Mom elbowed me in the stomach. “He might be listening!” she hissed at me.
“I mean. Uh. Wow. That looks so good!” I was almost shouting.
“Subtle, Ox.”
“A werewolf is courting me with a dead rabbit. There’s nothing subtle here.”
“Couldn’t have been flowers,” she muttered as she slid on her rubber boots by the door.
“He gave you flowers,” I reminded her as she stepped down the porch.
“I meant for you,” she said. She bent over and grabbed the rabbit by the ears, pulling it up off the ground. It came up with a low crackle, grass stuck to the underside. “Courting. I swear.”
“Why are you touching it?” I said, sounding horrified.
“We can’t leave it here,” she said. “He’ll be offended.”
“I’ll be honest. I’m already offended.”
“Quick,” she said as she walked by me into the house. “Look up rabbit recipes on the Internet before you go to work.”
“You’re dripping on the floor!”
“It’s just a dead rabbit, Ox. You sound hysterical.”
“I sound hygienic.”
I wasn’t very good with Internet stuff, so I googled “what to do when your future werewolf mate/boyfriend/best friend courts you and brings you a dead rabbit.”
First, there was a lot of porn.
Then I found a recipe for Maltese rabbit stew.
It was delicious.
The stew, not the porn.
The porn was weird.
GORDO SAID, “So. You just got a basket of, like, eighty mini muffins delivered to you.”
I said, “Mini muffins?” and I looked up from a tire rotation I was doing on a 2012 Ford Escape.
“Uh. Yeah. Like, eighty of them.”
“That’s a lot of muffins.”
“Lynda from the bakery brought them over. Well, actually, her son did because the basket was too heavy for her to carry.”
I sighed.
Gordo narrowed his eyes. “Dreamy sigh,” he accused.
He followed me into his office.
Sure enough, there was a basket of mini muffins. The biggest basket I’d ever seen.
I knew what this was.