Page 28 of Plus-Size Bullied Mate

Mom makes a sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a long-suffering sigh, then she reaches up and touches my jaw once, as she used to when I was a boy. It’s brief and caring, like a silent reminder that she’ll always back me regardless, and then she drops her hand.

“Try not to make it worse than it has to be,” she says quietly.

I think of Tessa’s face when I gave her the ultimatum, and how the shock had dissolved into fury. Even if that kind of emotion isn’t ideal, it was the most honest thing I’d seen from her yet.

“That,” I begin with quiet resignation, “might already be out of my hands.”

Chapter 9 - Tessa

The dress isn’t mine, and it makes me feel a bit ridiculous. Someone made sure that it fits, but it doesn’t feel like it belongs to me.

It’s simple and cream colored, like the kind most girls would dream about when they have the luxury to do that. Instead, I stand in front of the mirror in the spare room and look at the stranger wearing it, trying to name what I’m feeling.

But try as I might, I find mostly static and a different kind of numbness I’ve never felt before.

The ceremony is in three hours, and I only know because someone knocked on the door this morning and told me. It wasn’t exactly said with care, but it got the message across.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, I press my palms flat against my thighs and breathe.

Outside the window, I can hear the pack moving around, along with the usual sounds of preparation, indicative of a community organizing itself around an occasion. It would almost feel normal if I didn’t know, with absolute certainty, that half the people making those sounds resent that the occasion exists at all.

Growing up in Pine Ridge would’ve been easier if it weren’t for the one night that has plagued me ever since. I likely would’ve still been an outcast, given the status my parents had from the start, but the one terrible choice they made changed everything. It deepened the isolation in ways they never anticipated.

Regardless of all the ways they tried to rise in the pack ranks, nothing seemed to work, and because of that, they didn’t report the rogue wolves they spotted attempting to cross our territory lines. They hesitated when they should’ve said something, and because of that, a planned ambush snowballed into something irreversible.

They overwhelmed Hunter’s father before backup could arrive, and as strong as he was, it was too much even for him.

My parents died in the same attack, but that is the part the pack edits out.

They were killed in the ambush they’d inadvertently enabled, caught in the crossfire of consequences they hadn’t fully understood they were setting in motion. I lost them as a child, and in the same event that claimed Daniel Reed. Somehow, in the accounting of grief that followed, my loss was never accepted.

Their deaths were tangled up with their culpability, and when everyone needed someone to blame, they were right there. After the fact, I took their place. When it was all said and done, I was the convenient target.

I don’t know if they would have made a different choice if given time and options they didn’t have. I don’t know if they were good people who did a terrible thing or something more complicated than that, but I know they smelled like home. That my mother used to sing slightly off-key in the mornings, and that my father kept every drawing I ever made, including the bad ones.

I have cried for them in private more times than I can count because doing it in front of the pack felt like a right I was never granted.

To them, I didn’t have the right to my own grief because theirs overshadowed mine.

The ceremony is brief and to the point, leaving me backed into a corner I never wanted to be in.

I expected something more elaborate, like the usual rituals designed to impress upon everyone watching the significance of the occasion, including me.

What I get instead is Hunter standing at the front of the gathered pack with his eyes on my face, speaking the words Cole tells him to, and I barely hear because the roaring in my ears drowns everything out. I say what I’m told to say when I’m told to say it, and while my voice comes out steady, I feel anything but.

Even agreeing in the slightest feels like a betrayal to myself, all while the pack watches.

There are a few who look genuinely neutral, and a small handful who look something closer to curious, but more so, the others seem like they can’t understand why this is happening at all. I wish I had that answer for myself.

Hunter’s mother, Clara, stands near the back and keeps her face very still. She looks at me exactly once, for just a moment, and her expression is complicated enough that I can’t reduce it to a single emotion.

It doesn’t seem like hatred, but it isn’t acceptance either. I’m not sure that makes it easier.

When it’s done, Hunter’s hand closes around mine, brief and deliberate, and I let him, because my capacity for resistance has been completely depleted.

There, it’s done. It happened. I think to myself, waiting for the nightmare to be lifted and for everything to feel normal again. But as I wait, nothing comes, and it all becomes far too permanent.

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