My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 147: My Wolf Girl Sat Next To Me While I Counted and Asked Permission For Something She Hadn’t Named

Selah had bought them an evening, and by the time the evening arrived Soren had spent most of it working out what she’d bought it for.

He wasn’t writing any of it down.

He’d stopped writing anything down after Dani had shown him the shell and its billing line.

A page was a thing that could be pulled out of a drawer.

A page could be read by an office he was watching from a distance.

So he did it in his head.

One count for the tech leaving the stands early.

One for the doors closing behind the tech without Marsh noticing.

One for the delegate touching his own throat.

One for the empty fourth seat that had been empty since the guest list posted.

Four more entries by nightfall.

He worked through them one at a time, checking each entry against the pattern, seeing whether it wanted to sit next to another entry he’d already logged.

That was the trick with a pattern that hadn’t finished forming.

You could push a piece into a shape it wasn’t going to hold, and the shape would look right for a day, and then a new piece would arrive that didn’t fit, and the whole shape would fall.

He was on his third pass when Yara moved.

◆◆◆◆

They were in the small room off the common area with the door half open.

Soren was on the floor with his back to the couch.

Yara was on the couch behind him.

Humanoid.

She had her legs pulled up and one bare foot resting against his shoulder, and her red irises on the door because she’d been watching the door for an hour and she was going to watch it until she decided nothing was coming through it tonight.

That was Yara.

She checked exits.

She checked exits even in a room she owned.

She moved her foot from his shoulder to his neck and left it there.

"You’re counting again," she said.

"I’m counting again."

"For how long."

"Since dinner."

"You skipped dinner."

He hadn’t skipped it.

He had eaten standing over a plate at the counter without noticing what was on the plate, and Yara had been in the room watching him do it, and she’d said nothing then either.

"I ate," Soren said.

"You put food in your mouth. That’s different."

◆◆◆◆

Her foot was warm against the side of his neck.

Yara ran warm in humanoid form.

That was one of the things about her that still surprised him.

The wolf slept in her body the whole time, and the wolf was warm, and her skin carried what the wolf carried.

A few degrees over his own if he was cold.

A few over the room if he was warm.

He put his hand around her ankle without thinking about it.

She let him.

Neither of them said anything about that either.

She wasn’t asking what count.

She hadn’t asked all week.

She didn’t need to.

The perception channel that ran between the two of them was not a language.

It didn’t carry sentences.

It carried tone.

And Soren’s tone the last three days had been the tone of a person counting.

She could read counting off him.

She could read whether the count was going well or badly.

Tonight she had moved her foot from his shoulder to his neck without a word.

That was a piece of contact she wanted more of, and she’d adjusted for it, and Soren clocked the adjustment.

The count was reading as going badly on her side of the channel.

◆◆◆◆

She was reading a specific thing off him tonight.

She’d been reading it for two days.

His count was moving wrong.

Not the shelf itself.

The counting.

He was picking up entries and putting them down, and his hand was catching on one of them longer than the others.

He did not know that he was doing it.

The entry his hand kept catching on was one Yara did not want to name yet.

She was going to have to name it eventually.

Not tonight.

◆◆◆◆

She took her foot off his neck.

She slid down off the couch and sat on the floor next to him, and she put her shoulder against his shoulder and stayed there.

"Ask me something," she said.

"What."

"Anything. It’s late. I’ll tell you the truth even if you don’t like it."

That was Yara’s version of an invitation.

She’d offered it maybe six times since they’d bonded.

It was always something.

Soren thought about it.

Then he asked the wrong question.

He was tired and the shelf was still in his head, and it slipped past his teeth before he had the sense to hold it back.

"How many of the coincidences do you think are one thing."

"All of them."

"You didn’t count them."

"I don’t have to. You have. So all of them."

He sat with that a second.

Yara had trusted his count to answer a question she’d been asked, which was a small gift and a large one, and she’d trusted it without asking to see the count itself.

"Ask me one back," he said.

"Alright."

◆◆◆◆

She turned her head.

Her cheek was against his shoulder now, and her eyes were still on the door.

Her free hand found the edge of his shirt at the hem and slid two fingers under it, flat against the small of his back, not moving.

She’d never asked before she did that either.

She never did.

Soren felt his own back muscle relax under her palm the second she settled it.

He hadn’t known he’d been holding the muscle.

That was the other thing about Yara.

She read tension he didn’t know he was carrying, and she put pressure on it, and the pressure told his body to let it go.

"If you found out one of us was keeping something from you," Yara said, "a real thing, for a good reason. Would you want the thing, or would you want the good reason."

Soren opened his mouth.

Nothing came out that was true, so he didn’t say the thing that wasn’t.

He’d learned this winter that when you didn’t have an answer, the wrong move was to make one up on the spot.

The person who’d asked would hear the manufactured version and file it.

The file would matter later.

Yara did not push him.

She leaned her cheek harder into his shoulder.

Her hand found his and their fingers hooked without either of them looking at it.

She waited for an answer he was not going to give her tonight.

She wasn’t disappointed.

That was the worst part of it, and Soren was too tired to work out why it was the worst part, and he closed his own eyes for a second with her weight against his side and did not answer her.

The room stayed quiet.

Her hand stayed in his.

He counted on, in his head, through the four new entries and the ones on his shelf from before.

The count went to the same place it had gone the last three nights.

Yara sat with him while it did.

She already knew where it was going.

She didn’t tell him.