No Return Ticket for Our Lost Love Chapter 07

No Return Ticket for Our Lost Love Chapter 07

That night, it took a small garrison of the university’s werewolf guard just to restrain the feral wolf tearing apart the front gates.

But Matthew was, after all, the Alpha heir of the most ancient pack in Southerland.

To avoid a political scandal, the university administration kept his identity under wraps, assuring the student body that the rogue shifter had been safely returned to his pack for strict disciplinary action.

After that night, everything about Matthew changed.

He completely stopped using the weight of the future Luna title to pressure me, and he never brought up the contract breach fee again. Instead, he began to hauntingly frequent my life.

For four years, I had been the one waiting. Now, the roles were reversed.

Sometimes, when I walked out of a lecture, I’d catch sight of him sitting on the edge of a stone planter outside the building, holding a bag of my favorite snacks.

He would always claim he was just passing by, completely ignoring the fact that it took a grueling two-hour drive to get from Argent Academy to my campus.

Other nights, around nine o’clock, he would text me saying he was downstairs. When I went down, he would be standing directly under the glow of the streetlight, handing over a thick manila envelope.

Inside would be a rare, first-edition copy of an out-of-print book I had offhandedly mentioned wanting months ago.

“Had someone track it down at an estate sale,” he murmured, passing it to me.

“Thank you,” I replied, accepting it.

He would linger, the words visibly catching in his throat, before finally forcing out, “The day you leave… let me drive you to the airport.”

“No need. My roommates are taking me.”

“Let me do it,” he urged, his voice tight with sudden panic, as if terrified I would say no.

I looked at him for a quiet moment before finally giving a small nod.

As I turned to head back inside, his voice cracked behind me in the dark. “All those times you came to see me… I never once walked you back to your car.”

My footsteps faltered for a fraction of a second. I didn’t turn around. I just kept walking up the stairs.

The night before I was set to leave Southerland, my roommates threw me a farewell dinner at a diner just off-campus.

Midway through the meal, my phone rang. It was Matthew, telling me he was waiting outside my dorm.

When I walked back to the quad, he was sitting on the concrete steps by the main entrance. A small cardboard box sat resting against his boots.

“A parting gift,” he said, stepping up.

I knelt down on the pavement and opened the box.

Inside was a thick stack of pristine, newly printed airline tickets from Southerland to Eastgrove. One for every single week, starting from next month and stretching all the way through the following year—forty-two tickets in total.

Every single one was booked for a window seat, stamped with his legal identification.

In the memo line at the bottom right corner, a line of text was written in his familiar, sharp cursive: [You always said you loved watching the scenery from the window.]

As I held the heavy stack of plane tickets, I dug deeper into the box, only to find something else beneath them—a massive pile of faded, yellowing subway stubs.

The dates spanned back over three years. Nearly every few days, there was a timestamp showing a departure after midnight. And the destination on every single stub, without exception, was the station right outside my campus.

He had ridden the subway into the dead of night to come to my campus dozens of times. He had just never told me.

The early autumn night breeze blew exceptionally cold around us. I lifted my head to look up at him.

Matthew’s eyes were bloodshot, rimmed with a heavy, raw red. “Back then, when you used to cross all of Southerland just to catch a glimpse of me, I took it for granted. I thought it was just what you were supposed to do.”

“It wasn’t until I started doing it myself that I realized… just how hard it is. How exhausting it is.”

He spoke with excruciating slowness, as if laying out his overdue devotion piece by piece for me to inspect, desperately trying to prove that he actually did care.

But as my inner wolf looked down at those faded stubs, her eyes didn’t fill with tears or touched emotion. They only filled with an profound, crushing exhaustion.

“Matthew, do you know what I wanted more than anything else during those four years?”

“It wasn’t these forty-two plane tickets you’re trying to compensate me with now. And it isn’t this late-night subway archive you accumulated to look back on and make yourself feel better.”

I looked him dead in the eyes, making sure every syllable hit with absolute clarity.

“I just wanted, just once, back when I used to travel across the entire territory to stand outside your school for you to wrap your arms around me and tell me, ‘Thank you for coming all this way.'”

“But back then, you just thought it was my job.”

The color drained from Matthew’s face instantly, leaving him entirely ashen. His mouth parted slightly, but he couldn’t form a single sound.

I gathered the pile of stubs that held his secret, desperate devotion, stacked them neatly back on top of the forty-two airline tickets, and slid the box back against his boots.

“It’s too late.”

“Go home, Matthew.”

“And don’t come to see me off tomorrow.”