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Pain shot through my body as I headed quickly to the door.
“Claim mate,”my wolf growled through my head.“Don’t leave.”
After taking one last long look at Sina and Gaian, I forced myself to turn away. She was completely lost in Gaian, just like the way that she had always been with him and the others. And I stood at the door with so many fucking nerves.
Why couldn’t I just mark her? Why couldn’t I do what Gaian had done and not give a fuck?
Maybe because I had always felt like the odd one out of the group, like the one who didn’t really matter as much, like the guy who was just there. I knew it wasn’t true, but as I slipped out the back door, unnoticed, it sure as hell fucking felt like it.
“Turn back,”my wolf howled.
“No.”
Without removing my clothes, I transformed into my wolf and sprinted through the dark forest. I didn’t run the normal path that our pack took every dawn and dusk, but carved my own one through the thicket and sharp brush.
Sina is my mate. Sina is my mate. Sina is my mate.
I repeated the words over and over again, except they didn’t convince me that I should’ve stayed, that I should turn back. Instead, I found myself running farther into the woods, farther away from what I feared would be rejection.
Truthfully, Sina and I had never been extremely close. Not even slightly as close as the others, especially Gaian. Seeing how he had marked her, claimed her like she was his and only his, right in front of me …
It fucked me up because what if Sina never wanted me to mark her like that?
Trees whizzed by me. The faint scent of human drifted through my nose. I swallowed in desperate hope of moistening my dry throat, but it was no fucking help. My chest heaved up and down, my mind racing with thoughts so loud that I couldn’t concentrate.
“What if she doesn’t want us?”I asked my wolf.“What if she’s content with the others?”
“She’ll want us,”he growled.“Turn back.”
And while my wolf wanted to run back to her, I couldn’t force my feet to move that way. We weren’t running away from her forever, but I wanted to give them the privacy that I would want with her, the privacy that I so desperatelywantedwith her.
I just feared that she would always think of me as a friend that she fucked sometimes.
No matter how hard I thought about her, no matter how much I cared, I could never get it out when I was around her. I still felt that awkwardness that the others seemed to have shed away, even four years ago. I had never gotten past it.
I didn’t know why. I wanted to be closer to her, but … I didn’t know if that was what she wanted because she always seemed to pay more attention to Calder, Thayer, or Gaian. But not me.
“She loves us,”my wolf said, trying to convince me.
She might. Maybe.
But was it just as friends? Fuck buddies?
“She opened up to us and told us about her father before the others,”my wolf said.
Despite my wanting to keep moving, my legs slowed to a stop. I stared down at the dirt underneath my paws and howled low, still feeling so bad about our relationship.
My wolf was right. We had lain in the same bed as her the other night as she confessed so much of her life that she had been hiding from the other guys. But why me? I’d have expected her to admit something like that to Gaian. Was it because she saw me more as a friend?
“Don’t be an idiot. Go back to mate. Now.”
“No.”
I didn’t. I couldn’t go back now. I’d head back later on, when Calder and Thayer got back from the pub, so that I didn’t intrude on Gaian’s time with her. Unlike Calder and Thayer, I knew when tonotintrude on others.
At least, that was the reason I told myself for not wanting to go back now. Truthfully, I was fucking scared of rejection, terrified of losing Sina. And I didn’t know if this feeling deep inside me would ever go away. It had always been inside me, lingering like a beast toying with its prey.
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