Wen:This will teach him not to fuck with me
Bella:you’re evil and i love it
Bella:remind me never to get on your bad side
Krystin:James is in. He’ll meet you at the store in 20
Krystin:I told him to be extra friendly
Wen:Perfect
Daphne:take pictures if Mal looks like he’s going to murder someone
Wen:Will do
I was definitely smirking when Mal returned empty-handed and looking contrite. He’d washed his hands and changed his shirt but still looked like a puppy who’d been scolded.
“Ready to go shopping?” I asked with excessive sweetness.
His eyes lit up immediately. “Yes. I would very much like to learn about proper human food…shopping.”
God, he was so formal sometimes. It would be adorable if it wasn’t also infuriating.
I drove us to the grocery store because I absolutely refused to let a werewolf king who’d never operated a motor vehicle get behindthe wheel of mine. He sat in the passenger seat looking at me the entire time.
“I will never stop being amazed at how fast the vehicles here move,” he observed, even though he hadn’t taken his eyes off of me. “And there are so many of them all traveling in organized patterns.”
“Welcome to Earth. We have traffic and road rage.”
“It is very efficient. Much better than horses.”
I snorted. “You’ve clearly never been stuck in rush hour on the highway.”
“What is rush hour?”
“Hell. Rush hour is hell.”
At the store, I grabbed a cart and started wheeling it toward the produce section. Mal followed so close behind me that he kept bumping into my back. His hand kept brushing my lower back in a way that was definitely possessive. His body kept angling between me and other shoppers like he was protecting me from the imminent threat of suburban moms buying organic kale and arguing about HOA regulations.
“You can relax,” I told him. “Nobody here is going to attack me.”
“You do not know that with certainty. There could be threats anywhere. Hidden enemies. Dangerous individuals.”
“The biggest threat here is the price of avocados and the judgment from other women when I buy ice cream.”
He frowned deeply. “What is an avocado?”
I was in the middle of explaining the concept of overpriced millennial fruit that was supposedly going to solve all our problems when we reached the meat section. I gestured to the neatly packaged cuts behind the refrigerated glass.
“This is how we buy meat here. Already dead, cleaned, and butchered into portions. Not traumatizing to look at.”
He studied the selection with the focus of someone learning a completely foreign concept. “Which one should I choose for our dinner?”
“Whatever you want. Chicken, beef, pork. Just nothing that looks like it used to have a face.”
“No rabbit then.”
“Definitely no rabbit.”
