Page 18 of Meeting Her Mate
They murmured and nodded. That was all they did. And now, when my anger had subsided, I felt hatred for myself for what I had just done right in front of the entire pack. They looked to me not as they had done earlier tonight when I was telling them of my plight. No. There was no pity in their eyes. No adoration.
They were all scared.
Chapter 7: Alexis
Funny thing, heartbreak. It doesn’t manifest when you’re already living a miserable life. That constant existence of compounding pain—yes, terrible—makes a person strong enough to thrive in this misery, just as I had done all my life. There was no chance that things were going to get better, and I had made my peace with that. However, introduce a little ray of hope into the mix, and you’ll see that the organism that had been surviving in total darkness begins to believe that things are going to be better. And then snatch away that hope, plummeting that being into the desolation that its previous life used to be.
That’s how you get heartbreak.
Had I not saved Will and had we not bonded, I would have been a constant participant in the misery of my life, not knowing what hope felt like, and I would never have known heartbreak.
But now, now that he had crushed my hopes with his bewildering statements of rejection, all I knew was heartbreak. All I could feel was bitter agony.
It was this bitter agony that prompted me to pack up my things in the dead of the night and leave in my father’s pickup truck. After his and mom’s death at the hands of the vampires, there were only a couple of things that I got in the will. A shabby Ford pickup truck and a couple of thousand dollars that I burned through in a few months. I learned only later that the house they lived in was not their own. They had been renting it. Out of nostalgia and attachment to my parents, I chose to rent the house too, and the pack was considerate enough not to charge me abominably for the rent.
Ever since then, I have lived a hand-to-mouth existence, surviving on the meager salary that my two jobs provided. You could not get a nice job with educational background such as mine. And another thing, for a nice job, you actually had to be where the nice jobs were being handed out. Places like Bangor, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. That’s where people my age were thriving in careers such as data science and biotech.
The only options available to someone like me were to be either a waitress—which I was in the evenings at Fiddler’s Diner—or a smalltime gig at the wharf. By day, I worked at the wharf, marking the ships that arrived in the port, checking their inventory, and entering that data into a computer. It was menial work, and it paid menial money, but it was better than nothing.
“But it’s not going to be enough now,” I whispered to myself. Oh, yes, one of the side effects of spending life as a loner was you started to talk to yourself as if you were another person entirely. Sometimes, that was comforting. Most times, it was pathetic.
No one stopped me as I drove my truck out of the commune. I cast one last look at Will standing there by the fire like a deranged prophet, beard so long that it was reaching past his neck, hair falling in locks on his shoulders, shrouded in his long shawl. Why had I even bothered saving this jackass when I could have just as easily escaped?
Why had we even bonded? Not that it mattered now, given that he had publicly humiliated me and rejected me in front of the entire pack.
“But where are you going to go now, Alexis?” I found myself asking myself. I had a faint idea of what to do, and I was hoping that this idea would form into an actualized plan by the time I reached Fiddler’s Green.
The vampires might have been defeated in this battle, but the fact remained that they still controlled the passages coming in and out of the town. I wasn’t going to risk coming across them again tonight.
Tonight, I needed a place to crash and get drunk.
I picked up my phone and dialed the number of the only person I could trust. My only friend, Maliha Fresco. Maliha was an eccentric communist who, despite possessing the skills of a decent black hat hacker, chose to spend a low-key life as a diner waitress. It baffled me that she never fretted about the big things in life, such as falling in love with someone, having enough money to move about the world freely, or, you know, having a functional life.
“What’s up, baby girl? Missed your shift tonight,” Maliha said in her singsong voice. Even though I couldn’t see her, the enunciation of her words made it apparent that she was chewing up her perpetual wad of chewing gum that she kept adding new gum to. Every couple of days later, when that wad would be the size of a golf ball, she’d throw it at a passing car and laugh gleefully as it would stick to the car. She called it “spreading her seed,” whatever that meant.
“Hey, Maliha. Things are kinda effed up,” I said. Maliha did not know about my true reality, my life as a wolf. But she was still the closest thing I had to a friend, and what is it they say about friends in need being friends indeed?
“Talk to me, girl. How can home girl help?”
“I kinda need a place to crash,” I said.
“For tonight, or how long are we talking about?”
“That’s undecided. Can you help me out?”
There was a long pause during which I could hear the icky sound of Maliha chewing on her gum in contemplation.
“You can come by my place. Sleep on the couch. But if we’re talking long-term, baby girl, we’re gonna have to get you a studio apartment. Lucky for you, the one at the end of my hall just became vacant. Rent’s pretty reasonable, and that horrible smell, you know, the one, is long gone,” Maliha said. “I’m getting off my shift in a few minutes. Head on over to my apartment. I’ll meet you there.”
“Thanks, Fresco,” I said.
“You hungry? Have you eaten anything? Need me to bring something? We’ve got some delish pastrami sandwiches and half a blueberry pie. I called dibs. You want some of it?”
That was Maliha for you: kind, considerate, compassionate, and hospitable. It was no wonder that we were friends.
“Pastrami sounds great,” I said weakly, driving down the highway that headed into town.
“Baby girl, I kinda feel like your entire vibe is way off. Maybe you need a little something, something?”