Wolfie in the Middle (Unfinished)

Chapter 20

That night when the rest of my friends arrived back home, Hayden wasn’t surprised to find I was staying the night. She took it all in her stride, giving me fluffy pyjamas to wear to bed and making us a hot chocolate each. I told her everything from the moment Drake and I left school up to the point where she came back. The only thing I left out was everything about Drake. She didn’t need to know every little detail.

  Hayden offered to share her king-sized bed with me but I told her I would find it more comfortable if I was sleeping in the guest bedroom beside hers. She agreed and left me alone but as soon as I was on my own, I didn’t get into bed straight away. I slid to the floor, leaned against the wall and remembered the whole night like it had all just been one big vivid dream. If I closed my eyes the bright lights of the dance flashed across my eyelids and my heart pounded like the bass of the music. I could feel myself smiling as I remembered dancing to my heart’s content like I never had before and just having fun with Clayton and my friends. Then my mind skipped to the moment when Crosby became a threat and I hadn’t even reacted like a werewolf. I hadn’t panicked, snarled or tried to escape. I had stood there as still as a tree as my freedom was threatened.

 I squeezed my eyes tightly and hugged my knees. I was a disgrace of a werewolf and was weak at a time when I should have been strong and fought for myself. But in the back of my head a little voice reminded me of the fear and shock I had felt. It hadn’t been my fault, the voice was telling me. The fear had stopped me or my wolf from reacting and I could feel it all now. The feel of his tight arm around my neck and the realization that he could have pressed down harder and killed me entered my mind. I gasped quietly and clamped a hand over my mouth. That was when real fear swept in. The sort of fear I should have been feeling a few hours earlier, not now. I tried not to cry and I did well until I imagined what my mother would have thought. She would have been shocked that her training hadn’t worked and I’d feel guilty because the best teacher in my life had been my mother. She was my advisor, my friend and my mom all in one and I had spent my whole life trying to please her so she knew that when she made the choice to keep me, it was the best decision she’d ever made in her life.

 With tears trickling down my cheeks I crawled into the stiff, white sheets of the guest room’s bed. I turned the lamp off and tried as best as I could to cry without making any noise. My throat began to hurt after a while and I must have realised that crying wasn’t going to get my anywhere. Once my body had decided to stop, I was already well on my way to falling asleep.

My eyes snapped open and I was greeted by utter darkness. It was the middle of the night and after squinting for a few seconds, I could make out the hands of the clock. 4 am. I had just awoken from a nightmare and the terrifying images of a pack of half-shifted werewolves chasing me through a forest were still flashing through my mind. I tried to shake it off and tell myself it had only been a dream - a figment of my imagination - but the harder I tried, the easier it got to remember. Finally I decided to do something a little different. I switched on the lamp and snuck out of my room. I treaded softly to the kitchen downstairs where Hayden had made our hot chocolates to grab a glass of water and get the images of my nightmare out of my head. On the way there I was debating on whether I should open the lights or not. I didn’t want to cause my pack any discomfort so I decided on the latter. But as soon as I got there, all my plans flew out of the window. Someone was already there and the light above the cooker was on and casting light. I couldn’t see who the person was because they weren’t in my line of sight but after a few seconds of hesitation I walked in anyway.

 It turned out to be Julien. The cause of all my woes if you wanted to put it that way. He sat at the kitchen table with his head leaning against his fist as he read a book. He didn’t look up straight away which I thought meant he hadn’t noticed my entrance but a second later he said, “Did you come all the way down here to gawk at me?”