He was absolutely intrigued. He wanted to get to know her. To understand her. To meet her immediately.
Reed tapped on the message icon, composing an introduction in his head. But there was already a message on the screen. His heart lifted until he read what she’d sent him.
“Life is complicated right now. Not sure this is the right time. Sorry.”
Reed read it three times, but the words didn’t change. She’d seen the match. Seen her fated mate. The one person in the world meant for her and immediately shut it down, before he could even say hello.
His bear howled, clawed at his chest. He didn’t understand how she could reject him. Reed set the phone down because his hands were shaking. The coffee pot beeped, and he poured himself a cup, hoping that the stimulation would help himprocess what had just happened. He added cream and sugar and chugged it down, barely able to think.
Finally, he picked up the phone again and stared at her picture, her sharp eyes, that unreadable expression. Her rejection stung like a knife wound. He looked at the time stamp on the message. It had been sent in the middle of the night last night.
It sounded like she had an important job. But he wondered why she’d signed up and then decided it wasn’t a good time. Maybe she’d just been curious and wasn’t expecting to be matched right away.
He had to believe there was a reason. But it still hurt. He needed to respond, to let her know the door was still open.
He tapped on the messaging app. “No worries. I’m around if you ever want to talk.”
He hit send and stared at the messaging app for a moment, half expecting her to respond. But she didn’t. His bear paced restlessly beneath his skin, aching and wanting to do something to fix this, to find her and convince her they were meant to be together.
But Reed meant what he’d written. However long it took for it to be the right time. He would be here. He set down his phone and poured another cup of coffee. After he drank it, he got ready for his day. He checked mate.com in the driveway of his house before leaving for work. He checked it again in the parking lot when he arrived.
The Bright Institute for Shifters sat on the slopes of Fate Mountain, a sprawling campus of timber and glass that his father had founded after the Great War. It had started as avocational program for displaced shifters and had grown into one of the preeminent research institutes in the region.
The main building anchored the campus with its tall windows and airy lobby, surrounded by workshops and training facilities, where shifters and humans alike learned everything from woodworking to business development.
Reed worked in the IT department, keeping the network running and the databases maintained. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it mattered. The Institute had helped hundreds of people rebuild their lives, learn new skills, and find purpose. His father had built something that made a difference, and Reed was proud to be part of it.
He checked mate.com again in the lobby, found no change, and badged in at 8:15. The IT department was open and bright, with big windows looking out at the forest. A dozen engineers sat at their desks, most of them already deep in their screens. Reed liked his coworkers and his work.
He sat down, booted up his computer, pulled up the ticket queue, and stared at it without seeing. His phone sat face down on his desk, and he was tempted to check mate.com for the hundredth time that morning. But he forced himself to focus on work.
There was a database migration that needed to be tested. A bug in the student portal that someone flagged last week. It was routine stuff. The kind of work he could do on autopilot, which was good, because autopilot was what he needed today.
His bear paced restlessly beneath his skin. The beast knew his mate was out there and that she’d rejected him.
At about ten, he took a break and walked out to the courtyard. He sat on a bench in the weak morning light and checked his phone again. Still nothing. He wasn’t going to send another message. The one he’d sent had opened the door. Sending anything else would seem needy and desperate. Even if that’s how he felt, he wasn’t going to let her know.
This rejection wasn’t something that he could shrug off. There weren’t “plenty of fish in the sea” for shifters. She was his mate. His only mate. If she never came around, that was it for him. He would never find his one true love. And if he wanted a relationship, he would always know that she wasn’t it.
He thought of his siblings. Ash and Eliana had little Eli, who was already five. Ivy, who ran Fate Mountain Nature Center, was mated with her forest ranger mate Henry. Their baby Oliver was already three. And Holly, who ran Bright Ornaments and sold her crafts at the farmers market was matched with Elias Frost, a polar bear from Alaska. Their little baby Jasper was already a year old.
Reed was the youngest of the Bright siblings. Two years younger than Holly. But he already felt so behind. He was turning thirty-two this year. And even though it wasn’t exactly ancient, and he’d already accomplished so much of what he’d wanted in life, knowing that his mate had rejected him made it all seem so pointless.
He went back to work and pushed through the database migration, fixed the bug, opened a request, responded to code review comments on something he’d submitted last week. It was the normal day-to-day tasks. The ache in his chest wouldn’t go away, but he had to function around it.
In the afternoon, he overheard two of his co-workers speaking in shocked tones.
“The body was found in an alley behind the brewery. Can you believe it?”
“Yeah, I heard about that. They found him in the dumpster.”
Reed’s hands went still on his keyboard.
“What about the dumpster behind the brewery?”
His co-workers turned to him. They explained that the news of a dead body was all over Fate Mountain this morning.
“Sanitation workers discovered a body this morning during their route.”
