Fears To Face

∞ Chapter 18 ∞

~ Kayley ~

As soon as I woke up the following morning, my heart sank. Somehow , even before I fully woke up, I felt the realization in my gut. Tomorrow night my mom as well as Rayne would turn into a wolf for the night. That meant the stretching and bending would start today, and that meant they would be in so much pain they couldn’t have people near them. I knew I probably wasn’t able to see Rayne until after the day after the turn, when he was fully recovered and that made me seriously unwilling to leave my warm and cosy bed.

I had known that yesterday too, when I asked him to go to class with me. Looking back I wasn’t sure whether it was a smart thing to do. My classmates full on stared at us all the time, while we tried to  ignore them, holding hands under the table, whispering things to each other and stealing pecks when no one was looking. Yet, we both loved to be close for longer than those ten minutes in his car and knowing I wouldn’t be able to see him for a couple of days, I enjoyed our little time together even more and I couldn’t care less about my surrounding students.

But it wasn’t only because of Rayne that I felt down. My mother and I hadn’t spoken since our fight and I knew she would keep her mouth shut the coming days too, although that probably had more to do with the fact that it was a side effect of the upcoming turn than anything else. Yet, every time she’d looked at me these last days, her eyes had narrowed and she had this disapproving look on her face that caused knots to form in my stomach every time.  I never had a huge fight with my mother before and I hated this situation we were in right now, but she gave me no choice. Rayne and I were dating, or together, or whatever it was that you could call what was going on between us,  and whether she liked that or not, there was nothing she could do about it.

Somehow, I made it out of bed and into my car, on my way to school. Once inside, I wish I hadn’t. My classmates gazed at me as I walked through the halls and some were whispering things in each other’s ear, while others were outright rude and just popped up in my face with questions like;

“Who was that?”

“Where is that dude that was in biology class yesterday?”

Or worse. “Hey, that handsome dude, when is he coming again? I wanna meet him. Can you introduce us?”

I told them nothing of course and felt like yelling in some of their faces with something like; “I hate to break it to you, but did you not notice what WE WERE HOLDING HANDS?”  Luckily, I was able to keep those thoughts to myself, but it made me regret my action from the day before. What if people started telling it to others and soon it was daily talk around in the streets of our small town? More important, what if my mom would find out?

Well, I guessed it was a good thing it was close to the turn and she would mostly be busy with her own misery, but still. There was a good chance it would somehow end up for her to hear. And then what? I dragged myself into the cafeteria, trying to calm the nerves in my stomach, with Gwyn and Mallory on my side who tried to keep the others away, falling down on a chair with a sigh and ate my lunch.

After a while Mallory asked, “So where did you find him?” I looked up, puzzled. “I’m no different from all the other girls, he is one of the most handsome dudes I have ever seen in this rotten town. There’s something about him…”

“Did you notice his eyes?” Gwyn asked, fully into the conversation too. “They were fierce, glowing. What colour was it? Orange! That was it. I have never seen that eye colour before. It that even natural? It can’t be, right?”

I swallowed. Rayne had warned me for this. “Uhm, yeah he – uh – he wears contacts.” Oh god, that was a lamest excuse I could come up with. Really, Kayley? Orange contacts? Who in the world wears orange contacts?!