Chapter 29
T hey all stared at me like I had grown a second head.
“I could barely touch someone I’ve fucked multiple times,” Amir pointed out. “I’m betting odds are extremely fucking slim that I could still perform the way they want me to.”
“We’ll figure something out, precious,” Diego assured me. “Miles, hold them off for as long as you can, and we’ll all see what else we can get for work.”
“Let us worry about it, little dove. In the meantime, your room is ready if you want to look at it.”
“Are you trying to distract me from despair?”
“Is it working?” Kai asked with a smile.
I pouted. I really did want to see the room.
They ushered me over to what had previously been the guest room. All the furniture had been changed out, the walls painted a warm sunrise pink with blackout curtains the same shade so they blended into the wall, and the beautiful sleigh bed I had admired was front and center. The bed itself was empty beyond the new mattress and sheets I had purchased; all of my nesting supplies were still upstairs in Diego’s room.
“It’s beautiful.” I laid my hands on the smooth wood. I had wanted a pink room for as long as I could remember, but my sister hated pink, we weren’t allowed to paint in the dorms, and Jerry certainly hadn’t been amenable to the idea. Tears pricked my eyes, and I climbed onto the bed, spreading out to see the ornate ceiling rose they had added around the light.
Was this what it felt like to start healing your inner child? I had been working on reparenting myself before everything went down, letting myself have the treats and small experiences that had been shamed out of me my whole life. A pink room was beyond indulging myself, and I’d never thought I would be able to feel loved because of a paint color, but here I was, sprawled in the start of a new nest and ready to start bawling.
“Everyone get in here.”
Kai was first in, Diego tucking up against him and Amir on my other side while Miles hesitated.
“I said everyone .”
Miles joined us, stretching out next to Amir. “I’m pretty sure this is the best mattress in the house.”
It honestly felt like a cloud, and even though everything was fucked up, I couldn’t help my purr at all the alphas being in here with me. I was trying not to feel guilty over how much money they’d spent on me since I’d come to stay with them. We hadn’t known how precarious things were at the time, and the thought of returning everything had my instincts twisting me into knots.
I loved this beautiful house they called home, but if we needed to move, I was pretty confident I would be happy anywhere as long as they were with me. I might not be able to pull as much income as they could, but I would be handing in some big projects soon and getting paid. Hopefully that would be enough to offset things while they looked for work.
Being with someone unemployed did make me nervous after I had supported Jerry, but I kept trying to remind myself that these alphas were different. They had been going out of their way to take care of me since we had met, and even if they needed some financial support, I didn’t think it would stay that way.
It wasn’t like Kai was going to lose his job and hide it from me. The pack seemed like they were pretty good at open communication and that helped.
We decided on a quiet night. The last project I needed to work on had finally finished its download and the alphas were going to start looking for other work. In a sense, it was nice to fall into this sort of rhythm. I had been neglecting my own work in favor of getting to know my new partners, but it would be better to ensure my clients were happy and hopefully they would hire me again or refer me to others.
An email popped up in the corner of my screen after I’d been working away for a few hours.
Notice of nonpayment.
What on earth? I clicked into it and found a notification from my phone company that payment for my bill this month hadn’t cleared. That didn’t make any sense. Miles had assured me that all the payments for the show had gone through already.
I logged in and felt the same dread as when Jerry had first abandoned me, seeing zero dollars in my account. I clicked into the account history and found no record of any money coming into it.
What the fuck?
I locked my computer and wandered through the pack house in search of Miles, finding him in the courtyard on his tablet.
“Hey, sweetheart. Is everything okay?”
“Not really.”
He sat up straighter. “What’s wrong?”
“None of the money from the heat is in my account.”
Miles paled. “ What ?”
“No payment and no record of it in the account history. I thought you said everything would be paid out by the end of the heat?”
“It should’ve been. We’ve never had a problem with payment going through before.”
“Glad I get to be the first problem for a lot of things lately,” I said bitterly.
“I’ll look into it,” he promised. “Let me contact the accounting department.”
“Please do.” My bottom lip wobbled and I was trying very hard not to start crying. I didn’t know if the company was scamming me or if I had a problem with my account, but what mattered was that I had gone through all that, turned everyone’s lives upside down, all to end up in the same financial situation.
Couldn’t the universe cut me a fucking break?
I didn’t want to wait there and start crying in front of Miles, so I turned on my heel and zipped back to the workstation they had set up for me, forcing myself to get things accomplished while tears slipped down my cheeks. Maybe it would be a quick fix, something that only took a phone call to resolve. I was still way too raw from the first time being fucked over, and my brain kept screaming that it was happening again.
Soft tenderness flowed down the bond toward me from Kai, and a moment later a text popped up.
Kai:
Need me to come home?
