The Reluctant Mate

26 Amanda

No matter how hard I tried to deny it, I missed Porter.

It was probably just that stupid bond messing with my mind, probably tinged with an unhealthy helping of Stockholm Syndrome. I may have known how to break the bond now, but even the thought of doing so caused my heart to feel like it was being ripped from my chest.

But the thought of accepting the bond still made my stomach revolt like I'd gotten into that fairy juice again. What a repulsive name for a drink. It sounded like body fluids or like someone had stuffed Tinkerbell in a juicer. Gag.

Carrie had assured me that was not the case, since it was fairies who produced it a lot like regular alcohol, except with magic involved. Fairies. I scoffed. Maybe I really had hallucinated everything.

But if it was all a hallucination, why was it affecting me so much? I wasn't sleeping well, and when I did, I kept dreaming of him, and then I woke up missing him more. It sucked.

It also didn't help that the nights seemed a hell of a lot more scary now that I knew that there were other things in the darkness besides just disgusting insects and human psychos. And werewolves weren't even the worst of it.

Vampires sounded hot in theory, but I didn't like that they were real. I told myself they couldn't be that bad since we would have heard about mass murders if they really did go on killing sprees, but then again, there were a lot of missing people in the world, and who could say what had happened to them? I'd always thought that people who disappeared either had enough of the bullshit and booted it by their own will, or some completely normal bad thing had happened to them, but now I knew there were also undead psychos as well to worry about.

Now, whenever I got that creeping feeling like I was being watched, I had to convince myself I wasn't about to be murdered by a vampire, and then that it wasn't a human planning the same, before I arrived at the fact I was just being paranoid. But, if werewolves and vampires were real, who knew what else might be lurking in the shadows? Sure, Porter had said that there were weren't zombies, but he hadn't sounded very certain.

On the plus side, at least I had a new and improved zombie apocalypse plan. I would just go and hide from them with the werewolves. Could werewolves turn into zombies? Even if they could, I bet they'd also be really good at killing them. Although zombie werewolves sounded extra dangerous so if they got through the werewolves' defences...

I really needed to stop watching so many scary movies.

Even though Porter had believed I wouldn't remember what he said when I had been sick, I actually had a fairly good drunken memory, and I remembered pretty much all of that night. Mostly to my chagrin. I had yelled and bawled and vomited, and he had seen it all. Even thinking about what I had done made me want to hide under a rock. Sure, my drinking had never been super healthy, but I always kept at least a bit of control in every situation, at least until I met fairy juice.

I had woken up the morning after alone in his bed feeling like my head was going to explode. I did not speak to him again after that. He didn't approach me, and I didn't approach him, even though I spotted him a few times before I left his pack. Maybe he didn't want me now that he knew how bad I was. How broken I was. From what Carrie had said, he still would, but I had trouble believing it. I was too much trouble.

And deep down I wasn't sure about anything, even if he was crazy enough to still want me. So I'd been sitting on the couch stuffing my face with ice cream again. I'd gained five pounds, and I wasn't happy about that.

I wasn't happy about anything.

This wasn't working.

I texted Carrie.