Hope for my Future

Chapter Eleven

Nicole

"All right, you have to tell us what is going on between you and Tanner."

I was sitting in the Beta house, feeling like Bree was yanking all my hair out, even though she assured me she was just styling it. Tina, the Beta Female, was in a chair across the room, putting finishing touches on her make up, almost ready to, in her words, 'transform my face'.

Apparently, this pack liked to go all out for their Alpha's birthday. With a full-on, black tie formal ball; that sort of all out.

I had never done anything like this before in my entire life.

I stayed silent a moment too long, and Tina paused to glance over at me, her long blonde hair swinging softly across her shoulders.

"You know the less you talk the more our imaginations will fill in, right?"

I sighed, wishing I could shake my head but not wanting to undo Bree's work and have to start this torture all over again.

"Nothing. Well... nothing at the moment."

Bree pinched my shoulder. "Does that mean something happened or that you think something will happen?"

Sometimes girl talk made me extremely uncomfortable, especially when it was all focussed on me.

"Something happened. We, uh, might have slept together."

"I knew it!" Tina burst out, grinning at me. "Who could resist a body like yours, huh?"

"Tina!" I objected. "It wasn't like that! We'd been drinking, and..."

"And nothing, honey," Bree interrupted me. "I've seen the way Tanner looks at you, on the rare occasions you two actually leave that cosy little cabin of yours. He likes you."

"Yeah, well, I think I may have messed up whatever it was between us."

"Why? What happened?" Tina pulled a chair in front of me and sat as she spoke, ready to begin working on my make up.

"I kind of froze him out right after we..."

Bree's hands paused in my hair, and the mirror before me caught a thoughtful look in her cerulean blue eyes before Tina forced me to close mine.

"Is it because of this?"

She lightly ran a finger over my shoulder, where three jagged scars curled up from my collar bone and tapered off down my back. I had told them a tightly edited version of my story, leaving out most of the painful details, but they still got the idea.

I shrugged the opposite shoulder and felt her hands start moving in my hair again. "Yeah, that's a big part of it. There are a lot of things in my past that I just don't know how to move on from."

Even now, months after the raid on the Ring, I still felt the shadows gripping at me. Lily helped, a lot, and so did life here at Barrow, but I felt like, as hard as I ran from them, the long fingers of old nightmares still scratched at my skin.

Conversation waned as both of them worked on 'my look', and I let my mind wander. I was growing melancholy as I thought about the male I lived with. It wasn't his fault; he was much warmer towards me after the night we spent together, even through the hurt and confusion I saw as plain as day in him. He still didn't talk much, which was probably a combination of his personality and my rudeness. But he smiled more easily, and made tiny little gestures, like taking my plate to wash after dinner, that meant nothing except that they showed me who he really was. All this time I had been living with Angry Tanner, now I was getting to know the real male.