Instinct

33. What Is Going On?

When Stephanie was little, life seemed pretty simple.

Back then, even the pressures of school were a distant line on the horizon, laughable, almost imaginary. The most stressful instances were centred on who had fallen out with who, or having broken something and not wanting to own up to it.

And even those were temporary things, easily forgotten.

Later on, a few inches taller and growing out of childish ideals, real life started to set in. Everything started to seem far more important than it probably was. It began to take on meaning, how people talked to her, how people saw her. She was surrounded by judging eyes and teenage, quick-witted tongues.

But it had always been Stephanie and Liam against the world.

Even when he’d hung out with some of the guys and she’d stayed at home because she was just too timid, too serious to relate to the then obnoxious and far too vivacious girls her own age, she’d held on to that. Stephanie hadn’t begrudged him his other friends, and she’d consistently declined his offers to join them.

She’d always felt a little like she didn’t fit inside her own skin.

People had questioned her; there was no doubting that. You spend so much time together, but you’re not ‘together, together’? Stephanie wasn’t blind, nor was she stupid: she knew Liam was handsome. He was charming – charismatic – and so very kind, but she’d just laughed. No, she’d replied time and again, we’re just friends. There was nothing more to it.

After they’d gotten into high school and he’d started chasing other girls, she tried to convince herself it didn’t matter, it didn’t hurt. They were more like siblings than anything else, anyway.

Then, when their lives had been turned upside down, and she made the choice to pass Alexei to him, she felt their palpable bond of friendship, of complete trust, stretch. And when she had turned and run, trusting him to take care of her little sister, she’d felt it grow frayed under the weight. Sometime between being shot and waking up in someone else’s home, being totally worthless, invisible, it had snapped.

All of those careful little strings had been cut between Stephanie and her family, her pack, her old life.

Even though she hadn’t intended it, she had reached out to Eric Bradley, and he had reached back. She wasn’t jaded enough, scarred enough, to realize that it, too, would end. It would all go away.

When he made her leave, the fear had returned and she had begged him not to hate her. It hadn’t mattered, and she had fled, those weak ties severed infinitesimally more quickly than they had formed.

After that? It had taken much longer for her to heal and trust, and even then she sought out a person after her own soul. She should have learned, but it turned out that the third time truly wasn’t the charm either. When she woke up to white walls and the pang of being totally, completely alone, something inside her shifted, warped.

Starved for everything that she had lost, she had let her mind run rampant, fabricating what-ifs and fantasies to keep the fire within her from burning out entirely.

So when Brennan Hartley came along, she surprised herself by trusting him wholly nearly immediately. There was something within him that had been broken, but still shone so brightly that she couldn’t not trust him. Yet, there had been that warning within her, a countdown to the end of a good thing. Maybe it was cowardice, maybe fear and hurt and anger all simmering deep down within her where she couldn’t even feel it, that pushed her to abandon everything before it all fell through her fingers. Before she could form any attachments, she’d left.