“Before, please.”
“Roger, roger. I’ll put that in for you, and have it out ASAP.”
“Take your time. We’re not in a rush.”
She gave a little salute, and once again, I was alone with Giselle, who was gripping her lemonade with both hands. Had she not ordered an alcoholic drink because she’d been conscious of my budget?
“Would you like a cocktail or some wine?” I asked casually, like it was no big deal. Because it wasn’t. But I did want her to order whatever she liked.
“Thank you, but I can’t,” she said with a wry sort of grin. “Doesn’t mix well with my situation.” She let out a sigh that shouldn’t have been as adorable as it was. “I do miss having a nice rosé from time to time, but it’s not worth it.”
“I understand that.”
Actually, I didn’t. Shifters were rarely ever ill, and we metabolized human alcohol before it could really affect us, but I liked to think I could at least sympathize.
“Does it bother you that I’m drinking? I don’t mind ordering a soda.”
“No, no, you don’t have to worry about that. I think it would be different if I was in recovery for alcohol addiction or something, but no, I don’t expect other people to change their diet for my chronic illness.” She chuckled lightly. “Every now and then I have some Karen tendencies, but that would be going way too far.”
“Really? You, a Karen? I can’t see it.”
“Little do you know, when the full moon rises in the night sky, a monstrous spirit comes over me and I turn it into the biggest Karen you’ve ever met, complete with the choppy haircut and asking for the manager while I point at my expired receipt.”
Since Giselle liked wearing wigs, my mind instantly supplied an image of her with the same hairstyle as that terribly abusive mother with all the children on that one TV show. It was slightly disturbing, but also definitely hilarious.
“Are you trying to tell me that you’re a were-Karen?”
She was smiling so impishly as she still held her cup with both hands, hunched slightly like a mischievous fair folk from those ancient myths. Maybe one day I would see her as the full human she was, but she seemed so impossibly perfect that my mind was grasping at some sort of logical reason as to why. Because surely no one person could be that good, right? “My secret! It’s been exposed!”
I laughed, perhaps a little louder than I should have in a crowded, upscale restaurant, but she had no idea how apropos her joking was. I had the temptation to assure her that her secret was safe with me, then burst into my wolf form, but that wouldonly fly in an absurdist comedy—not in real life, and definitely not around a couple dozen humans.
“I’ll have to blackmail you and your whole species now,” I said. But in my mind, my fantasy stretched out far into the future, into a reality where Giselle found out what I was and looked back on this conversation and recontextualized it. It was a nice thought, but that could never happen.
As good a human as Giselle was—and I had met many good humans in my life—their species was violent and quick to destroy anything different. Even in ancient times,Homo sapienshad wiped out pretty much every other humanoid species except for a few neanderthals and whatever the shifter ancestors were.
I was no expert, but thanks to my son’s love of dinosaurs and the prehistoric, I often read different articles and studies on them—usually while bored on the toilet—and I recalled that there were eight other species besideHomo sapiensat one point. The aforementioned neanderthals,Denisovians,Homo erectus,Homo… I couldn’t quite mentally pull up the rest of their names, but there were more.
“You all right over there?” Giselle’s soft voice reached into the middle Pleistocene era and yanked me back to the present. “You seemed like you went off somewhere.”
It wasn’t like we were ever going to have a second date, so I decided to just be honest. “Sorry, I was thinking about the rise of proto-humans and their eventual collapse due to total domination byHomo sapiens.”
She nodded like that was a perfectly normal thing. “When you say proto-humans, are you talking aboutProto-Homininsduring the Late Miocene Epoch, like theArdipithecus, or more the earlyHomoin the Cenozoic Era?”
Holy shit. Giselle had me outmatched in my knowledge of the prehistoric.
“What?” she murmured, tilting her head at me not unlike a wolf would when confused.
“Just surprised you instantly knew what I was talking about. And then some. Did you minor in paleontology?”
She chuckled at that, but it wasn’t condescending. With Giselle, I always felt like I knew how she was feeling and what she was thinking. There was no two-facedness, no reading between the lines with her. “I did a student-teaching program at a gifted school where the majority of students were neurodivergent, and then my practicals in an inner-city school with, again, a bunch of undiagnosed neurodivergent kids. Believe me, you learn alotabout dinosaurs.” She paused. “And trains.”
The matter-of-fact way she said it had laughter bubbling up inside me. Man, it was just soeasyto talk to her. No wonder she was an excellent teacher.
“Sothat’swhy Junior likes you. Not because of your great personality or incredible professionalism. I should have known it was the dinosaurs.”
“It’s the dinosaurs,” she agreed before breaking into giggles.
My ego was starting to bubble up. She was having a good time. A good time she very much deserved.
