Filed To Story: Alpha's Regret: His Wrongful Rejection
I’m still on the table. Justus has me stuck up here, treed like a raccoon. To get down, I’d either have to jump—and risk losing my makeshift gown and my dignity—or I’d have to turn my back on him to step down to the bench. Something inside me won’t let me do that.
“She’s taken with you,” Justus says, his voice low even though there’s no one nearby.
My cheeks heat. I don’t know how to answer him. There’s too much weight to his words. I’m probably his only chance of having a pup of his own, and there could have been one between us, but not in this timeline, not the one that made me the way I am. That’s a lot of baggage between two people who are virtually strangers.
But is he really a stranger now? He doesn’t quite feel like one anymore. He just kind of feels new.
“She’s taken with you, too,” I finally reply.
He shrugs and grins. “She saw that elk we brought home, and she knows what side her bread is buttered on.”
“You think she was being sweet to you for food?”
He nods very seriously. “Absolutely. She knows what I’m good for.”
“I don’t know. She seemed pretty taken with your beard.”
His grin widens. “I do have a great beard.”
My lips rise at the corners of their own accord. “Very yankable, it seems.”
He takes a step closer. I clutch the sides of my gown with my sweaty palms. “Yes, I’ve been told that many times. Great for yanking and catching crumbs.”
“Seems like a good thing to have, then.” I don’t know what I’m saying, or what we’re doing, or what I’m still doing up on this table. Is this flirting?
“It serves me well.” He closes the rest of the distance between us. “Want to give it a tug? See what everyone is talking about?”
My face catches fire. My lower belly squirms. I’m on my own. My wolf is hanging back, watching, and the pecking voice is missing in action.
I can’t think of even a quasi-smart reply. I’ve run out, so I do what I have to do—I reach out, take a chunk of beard between my forefinger and thumb, and pull, very gently. The smile that breaks across his face steals all my air. Blood whooshes to my head. I’m a balloon about to pop. I’m a complete dork, and at the very same time, I’m utterly, totally, transcendentally entranced.
I drop my hand. Justus catches it and brings it back to his face, pressing my palm to his cheek. My skin is so clammy. My thighs clench, trying to tamp the squirmy sensation that’s doing strange things to my pulse and breath and ability to think.
“I shouldn’t have left you.” I’m not sure whether he means today or back when we mated, and regardless, I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that. My wolf snorts. She agrees with him, and she’s unimpressed that it took him so long to realize it.
“I was fine.” I’m going to assume he’s talking about today.
“I was afraid you’d ask me to take you home, so I made myself scarce.”
My jaw drops, not much, but enough that I have to close my mouth. Males don’t just admit things. They brood or stomp around or refuse to eat the dinner put in front of them, and then you have to go back to the kitchen and play ‘guess why’ with the other females.
Hold on. Back up. Focus. He bailed because he didn’t want to take me home today?
“But you will take me back to Quarry Pack?” I ask, my anxiety spiking. I don’t actually want to be anywhere else right now. I like his rough hand cradling mine while I stand on top of a table like I’m a bold female who’s never obsessively worried about exposure, bolt holes, and escape routes. But in order to breathe, I need to know Icould go.
“Yes, when you say it’s time,” he says, his eyes shuttering. He lets go of my hand, and I let it fall to my side. There’s a fraught moment while he braces himself, waiting for me to ask, and I try to think of something, anything else to say instead.
I do want to go home. But not right now. I’m afraid to tell him that I want to stay. That he’ll read too much into it.
He’s afraid, too, though he’s doing a good job not showing it. The bond is giving him away.
I stare down at him. He stares up at me.
He blinks first. “Will you come for a walk?” he asks, his voice gruff and tentative.
I nod, my throat too tight to say yes out loud.
He reaches for me, but he doesn’t grab my waist. His hands stop and hover a hairsbreadth over my hips. I have to step forward into them.
He cocks his head and lets me see into his eyes again. He’s nervous. Relieved. Excited.
I am, too. I step into his hands. His fingers curve around my sides, and he lifts me like I’m made of cotton fluff. I instinctively grab his shoulders for balance. His wolf rumbles. I draw down a deep breath, my nose quivering. Oh, lord. His scent.
