"Son of a bitch!”
Forgetting that she was in public, Ariel quickly sank down in her seat, pulling the large book she held in front of her face, cringing. She heard giggling beside her and reached out to smack Daniel on the leg to stop him from laughing at her. She could feel the eyes of everyone in the library staring at her and she had the sudden fear that a skeletal librarian would come in and toss her out by the back of her shirt for defiling the sanctity of the public library reading room.
"Tell me again why I'm sitting here with you," she hissed toward Daniel, still holding the book up in front of her even though she had just finished reading it.
"I need moral support," Daniel replied.
"Moral support to get through your history final?"
"Yes."
"Do you know how much longer I'm going to need to be supportive because all of these people are still staring at me and I'm fairly certain that those ones over there in the corner are planning to kill me."
"We can go as long as you bring me back to your place and give me some of the good stuff."
Daniel lifted his eyebrows at her and Ariel smiled back, nodding as she helped him gather up his papers and books and carry them toward the circulation desk.
Twenty minutes later, Ariel walked into her living room carrying two bowls of ice cream. Daniel was sitting on the floor with his back against the couch and she placed one of the bowls in his lap. She settled onto the couch behind him and grabbed a jar she had tucked under her arm. Twisting off the metal top, she dipped a spoon down inside and reached around Daniel to drizzle a long golden stream of homemade caramel sauce over his ice cream.
"Oh, yeah. That's the stuff," he murmured.
"I know how you like it," she said, digging the spoon down into his ice cream so that his first bite would be mostly rich, buttery caramel.
"I'd totally marry you if we didn't have sex, I could see other people on the side, and you made me caramel every day."
"I'll keep that in mind."
Ariel curled into the corner of the couch and spooned some of the caramel over her own ice cream.
"So, do you want to tell me why you decided to shout obscenities in the presence of old ladies and innocent library books?"
Ariel dropped her head back against the couch with grunt of frustration. She swallowed her mouthful of ice cream as she reached for the book on the edge of the coffee table.
"The stupid cliffhanger at the end of this book," she said, holding the book so close in front of Daniel's face he had to lean back away from it.
"Don't all of those books end with a cliffhanger? I thought that was the whole point of having a series. You hang, then they scoop you back up, then you hang, then they scoop you back up," he turned his attention back to the bowl in his hands and took another bite of ice cream, "It's all really exhausting, honestly."
"You don't understand. This was like…" she groaned with exasperation, unable to come up with exactly the right words to explain why she was so angry at the book, "The books have been leading up to a war between the two rival tribes of wolves. There was a standoff with the Alphas of each of the packs and this book ended right as Lazar leapt into the air and shifted while the other was shooting a crossbow at him."
Daniel looked back at her with a dumbfounded expression on his face.
"Lazar?"
"Yes. He's the good Alpha who has been trying to get a bloodthirsty pack away from his pack's lands."
"Lazar?" Daniel repeated.
"Yes," Ariel said emphatically.
"And he's a wolf?"
"When he shifts, yes."
"So, he's Lazar…the wolf."
Ariel chose to ignore the comment and turned the book over in her hands, staring down at the picture of the author on the back of the cover as Daniel sang "To Life" under his breath.
"He's so beautiful," she murmured.
"The wolf?" Daniel asked after a resounding L'chaim to finish out his song.
"The author," she said, tilting the book to Daniel so that he could look at the black and white picture on the cover.
Ariel had stared at that picture more times than she could count. Max Grimsley's dark eyes burned into her from the covers of more than a dozen books tucked on the bookshelf in her bedroom, and, though she wouldn't admit it, she often turned whatever book she was currently reading over on her nightstand so that she could look at his picture before going to sleep.
"Well, pretty soon you will be able to look at the real thing," Daniel said, a hint of teasing in his voice.
Ariel sighed, part of her hating how it made her feel to have a moony-eyed crush at her age while the other part loved the tingle through her body each time she read his name or saw his picture.
"I know. I can't wait."
She indulged the moony-eyed side by letting out an excited squeal. It had seemed like the months leading up to the convention were multiplying and sliding by with all the vim and vigor of a pot of day-old grits, but it was finally only a few days away. Max Grimsley would be there, signing copies of his books and giving a panel on fiction writing.
"So, which are you more excited about, having him sign your book, or getting the opportunity to yell at him for dangling you so precariously over his literary cliff?"
She had told people she was going primarily for the workshops that she hoped would further her own burgeoning writing career, but she knew she was going for him. The ache inside her when she looked at his picture was intense and she couldn't wait to be near him, even if it was only long enough for him to scrawl his name across the cover page of her book and flash her an obligatory smile. Even that may satiate her.
"We'll have to see how I feel in the moment," she said, taking another bite of her ice cream and letting the slowly melting vanilla ice cream and rich caramel swirl across her tongue.