“I mean, not that I do?”… “Not that I did?”… “Only just?”… “Right now?”
So many she should have guessed. She should have guessed over the mating bond. Over the words in the guidebook that she’d always let her eyes skim right over, rather than allowing any of them to go in.A compulsive connection with a werewolf may only occur if one already exists, she thought. And oh, the way the witch inside her yelled for that.At last you ask me, it said inside her.Why didn’t you ask me?But of course she knew why she hadn’t.
Her entire view of how things were had stood in the way.
Just as his had stood in the way for him.
He hadn’t thought he was enough.
Even though he was everything, he was everything, oh god she could finally tell him how much he was. “Oh, love. How could you ever think it would cost you anything at all, when all I ever wanted was to hear you say one-half of what you just said, one-tenth of it, one-millionth? I used to lie awake at night dreaming of just that tone in your voice,” she said.
And once she had spoken—once she saw the light in his eyes change from dark to shot through with lightning, once she saw hisfrown smooth and his lips part—she couldn’t stop. She let out all the words she’d always wanted to.
“Every love song I loved I sang at the top of my lungs while alone, thinking of you. My heart used to come close to bursting, with the hope that you thought of me too. It’s the reason it crushed me so completely when you went away, because the thing was, it wasn’t just losing my friend. It was losing the whole idea of the way life could be. The idea that sometimes things turn out the way you most long for, sometimes things will be okay, sometimes you are the heroine at the end of the movie, who takes a chance, and it goes the right way. The amazing, brilliant, perfect-just-as-he-is nerd she loves chooses her, the moment she says.”
After which, it was his turn to be speechless. She saw his lips form words, then stop, and start again. And again, and again. Until finally he managed to get them out. “And you’re saying that’s what this is. That this was always it, to you.”
“With all my heart, it was, and still is, and always will be.”
“But you never let it show, not ever.”
She shook her head, half laughing. “Do you know how many things I did to make sure it didn’t? The amount of times I would wait to text you back, or pull faces when you hugged me, or sign birthday cards with just my name so you would never know. So you could never guess,” she explained, and oh, the laugh he let out when she did. The delight in it, the ruefulness. The way it spurred her on. “It’s why I can’t ever be mad at you for fearing looking lovelorn and pathetic. Because I was terrified of the same thing, too. I used to thinkif he did, he would say, if he did, he would say, if he did, he would say.”
“And all along I thought the same.”
“I guess so.”
He shook his head. “Boy, we really made a mess of things, huh?”
“I’d say yes. But nothing has ever felt less like a mess to me than this.”
“Even though we wasted all that time, and suffered all that agony?”
“It’s a small price to pay to feel my heart soar like this. To know,finally, that I can put my hand over yours, and you will turn your hand and fold it around mine, just like you are doing before I even say it,” she said, because sure enough he was. And so instinctively that he looked down in a wondering sort of way. Like he could hardly believe it was true.
That this was how things were now.
They were love, all love, no holding back or trying to pretend.
“God, yeah. You’re right,” he said, after a moment of letting that wash over him. “I’d pay that price a thousand times over again, for this feeling. Even being alone, even being a monster, even longing for you the way I did, I would.”
And then she offered what she had known she would, the moment the truth about what she had done had hit her. The thing she could give him, as one who had made him what he was. “I can turn you back, you know. I can give you back everything I took,” she said as he looked at her again. As he met her gaze, steady and so full of love it was like being held.
Then he spoke, softer than ever. “You already have. You’ve given me what I always wanted. To be like this, to be the beast from the kind of movie you saved the day in. But with a better ending than anything like that beast gets. I am all the magic of a million things we watched together, and none of the agony, at the end,” he said. And as he leaned in to kiss her, he whispered one more thing. “Because now we get to live out our happily ever after, forever and ever, amen.”
EPILOGUE
Cassie had told him that she could just use magic to install the sign. But Seth had insisted on making a contribution of his own, and so had Pod. And so here they were, him halfway up a ladder leaning against the porch roof, Pod trying to pull him up there by his hair, her giving directions from the grass.
“A little higher up on the left,” she said. And of course he went too high with it. So she waved a hand down. Then he went too low. Really, she was just going to have to face the facts: the Sanctuary for Supernatural Creatures was just going to have a slightly crooked sign. And if she was being honest, it kind of felt better that way.
It gave the whole place character. It made it seem welcoming.
Not that they needed to be more welcoming. They were already busy all the time now. Yesterday they had fixed a vampire’s ingrown tooth. The day before, they had treated a fairy’s damaged wing.
And then there was Nancy. Nancy, who was almost certainly the witch Cassie had suspected she was. She had seen this very sign laid out on the grass, ready to be put up. Even though Cassie had covered it in magic. So of course, Cassie had explained a few things. Pointed her in the right directions. Watched her be amazed by all the wonders of the world, before setting her off on her own journey toward something better.
Just as she had for the wolves who had turned up, too. Even though she was pretty sure one of them had been Tyler, wearing a disguise. He had slunk up looking for a cure, sheepish yet notexactly sorry. Though she hadn’t said anything about it. She didn’t have to.
