But to me it still feels like a dream. Even after my granddad lets us all retire to my bedroom without a word of protest beyond, “Well, I guess everybody already know how crazy this family be now. Ya’ll go’on ahead.”
I have a feeling both my dads will be complaining real loud at the next Thanksgiving dinner. About how easily Granddad accepted me and my Viking wolves after doing everything in his power to squelch the original threesome that brought Clyde and me into the world.
When I close the door behind us, I think the night will be filled with more of the same. Me telling them about all the stuff that’s gone down over the last four years: my taking over as alpha of the pack, about Clyde and Kyle, their daughters, and everything that happened on Vikings after they left.
But as soon as the doors close behind us, their hands are on me, rough and desperate. And the only talking we end up doing for the rest of night involves words like, “Yea, Varra,” and “How we did miss you, Varra,” and “Give me your lips, Varra.”
“Well, ‘vàrr’ means ‘ours,’ and ‘a’ is often added to words to make them feminine,” Alisha told me once over dinner. “So I think that must have been their way of calling you their female. Their version of a special title, ‘Ours.’”
And I am theirs. That night they prove it by easily bringing me to the height of pleasures I didn’t ever think I’d feel again. That night the many years apart fade into mere hours. And when the summer sun rises outside the window, it’s truly a new day.#p#分页标题#e#
The first of many I know will be spent with my Viking wolves.
“Yours always,” I say as the sun rises.
“Ours always,” they say aloud on either side of me.
Then they kiss me. First one and then the other, tipping my face back and forth to receive their tired kisses.
“This is what my mother did call ‘happily ever after’ in the story she told around the longhouse fire of how she and my father came to be mated,” FJ says when they’re finally done kissing me.
“Yes, that’s exactly what this is,” I agree. Even though there’s a lot we still haven’t said and a lot—I mean, like, a ton of details—we’ll have to get figured out somehow. But none of that matters. I know this is our HEA.
We have each other now, so we all know what will come next. The daughters we’ll raise to believe they can do anything. The kingdom we’ll happily run together.
The life we’ll make, now that they’re finally home.
Epilogue
“I know right then and there that our lives together will truly be one big happily ever after…”
On his finger screen, Rafes watches his mother Alisha Ataneq-Nightwolf read the last line of her cousin’s memoir. She lets that last sentence linger for a few emotional moments before looking up to once again address a rapt crowd which includes Rafes’s younger fraternal twin sisters, Nauja and Elisapie.
Rafes, who’s making his way up Yellow Wolf Mountain toward the North Dakota time portal, rolls his eyes as he observes his mother squeeze every bit of dramatic juice possible out of the moment. But despite having heard this story many times before, Nauja and Lis look just as caught up in the tale as the rest of the crowd, many of whom are carrying digital signs with slogans like FATED MATES FOREVER! and TIME TRAVEL IS A RIGHT!
And even though it’s a beautiful sunny morning here on Yellow Wolf Mountain, Rafes finds himself grunting at the screen. Not good.
This video was recorded yesterday but went viral on the wolf-net a few hours ago. The last thing he needs on the day the first Black Box Initiative is supposed to break ground is for other North American wolves to respond to Queen Tee’s newly released memoir the way the crowd in his mother’s video is.
“Unfortunately, their happily ever after is now being severely threatened,” Alisha tells the crowd on his finger screen.
The camera pans to the construction materials for the Black Box Initiative, then back to a solemn Alisha who says, “We now know why no future wolves have come through the gate since early this millennium. The Lupine Council, in all its short-sighted wisdom, has decided to construct one of these so-called “black boxes” around every gate in North America. Starting with this one. So unfortunately, the fated mate tradition, a tradition as old as our race, will soon come to an end because a bunch of male wolves got together and decided they knew what was best for us all.”
The crowd boos loudly in protest while Rafes grits his teeth. If his mother is to be believed, the Lupine Council decided to go forward with this multi-trillion dollar construction project merely because they wanted to bum everybody out.