When I was a girl, we’d till the garden behind Abertha’s cottage as soon as the ground was soft and dry enough, usually in March when the weather still felt like winter on most days. The sky would be stark gray, there would be a bite in the wind and only the barest hint of buds on the trees, but with every spade-full of turned dirt, a delicious springtime scent would rise in the air. That’s Justus.
When I breathe him in, I can hear the crunch of my boots on the cold dirt, the scrape of the hoe hitting rocks, the thunk of steel hacking through clumps of earth. I can feel my palms burn from the rough wooden handle.
His scent confuses the past and the present in my head. He wasn’t there. It’s a trick of the senses that he smells exactly like my memories.
Or is it something else? Out of all the males in the world, Fate picked him for me. Why?
He takes my hand and leads me in the direction of the bonfire, his pace so slow it’s almost bride-like. His grip is strong and certain. I hope he doesn’t notice the clamminess.
We take one of the worn paths that winds between the various areas of activity. We pass by a workbench with the tools left out and some sort of wooden contraption left in the vise. A little further on, someone has left a bowl on a pottery wheel, the rudimentary kind made from wood discs that you kick with your foot. Farther still, there is a circle of empty chairs, whittling left in one, a pipe left in another.
We pass through scents—sawdust, clay, tobacco—but Justus’s rich earthiness travels with me. My steps feel light, and my head swims. I’ve never felt like this before. So not alone.
When we walk by the dancers, they holler and howl and call to Justus. He smiles and waves them off, but two females—Ashleen and Brigid, two young mothers who spent most of the afternoon chasing after their pups—make their way over and block our path, their feet flying, sweat streaming down their smiling, ecstatic, moonlit faces. Several males follow in their wake, stomping out their part of the dance, winding between and around them.
“Come on, Alpha, Annie!” Ashleen calls.
“Alpha! Annie!” the others echo.
I freeze. There is no way my feet can do what theirs are doing. They’d twist off at the ankles.
“Not tonight,” Justus says kindly.
“Come on, Alpha!” a male shouts, and then his wolf bays, calling Justus to join the pack.
Justus shoots me a rueful grin, and then as smooth as butter, he breaks into the steps. His shoulders dip, his feet stomp, his rhythm perfect. Effortless. The dancers erupt in shouts and howls of approval. Justus throws his head back, tossing his hair. It’s the first time I’ve seen him cocky.
My lower belly winches and something flutters in my chest.
I’ve never seen a male dance up close before. I’ve spied from the kitchen at Quarry Pack when our mated females put music on the radio after dinner. If they’d had enough to drink, some of their mates would dance after they got the sparring out of their system. There weren’t really steps to their dancing. They’d kind of grind on the females and grab whatever part of them was closer at hand—boob or butt.
This is different. These males had to learn this. The females, too. And it doesn’t look like foreplay at all. It’s more like a model you make in science class—the females are the sun, the males are orbiting planets. The females are the nucleus. The males are electrons.
Justus winds in a figure eight, looping the other females, and then looping me. The males fall in line behind him, their wolves’ sharp yips punctuating the drumbeat.
My heart thumps. The males are big and loud and close.
Don’t move. Don’t breathe.
Or run? Maybe run?
I’m an island in a stream, and I’m scared, but also, I’m outside of it all. This is so far beyond my experience that I can’t do anything but watch and listen and try to orient myself in this strange, strange moment.
Life is work, right?
Bed, bath, kitchen, garden, greenhouse, beehive, kitchen, bath, bed.
Work, punctuated with episodes of sheer, unfounded terror.
Life is swimming, and if you stop, you drown, and if you think about what might be underneath you, you’ll sink.
You don’t leave your work out on the table or your pipe on the seat of your chair. In order to dance.
I don’t know how it’s dangerous, but it has to be. My soul says so.
Justus passes behind me and then in front of me again. He stops, the males fanning out behind him, furling into a new configuration. He steps forward and back, one foot, then the other, his lips curled up in invitation.
I suddenly feel disproportioned. My feet are cafeteria trays. My arms are fence posts.
He does the sequence of steps again, a shuffle closer, a quick hop back. Isn’t this what male birds do to attract their mates? What do the female birds do back? Stand there awkwardly and wish they’d stop?