Chapter 9 - Tara
Tending to Jasper’s wounds takes longer than I thought it would. This man takes up a lot of space, and a lot of his body has been injured.
But it doesn’t bother me. Before he left, I couldn’t think of anything worse than being this close.
Then he was gone, and I was left in this cabin all alone for two days, unsure when he would return or if he was even alive.
I hate his guts, but that doesn’t mean he should die.
When I saw him stumbling in, looking so weak for someone who I thought could never be wounded, I panicked.
It just seemed wrong.
I had to do something, I don’t know. Again, I had no idea if he was even going to be coming back!
That sort of anxiety does something to a person. At least a human one.
“You should go to bed,” I tell him, putting the cloth and supplies back on the table. I don’t think I did much, but I did something.
“Yeah,” he responds. “By morning time, when you come down to see me, you’ll be shocked by how most of my wounds will have cleared up. Partly thanks to your help, of course.”
I can never tell what’s a joke when it comes to him. He always has that teasing, snarky tone in his voice. Especially when he’s talking to me.
“No,” I shake my head. “You need to go upstairs. To the bed, you’re injured.”
“I’ll be fine.”
There’s such a thing as being too brave, I think? I know his body works very differently from mine, clearly, but there’s no way in good conscience I’d let him sleep on the couch.
No way at all.
“You won’t be fine,” I say. “I’ll help you get upstairs.”
I gaze at his bare chest, his arms, and then my gaze flickers back to his face. I’m not sure how exactly I’ll help him upstairs; his body looks (and feels) as hard as granite. But I’m determined to help.
Usually, I’m not this decisive, but I’m convinced that he has to listen to me.
“Once you’re in bed, you can sleep.”
He smirks. “Thank you for granting me that permission, Tara.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re really not going to come upstairs?”
“No, I’m fine. The bed’s yours.”
“I can sleep on the couch!” I protest. “I can even just sleep somewhere else. In a library or something.”
Even as I say this, I know that it’s not true. I spoke as little as a few words to his pack mates while he was gone, and they weren’t exactly welcoming.
I don’t think they’d be too happy with a human sleeping in their library or anywhere else.
But I want Jasper to know that I’m serious.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jasper says, his eyes weary with exhaustion. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“So, I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“No, I will.”
“Why are you so stubborn?!” I exclaim. “You almost died.”
He chuckles.
“What?”
He can be so serious, but only when it’s convenient for him. The Jasper I saw when the alarm bells sounded understood the severity of the situation he was in. This Jasper, although clearly tired and hurt, is determined to turn everything into a joke.
“You realize that this is what it’s like talking to you, right?”
“Being stubborn?”
He tips his head back, either from frustration or exhaustion. Probably both.
“Yes.”
“Clearly, I’m not that stubborn if I’m here with you now, trying to help.”
“Again,” he says, “this is mutually beneficial. If there’s something you don’t want to do, you sure as hell don’t do it.”
“Oh, you mean like how I let you kiss me out of the blue, even though the very thought of you touching me made, and makes me feel sick?”
“That’s not the reaction I got.”
My eyes widen, and I almost begin to lose my desire to help him.
Not the reaction he got?
If he thinks for a second I wanted him to kiss me, or even worse, enjoyed the kiss… Well, he’s deluded.
My body registers his certain physical attributes, but anything other than that completely turns me off.
I have no desire for him at all.
“You’re crazy,” I say. “You drive me insane, and still, I’m trying to help you.”
“I don’t need help,” he retorts. “I’m an Alpha, I help others, I don’t need them to help me.”
“Oh, save me the pack stuff,” I walk and lean against the far wall. “You obviously need help, you’re still—"
I pause.
“You were going to say human, weren’t you?” He smirks.
“No,” I assert. “You’re still a person! And as a person, you need help from other people. That’s deluded to believe that you don’t.”
“You don’t know me, Tara,” he frowns. “I know that you think you have me all figured out, but you don’t.”
“All I’m saying is sleep in a bed, given the state that you’re in! You’d think I was telling you to, I don’t know, retire from your Alphaship or something.”
“I couldn’t just retire,” he counters. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“Besides the point.”
Our eyes lock; we’re two stubborn people who refuse to back down. But I know that I’m right.
“Tara. Come on.”
I shake my head. “You’re wrong, Jasper. You need to at least look after yourself.”
I remember what it was like when my grandma died, and I officially had no family left.
It’s not like my grandma could help me with many things toward the end of her life anyway; it was more me taking care of her.
