Chapter 7
MAISIE
I lie in bed for an hour staring at the ceiling, replaying the exact moment his brain short-circuited. He hesitated. It was barely a full second, but I saw it. I asked one simple, direct question and watched Boone Kinkaid freeze like a deer in headlights before dodging it entirely.
Have you ever found yours? Your mate?
I know how werewolf biology works. Finding a mate isn't a casual crush you file away for later. It's the entire point of their existence. And Boone—who is brutally honest about everything from football plays to how terrible my biology notes look—stopped dead.
Then he gave me some careful, diplomatic speech about choice. Which was sweet. Great sentiment. But it also sidestepped the actual question.
I roll onto my side and yank the blanket up, pissed at myself for caring this much.
Is there someone else? Did he already find his mate, and I'm just the human girl he's messing around with until things get real?
Or is he holding out, keeping me at arm's length so he doesn't get attached to someone who isn't biologically his?
Either option makes my chest feel tight and bruised. I'm lying here in his damn gray sweatshirt, inhaling his scent like a total freak, feeling like an idiot.
He knows something. And the worst part is, I'm pretty sure everyone else knows it too.
By Thursday, the weirdness is impossible to ignore.
First, there's Tate outside the dining hall on Wednesday morning. He spots me before Boone does, and his entire face locks up—this intense, loaded look—before he forces a completely unnatural grin. "Morning, Maisie." Way too loud. Way too deliberate.
I filed that one away.
Then comes Thursday afternoon outside Introduction to Magical Species Interaction. I'm waiting near the doors for Boone when Priya, a girl from my lab section, walks up with an eager smile.
"It's so cute watching you two," she says, leaning in. "Especially since—"
Her friend instantly grabs her forearm. Hard. Digging fingers in with a look that screams shut the fuck up right now.
Priya blinks, catches herself, and gives me a tight, panicked grin. "Especially since you seem so great together! Okay, bye!"
They scurry off before I can even open my mouth.
I stand there in the hallway, staring after them. Especially since what?
Twenty minutes later, I storm back to the dorm and drop my backpack onto my desk with a heavy thud.
Delilah takes one look at my face and quietly closes her laptop. "What happened?"
"Something's going on," I say, crossing my arms. "Everyone's acting like I'm the butt of some massive inside joke, and you're going to tell me what it is."
Delilah sighs, rubbing her temples. "Maisie..."
"Tate looked at me yesterday like I was a ticking bomb," I cut in. "And twenty minutes ago, someone almost spilled something before her friend physically gagged her. You know what's happening. Tell me."
"I suspect," Delilah says carefully, holding up a hand. "I don't know. And even if I did, it's not my place. I'm not copping out on you—if you were in danger, I'd drag you out of here myself. But you're not. This is a conversation you need to have with Boone."
"You could give me a tiny hint."
"You could ask him directly."
I glare at her, but she holds my gaze without budging. I've lived with her long enough to know when she's locked in on a principle.
"He needs to be the one," she says gently. "If I'm right about what he's doing, you deserve to hear it from him."
"Fine," I say, grabbing my laptop off the desk and zipping it into my bag. "If nobody's going to tell me, I'll figure it out myself."
I turn on my heel and head straight for the library.
Here's something I didn't fully appreciate about Creature University until I spent three hours in the research stacks. This school has been collecting, publishing, and archiving academic scholarship on creature behavior for nearly ninety years.
Ninety years.
That's a lot of published material. Including, it turns out, things like Olfactory Pair-Bonding Mechanisms in Lupine Fated Mate Recognition and Pre-Completion Courtship Behaviors in Werewolves: A Longitudinal Study of Proximity-Seeking and Protective Instinct Expression and my personal favorite, which I'm internally calling You Already Know, You're Just Not Looking: Human Partner Recognition Latency in Mixed-Species Mating Pairs.
That last one's real title is longer and less funny. I'm paraphrasing.
I started with a reasonable search. Werewolf courtship, general. The database returned about four hundred and seventy results in under a second. I narrowed by relevance. Read abstracts. Picked three sources.
By the second one, I was reading slower.
By the third, I had a notebook out.
