Was there any universe where she could have something like this?
She couldn’t quite believe there was.
As much as she wanted to.
***
Wilson drove around the town, restless. He didn’t want to go back to his hotel room and sit alone, wondering what Mavis was thinking about.
The way she’d protested so automatically that it was impossible, that it couldn’t be true—he didn’t know what to make of that.
It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in mates. They were going to a wedding between two true mates tomorrow, for Pete’s sake. So the problem must be something else. Something that was keeping her from believing that she could be someone’s mate.
Maybe it made sense after all, then. With her past...it might be hard to believe in something so good, after so much bad.
He pulled over on the edge of town, looking up at the black shapes of the mountains looming above him. He felt a sudden urge to shift and run out there, explore this wild countryside in snow leopard form.
Wilson had grown up in the Midwest, and gone straight to West Point out of high school, then spent most of his active career deployed in the Middle East. He’d never spent any time in this kind of environment, dramatic mountain peaks, glaciers, frozen lakes—the kind of environment a snow leopard was meant to inhabit.
Every time he looked out at the mountains, he could feel his leopard growling in his chest, wanting to get out and learn what was out there. Explore every inch of it, until he knew it like the back of his hand.
Until he made it his home, a place he could live with his mate...
His phone buzzed, and he started. He thumbed it open, and found himself looking at an email.
Hello, sir, it began. The men and I are going out on the town. You’re welcome to join us if you’d like...
Cal had given the address of a local bar. Wilson stared at it for a long moment, then started the car with a determined motion.
He wasn’t going to go back to his hotel room alone. He was tired of being alone—well, maybe it was time to take some steps to rectify that.
***
“Sir!” Cal said, looking startled, as Wilson came into the bar.
“You’re not in the military any longer,” Wilson said to him. “Call me Wilson like any other man would.”
There was silence around the table as the rest of the veterans took that in.
“Well, Wilson,” said ex-Sergeant Turner, always the brashest of Wilson’s men, after a long pause. “Why don’t you have a seat?”
“Thank you,” Wilson said, and sat.
The group was divided evenly between the ex-Marines and the Glacier pack, with the groom squarely in the middle. Wilson took a seat in the middle also, and said seriously, “Congratulations. I mean that.”
“Thank you, s—Wilson,” Cal said, the name sounding a bit awkward in his mouth. “I never thought I’d get this lucky.”
“You all have mates, am I right?” Wilson asked the leopards. They all nodded. “Any of you?” he asked the rest of the Marines.
Turner, Gonzalez, Sanders, and Neal all shook their heads.
Though, Wilson thought, if he was on a first-name basis with all of them now, he should start thinking of them as Ken, Carlos, Nate, and Ty instead.
“Well,” Wilson said, “clearly with all the useful things the Marines taught us, being able to hang onto a woman wasn’t one of them.”
“Hey,” said Ty good-naturedly, “some of us have other priorities.”
“No priority should be more important than your mate,” Cal said seriously. “I thought for a long time I was fine just doing my job, taking care of the Park, being a good boss. I know better now. Nothing’s more important than Lillian and our baby.”