I studied my face in the mirror, trying to see myself as I’d been several months ago, before I knew any of this wild ride was coming for me. I looked for a long time and didn’t think I saw that same girl. I saw someone stronger. Someone bold who had more to talk about than the latest episode of her favorite show or whatever was coming next in the Moonlight Caravan series. Okay, I still snuck online to fangirl about Moonlight Caravan almost weekly, but the point was it wasn’t my entire personality more.
Breaking out of my bubble had helped me discover parts of myself I didn’t know were there before. Somehow, I thought I could see all that in my face. I looked like somebody who had control of her life, and I felt a burst of pride at that realization.
Of course, I wished I was someone who had control of her life and knew the hell where her boyfriend slash mate slash breeding partner was. I still couldn’t keep all the werewolf terminology straight, but I knew they seemed to scoff at labels like boyfriend and girlfriend. I was Riggs’ mate. We didn’t date. We bonded. But that was all okay. This was his world, and I wanted to respect it, even if I didn’t always understand it.
Once I was dressed and ready, I headed outside to glance around, wondering if maybe he was just chopping wood. Yes. It turned out that one of Riggs’ actual hobbies was chopping wood. He even had a wood chopping axe collection, along with all sorts of peculiar reasons each one was better suited for certain jobs. When he was stressed, bored, or extra excited, he liked to go out, chop down a tree, and then chop it into small bits for no particular reason.
Thankfully, the pack seemed to find some use for all the spare firewood and regularly came to gather from the huge pile that had grown behind our cabin. But I suspected Riggs would’ve kept on chopping whether anyone wanted the wood or not.
I’d spent many nights watching him hack through wood like butter. It was like a dance the way he did it. He’d swing overhead, then cut back back handed, pivot, and hack down. In moments, he’d have a round split into multiple evenly sized strips of firewood.
So I went toward his wood pile when I didn’t see him out front. He wasn’t there, either. I started toward the trees, thinking maybe he decided to get a fresh tree to play with when I heard a window in the cabin open.
I turned, then saw him on the second floor. He threw something toward me. I watched it sail for a few seconds before my brain registered what I was looking at.
A paper airplane.
I laughed then. The cheeky bastard was teasing me, wasn’t he?
He absolutely was, because when I looked back toward the window, he was pretending to bashfully hide so I could only see his eyes over the frame, just like I had back in the city when I’d thrown my stupid love letter slash suicide note, as he liked to call it.
The airplane landed nowhere near me. It took a rogue turn, spun in a circle, and nearly collided with the cabin. I could’ve told Riggs that was a normal occurrence with paper airplanes thrown from windows. You always had to prepare for the invisible wind currents.
He disappeared from view, leaving me to go collect the airplane note and pull it open. As expected, I found writing in his cramped, messy handwriting within.
To the beautiful strange woman walking outside in the middle of the night,
You make me want to be better. This is me trying.
Oh, and to anyone who happens to find this letter. My address is the lone fucking cottage right in front of where you found it. You’ll find the door unlocked and you’ll find me scantily dressed, totally unprepared for you to come up and murder me.
P.S. If I forgot to unlock the door, there’s a key behind the broken shingle.
I grinned at the note. What a big idiot.
Still, I wondered what that part about making him want to be better meant. It otherwise seemed like a total tease, and I had no doubt I’d find him upstairs with only whip cream covering his genitals or something equally ridiculous.
Naturally, I rushed inside and ran up the stairs, a big smile plastered on my face.
“Very f-” I started but trailed off when I came in the upstairs room. Riggs was on one knee with a ring held up toward me.
“Will you marry me?” he asked.
My lip shook and I had to put my hand to my mouth to compose myself. I hadn’t expected this with Riggs. Not ever. Werewolves didn’t do marriage. If anything, they looked down on it as a silly, stupid human tradition. But Riggs was on one knee and he’d gotten his hands on a ring. He had set all this up just for me, even though he probably knew his pack would make fun of him when they found out what he was doing.