The thing about academic writing is that it's dry and technical and precise, which means it takes longer than it should to realize you're reading a detailed description of your own life formatted as a peer-reviewed study. But eventually it registers.
Pre-completion werewolf partners demonstrate a marked increase in food-provisioning behavior toward the recognized mate, reads the first article, ranging from direct offering of food to ensuring the mate's nutritional needs are met through indirect provision.
This behavior is instinctive rather than calculated and typically presents early in the recognition phase.
I write food in my notebook and draw a line to: brought extra lunch, ordered dinner without asking, got annoyed when I skipped breakfast, showed up to a study session with a bag of food that was somehow exactly what I wanted.
I stare at what I've written.
I keep reading.
Scent-sharing through the transfer of personal garments is among the most reliably documented pre-completion courtship behaviors.
The recognizing partner will offer garments imbued with their scent to the unrecognized mate.
The wearing of such garments functions as a significant social signal to other wolves, marking the wearer as claimed within the recognizing partner's social environment.
I look down at the sweatshirt I'm currently wearing.
His sweatshirt.
The one I stole two weeks ago and have been wearing approximately four days out of every seven.
Oh my god.
I write SWEATSHIRT in my notebook in capital letters, put the pen down, sit back, and spend about thirty seconds staring at the middle distance.
I'm processing the fact that I've been wandering around one of the most werewolf-dense campuses in the country wearing what is apparently a sign that says CLAIMED in a language everyone around me can read except me.
The article keeps going.
Escort behavior, it says, presents consistently in pre-completion pairs.
The recognizing partner will orient their movement to match the mate's, preferentially choosing routes that allow them to walk beside or slightly behind the mate in crowded spaces, positioning their body to create a physical buffer.
I write: walks me everywhere. always ends up between me and any crowd. carries my bag. positions himself between me and the door.
Heightened awareness of the mate's physical condition, the article continues, like we're playing a game and it's winning, including monitoring of temperature, fatigue, hunger, and emotional distress.
The recognizing partner will often respond to changes in the mate's condition before the mate has verbally communicated them.
I write: knew I was cold before I said anything. knows when I'm tired even when I say I'm fine. handed me ibuprofen about thirty seconds before I realized my head was actually hurting.
I thought that was just him being attentive. I thought that was just the kind of person he is.
Apparently it's more specific than that.
Territorial response to potential romantic competitors, reads the next section, and I already know exactly what's coming, including heightened alertness and, in social settings, positioning of the body to reduce the mate's accessibility to other males.
This behavior intensifies in direct proportion to the perceived threat level and is among the harder-to-conceal pre-completion instinct expressions.
I draw a little star next to territorial response and write: Donovan from Bio. That guy at the festival. The TA who lingered after seminar. Goes very quiet. Watches them until they leave. Asks about them later in a tone that is technically casual.
The fourth article is a 2019 study on proximity.
It contains the finding that recognizing werewolves in the pre-completion stage average twenty-three percent more physical proximity to their recognized mates compared to their proximity with other close friends or partners, with a confidence interval the researchers apparently felt the need to make very, very clear.
I look at where Boone typically sits at our study table compared to where he sits with Tate.
I close my notebook.
I look at the ceiling.
I think about every person who’s looked at me and Boone together and done that thing with their face—that brief, knowing, carefully contained thing. Priya’s friend grabbing her elbow. Tate’s one-second performance. Delilah saying it’s not my place.
And then I think about half the werewolf population of this campus watching me walk around in Boone Kinkaid’s sweatshirt for two solid weeks while I smiled at everyone like I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
“Oh my god,” I say, quietly, to nobody in the library stacks.
A vampire two shelves over glances at me.
“Sorry,” I say. “Carry on.”
I go back to the dorm.
Delilah looks up from her desk and I point at her.
“You knew,” I say.
“Maisie—”
“You knew and you let me keep wearing the sweatshirt.”
She has the grace to look at least slightly guilty. “I suspected,” she says carefully. “I didn’t know know—I can’t read wolf mate-recognition scent the way another wolf can—but I had strong suspicions. Yes.”
“For how long?”
A pause. “Possibly since the second study session.”
I sit down on my bed. “That was weeks ago, Delilah.”
“I know.”
“I’ve been wearing his sweatshirt to class.”
“I know.”