Too Late, Alpha, I'm Your Pen Pal novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Tuesday Coffee
Maja hands the Alpha his change without looking up, his fingers touch her wrist, and then he tells the whole store he will marry the woman who writes to him and orders Maja to help find her.
Every Tuesday at six, the Alpha of Larch Hollow walked into Lund's General Store and I did not look at him.
I had practiced.
I looked at the register, the pencil cup, the jar of butterscotch candies by the scale.
I looked at everything in the building except six feet two inches of black-haired man in a thermal shirt.
The bell over the door rang, and the whole store went quiet.
"Evening," Lennart Brekke said.
"Evening, Alpha," I said, to the register.
He bought a pound of dark roast every Tuesday, though I knew he had a full tin at home.
He came for the other thing.
Along the back wall of the store ran forty old brass letterboxes, left over from when Lund's was the post office.
Box 9 was the Moon's box.
A lonely wolf could leave a letter in it, and the store burned the letters at the full moon.
Fifteen months ago the Alpha had left one about his mother.
I sorted the store's mail.
I had read it, and I had answered it.
Now we wrote every week, and he had no idea who he was writing to.
I rang up the coffee.
"Eleven forty," I said.
He put a twenty on the counter, and I made change and held it out without raising my eyes.
His fingers closed over my wrist instead of the bills.
It was a brush, nothing more, the heel of his hand against the inside of my arm.
Heat went up my arm.
My breath stopped, and I heard his stop with it.
Three years I had been careful never to touch him.
Three years, and I had thought I knew what it would cost.
I had not known it would feel like that.
"Sorry," he said, and did not let go.
"It's fine."
"Do you have a fever?"
"No."
"You're burning."
I took my hand back and put it under the counter, where he couldn't see it shake.
He was looking at me now.
I could feel it on the top of my head, on the part of my hair where the bangs began.
"Maja," he said.
It was the first time he had ever said my name.
"Your change is on the counter, Alpha."
A long second went by.
Then he picked up the bills and walked to the back wall, and I breathed again.
He used the iron key on the cord around his neck and opened box 9.
My letter was in it, one sheet, typed on Gerda's old typewriter the night before.
I did not need to watch him read it, so I watched the butterscotch jar instead.
I knew every word.
Dear L,
You asked if grief ever gets smaller.
It doesn't. You get bigger around it.
Eat something that isn't coffee.
Moth
In the glass of the butterscotch jar, I saw him read it twice.
Then Lennart Brekke smiled, a real one that crinkled the corners of his green eyes.
I had never once seen him do it in daylight.
I felt it in my knees.
The bell rang again, and Karsten Vold shouldered in with sawdust on his vest, the Beta, loud as a brass band.
"There you are," Karsten said. "The elders want you at the hall. All three of them. It's the mate thing."
The smile went out of Lennart's face.
"Not tonight."
"They're done being polite. The Gathering is October thirty-first."
Karsten counted it off on his thick fingers.
"Name a mate by then, or take Runa Aas of Stonewater, or they call a vote on whether you keep the seat."
Two customers by the feed bags stopped pretending to shop.
Lennart folded my letter into his shirt pocket, slowly.
"I told them three years ago," he said. "I refuse the Moon's choice."
"And I'm telling you they don't care."
"Then they can have this."
He turned around to face the whole store.
He wasn't loud.
He never needed to be.
"I won't take the woman the Moon picks, and I won't take the one the elders pick," he said.
"I'm going to marry the woman who writes to me."
Nobody breathed.
"Who is she?" Karsten said.
"I don't know yet."
Gerda Lund, behind the deli case, put down her knife and looked straight at me over her cat-eye glasses.
I did not move.
Lennart looked at me too, then, and this time I couldn't look at the jar.
"You sort the mail, Maja," he said. "You'll help me find her."
There was a pen in my hand.
I put it down very carefully.
"Yes, Alpha," I said.
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