AllFreeNovel
Share Us
She chewed on her lip but nodded.
So I did. I painted her the picture I’d already been planning since the moment I realised she was my mate.
“You could tell me what you like, what you’re afraid of, your favourite food, comfort movies, all the things that make you upset or angry. The way your perfect date would go, the pet peeves you have about men. What you’d love someone to do for you when you’re upset. Anything, Vex. Anything in the whole world, and I could be that for you.”
I’d done it with Drake to a lesser extent. He was like a puzzle, and I had to keep track of the outcomes of different behaviours, but it had worked. I knew how to make him feel better.
Iwantedto do that for her.
She didn’t trust us, and trust is what we needed to earn from her. Icouldtreat her like a queen.
“Would you… enjoy that?” she asked.
I frowned.
Enjoyit?
Enjoyment wasn’t the point. Every time I protected her or put a smile on her face, it was a win. She was my mate, that was hard wired into me, and I could ride that victory. It was a game I’d never had in my life before, one that gave me hits of satisfaction I’d never felt so easily.
I wanted to be someone she could trust, and I wanted her to let me close, so I could have her around. Love had made it clear that I wouldn’t be allowed near her without her consent, so I couldn’t force my presence on her.
Even if I did, there truly was something tangible to how much I liked the idea of making her want me. Of exploring everything about her that made her smile or laugh or fall for me more. Of exploring the lust that had me in a chokehold every time I looked at her. I wanted to know how to make her beg for me, how to make her scream my name and make her so high on ecstasy that her body gave out and she had no choice but to let me hold her.
Explaining that, however, would ruin it for her, and then neither of us would win. “I would…enjoybeing someone who made you happy,” I said at last.
The word enjoy was wrong on my tongue, the lie uncomfortable in a way that lies weren’t usually. But to tell her Ineededto be someone that made her happy? I thought she might just run.
“But it wouldn’t be the real you?” she asked.
I opened my mouth, then shut it, oddly stumped by that question. She didn’t want me without the mask—she might think she did, but she didn’t.
“You’re my mate,” she whispered. “The universe put us together.”
“And I can be what you need.”
Her jaw ticked, expression tightening. “Not like that.”
“You don’t want what you think you want—”
I cut off at her visceral reaction. Her eyes blazed with fury, and her hand clamped around my neck as she squared up with me—even caught in my arms like she was. “Don’t youdaretell me what I want.”
My blood heated, and I had to shift so she wouldn’t feel how rock hard I got at the fire in her eyes.
Shewasmy mate.
I don’t know how I hadn’t seen it.
But… I had. The whole time, I’d known she was special, but without a name to it, without understanding, I’d shoved her away, afraid of attachment without claim.
Even now, I didn’t have that claim. Not the way I needed it.
“I want you as you are.”
I stared at her, mind going a million miles a minute as I thought out what that might truly look like.
Freedom?
Or… or something else.
