Page 10 of Wrong Number, Right Grizzly (Dial M For Mates #7)

RONAN

If you had told me even a week ago that there would come a day when I would be disappointed that my car was fixed quickly and inexpensively, I’d have thought you were lying. But here I was, wishing the part had taken a little bit longer or a lot longer.

When the garage called, I dawdled. I’d never unpacked my suitcase, but still, putting in a few items took forever.

Anything I could do to keep my time with Nix just a little bit longer.

But it couldn’t be avoided any longer. I needed to go home and deal with work.

This wasn’t going to be goodbye forever, and holding onto that was what gave me the strength.

He drove me to the garage, and that was where we said goodbye.

“Wanna grab a quick meal before you leave?” he offered.

And I did so badly and not just one meal, but all of the meals.

I wanted to stay. But instead, I told him that I needed to get back, and I did, but also, the amount of time it took to eat a meal wasn’t too much to give.

It was more than my heart could take. This was 100%.

I ripped the Band-Aid off the situation. I hated it.

“I’m going to miss you.” I hugged him close and rubbed my face against his shirt.

“Not as much as I’m going to miss you.” He kissed the top of my head, stepped back, and opened my car door for me.

I climbed inside and gently closed it behind me. I had to remind myself that this was for the best in the hopes of preventing myself from being too emotional. If Nix saw me crying, he would want to fix it. I had to hold it together, and I did… at least until I started driving away.

I wasn’t even out of the parking lot when the tears began to fall. My attempts to blink them away failed less than a mile away from the garage. I pulled over and let them freely fall. This was harder than I thought it would be. I shouldn’t be this attached to him.

We’d barely spent any time together, in the grand scheme of things, but still, something told me he was my forever. No. Not something, everything. And I was driving away instead of back to him. Every mile I drove had me questioning my choice.

Pulling up to my place might as well have been me pulling up to that sketchy motel.

It no longer felt like home, just a place to sleep.

After dealing with my luggage and the mail, I collapsed on my bed, sobbing.

I needed to pull it together. Work was expecting me, even if it was only for a few hours.

I’d made the mistake of letting them know the car was done.

If I’d known I’d be in my current state, I wouldn’t have called. It was too late to take it back.

But try as I did, I couldn’t pull myself together enough to head into the office. Instead, I called and told them I wasn’t feeling well and then cried myself to sleep.

The next morning, I woke to a message from Nix: Thinking of you. Only three words, and yet they said so much. They told me that I wasn’t the only one feeling this way, that I mattered to him too, that I was more than a one-night stand… All things I knew, but the affirmation meant a lot to me.

I rolled into work on time, barely. I looked like shit. I knew this, my bathroom mirror didn’t lie, but I didn’t realize how bad I looked until Mary greeted me. She looked at me with concern.

“Did you catch something while you were away? When you called in yesterday, I assumed you were tired.” She was speaking in hushed tones. This wasn’t Mary looking for tea. She was actually worried.

“No, I just didn’t sleep well.” I left off the part where it was because I was sobbing over someone who was only an hour away, who I barely knew and who would be there in a minute if I called to tell him my reaction to the situation. I was definitely being extra.

“Are you sure? You don’t look great.”

“You always were a sweet talker.”

She responded with a half shrug, and I walked past her, all done with the conversation. If she needed anything from me, she knew where to go.

I went to my desk to deal with the tasks at hand. My to-do list was a mile long, and it barely got any shorter the first couple hours I was there. So much of it was easy five-minute tasks too, but my head just wasn’t in the game… it was back with Nix.

No matter what I was attempting to do, my mind kept wandering back to him, to the time we spent together.

The responsible thing would be to push through, grab another coffee, and tackle the list no matter what my emotions were doing.

Only thing was, I wasn’t feeling very responsible. I needed to get out of here.

I shot my boss an email telling him I wasn’t feeling well and that I needed to go.

There was no asking permission. I wasn’t going to give him that power.

My butt was gonna be out the door in five minutes, and if he had a problem with that, I would deal with it later.

I wasn’t too worried about it. My job had become the lowest of my priorities in a very short period of time.

Mary already thought I was sick, and knowing her, he’d been informed. I was glad for it, because he messaged me right back, telling me he hoped I felt better and to be sure to put my travel docs in before I left… because he couldn’t take a chance on me not doing at least something .

I jogged straight to my car, not even stopping to say goodbye to Mary or any of my other coworkers.

Other than a quick trip for gas, I didn’t stop anywhere, not even home.

I had someone to see and even five minutes was five minutes too long.

As it was, it felt like I was driving twice as far back as I had come here.

Each minute seemed more like ten, each mile… twenty.

But as I got closer to his home, I became calmer and less distressed.

And somewhere along the line, the tears were no longer attempting to fall, and I became excited.

Not once had it crossed my mind that Nix wouldn’t be happy to see me or that I was making a mistake. This was what I was meant to be doing.

I hit unexpected traffic thanks to storm-tree removal crews.

It was good that I hadn’t messaged Nix ahead to tell him when I’d be there, because that delay would have worried him.

And it wasn’t really one delay. It was multiple.

The damage from the storm was much farther spread than I’d realized.

But eventually I was flagged through the last crew, and twenty minutes later I was pulling into his driveway.

I parked the car, and when I got out, instead of going inside, I walked around to the backyard.

I didn't understand why I needed to go there, only that I did.

It was like I was being pulled in that direction.

I expected to see him there. Why else would I feel the need to go outside instead of to him?

But when I turned the corner, he wasn’t standing there or sitting there, even. But something was, and I found myself face to face with a bear. Not a cute little brown bear either. No, it was a big-ass grizzly bear.

It was my big-ass grizzly bear. It was Nix. It was— No, that was ridiculous. Of course it wasn’t Nix. Nix was a man and this was a wild creature.

But still… something told me it was him. When they asked people if they would pick a bear or a man, and everybody was like Oh, I’d pick the bear , I never understood that. But in that instant, I realized I didn’t have to pick. My bear was a man.

Or I’d completely lost my mind.

It was probably the latter.

I slowly backed up, remembering that you didn’t run away from wild animals.

The plan was to go back to the car and figure out what to do next, because this obviously wasn’t working.

I’d officially lost all of my self-preservation skills and was going to become this creature’s dinner, or at least their prey.

How ridiculous to think that it was the man I loved, absolutely ridiculous?—

Except I was three steps back, and suddenly standing in front of me, where the bear once was… was Nix.

Holy shit. I’d been right. Or I’d completely lost it. One of the two, and I wasn’t sure which.