Care For Me

Fifteen

Y/N's POV

The next day I finally woke up with no one else in the room. My body wasn't nearly as sore anymore and moving was merely uncomfortable, not torturous. At least that. I had spent the rest of yesterday resting and making sense of everything I was told. On my own. While Rosé had offered her help and came in to supply me with meals, I was too overwhelmed to have someone else give me more input. I had to sort things for myself and emotionally cope by myself.

To a degree it was a tough pill to swallow — finding out the truth about what I had seen and the background of Jungkook's behavior. One would expect it to be relieving and making everything okay again but emotionally it was an entirely different story. Apparently he had neither abandoned or cheated on me — as far as that was what I could call it, considering we had only been dating, not made anything officially exclusive. That meant my heartbreak had been for nothing. He could not have been the wolf from the nightmare or memory that haunted me. I had just mistaken him in a moment of overwhelm out of not knowing any better. He was merely a year older than me and couldn't have been my father's killer from a memory that must date back before my adoption at two years old. Those were the rational facts. I could make sense of that. I could even make sense of the things Rosé and Taehyung explained to me about the werewolf culture. The notes I had made were really helpful in not getting as confused or lost, as well as outlining the pillars of the werwolf existence. Aside from the fact that I had to wrap my head around the existence of werewolves in the first place. And that I was one. Bonkers, still.

But rationally, I could make sense of it.

Emotionally, I was a mess. All over the place.

I had to process my original feelings and then align them with the new ones from the revelations I was given. My heartbreak for Jungkook had been for nothing but I could still feel it. I could still feel the broken trust and wounded attachment. On the other hand, there was relief for having been wrong and a hint of happiness for the (though failed) effort Jungkook had apparently put in to indeed see me throughout the week. Not to mention that he had allegedly been just as displeased by our separation. And he had spent time preparing a birthday surprise for me in the midst of this? Some excitement, indeed. But then there was the broken trust again for the way he had lied to me all this time. He had known about me being a werewolf and being his mate, but he had not said a word. It was the reason he came to town, the reason he stayed and was so persistent to be with me but he didn't utter a single word about this. Even after I had told him about my voice. Even though we pinky promised to be open and honest with each other. A part of me felt betrayed and deceived. The human side of me, particularly.

Did he only like me for being a wolf and his alleged destined mate? Did he even care about me? Would he not have cared about me if I weren't a wolf? Would he not care about me if I wasn't his mate?

That was the next layer of troubled feelings. A mixture of anxiety, anger and heartbreak.

For all I had been told, the mate bond was clear and straightforward. Be of age and near the person — boom, you know. Jungkook claimed I was his mate and yet I couldn't say the same on my end. And that scared me. What did that mean for me? Was something wrong with me? Inadequate as a human and now inadequate as a wolf as well? What did it mean for my rank? What would it mean for the support I'd get here? Would I then be left to figure myself out? If I wasn't his mate, would that be the end of it all?
It felt like I had failed at something that I should've inherently succeded at. Why was I defined by something that I couldn't control in the slightest? It seemed so unfair that everything came down to this. Was I nothing if not that? To him, to Taehyung, to Rosé?

And then there was the sadness, the pinch in my heart and bitterness in my gut over not being the one for him. Because until a few days ago, I had wanted to be. With all the time we had spent together, how close we had gotten, I had allowed myself to hope again. Hope for connection, a sense of mutual care and belonging. Being important to someone. Being seen. Being liked. The potential of being loved. And all along there had been a condition to that that I didn't know of; a condition that could make or break everything — that I either inherently fulfilled or didn't. To me nothing else had mattered. To Jungkook (and everybody here) being someone's divine mate was all that mattered. The fact that he had pursued me knowing and believing in that from the beginning, but leaving me in the dark, practically setting me up for failure, seemed so unnecessarily cruel to me. If I had known, I wouldn't have let it get so far in the first place. Then I wouldn't be here right now, worried about losing everything, and so deeply emotionally attached to someone who only cared for me if I was his mate and would toss me out as soon as he found out I wasn't. So how much longer did I have? How long until Jungkook would realize that he was mistaken?