Werewolf Wedding(32)

After two quick ones, and a third that made my heart pound just a little, he pulled away and whispered in my ear, “Well I meant that’d be plenty for you. Keep the bed warm, I’ll be home for dinner, honey.”

I cocked my head. “Excuse me, Prince Jackass?”

“Oh never mind,” he said with another grin. “I’ve just always wanted to say that. I’ll call you when I can. Stay safe.”

And then, with a swishing turn and a click of my front door, he was gone. But those words, stay safe, stuck in my throat like a lump of Tylenol.

*

An hour later, I pushed the door to my studio open with my foot, not because I was being cool, but because my arms were full of crap. I had a statue to fix before my subject... er, fiancé, came to finally model for it, and I wasn’t going to be the one to screw everything up.

Then again, I wasn’t entirely sure how to fix a statue broken in such a way and have it look convincing, but I’m also not the type to give up without a fight.

Obviously. It takes a certain kind of stubbornness to try and not only corral a werewolf, but also convince him that maybe jetting out of town at the first sign of trouble isn’t the best course of action. And why had he told me to stay safe? Isn’t that the sort of thing the guys on Band of Brothers said to each other right before someone got blown up?

“You’re sweating,” Jeannie said in her trademark deadpan. “Did you have more sex? I only ask because you’re sweating but you aren’t acting all fretful, which means—”

“Yes,” I said, as flat as I could manage. “All the way, every place, tongues all over the body.”

She helped me with my double armload of stuff and as soon as the epoxy jug, the paste, the color matching caulk and the silicone tube were safely on the floor, she put her hands on her hips and frowned. “You’re lying.”

“That’s true. Sort of. There were tongues all over the place, but not all the way.” I felt a little abashed as I was talking, but it was something I had to get out. “This might sound really stupid, but I think he’s trying to make it special. Also we’re getting married.”

“Huh,” Jeannie grunted. “I’ll take this stuff to the back.”

I stood there, waiting and listening, well aware of what was about to happen. Jeannie’s never at her best early in the morning. She always jokes that her meds haven’t kicked in yet, which I know isn’t true because she takes them before she leaves the house. My guess is she’s just naturally a night owl, and has forced herself to assimilate to normal, polite society via sleeping at night and waking in the day.

The other thing about her is that underneath the slightly gruff exterior, and the small frame, she’s strong as a goddamn aurochs. As soon as she was in the studio, I started counting backwards from thirty. If she lasted that long, it’d be a new obliviousness record. To her credit, and to my surprise, I only had to count down to eighteen before I heard the sharp inhalation from the other room, a lot like the sound an excited teenager makes when he’s huffing nitrous.

“YOU WHAT?”

Something hit the ground and broke, but it didn’t sound expensive. The only thing I hoped was that it wasn’t one of the novelty coffee mugs that I liked. When she re-emerged from behind the sliding door to the studio, she was covered in flour.

Except there is no flour in a sculpture studio, so she’d somehow gotten herself covered from head to toe in Plaster of Paris dust.

“Don’t turn on the sprinklers,” I said, “or you’ll freeze like that.”

She was unfazed. “What the hell did you say?”

“Don’t turn on the—”

“You are getting married?” Jeannie’s voice was halfway between excited and a vulture shrieking. “To that billionaire? Holy shit, Dilly I think I’m going to faint. And I haven’t even had an over-the-panties handy from the guy.”

I shrugged, trying to act as casual as I could. Reality was, it had only just hit me what I was doing, and somehow hearing Jeannie say it put a lump in my stomach that felt like I’d eaten a bucket of spackle.

Without my having started talking, I guess she felt the need to keep on, out of fear that otherwise she’d either explode from tension build up, or maybe the world would disappear. Even as nervous as I was getting as reality set in, the fact that she was standing there, covered in plaster, and hooting at me was just a little too much.

I sat down, a little harder than I meant to sit, and then just started howling with laughter. I don’t mean the kind where you get some tears in your eyes – I mean the sort of laughing that’s as bad as a terminal case of hiccups. My sides hurt, my face burned from the exertion of being pulled up into a smile for so long. My eyes began burning from either the plaster dust wafting off of Jeannie or from how tightly I had them clamped shut.

But then the damndest thing happened.

As I sat there screaming with laughter, I felt my chest tighten up a bit, and then my eyes burned not from the dust, but from something coming out of them. Moisture in the corners of my eyes collected and rolled slowly down my cheeks. The volcanic laughter that had took me so quickly shifted to what I thought before was the complete opposite, but in that moment, I realized exactly how similar they were.

Despite riding a falling-in-love high for the past two weeks, exactly how stupid I’d gotten hit me square in the chest. The droplets turned to streams, and before I knew it, I was sitting there in the floor of my studio, weeping loud and proud.