My Not-Yet Mate and the Thirty-Day Trial novel · Chapter 23 of 24

Chapter 23: I Stay

The Grange hall was full at six on Thursday, and nobody was talking.

Eighty wolves sat on the folding chairs in rows, in their good coats, with their hands in their laps.

Dena sat in the third row in a clean purple scrub top with her nose already red.

My mother sat beside her with a tissue in each fist.

Emmett stood at the side of the stage, and the Keeper stood in front of it with her black book.

Day thirty had come.

Joss and I walked up the aisle together, side by side, in boots.

I wore the green dress with the buttons.

He wore the grey henley, because I had asked him to, and his green canvas jacket hung open.

Our wrists were bare of everything but the thin frayed red cords.

We stopped in front of the Keeper.

She looked at the book, and at us.

"Thirty nights," she said to the hall, "and the door was open every morning."

"Neither of them walked through it. Today the book closes on them, and the hall is only the witness."

She turned to me.

"Dr. Dunnaway. Do you stay?"

My mouth was dry.

I had practiced something longer.

I looked at Joss instead, at his face, the three-day stubble and the hazel eyes.

"I stay," I said.

My voice carried to the back of the room.

"Nothing made me say it."

"I looked for something that would, for thirty days, and I couldn't find it. It's mine."

"I chose him with a clear head every night, and I'll choose him tomorrow."

The hall was so quiet that I heard a baby breathe.

The Keeper nodded.

"Mr. Holcombe. Do you stay?"

"I stay," Joss said.

He did not look away from me.

"I've been wanting her since a calf in a pasture."

"I didn't know it was a choice until I got thirty nights to make it."

"I choose her. I'd have chosen her with the cord on or off."

The Keeper wrote something.

"Then the bite," she said. "You each take the other, at the place that is saved. Only the two of you."

Joss turned to face me.

He bent his head and moved his hair aside, and the left side of his neck was bare and brown in the lamplight.

My hands came up to his shoulders.

They were shaking.

He tipped his head to the right.

He gave me the curve where the neck meets the shoulder, the soft place I had kissed and not bitten for thirty days.

I stood on my toes.

I put my mouth against his skin, and I felt his pulse beating hard against my lips.

I opened my teeth and bit down.

He made a low sound that went through my body.

The skin gave under my teeth, and I tasted copper and salt and him.

His arms came around me and held me hard against his chest.

I let go, slowly, and licked the bite.

His breath was ragged on my ear.

"Now me," he said.

He lifted my chin with two fingers.

I turned my head and bared my neck.

I felt his hair fall across my face, and his stubble, and his lips, hot and gentle.

Then his teeth closed on the place where my neck meets my shoulder.

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