How to Flirt With a Naked Werewolf - Molly Harper [100]
It was as if I’d scheduled my day in terms of “8:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M., generally pleasant person; 5:05 P.M. to 6:00 A.M., total basket case.”
I put on a brave face. I smiled, I served, I earned my living. I hurt. Either I couldn’t sleep, or I crashed and slept for fourteen hours. I couldn’t seem to eat anything, and the smells of the food I was cooking turned my stomach.
I was reminded of my parents’ more tragic friends, the ones who hadn’t quite gotten past the “if it feels good, smoke it” portion of the free-love era. They’d show up at the commune all jittery and stay long enough to get a decent meal and then amble away. When I looked into the mirror, I saw the same hollow-eyed stare, the unhappy twist to the mouth. Cooper had turned me into a strung-out love junkie.
Convinced I could still smell him in my bed, I bleached my sheets to bone white. I immediately regretted the loss, but it didn’t matter. Cooper’s scent was everywhere, in the mattress, the pillows, stubbornly resisting my efforts to drive it off.
I skipped over several stages of grief and got stuck at anger. In my more vindictive moments, I hoped Cooper was somehow worse off than I was, that he was somewhere curled up in a fetal position, twitching in misery, and I was just feeling an echo of it.
I don’t want him back, I told myself. I don’t need this shit. Even if he came crawling back on all fours, I wouldn’t take him. And an hour later, I knew that if he walked through the door, I’d fling myself at him and forgive him for everything. Back and forth I teetered until I worried that I’d finally cracked, that the depression Cooper’s presence had somehow delayed was flooding in. Maybe this was the life I would have had in Grundy if I’d never learned his secret, if I’d never loved him.
I know, even I wanted to slap myself a little bit.
Irony of ironies, my books on werewolf relationships arrived, having been delayed for weeks by some quirk of the postal system. I don’t know if it was morbid curiosity or a masochistic streak that had me thumbing through guides to successful relationships with were-creatures. But it proved to be a fascinating way to torture myself. For instance, I learned that the Grundy habit of offering a lady meat as a courting gesture was very much in line with werewolf sensibilities. Werewolves marked nearly every important gesture with food—dating, proposals, apologies. If Cooper came back and offered me a ham, I wasn’t sure I could keep from expressing my feelings with a cast-iron skillet against his head.
One night, while perusing Rituals and Love Customs of the Were, I found that most breeds of wolves mate for life. And if one wolf in a breeding pair dies, it can send the other into a depression. The mourning wolf wouldn’t hunt, wouldn’t do anything to take care of himself, until the pack had no choice but to let him die. This made no sense. I wasn’t a werewolf. And I certainly wasn’t part of a breeding pair.
Wait a minute. Breeding pair. Not eating, constant fatigue, nausea, mood swings . . . Mentally, I counted back to the last month.
Shit.
I was late, several weeks late, and I hadn’t even noticed. This didn’t make any sense. I was the contraception queen. To keep up with Cooper, I’d taken to storing condoms in every room of our house. Clearly, Cooper’s swimmers could not be contained by mere modern prophylactics.
Stupid werewolf ninja sperm.
“Oh . . .” My hand dropped to my stomach. I put my head in my hands and gave in to the urge to cry. What could I do? How could I be sure? I couldn’t run into town to buy a pregnancy test. The entire town would know before I checked out at Hannigan’s. Could I even go to the doctor? Would they be able to tell that the baby had a few extra furry DNA strands?