Moonbound Mate

Chapter 2

I woke up alone in his bed, and my stomach dropped straight through the mattress before I'd even fully opened my eyes.

Of course. I lay there a second, bracing myself. This is exactly what everyone warned me about. This is exactly how it's supposed to go.

I sat up fast, already reaching for my clothes crumpled on the floor by the bed, already building the wall around my chest brick by brick the way I'd learned to do after my dad left, when the bedroom door opened and Kael walked back in carrying two steaming cups of coffee like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

He stopped in the doorway when he saw my face. "What?"

"Nothing." I pulled my shirt over my head too fast, catching my hair in the collar. "I just... I thought you'd be gone by now."

"It's my apartment." He said exactly like he had the night before, setting one of the cups gently on the nightstand beside me. "Where would I go?"

I stared at the coffee like it might do something unexpected if I touched it. "This isn't how this is supposed to go."

"How is it supposed to go?"

"You're supposed to disappear," I said, my voice sharper than I meant it. "Or make me leave first so you don't have to. Everyone on this entire campus says you will never see the same girl twice, Kael. It's practically a school legend."

Something tightened at the corner of his jaw, a muscle jumping there like he was biting down on words he wasn't ready to say. "Everyone talks too much."

I wrapped both hands around the warm cup instead of answering him, mostly because I genuinely had no idea what to say to a boy who was breaking his own well-known rules and looking almost irritated about it, like his own behavior was inconveniencing him.

He drove me back to my dorm in a silence that wasn't uncomfortable so much as it was heavy with something neither of us said out loud. When he pulled up outside my building, he didn't just let me climb out and disappear back into my normal, humiliating life.

"Text me when you get inside," he said.

I blinked at him, one hand already on the door handle. "Why?"

"Because I said so." His eyes flicked toward the entrance of the building, scanning it the way a soldier might scan a street for a sniper, and for one strange second the calm on his face sharpened into something alert, almost predatory. "Just do it, Mira. Please."

The pleasure surprised me more than the rest of it combined.

I did text him. And I told myself, walking up the stairs to my room, that it meant nothing, that this was just a strange, one-time hookup with an aftermath that would fade by dinner.

It didn't fade.

Grant tried to talk to me twice that first week, catching me outside the dining hall with his hands shoved deep in his pockets and an apology already halfway rehearsed on his face. The first time, I just walked past him like he was a stranger asking for directions. The second time, he actually grabbed my sleeve.

"Mira, come on. Can we just talk for one second?"

"We talked plenty the night I found you in my bed," I said, pulling my arm free without raising my voice. "I think we're all caught up."

He didn't try a third time. Word travels fast on a campus this small, and by the following Monday, half my pre-med cohort seemed to know exactly what had happened on my birthday, delivered to me in careful, pitying half-glances between lectures. I hated the pity almost more than I'd hated walking in on him. Pity made it real in a way anger hadn't.

Priya noticed, of course. Priya noticed everything.

"You've got your armor on today," she said, sliding a tray down across from mine at lunch on Thursday. "The tight ponytail. The blazer. You only dress like a district attorney when you're trying not to feel something."

"I have a practical lab."

"You have a lab practical every Thursday and you never dress like this for it." She studied me over her sandwich. "This is Grant-shaped armor. Or..." Her eyes narrowed, sharp and delighted, "...is it Kael-Draven-shaped armor?"

"It's nothing-shaped armor. Eat your lunch."

She didn't push, which was its own kind of mercy, but I caught her watching me for the rest of the meal like she was assembling a puzzle out of pieces I hadn't handed her yet.

The next few days unfolded in a way I couldn't fully explain, even to myself. I'd cross the quad between classes and catch him leaning against the science building, arms crossed, watching the exact direction I was walking until I disappeared inside. I'd leave the library at midnight, exhausted from studying for an organic chemistry exam, and find his car parked near the entrance, engine off, headlights dark, like he'd been sitting there a while just in case.

One afternoon, walking back from an exam I was fairly sure I'd bombed, I spotted him standing near the fountain in the middle of the quad, hands in his pockets, watching a group of freshmen toss a Frisbee back and forth without actually seeming to see them at all. I almost walked past without saying anything. Almost.

"You could just talk to me instead of watching from a fountain like a sad statue," I said, stopping in front of him.

Something that might have been the beginning of a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. "I wasn't watching you."

