My Alpha Wanted a Graceful Rejection, So I Rehearsed Dating His Rival novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Forty-One Items

A canoe, a sauna stove and a freezer full of venison go back to Nils with Ulla's signed tally, and the Blessing Alpha who lifts the freezer says he does things once.

At six the next morning, Nils had parked the lodge's only dolly under the wrong end of an eighteen-foot canoe.

"Other end," I said.

"I know which end."

"It's the one with the seat."

Ulla sat at a folding table at the head of the dock with a rubber stamp, an ink pad and a clipboard.

I had asked for a signed tally on every item.

She had agreed faster than I expected, which should have told me something.

My cousin Petra held the other end of the dolly.

"Run one," I said. "Item one, the canoe. Nils, you say, 'I accept it back.'"

"I accept it back."

"With the voice."

"I accept it back," Nils said, with the voice.

Ulla stamped RECEIVED in block capitals and signed her whole name beside it, with a long flourish on the S.

It took two trips to get the canoe off the dock.

The first trip put it on the rack above the lodge porch.

The rack was built for a sixteen-foot boat, so two feet hung off each end.

On the second trip Nils tied it on in a way he called secure and Petra called prayer.

"That's one," I said. "Item two. The sauna stove."

Item two was a three-hundred-pound cast-iron stove.

For my twenty-fifth birthday Nils had given it to me with a bow the size of a tire.

I had once said, over dinner, that I wanted a sauna.

I had not said I wanted to carry the heater for one up a hill in a pickup.

The dolly went up the lodge steps.

At the front door, the stove was an inch wider than the frame.

"Take the door off," Ulla said.

"It's the lodge's front door," Nils said.

"It will be your front door in seventeen days. Take it off."

Nils took the door off its hinges.

The stove went through with a clang and stuck in the vestibule, where it would live until the feast.

"RECEIVED," said Ulla.

Between the stove and the freezer I did Item nine early, because it fit in my apron pocket.

It was a wooden spoon with an A burned into the handle, from the first birthday after the bond.

I had stirred with it every morning for eight years.

I held it out to Nils.

He looked at it longer than he had looked at anything else all morning.

"Keep the spoon," he said.

"It's on the list."

He took it.

It was the one thing that morning I had not rehearsed handing over, and I did it fine.

Item three was a seven-cubic-foot chest freezer from our third anniversary.

It was full of venison, and I had never once been able to eat it.

By then the morning shift had gathered on the lawn with their coffee, standing, which was worse than filming.

Nils took one end of the freezer and Petra took the other.

They got it six inches off the ground, and he made a noise I had only heard from the bakehouse mixer.

"Wait," Nils said. "I have it. I don't have it."

"Put it down," I said.

A green pickup with Copper Harbor tags rolled up the lane.

The man who got out of it had to duck a little to close the door.

He was six foot five, with a square dark beard and a scar through his left eyebrow.

He wore a canvas coat although it was June.

He looked at Nils, at the freezer and at the stove standing in the vestibule where a door used to be.

He did not ask any of the questions I would have asked.

He walked over, set a hand under the free end of the freezer and lifted.

Nils went straight up on his toes and let go.

"Where does it go?" the man said.

"Nowhere," I said. "It goes back to him."

He nodded.

He carried a chest freezer full of venison up the steps and set it down next to the stove.

Then he held out his hand to Nils.

"Soren Halme. I'm early for the Sitting."

"I know who you are," said Nils.

"Soren Halme," said Ulla, and I have never heard a name said with so much weather in it.

"The Blessing Alpha. You're not due until Monday."

"The road was clear."

"Is this a ceremony?" Soren said.

"It's a rehearsal," I said. "I'm being rejected on Midsummer, so I'm returning his gifts first. Forty-one. Today is nine."

"You practice," he said.

"Everything. The howl out, the exit, the Courtesy Hour."

I turned the clipboard around so he could see.

"If there's an unmated Alpha in the hall, he may court me in that hour. You're the only one."

"He won't," said Nils.

Soren looked at him.

Then he looked at me, and for the first time his face did something that wasn't a rule.

"I don't rehearse," he said. "I do things once."

"That's how people end up embarrassed."

"Probably," he said.

"Then I need you here Thursday at four."

"No," he said.

"I'll put you down."

I took a pen out of my braid and wrote S. HALME, COURTESY HOUR, THURS 4 on the schedule, and underlined it, in ink.

"I'd like it noted that I didn't agree," Soren said.

"It's noted," I said. "In pen."

Item four was a log splitter.

Soren picked that up too, without being asked.

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