Page 32 of Plus-Size Bullied Mate

For him, it was a chance to get away, and for the two of us to spend some time together. For me, those moments were everything.

I hadn’t thought about those trips in a while, but I’m thinking about them now. Then I think about Tessa’s parents.

The Collins had been afraid and out of options. They were caught between a threat and a pack that viewed them too lowly to feel like they could go to anyone for help.

It doesn’t make what happened unhappen, but that choice feels more human than the story the pack likes to tell. I spent long enough outside of the pack grounds navigating difficult situations to understand the difference between evil and being cornered.

Tessa was a kid at the time, just like I was.

She was so young and lost her parents in the same event that made her the pack’s designated liability, forced to start her life in a community that had already decided what she was before she could speak for herself.

And me… I have to own this. This responsibility has been mine to carry for quite some time, but I’m only now taking it on.

Even before I became the alpha, I had enough authority among my peers to have interrupted that pattern a long time ago. I should’ve said enough and used the pull I had to stop that torment from getting worse.

And yet, I maintained that deliberate distance, all because the bond made me uncomfortable. Facing it required something I wasn’t ready to spend, and now we’re both paying for it.

The invisible line in my chest tugs, steady and unyielding, and I eventually follow it back into the cabin.

She’s in bed again, lying there stiffly with that distinct border reinstated.

I lie down on my side and look at the ceiling while I listen to the silence outside, catching the wind through the high branches, the faint sound of the springs, and nothing else for miles, and I think about what it will take to get through the wall Tessa has put between us.

Force won’t work, and I know better than that.

But regardless of everything else, I’m a patient man at my core when the situation requires it, and Tessa will have to put her book down eventually.

Chapter 11 - Tessa

The mountains are beautiful, and that only makes it harder to be cold.

I hate the way the light comes down through the pines in the morning, how the hot spring steams not far from the porch, or the way the mineral smell drifts in through the window gaps and would likely be soothing under any other circumstance.

I hate that someone once chose this location on purpose. All for the beauty, seclusion, and the atmosphere of a place the world can’t reach. That part would mean more if I were with someone I chose, not the very person I have a long history of negative interactions with.

Turning away from the window, I eventually go back to another book I picked out.

This is survivable… at least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

This is survivable, since time is passing right now, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Every hour is an hour closer to whatever comes next, even if that’s a completely different challenge all on its own.

Whatever comes next being a return to the pack as Hunter’s mated luna. Contested, resented, and occupying a position I was put in rather than arrived at naturally.

What I can’t write off as something passing with the time is Hunter himself.

He’s been trying, and I’ll give him that, regardless of how aggravating it is.

He makes coffee in the morning, and he keeps the fire going without being asked. He cooked dinner last night, set the table, and even asked about the other book, even though he did it with the slightly uncomfortable air of someone not used to feeling like anything but a natural.

I gave him nothing in return, and I know that. I did it deliberately, as planned.

The alternative would’ve meant letting this feel like what Hunter’s trying to pretend it is.

A retreat, a new beginning, and two people in a beautiful place learning about one another in quiet isolation. More accurately, a chance for a newly mated couple to complete the bond and get those volatile hormones out before returning.

I’m supposed to be submitting to him and letting him claim me in the most thorough way a wolf can.

But that’s not what this is, and if I let the mountain air and the steam from the springs outside start making it feel like it might be, then I have lost something I can’t afford to lose. The essential piece of me that knows the difference between being chosen and taken.