My Childhood Friend is a Werewolf

Prologue

She was late. She was so, so, late.

The sound of the door opening was like a car alarm blaring its head off in the middle of a parking lot, drawing the heads of every person in the classroom to her direction. Emma Hadley felt like a deer in headlights standing at the door, waiting for a pin to drop or for someone to say something.

"Good of you to join us, Ms. Hadley," her teacher said, his arm still suspended in midair as he was writing something on the blackboard, "please take your seat and refrain from disrupting class any further."

Emma's cheeks burned with embarrassment as she mumbled, "yes Mr. Robinson." As quickly and quietly as she could, the seventeen-year old darted through the class desks to her own, placed next to the window, and slid into her seat. Her movements were swift while she took out her notebook, textbooks, and pencils. Luckily for her, her best friend Hannah chose not to make the situation worse by trying to whisper to her, but Emma was given a pointed glance that said she would be expected to spill.

Emma's cheeks flushed red now for an entirely different reason, making her lateness to class even more suspicious in the eyes of her friend. That didn't bode well for her, as she knew that it was only a matter of time until Hannah accosted her and demanded to know why the perfect-attendance student was thirty minutes late to class.

Maybe if the reason was something as simple as "I forgot to set my alarm," then Emma wouldn't feel so utterly speechless about explaining it, but alas her life was not so simple.

After all, how did one explain that the reason for their extreme tardiness was because they had watched their childhood friend transform into a wolf?!

The door to the classroom opened again and the subject of Emma's thoughts came through the door, making her internally panic at his presence.

"Mr. Raeburn, good of you to join us. Did you and Ms. Hadley jointly plan to disrupt my class this morning?" Mr. Robinson obviously meant that to be a rhetorical question, dismissively waving his hand at Emma's childhood friend, Dren. "Go ahead and take your seat."

Unlike Emma's entrance, where most of the students lost interest in her after she started walking to her desk, the majority of the girls in the class were silently swooning while watching Dren make his way to his desk, which just so happened to be directly behind Emma. He was casually captivating without meaning to be, with the vibe of someone lazy, but effortlessly cool. It was the perfect bad boy charm, but Emma knew that he only had eyes for her from the moment he stepped into the classroom. She could feel the gaze of his smoky green eyes trained on her back.

From the corner of her eye, Emma saw Hannah's stare dart between the two of them. It didn't take long for realisation to dawn on her, and the moment that it did Emma cursed her existence. There was no way she was getting out of this now.

Luckily for her, once class ended, she and Dren were called up by the teacher to talk about their extreme tardiness, prolonging her inevitable conversation with Hannah. It was also quite awkward to have to stand next to Dren while being lectured by the teacher, trying to wrap her head around the fact that she had literally seen him turn into a wolf yesterday.

And that wasn't even the craziest part. The craziest part was that he told her she was his soulmate.

His soulmate?!

Needless to say, she hadn't been able to get any sleep that night. There had even been a moment when Emma thought to just skip the whole school day altogether and stay at home, but her straight-A-student mentality had guilted her into going. Well good on her guilty conscience, because now she was regretting it.