s quiet a long moment. Then he says my father would have liked you.
It’s mine. Not queen-of, not mate-of. A thing I chose, that I’d have wanted even if I’d never fallen for the king. A life you land in and a life you pick aren’t the same, and I can finally feel the difference.
In the afternoons the pups find me. It started by accident, a couple of them hovering while I watched TV, asking what everything was, and turned into a standing appointment: human pop culture lessons for young lycans who have never heard of Disney movies or meme formats or the correct way to deploy “that’s what she said. ” It goes about how you’d expect.
“But why doesn’t she just break down the door?” one of them demands, appalled, during Frozen.
“Because she’s five,” I say.
“I could break down a door when I was five.”
“You’re a lycan. Different rules apply.”
Milo finds this endlessly funny. He finds it less funny that Mr. Darcy, now the unofficial mascot of the compound, has taken to accepting a pellet from his hand each evening and then dropping dead on cue for the applause of anyone watching.
“He forgave me weeks ago,” Milo mutters, examining a finger that no longer gets bitten.
“This is pure theater.” It absolutely is. The hamster gets it from me.
The night everything changes starts like any other.
We’re on the balcony of our quarters, the moon high and bright overhead. I’m wrapped in a blanket, my back against Milo’s chest, watching the stars appear one by one.
“Tell me something,” he says.
“Anything.”
“When you imagine the future - ten years, twenty years - what do you see?”
I consider the question.
“Honestly? I never used to imagine that far ahead. I was too busy surviving the present.” I tilt my head back to look at him. “Why?”
“Because I’ve been thinking about something.” He pauses. “Lycans live a long time, Lynn. A very long time. Centuries, sometimes, if we’re lucky.”
“I know.”
“And humans…”
“Don’t.” I feel something tighten in my chest. “I know that too.”
“There are older rites,” he says carefully. “Ways to… extend that. To bind years to years.”
The moonlight seems to brighten.
“The goddess mentioned something like that. The night of the ceremony.”
“She would have.” He tightens his arms around me. “It’s not something I’d ever ask you to do. The choice would have to be yours, completely. And it wouldn’t have to be now - it could be years from now, decades, whenever you were ready. If you were ever ready.”
“What would it mean?”
“It would mean living as long as I do. Aging as slowly as I do.” He presses a kiss to my temple. “It would mean forever, Lynn. Real forever, not the human version.”
I let the words settle over me.
Forever.
Not the abstract concept I’ve always understood, the vague “until death do us part” that every human relationship operates under. But actual, literal forever. Centuries of waking up next to this man, of libraries and pack politics, of hamsters with vendettas. Whole centuries of life.
“That’s a lot to think about,” I say.
“It is. And you don’t have to think about it now.” He turns me gently so we’re face to face. “I just wanted you to know that the option exists. That this-” he gestures between us, “-doesn’t have to have an end date.”
“Unless I get hit by a bus.”
“Unless you get hit by a bus.” His lips quirk. “Though I’d prefer you didn’t.”
“I’ll do my best.”
We’re quiet for a moment, and I let myself feel it, the future opening up before me like a book I get to read slowly. Page by page. Chapter by chapter. A story that doesn’t have to end.
“Ask me again,” I say. “In a few years. When I’ve had time to wrap my head around it.”
“And if your answer is no?”
“Then I’ll grow old and gray and you’ll have to push my wheelchair around the compound.”
“I could live with that.”
“So could I.” I curl closer to him. “But I don’t think my answer will be no.”
His breath catches.
“Lynn-”
“I’m not saying yes now. I’m saying… ask me again. When it’s time.”
He kisses me, slow and deep, and through the bond I feel everything he can’t put into words, hope and love and desperate, aching joy.
We stay on the balcony until the moon begins to set.
And when we finally go inside, tangled together in sheets that smell like him, I dream of forever.
It doesn’t scare me anymore.