Page 29 of Meeting Her Mate

“Way to make it all about yourself again,” I said. I didn’t enjoy the fact that I was being so confrontational with him, but it felt right that I should at least give him a little taste of his own medicine. It wasn’t like I was doing this on purpose. I was rattled. I’d been knocked out, strapped to a table, and threatened with death. “You realize misery’s not a competition, right?”

“What do you want from me?” Will asked.

“Leave me alone!”

“I did leave you alone. Don’t you see that?” Will shouted from across the room.

“If that’s true, why did you come here? If you had truly rejected me, why did you come here, risking your life to save mine?”

Even from this far away, I could see emotions convulsing across his face. For once, he did not have a response or a retort to the question. I felt like this was the right time to make my exit, given that I’d gotten the final word.

As the elevator doors closed, I caught one last glimpse of Will standing there against the backdrop of the city, against the cold blue moonlight shining through the broken glass windows. It felt cruel, breaking things off like that when he had just rescued me. On my part, it felt like I had indulged in something gratuitous.

When the elevator opened up on the ground floor, it was extremely uncanny. Everyone present inside was going about their business as if nothing was wrong. As if a great battle had not taken place a few stories up. The receptionist and the guard were flirting with each other. There were a couple of suited gentlemen sitting in the lobby sofas, perusing magazines, looking at their phone screens, and watching the television. The receptionist saw me and smiled at me, unnerving me.

“I hope the interview went well. It most certainly went long, didn’t it?” she asked.

“What the hell?” I felt as if I was trapped in a surreal nightmare where people chose to ignore the presence of the big bad evil entity haunting the only person who could see it.

“Mind how you go,” the guard said. “There’s broken glass on the pavement.”

As I walked across the lobby, I could feel each pair of eyes boring through my skin, all those glares malignant with ill intent. I wouldn’t make it out alive, would I? I wondered.

But the never-ending walk from the elevators to the main entrance finally came to an end, and I was out again, breathing the chilly night air. I shot a look up the building, wondering what would become of Will. He was still up there, up there with Blair.

“You know what? Not my circus, not my monkeys,” I said, throwing my hands up. I had dealt with enough shit today. Now more than ever, I needed to be free from this. On top of all of this, I had no plan any longer. With Beckett Pharma’s job opening gone, I was back to square one. Scratch that. I was even worse off than at square one. I didn’t have the two part-time gigs that I was doing either. I barely had any money left over to pay for food, utilities, and rent. Where was I going to find a job again?

But here was the thing about familiar things: They drew a boundary around you, putting you in the so-called comfort zone, making you think everything was fine the way it was. When I got into my battered pickup truck, the truck that I had associated fond nostalgic memories with, memories of my father taking me to the farmer’s market every weekend, memories of my mom and me going to the mall in Derry in the truck, the comfort zone enveloped me like an ethereal hug. It was as if my parents were reaching out from the beyond, letting me know that I was going to be okay. I gripped the steering wheel and felt the grooves and dents that years of wear and tear had caused. My hand was too little to fit into those grooves, but I remember my dad’s hands fitting into them just fine. It was the same with the seat. It was sunken after years of use. Sunken just enough to make me feel like I was in a cradle.

When all was against me, when it felt like the world had closed itself off to Alexis Richards, the comfort inside my pickup truck gave me just the right amount of strength to make me optimistic enough about whatever awaited me tomorrow. Tomorrow would be a new day. It didn’t matter that I didn’t get the high-paying job at Beckett Pharma. I would make do somehow.

As if the universe was taunting my will, it started raining. This was one of those classic Fiddler’s Green things. You never knew when it began pouring. In high school, they’d taught us about the water cycle and how water from the sea and other bodies of water evaporated and then condensed into rain clouds, causing it to rain. With the sea so close and with the wilderness all around us filled with lakes and streams, it wasn’t exactly a mystery as to why Fiddler’s Green got as much rain as Seattle did.

“Don’t give up on me now,” I said to my pickup truck. It sputtered in response. For the next fifteen minutes, as I drove back to the apartments, I drove with bated breath, wondering when the engine would give up. Fortunately, it did not happen. Well, at least there was one thing going for me.

I climbed the stairs up to the apartment, feeling like the protagonist in some low-fi anime where the main character has to mandatorily make their way through a neon cityscape, then seek refuge in their apartment overlooking the cyberpunk landscape while slurping on noodles. But there were no neon lights in my life, no futuristic city with flying cars, and certainly no noodles in my apartment waiting for me.

I could go to Maliha, maybe raid her fridge and spend the night with her. The heat from her servers would be quite welcoming in this cold weather. But on second thought, I decided against it. I simply did not have it in me to match Maliha’s optimistic, overly-cheery energy.

I had suffered a defeat today. It only made sense that I recovered in solace.

As I walked through the corridor leading to my apartment, I passed Maliha’s apartment. Blaring music was coming from behind her door. Her off-key singing voice soon followed. I chuckled dryly at the mental image of Maliha dancing in her underpants with headphones on and singing horribly while it rained outside. That girl was truly a universe unto herself.

Once I had crossed the rest of the apartment entrances and was just a few feet away from mine, I realized something was wrong. For one, wet footsteps were leading to my apartment. My door, which I was certain I had locked before leaving, was halfway open, creaking against the wind.

All of a sudden, the low-fi anime that I had projected myself into had turned into a slasher horror movie. It was thundering outside. Lightning flashed in the dark hallway. Rainwater managed to find its way through the leaky roof in the building and was pooling all along the hallway. And my door was open, swinging precariously.

The wolf within me begged to be let free. Why shouldn’t I? Earlier today, I was knocked out before even I got the chance to show Blair my true form. When I came to, I was tied with straps around my limbs, preventing any movement.

This was not the case right now. Whoever was inside my apartment had made the grave mistake of crossing paths with a girl who had been through the wringer today. It did not matter if it were Blair’s men, the vampires, or Maurice himself.

It was time to stand up for myself.

I jumped through the doorway, shifting in mid-air, and landed on my paws, snarling at the silhouette tucked away in the darkness. My instinct hadn’t been wrong. Someone had indeed broken into my place.

I could see better, hear clearer, and make out the shape of the man even though it was pitch black. But when the lightning shone through the window, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the man shifting into a bigger wolf. As he filled the room with his massive size, an impulsive thought raced through my brain.

You can run.