Silver and Cold |h.s.|

16. Misinterpretations

The heat of the sun beating down on your bronze skin is the only feeling you allow in the wake of yesterday's events. You can feel every ray of sunlight seeping into your skin and making you feel human.

Human.

You noticed yesterday, for only a moment, that you'd forgotten what you were. You'd awakened in the middle of the night, something calling out to you from beneath your skin, but you couldn't place it. You'd felt it before but there wasn't a name for what it was. You just had this strong desire to go outside.

It was only when you'd stepped towards the window, a soft blanket wrapped around your shoulders, that you'd noticed the full moon hanging in the sky and it all clicked back together.

You had forgotten the call of the wild.

The revelation had you frozen solid. You had been so panicked. How long had it been now since you'd been home? Since you'd seen your family?

Harry's soft cries from his bedroom were your reminder. You'd turned your head over your shoulder to where his strangled groans called out and padded over to his door, sunk to the floor, and fell back asleep beside his closed door.

This was why you had forgotten. This was why you hadn't been home in so long, why you hadn't seen your family and why you were choosing to stay despite the consequences.

Harry.

You heave a sigh and try once more to read the book in your palms. You've scanned over the same sentence for at least five minutes, not absorbing a single word as you just...suffer.

No, suffer wasn't the right word. You were always so bad at verbalizing your feelings. Pack communication thrived off of senses and more often than not you didn't have to say anything to convey how you felt but now...now that you had a voice and weren't around your family...it was hard to describe.

There was a heavy weight on your chest that seemed permanently fixed to your heart ever since the kiss. That kiss that woke you up to a new reality. One in which the kiss was designed only to protect you, not because there were any feelings involved.

How stupid of you. How incredibly ignorant and desperate of you and so very bold of you to assume that he felt anything more for you than contempt and disgust. He could hardly look at you and he couldn't even talk about you without separating you from his precious Selene. He couldn't fathom the fact that the two of you were one in the same.

You weren't mad at him. You couldn't fault him for his reaction but at the same time it just...hurt. You'd never experienced this before, this rejection.

The last time you'd been intimate with a human, you were young and foolish and just wanted to get it out of the way. You'd heard your friends talk about how "amazing" and "hot" sex was and you just looked at it as purely scientific. You had a job to do. You had to protect the forest, you couldn't waste your time pining over some human boys when there were threats at every turn.

Even then, though, that human boy hadn't made you feel like this. It'd been sloppy, even you could tell that, and it had been two innocent teenagers just trying to figure it out, but he had made you feel good about yourself afterwards. He'd never left you feeling so...wrong.

And that was how you felt right now as you sat in the hot sun trying over and over again to read this same fucking sentence. You felt wrong.

Was that Harry's fault though? You weren't sure. You definitely knew it was mostly you to blame. You had forced his hand. You had entered his life when you should have bolted immediately the moment he got you out of that cage.