Bride(51)
One arm brushes against my thigh as he twists to look at me. “I’m surprised you’d want to tell me.”
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 how perfect 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.”
His lips quirk into a smile. “A mate is . . .” The cicadas quiet. We can only hear the waves, gently lapping into the night. “Who you are meant for. Who is meant for you.”
“And this is a uniquely Were experience that differs from Human high schoolers writing lyrics on each other’s yearbooks before heading to separate colleges . . . how?”
I might be culturally offensive, but his shrug is good-natured. “I’ve never been a Human high schooler, and the experience of it might be similar. The biology, of course, is another matter.”
“The biology?”
“There are . . . physiological changes involved with meeting one’s mate.” He’s choosing his words with circumspection. Hiding something, maybe.
“Love at first sight?”
He shakes his head, even as he says, “In a way, maybe. But it’s a multisensory experience. I’ve never heard of someone recognizing their mate just by sight.” He wets his lips. “Scent is a big part of it, and touch, but there’s more. It triggers changes inside the brain. Chemical ones. Science articles have been written about it, but I doubt I’d understand them.”
I’d love to get my hands on Were academic journals. “Every Were has one?”