Page 60 of Bride

“I’m not worried.” He sounds hoarse.

“Good. So now that I’ve shown you my fearsome weapons, you’ll take me to Emery’s with you? It is, after all, the honeymoonyou owe your bride. Pleasure doing business with you. I’ll go pack, and—” I make to stand, but his hand snatches me back down.

“Nice try.”

I sigh and lean backward, wincing when the tiles press into my spine. The stars crowd the sky, drift us into a moment of silence. “Want to know a secret?” I ask, weary. “Something I thought I’d never admit to anyone.”

One arm brushes against my thigh as he twists to look at me. “I’m surprised you’d want to tellme.”

I am, too. But I’ve carried it so tirelessly, and the night feels so soft. “Serena and I had a huge fight a few days before she disappeared. The biggest ever.” Lowe remains quiet. Which is exactly what I need from him. “We fought plenty, mostly about trivial shit, sometimes over stuff that took us a bit to cool down. We grew up together and were at our most annoying with each other—you know, sisters? She spat into the pockets of the caretakers who were mean to me, and I read smutty books to her while she was so sick she needed IV drips. But also I hated that sometimes she just wouldn’t pick up her phone for days, and she hated that I could be a stone-hearted bitch, I guess. That last fight we had, we were both fuming, after. And then she never showed up to help me put on the duvet cover, despite knowing that it’s the single hardest thing in the universe. And now the things she said keep circling in my head. Like sharks that haven’t been fed in months.”

I can’t see Lowe’s expression from down here. Which is ideal. “And what do the sharks say?”

“She got a recruiter from this really cool company interested in me. It was a good job—something challenging. Something only a dozen people in the country could do. And she kept telling me howperfect I’d be for it, what an opportunity it was, and I just couldn’t see the point, you know? Yes, it was a more interesting job, with more money, but I kept wondering, why? Why would I bother? What’s the end goal? And I asked her, and she...” I take a deep breath. “Said that I was aimless. That I didn’t care about anything or anyone, including myself. That I was static, headed nowhere, wasting my life. And I told her that it wasn’t true, that I did care about stuff. But I just... I couldn’t name anything. Except for her.”

...this apathetic spiral of yours, Misery. I mean, I get it, you spent the first two decades of your life expecting to die, but you didn’t. You’re here now. You can start living!

Dude, you’re not my mother or my therapist, so I’m not sure what gives you the right to—

I am out there, trying. I had a fucked-up life, too, but I’m dating, trying to get a better job, having interests—you’re just waiting for time to pass. You are a husk. And I need you to care about one single fucking thing, Misery, one thing that’s not me.

The sharks gnaw at the inner walls of my skull, and I won’t be able to make them stop until I find Serena, but in the meantime, I can distract them. “Anyway.” I sit up with a smile. “Since I so selflessly opened my heart to you, will you tell me something?”

“That’s not how—”

“What the hell is a mate, precisely?”

Lowe’s face doesn’t move a millimeter, but I know that I could fill a Babel tower of notebooks with how little he wants to have this conversation. “No way.”

“Why?”

“No.”

“Come on.”

His jaw works. “It’s a Were thing.”

“Hence, me asking you to explain.” Because I suspect that it’s not just the Were equivalent of marriage, or a civil union, or the steady commitment that comes with sharing monthly payments to multiple overpriced streaming services one forgot to discontinue.

“No.”

“Lowe. Come on. You’ve trusted me with far bigger secrets.”

“Ah, fuck.” He grimaces and rubs his eyes, and I think I won.

“Is it another thing I don’t have the hardware for?”

He nods, and almost seems sad about it.

“I understood the whole dominance thing.” We really made some strides in the past fifteen minutes. “Give me a chance.”

He turns to me. Suddenly he feels a little too close. “Give you a chance,” he repeats, unreadable.

“Yeah. The whole rival-species-bound-by-centuries-of-hostility-until-the-bloody-demise-of-the-weakest-will-put-an-end-to-the-senseless-suffering thing might seem discouraging, but.”

“But?”

“No buts. Just tell me.”

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