Chapter 9
MAISIE
I wake up and immediately do something deeply humiliating before I've even brushed my teeth. I run an experiment on myself.
Here's the setup. Pretend Boone Kinkaid isn't my fated mate.
No cosmic scent thing, no bond, no ancient werewolf biology quietly making decisions about my life before I got a vote.
He's just some junior on the football team who got assigned to tutor me in Creature Bio, and somewhere between explaining mitochondrial inheritance with French fries and walking me back to my dorm four separate times, he started liking me.
No fate. No destiny. Just a big, warm, annoyingly competent guy who forgets his own strength when he hugs me.
Would I still want him?
The answer shows up so fast I actually say, "Okay, rude," out loud to my empty room, because apparently my subconscious didn't think this deserved any deliberation.
Obviously I would.
I liked him before I knew a damn thing. I looked for him around campus before I understood why I kept finding him.
I wanted to tell him about my ninety-four before I told anyone else—including Delilah, including my own mom.
I kissed him first, in the clearing at the edge of the old quad under the maple trees, festival lights strung up behind us, cider still sweet on my lips, and nobody's biology made me do that. That was just me. Deciding.
I wore his sweatshirt because it smells like him and I liked smelling like him, which is a sentence I would've found deeply pathetic in high school and now just find true. Whatever. Sue me.
I climbed into his lap because I wanted his hands on me. Nobody's fate did that. I did that. My own two very human, very ordinary hips did that, on purpose, no regrets.
The whole exercise mostly just pisses me off because I even needed it in the first place.
I spent an entire night hurt and confused, cross-referencing sixty pages of academic literature on werewolf courtship in a spiral of panic, when I could've just asked myself one honest fucking question and saved everyone the trouble.
I flop back onto my pillow and groan at the ceiling.
"You're doing the face," Delilah says from her desk, not even looking up from the herbs she's measuring out. She has a real talent for narrating me without eye contact.
"What face."
"The face where you figure something out and get mad about how long it took you."
"I hate that you have names for my faces."
"I've catalogued four of them." She sets down her glass vial and turns to me. "Tell me."
So I tell her. All of it—the experiment, the answer, the sweatshirt, the lap, the whole embarrassing inventory. Delilah listens with the patience of someone who's been waiting for me to catch up to something she figured out weeks ago.
When I finish, she leans back in her chair and looks at me flatly.
"CU put him in the room," she says. "It didn't make you fall for him."
"That's annoyingly reasonable."
"I have my moments." She shrugs, picking up her vial again.
I stare at the ceiling for two more seconds, let out a breath, and sit up.
I know what I want. I want Boone. And I'm not texting him—I'm going to go find him.
"Absolutely not," Delilah says the second I pull the ears out of the costume bag.
"They're perfect."
"They're cheap." She's already laughing, one hand pressed over her mouth like that'll stop it. "Maisie. You're about to walk into the biggest party of the semester, on the night you're planning to tell your werewolf mate you choose him, wearing dollar-store wolf ears."
"I know." I settle them onto my head, adjusting the little plastic headband until they sit at a properly obnoxious angle. "That's the appeal."
"He's going to lose his mind."
"That's also the appeal."
She's laughing so hard now she has to sit down, wiping at her eyes, and it takes her almost a full minute to get words out again.
"You've spent all this time pretending you don't notice this man is a walking hormonal event, and your plan—on the one night you're finally going to admit you want him forever—is to show up dressed as the thing he literally is. "
"It's funny."
"It is extremely funny," she agrees, still gasping. "It's also the most unnecessarily provocative thing I've ever watched you do, and I watched you eat gas station sushi in September out of pure spite."
"That sushi was fine."
"That sushi was a war crime." She stands, straightens my ears with way more tenderness than the joke deserves, and steps back to take in the whole picture—leggings, an oversized flannel, the ridiculous ears, my hair down the way I know he likes it best. "You look cute.
Annoyingly cute. Provoke-a-werewolf cute. "
"That's the goal."
"Go tell your boy you love him, Maisie Pope."
My stomach does something dumb and warm. "I didn't say love."
"You didn't have to." She grins, wicked and delighted. "Your face has been saying it since the fall festival."
The oldest part of campus is packed by the time I get there—string lights threaded through every tree, pumpkins the size of small cars lining the quad, a massive bonfire already roaring near the library steps where Boone first asked if I was the one who needed a tutor.
Music spills out across the lawn. Somebody's set up a cider stand shaped like a haunted house, and a cluster of vampires in dramatically unnecessary velvet capes are posing for photos in front of a fog machine like it's the Met Gala.
I stand at the edge of the crowd, ears slightly crooked on my head, my pulse racing faster than the walk here can account for.
I'm looking for one specific, enormous, gold-eyed werewolf.
And when I spot him standing near the fire with his friends, I don't even hesitate.
I just start walking.