The Things We Water

by Mariana Zapata

“I’m not used to feeling….” He did some up and down gesture with his hand. Something in my chest stirred. “I don’t know what that means.” There was a pause. His palm swept down his mouth. “Torn.” “Over what?” “Doing what I should instead of what I want,” he answered.

I needed to make sure you were okay.”

“I never want anything. I never ask anyone for anything. My entire life has been in preparation for taking care of everything and everyone, and for the first time… for the first time, I’ve got someone around that feels more mine than anybody else I’ve ever met. For the first time, I’ve found something I want.”

He was just… Henri. A mountain. An ocean. An immovable force of nature that did what he had to do, even if he didn’t want to do it.

“I don’t want to be your friend.” He might as well have slapped me. But he wasn’t done. “I want you to marry me,” Henri said.

“You are a good person,” Henri went on. “And I want you enough for both of them. For all of them.”

“Liking you would’ve been enough, but… you had to be you.”

Maybe some people thought you shouldn’t be attracted to possessive people, but I wasn’t one of them. It fueled my soul. Fed my spirit.

“You know damn well that I like you just fine. More than fine.” His eyes searched mine. “Nina… you smell like my mate. Feel like it too….”

“The more I learn about you, the more I like you, and there’s not many people I can say that about.”

“Nobody has ever made me as happy as you do, and the idea that somebody else would be spending their free time with you, hearing you laugh… I can’t fucking do it. It’s unbearable to me.”

“We both know what there is here between us, and we aren’t going to insult each other by pretending like we don’t. There’s a choice to be made, yeah, but is there? The first thing I thought when I saw your face was that you were so damn pretty. You smell like my favorite thing in the entire world. The sound of your voice makes me smile. “A wolf knows when it knows, and I haven’t been able to stop looking at you… looking for you… since you got here. Matti’s always going to be one of the most important people in your life, the same way he is for me, but what you and I are going to have is going to top that.”

“A mate is the foundation for the present and the future. I’ve made my decision, and you made yours before I even did. This is going to happen.

“When you’re scared, you come to me because you know I’ll protect you. When you’re worried, you come to me because you know I’m going to be there for you. You trust me. You love me. I know it, and so do you.”

“Can I kiss you now?”

I had a one-track mind sometimes, especially when that track was shaped like an epic statue in a museum and had the only other face I’d ever thought I’d want to look at every day for the rest of my life.

“So, are you saying I can do whatever I want to you?” He looked me dead in the eye and confirmed every fantasy I could’ve ever imagined. “Whatever, whenever.”

didn’t even have to sigh for him to know when something was bothering me. It was one of the greatest gifts of my life being known so well.

“You’re the kindest and one of the most loving people I’ve ever met. I knew it minutes after I saw you. That’s why you smell like a honey bun. That’s how love and kindness come across. Who better to have the power you have than someone who understands the value of life the way you do? It’d be so easy to do with that whatever you wanted, and I can’t imagine what your fucking parent has to be like if you got it from them, but you’re no angel of death. You’re an angel of….” Henri’s forehead wrinkled. “Of?” The word came out a little broken. So much hope hung on whatever his answer would be. Those beautiful eyes roamed my face as he drew a circle over my back with his thumb. After a moment, he nodded. “Love.”

Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for accepting me. Thank you for being who he was.

“You’re everything I’ve ever wanted in a mate, and I didn’t even know what that was until you bit my leg.”

“You’re going to be stuck with me, Fluff, because there’s nobody else on this planet I would rather be with than you.”

The hardest thing in the world to do is pretend you’re fine when you’re not.

“You’re both mine, and you don’t have anything to be worried about. Understand?” I blinked, and Duncan’s beautiful fluffy tail swayed behind us. His “yes” resonating in my head. The hand on my back slid a couple inches higher between my shoulder blades. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and his jaw went tight. “From now on, we go through everything together. All right?” I nodded, and Duncan… Duncan put his paw on Henri’s knee. I’d been holding it together with tape, and all of a sudden, the most intense urge to cry hit right in the back of my eyes, especially when the werewolf royalty smiled softly at not just me but my boy too. “Come on, you two. Everything is going to be fine.”

I had to throw my hand over my heart because I had freaking known it! He would disembowel someone for me! I knew it, I knew it, I knew it!

“Violence might be my love language.” I still had my hand over my heart. “I knew you would do some shady stuff to protect me. I just knew it, Fluff.”

You could never forget love. Love was the one thing that could survive illness and distance, and even time.

My Great Wolf was loving and possessive, protective and obsessive. He believed in me. Trusted in me.

An explosion of “love” I knew better than almost anything.

that love didn’t know the word DNA.

A mother was always a mother, no matter how old their child got.