Alive // bxb

Chapter 16

Liam's POV:

Throughout the years, I had found myself fantasizing, again and again, about having a mate.

Memories of struggling to fall asleep at night when the thought of them, whoever they could be, enraptured my mind. I had a notebook that I'd kept since I was eight with date ideas and little things I could say to make their day better. Looking back, it was honestly pretty sweet of me. I still had that notebook, but I didn't look at it often because the usage of female pronouns in the beginning before I started using gender-neutral ones had made me uncomfortable ever since I knew Milo was my mate. Once I had gone back and tried to erase and rewrite the pronouns, but when you're eight you don't really think about the future so I'd made the executive decision to use crayon. Very intelligent of me, I know.

Instead of writing a name on the cover of the notebook like Mate Book or something stupid like that, I had instead drawn a big heart and filled it in with smaller hearts whenever I felt sad, but we really don't have to get into that.

I had found it that weekend while cleaning out my closet- Mom was going to take some of her old clothes to the thrift store, so Paisley and I were also tasked with getting the unused clothes out of our dressers and I had also decided to get a head start in deciding what I needed to keep when Milo and I moved in together. I had been at it all morning and it was past noon so I had already been thinking about taking a break, so when I found the old notebook shoved with a bunch of old school notebooks in the corner, I decided to take half an hour and flip through it.

Despite my awful handwriting, it was actually pretty cute.

The first page had my name, the date, a big green heart, and inside the heart, the words, 'Say 'I love you'.'

I choked on my own saliva at that.

The rest of the pages held things of a similar caliber. My handwriting gradually improved over time, over about the three to four years I worked on this little project, but my suggestions definitely did not. In all honesty, the first page probably had the best suggestion out of all of them- the rest were things like 'Give them flowers' and 'Go play at the park'.

I found myself flipping the pages back to the first page. The heart at the bottom was lopsided, one half larger than the other and the round bits at the top a little bit shaky, but it made me smile a little bit all the same. My finger subconsciously traced the wonky letters over and over, feeling the indents in the page where I'd pressed too hard.

'Say 'I love you'.'

I really should take my own advice, I thought to myself, but I knew there would be a lot of careful contemplation on both ends before either of us felt ready enough to announce it.

If I was being honest to myself, I was scared of it.

I felt like I had my world turned upside-down in the past half year, and not because of Milo or anything he did or because of his gender. The whole mating thing was a lot stronger than I'd anticipated, every moment apart was a moment gone to waste and sometimes, a deep ache in my chest would spur me to go see him again. And it hurt because I knew that he didn't feel that way, yet at least, since he didn't feel the mating pull.

Yet sort of me was also kind of gratified, because it knew that he didn't feel the mating pull, which meant that everything he felt for me was something he would have felt, werewolves or not.

I did love him.

I just wasn't ready to say it.

In all honesty, I was a little bit scared of how much affection I felt for a simple human being- well, werewolf. A single word and I'd be there, a gesture and I'd jump off of a bridge for him, if he truly wanted it. That was a scary thing to know, that this small creature now controlled your life with no say on your part.