"You were absolutely watching me. I saw you look up the second I got around the science building."

"Coincidence."

"You keep using that word. I'm starting to think you don't actually know what it means."

That earned me something closer to a real smile, quick and startling, gone almost as soon as it appeared, like he'd caught himself doing something he wasn't supposed to and shut it down. "How was your exam?"

"Terrible. Thank you for asking, and for changing the subject so smoothly."

"You're welcome." He studied me for a second, head tilted slightly, in that way he had of looking at me like I was a puzzle he hadn't solved yet. "You looked upset yesterday. In the dining hall."

My stomach dropped a little. "You were watching me in the dining hall too?"

"I have eyes, Mira. Half the campus was staring at you and whispering. I wasn't the only one watching."

"Great. Very comforting."

"I didn't say it to comfort you." His voice softened, just slightly. "I said it because I wanted you to know I noticed. That's all."

I didn't have a response ready for that, so I said nothing, and neither did he, and we stood there by the fountain for a strange, suspended moment before I finally made myself walk away first, my heart doing something complicated and unfamiliar in my chest the whole way back to my dorm.

"He's basically stalking you," Priya announced one night, sprawled across her bed while I tried and failed to focus on a textbook. She didn't sound worried so much as delighted. "In a hot, broody, main-character sort of way."

"He's not stalking me. He just... shows up."

"Constantly. Coincidentally. Sure, Mira." She grinned at me over the top of her laptop. "I'm just saying, if a guy that intense started 'just showing up' everywhere I went, I would either call the police or start planning a wedding, and I genuinely don't know which."

I laughed it off, the way I laughed off most things that scared me a little. But that night, lying in the dark long after Priya's breathing had gone slow and even in the bed across the room, my mind kept snagging on something small and strange, like a splinter under her skin.

A memory surfaced right as I drifted toward sleep, one that didn't belong to me at all. A flash of trees pressed close together, moonlight slicing silver through the branches, a howl echoing somewhere far off in the dark. I sat straight up in bed, heart slamming, sweat cooling on the back of my neck.

I had never, in my entire eighteen years, gone camping in the woods at night.

So why did it feel like a memory instead of a dream? Why could I still feel the cold air on my skin, still smell wet pine and earth, hours after I'd woken up in my own warm bed?

I told myself it was exhaustion. Stress from the breakup. My brain is doing something strange after the worst birthday of my life. That's all it was. It had to be.

But three nights later it happened again, this time, closer, like I was standing in those same trees myself, watching two silver eyes move steadily through the dark toward me, not with menace, but with purpose, like they were searching for me specifically. I woke up gasping, sheets soaked through with sweat, Kael's name half-formed on my lips before I even understood why it was the first thing I wanted to say out loud.

My phone buzzed on the nightstand at 3:04 a.m.

Kael: Are you okay?

I stared at the screen for a long moment, a slow chill crawling up the back of my neck.

Me: How did you know I was awake?

Three dots appeared on the screen. Disappeared. Appeared again, like he was typing and deleting and typing again.

Kael: Lucky guess.

Me: At 3am? That's a pretty specific lucky guess.

Kael: Go back to sleep, Mira.

Me: That's not an answer.

Kael: I know.

Me: Do you dream about trees too? Moonlight? A howl somewhere far off?

The dots appeared and vanished three separate times before any reply came through at all, which told me almost as much as whatever words eventually followed.

Kael: We'll talk about it. Not tonight. Please, Mira, just trust me a little longer.

Me: You keep saying that. Trust you a little longer. For how much longer exactly?

He didn't answer that one at all, and somehow the silence afterward felt heavier than anything he could have typed.

I set the phone down slowly, staring at the ceiling instead, replaying the dream, the trees, the moonlight, the howl, those searching silver eyes, over and over in my mind until the details started to blur together, until I couldn't tell anymore whether I was remembering something or inventing it out of pure exhaustion.

Somewhere underneath the confusion, though, a small and quiet part of me had already started to suspect that whatever explanation eventually came, it was not going to sound anything at all like luck.

I didn't sleep much for the rest of that night. I lay there listening to the ordinary sounds of the dorm, a door down the hall, water running somewhere in the pipes, Priya's steady breathing across the room, and tried to convince myself that ordinary was still the world I lived in. But some part of me had already started packing its bags for somewhere stranger, and no amount of convincing was going to call it back.