Page 100 of My Big Fat Shifter Wedding

Sometimes, I wished he didn’t know me so well, because arguing with him when I was destroyed was incredibly difficult. It would be easier if he would lose his shit, which he would completely be justified in doing. Why, for once, couldn’t he be an asshole?

“Nothing is going to happen! This is a fluke! Shit like this happens in families!”

“You don’t know that! I know you think you can say that, but you can’t! There’s so much you don’t understand, and I can’t explain it to you!”

He scoffed at that, and I thought I’d finally raised my voice enough to get him to do it back, but no, that didn’t happen. Instead, his tone remained exasperated more than anything else.

“Like what? Do you mean that you’re all werewolves? Is that it?”

What the fuck?!?!

I blinked at him so hard and so many times that my brain got confused at the rapid signals. Perhaps I was getting sleepy. But no, I wasn’t readying for a nap. I was in fucking shock.

“What did you say?” I asked, voice barely above a whisper. Because surely, I had hallucinated that. There was no way that my fiancé just casually blurted that he knew we were all wolves. It had to be my mind desperately trying to imagine a scenario where we could work out and still get our happily ever after.

“I said, is this because your whole family, or at least a lot of them, are werewolves?” he repeated steadily, proving that no, I hadn’t spontaneously developed psychosis. “Because if it is, I understand there’s gonna be a learning curve, and probably some stuff we’ve gotta address, but, again, I do not care.

“Whether you’re a human, or a werewolf, or a cyclops, or the reincarnation of an ancient god, none of that is important to me. What’s important to me is you, Olivia. It’s your soul I’m in love with, your soul I’m connected to, no matter what vessel it’s been poured into.” He took a step toward me for the first time since I’d put space between us, his arms open wide enough to invite me to step into his embrace, but not forcefully so. “And I hope you feel the same way about me.”

I wished I could say that I smoothly laughed and dismissed his claims as preposterous because werewolves didn’t exist. I wished I could say I ran into his arms with abandon and forgot everything I’d said. But I didn’t do either. I could only stare, my brain locked between panic, relief, and the aforementioned shock.

“How… Who... I...” Okay, that wasn’t going anywhere, so I swallowed and tried forming full sentences in English again. “Why would you possibly say that?”

The corner of his lip quirked, the first thing even close to a smile since he’d returned to the party in his awful state. “It wasn’t like your family exactly made it difficult to guess.”

I had no rejoinder.

“You always have the week of the full moon blocked off. I know you said that’s when your family does your monthly hike, and I get keeping a strict schedule, but I noticed it wasn’t always the same seven days every month and never really gave it a second thought until I saw your lunar calendar.”

“Astronomy is really important to some of my aunties. Thinking people are werewolves because they’re interested in the lunar cycle⁠—”

“I’m not done,” he said, holding up a finger, and I was starting to see more of Keith’s optimistic nature seeping in. “Out of the forty or so of your family members I’ve met, not a single one has ever worn a piece of silver jewelry. Seriously, not a soul. And don’t think I didn’t see that pair of older emo and goth teenage girls that were at the corner of the party and in several family photos. No self-respecting goth would avoid silver jewelry.” There was a glint in his eye as he hit me with what he knew I couldn’t argue with. “Amanda taught me that much when she got into different subcultures. You want to tell me that she’s wrong?”

I couldn’t believe that this was happening. “Well—” I started before I realized that I had nowhere to go. Never in my life did I ever think that I was going to have to argue that people who could randomly change into wolves weren’t real while being confronted with all the blatant evidence my family had been shoving into my fiancé’s face.

Ex-fiancé, the bitter side of my mind reminded.

Let’s hold off a minute on that particular title, the other side of my mind shot right back.

“Not to mention that while you have plenty of gold and bronze décor in your house, again, not a lick of silver. And then there was another lunar calendar in the downstairs bathroom. One near your altar to the moon is reasonable, two on different sides of the house indicates a high level of importance. Oh, and also, there’s the fact that your family has a literal altar to the moon right between two of the most prominent rooms in your home.”

That was a pretty damning list, but still one I could plausibly deny. Already, my mind had switched from breakup and heartbreak into preserving the secrecy of my species so we could be safe.

But Keith kept on going.

“Speaking of those hikes, I heard several other family members talk about it, and they described it as going on a run. So have you. But for all that running, there’s no equipment anywhere in the house. No high-visibility vests, no running shoes, no chafe guards, no electrolyte packs or, while we’re talking about packs, fanny packs! You’re telling me that your entire family, including the kids and the old ones, are all going out and exercising together in the heat of summer and not a single one of you has the most common purse substitute hanging around?”

Shit, was that a thing? Did humans need to bring supplies when they went on runs? It made sense that they couldn’t drink from random streams or hunt rabbits, squirrels and other things for sustenance.

“And if you want to argue that your hikes aren’t intensive enough to need all that, how about Nonna Rizoli mentioning multiple times that she’s over a century old, including sabotage stories that line up with actual history I googled later from World War Two? Also, that my leading nickname among a majority of your family is the big human.”

I opened my mouth to object and insist that it was slang for “guy” even though my argument was growing more futile by the second. However, the objection died on my tongue when Keith took another step forward, his lightly amused but determined gaze growing gentler and more understanding.

“Also, while I was down in that hole, I got the impression your cousins truly believed it wasn’t a big deal and that I could get out very easily. It wasn’t a nice thing to do, but I don’t believe that they wanted to hurt me. They were just stupid.

“And finally, something I picked up on from the very first time we met, was that you, as well as the rest of your family, are ridiculously strong. Whether it’s hauling tables, clapping my back, gripping my arm for support, or even tossing a dodgeball, every single one of you has the type of power that I could only hope to attain if I spent ten hours a day in the gym for several years. And that was just with casual things. I would hate to see how it was if your family was pushed to actually defend themselves or others in a dangerous situation.”

“So...” I wished that it wasn’t taking five-to-ten business days for my thoughts to load, but Keith was patient as I licked my lips and tried to think of where the conversation could possibly go. While I had heard anecdotes about an occasional human discovering shifters, and most of them were horror stories, no one I knew had been in this situation, and suddenly I found myself entirely unprepared.