Callie:
I’ll be fine 3
But thank you
I wasn’t going to make him cancel his plans to babysit me. Realistically there were a bunch of things I still needed to do to protect myself. I needed to get myself off the apartment lease so my credit score wouldn’t get fucked if Jerry didn’t pay. I needed to cancel everything we’d booked for the wedding. I needed to decide if I really was going to stay here with the pack, and if the answer was yes, I needed to update my documents, find a handful of professionals in the city like a new doctor, dentist, and who the hell knew what else. I would probably have to set up mail forwarding because if Jerry was willing to throw out all of my things, I could basically guarantee any mail that showed up with my name on it would go straight into the trash.
Why wasn’t there someone I could hire to think of every single thing I needed to do and they could do it for me? Not that it would matter since I had no money to pay anyone to do anything.
I hadn’t been financially insecure growing up, at least not in a way that I had noticed when I was young. Facing it as an adult had been a steep learning curve. I probably should’ve chosen a more practical degree, but I hadn’t and I’d had to compete with everyone else in LA who wanted to make it as a cinematographer. I had plenty of other skills I could put to use to make money if I wanted to work myself to the bone. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d had to do so in the past few years, but for now I would focus on getting the two jobs ahead of me finished as quickly as I could.
I took a break for a couple of hours and worked down my list. Mail forwarding was blessedly easy to set up. After that I contacted my old landlord and told him what went down. He agreed to take me off the lease and would speak to Jerry about adding the other people he had moved in without permission.
Next up was canceling all the wedding things. I didn’t have a lot to worry about since we couldn’t afford a big wedding. We lost the deposits, but that couldn’t be helped. The worst was telling the guests, not that we’d intended to have many. I opted for a mass email, dreading any responses that might come through.
My phone rang not two minutes later. Mom’s name and number floated across the screen.
Great.
With a sigh, I answered. “Hello?”
“What did you do?”
I flinched at the immediate accusation. “I didn’t do anything.”
“Callie,” she sighed, “don’t be obtuse. What happened?”
I didn’t want to give her details, but I knew if I didn’t, she’d be up my ass about it until I caved. “He married someone else.”
Another sigh. More dramatic this time. “ What did you do ?”
“Nothing!”
“Darling, people don’t throw away that many years of a relationship for no reason. Were you not servicing him?”
“ Mom! ”
“It’s a reasonable question.”
Reasonable to whom? “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“How else can you avoid failure in your next relationship if you don’t examine your flaws?”
I ground my teeth together, already drained after a minute of her. “Why are you assuming I’m the one who failed here?”
“Are you the one married out of the two of you?”
“I don’t think his marriage really counts when he got drunk and dragged the first woman he found to the chapel.”
“So argumentative. Men don’t like that, darling. Of course it counts. The documents were filed, right? Unless he gets divorced, it counts. Should I assume you’re coming back home then? You’ll have to sleep on the couch. I turned your old bedroom into my craft room.”
“I’m not coming home.”
“Don’t be silly. What are you going to do in LA without him? He’s the only reason you moved there.”
God forbid she assume I have a job and friends and other roots tying me to the city. I didn’t, but that wasn’t the point.
“It’s all right to admit defeat and come home to Mama.”
“I’m not doing that. I’m going to stay in Las Vegas with friends.”
Mom tutted. “Well, don’t stay too long. You know what a burden you are on people.”
“That’s really unfair to say. Just because you think I’m a burden doesn’t mean I am to everyone. They’re really excited to have me stay. I don’t expect you to understand, but things ending with Jerry was not my fault, and I’m not going to come back to Seattle. I’m sorry that your first instinct was to blame me for how everything went down, but I think it would be best if we didn’t speak anymore.”
“What on earth do you mean? You can’t just stop speaking to me.”
“Actually, I can. And I’ve kind of been wanting to for a while. I put up with how you speak to me because I didn’t see that it was out of the ordinary before. I do now. I’m not gonna force myself through that anymore. I don’t expect you to understand, but I hope you’ll at least let me have peace, though we both know that’s not your strong suit.”
“Callie…”
“I really did love you. I’m sorry you could never love me the same way you did Tanya. Have a nice life.”
“Cal—”
I ended the call and blocked the number before she could call back, though I wasn’t even confident she would.
Numbness settled over me. I had thought about cutting that tie for years; I’d known I wouldn’t feel good doing it, and I didn’t, but it felt right. I might not have had much experience with being treated well, but now that I’d tasted it, submitting to casual cruelty was so much harder than it used to be. Maybe one day we would talk again, but her response to my split showed me that I would never be good enough for her and that she would never put aside her own feelings to be there for me when I was in crisis.
I deserved better than that even if I had never been good at grabbing it before.
I avoided the pack the rest of the night, too close to the edge to let myself get comfortable. I had cried all over them too much already.
While Diego was in the shower, I slipped upstairs and extracted a few blankets from the nest to take downstairs. It made me a little queasy to dismantle my nest at all, but I just needed a bit of space to cry in peace.