Part Three

I sent Sarah a text and asked her to meet me at our spot. Our spot wasn’t really a spot, it was just a clearing in the forest furthest away from our house where the roots of an old tree were visible in the earth and it made a natural buttress.

“Hey, you,” she said, and smiled sweetly as I arrived, and found her waiting near the tree.

I had switched off my feelings for her before I even entered the woods, because I knew that this was going to be hell. She put her arms around my waist and I knew her next move would be to kiss me. We’d been dating for almost two years now, and our familiarity with each other was intimate.

Our relationship was more than just making out in odd places. We could talk for hours about our future, our dreams, and what we wanted out of life. Sarah wanted to be a teacher. She loved the idea of being there at the crucial time when young minds were shaped.

“What’s wrong?” she asked me when my arms didn’t encircle her like they always did.

“We can’t keep seeing each other,” I told her. She removed her arms from my waist and stood back in disbelief.

“What? Why?” I could see her confusion and I knew that if my feelings were switched on I wouldn’t be able to do this.

“It’s just not working anymore,” I said, unable to meet her eyes.

“It didn’t look like it wasn’t working for you yesterday afternoon!” she shouted. Anger had replaced the confusion in her aura.

“Look it’s not you…” I didn’t get a chance to finish my sentence as she interrupted me.

“Oh, don’t give me that crap! You said you loved me! What changed overnight?” She glared at me demandingly.

“It really is me, Sarah, you’re a great person. I just can’t be involved with you anymore. Please believe me when I say I never wanted to hurt you,” I tried to explain. She slapped me hard across my face and I was surprised at the aggression behind it. That wasn’t Sarah.

“So typical! You’re just like everybody else! You got what you wanted and now you’ll just move on to the next one! You got the good girl to take her pants off! I hate you! You’re such a bastard!” She was crying and ran off before I could say anything else. I despised myself at that moment.

Malachi found me standing there, on the verge of tears. At that point, I didn’t have the energy to face him either. He pulled me closer and hugged me. After a while, I hugged him back and we stood like that for a long time, father and son hugging. I swallowed back the tears that threatened to escape. I wouldn’t cry in front of him.

“I’m really sorry that you had to do that but it’s for the best,” Malachi said before he left me alone at last.

I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “How much of all that did Malachi see?”

I knew James had followed me down into the woods. He would never leave me alone with something as big as this. We were bonded as wolf brothers for life. It was just how our bond worked, being Alpha and Beta to each other.

“Just from before she slapped you,” James said as he came out from behind a tree. I sighed. Well, Malachi would know now that we had been intimate.

James and I walked back to the house, his aura changing rapidly and it was giving me a headache. “Just spit it out, James.”

He laughed and his aura intensified. “I didn’t think it was the right time to tell you, I mean, you were just slapped.”

“Just tell me already, because lately it seems that there will never be a good time.”

We stopped walking and James grinned. “Shoran said yes.”

“That’s really great, James. I’m happy for both of you,” I said and meant every word.

I’d actually forgotten that James was proposing to Shoran the previous night, which was why he wasn’t there to witness the humiliation of me getting my ass handed to me by my father. We were a few weeks short of our seventeenth birthday and Shoran was a few months older than us.

It wasn’t odd that James had already proposed at the tender age of sixteen. He and Shoran had imprinted shortly after his first shift and they’d been inseparable ever since. Imprinting could only take place after a first shift and James had known it the moment he saw her for the first time.

Shoran could feel a pull toward him but she would only feel the full effects of imprinting after her own resurrection ceremony. It was the single most powerful thing to ever happen to a wolf and for us, the moment of imprinting was sacred.

James didn’t stop smiling all the way back to the house and right through dinner. By the time we went upstairs to our respective rooms, I had to smack him behind his head to get the dreamy look out of his eyes.

James didn’t exactly live with us, but he might as well have, since he spent so much time there that he had his own room. James’s father, Garrick, was the Chief Medical Examiner at the hospital and his mother, Stephanie, was an emergency department doctor.

They spent most of their time at the hospital, which was why James was always here. Not only was James my Beta, but he was also my best friend, so spending all our time together was natural. On the rare nights that his parents were home, he spent every second with them.

The nights that he went home, the house felt quieter, and it was on those nights that my guilt became worse. Emotions were my downfall, especially my own. The fact that I could feel other people’s emotions as well, made feeling my own emotions excruciating at times.

I hadn’t completely mastered shutting other people’s emotions out and the only way I could completely block it out was to switch mine off. Keeping them off was never a good thing, it stunted your own and made you cold and unfeeling.

I’d only switched my emotions off once in my life, and that was when I’d broken up with Sarah. It seemed fitting to me to suffer the guilt over breaking her heart because mine was broken as well and I had no idea if I would ever get over it.