"Young love tends to be based on nothing but feelings. The couple has not yet faced and overcome a challenge or difficulty together. They are passionate about each other. They think about each other constantly and want to spend all their time"
Isaac...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
┗━━━━━━༻❁༺━━━━━━┛
"Still don't understand why you agreed to come..." I complained the moment my mom parked the car outside none other than Derek's loft.
I knew Derek was my dad and I understood he wanted to be around, but I wasn't sure how I felt about this whole moving in together idea. Just the three of us. And even if my mom kept denying it, I knew there was tension.
She still loved him, I think — but she was holding herself back. That's who she was. She stopped herself from being happy, and deep down, I always felt like it was because of me.
We couldn't pretend everything was fine. It wasn't. If we tried to sweep it under the rug and suddenly play happy family, it was going to blow up in our faces. There were feelings that still needed to be said — and none of us had the guts to do it yet.
I still didn't know how I felt about Derek being my dad. He'd been decent, helped me, showed up. But calling him "Dad" didn't feel right.
And I hated the guilt I felt about that. James didn't deserve credit for me. Not one bit.
But the truth was... we were all just trying to earn our spots. Trying to figure out how to be around each other without it breaking us.
"There's obviously something going on," my mom said while gathering some things she'd brought along. "And believe me, I want to leave it alone — but I can't ignore people coming after you. I have to figure it out."
"Right, but who exactly are these people?" I asked. I didn't know much beyond what little Scott told me. There was a group of alphas out there, sure — but something told me my mom knew way more than she was letting on.
"Don't worry about it. I'll handle it," she dismissed, already reaching for the door handle.
"Hey — what happened to what we talked about? No more secrets. We can't keep doing that. It's gonna ruin everything," I reminded her.
We'd had a long talk about this — about trust, about honesty. About how, if we didn't have each other's backs, we had nothing.
"Right..." she sighed. "But Angie, I don't want you to worry. I need to do this — it's my job to protect you."
"And all I'm asking is to keep me in the loop," I countered, watching her pause with the door still halfway open.
I could see it in her face. She was used to carrying the weight alone. Used to shutting people out, because for so long, she only had herself. But now she had me. And we needed to trust each other — because no one else was gonna do it for us.
