pupsick ❧ l.jn | ✔

book two ❧ [ii]

Renjun showed up fifteen minutes later and plopped down on the bench beside you with a zealous huff. You didn't even need to ask what happened.

"God, half the morons at our college don't know how to drive!" He stretched his arms over the back of the bench, rolling his neck out. "And the other half are just jumping into traffic willy-nilly like they're trying to get ran over or something!"

"Deep breath, Renjun, deep breath." You patted him on the shoulder.

"As soon as I graduate, I'll take the biggest, deepest breath of my life, I promise."

"And until then?"

"Until then, I'm white-knuckling the steering wheel with one hand and laying on the horn with the other."

You laughed heartily. "That's one way to go about it I guess."

"But how are you doing, Y/N?"

"Oh, fine. Something kind of... weird, I guess, happened earlier, though."

"Weird?"

You squinted your eyes at the two werewolves now at the opposite end of the soccer field as before, trying to guesstimate if that was enough distance for your conversation to not be picked up by their superhuman hearing. To be safe, you leaned in towards your human friend and lowered your voice.

"There was this other werewolf here, and he said something about me and Jeno." You admitted.

Renjun tilted his head curiously. "Said what?"

"Well, more specifically, he called me a-a knotslut?" The word felt unfamiliar in your mouth, and left a bitter taste on your tongue. Your lip curled unpleasantly at the memory it brought up, of how distressed it made Jeno.

His eyes widened as he looked around in alarm, then dropped his own voice to a whisper, "So where's the body? Because there's no way Jeno would've let someone that called you that leave alive."

"Jeno wasn't the one who heard him say it," you clarified. "Sungchan did. Jeno and I were busy goofing off. Channie had gone to refill his water by the bathrooms and apparently the guy said it over there by him."

"He probably thought that Sungchan was going to agree with him."

"Must've been a shock for him when Sungchan almost bashed his face in himself."

Renjun burst out in a full-bodied laugh, clutching his chest as his breath came out in puffy clouds in the cold air. "Oh, I'm sure it was."

"But, I want to ask you something, Renjun. Since you're here." You turned on the bench to fully face your human friend.

"Sure, what's up?"

"You're a Magical Creatures Studies major. Me and Jeno... it's not that weird, right? Like, new, I mean? There's got to be more of a history to humans and magical beings being together than six months ago."

"Oh there absolutely is!" Renjun's eyes sparkled as he straightened up in his seat. "I'm actually finishing up a class on Interspecies Marriage right now! Did you know that the earliest written record we have of a traditional werewolf mating ritual between a human and werewolf is nearly two thousand years old?"

"Wait, really?" You weren't expecting that much precedent. Maybe a couple hundred years, not a couple thousand.

"Yeah! And as for how we would conventionally think of marriage today between a human and werewolf, that still goes back at least 800 years for official written historical records. And that's just written. There's oral traditions of entire packs that were equal parts human and werewolf that are much, much older with archaeological evidence dated about the same."