Even so, just her being there and telling me to do things helped. Just knowing that I had someone watching over me, someone reminding me to take care of myself, did more than she could have ever known.
When she was gone, I learned to provide that support for myself. It wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t afford to let myself slip.
“Okay,” he sighs. “How about this? I’ll sleep in my bed since it’s so important, if you sleep there too.”
What?
I hesitate.
What’s his angle here? This feels like a trick.
“It’s not like that,” he says. “I’m just not having you sleeping on the couch. It’s not right, you’re not doing it. That’s the condition, okay?”
At this point, I’m tired.
If that’s the condition for finally getting him to listen to me, then so be it.
“Okay,” I concede. “Do you need help getting upstairs?”
He laughs. “Don’t push it.”
***
It’s strange having a man lying next to me in bed. I don’t think I’ve had that since, well, him.
And that didn’t exactly turn out well.
I’ve propped a big pillow between us, one that blocks our vision of one another, but I can still sense his presence.
If I looked hard enough, I'm sure I could see him, but I don’t dare do that. I stare up at the ceiling, wide awake, mapping the cracks in the wood.
His breath is loud and heavy, and the bed dips beneath his weight as he moves around.
Despite what he says, I know he’s in pain.
I can hear it.
I stay silent, and for some reason, I’m holding my breath. Being this close to him is making me inexplicably nervous.
Then I feel concerned.
Against my better judgment, I sneak a subtle glance and see that he’s wincing in pain. His face is contorted, struggling, as a bead of sweat drips down his cheek.
So much for being fine and healing before I know it.
I lay my head back on the pillow and decide that it’s only fair I distract him.
I clear my throat, but my voice still comes out shaky.
“So how was the hunt?”
I sound stupid. Clearly, the hunt wasn’t very good.
I’m meant to distract him from the hunt, but I can’t think of anything else to say.
He doesn’t respond at first, and a few awkward beats of silence pass before I hear his voice.
“It wasn’t a typical hunt.”
“What was it then?”
I haven’t felt confident enough to ask the pack members what exactly has been going on over the past couple of days; all I know is that he was searching for something.
Surely, that’s a hunt?
“A hunt is typically when you go looking for food; this was because the intruder alarm sounded.”
“So, you were hunting for a person, right? Rather than food.”
World’s greatest distractor. Clearly.
Why do I always sound so un-smooth?
“I suppose, yes,” he winces. “We were looking to eliminate the threat.”
“Did you?”
There’s a beat of silence, and then he sighs. It’s a sigh that I know has little to do with his physical pain and more with his frustrations.
“No,” he murmurs. “We didn’t eliminate anything.”
I’m about to let it go. Surely there’s something else we can talk about that he’d enjoy? Pack politics? The art of war?
Then he speaks again.
“At first, all we found were large areas of blackened forest. It was bad, really bad. Worse than I thought it was.”
“The blackened forest,” I say. “That’s to do with the curse, right?”
Again, as with most of what goes on this side of the valley, I know some information, but not a lot. What I do know, though, sounds crazy, like something out of a storybook.
“Yes,” he responds. “There was a curse put on our valley by a spiteful witch many years back. It’s a curse that keeps almost destroying the valley, and every time we try to do something about it, it goes away for a little while before eventually coming back.
I thought Willow was gone for good this time, clearly not. ”
“Willow is the witch?”
“Yeah.”
“But why would she make a curse? I know you have your prejudices against the witches, but they seem nice. Nicer than some of the shifters, actually…”
I stop myself, but he gets the point. As far as I’ve been concerned, the witches have been nothing but welcoming; his pack, not so much.
“Nicer than some Alphas?”
“Hmm,” I smile. “Maybe.”
At least his pained sounds have gotten quieter, at least he’s now making jokes. And why do I care so much?
I’m an empathetic person; it’s just the way I am.
“The reason,” he says. “Is because while the witches might be a little more open to humans, historically they’ve hated shifters.
The witch, Willow, was once the leader of a coven that lived in harmony with shifters.
She fell in love with an Alpha who rejected her after they made love.
She was so pissed that she took her coven away and plagued the land that we are currently on.
She’s vengeful, spiteful, and just won’t fucking die. ”
Scorned by an Alpha after being intimate, I get the rage.
But, as someone living in Roseville, among the shifters, I too care about the place not being destroyed.
“Who was the intruder, then? Willow?”
“Kinda,” he says. “She manifests in the form of these monsters—shadow monsters, they plague the valley anytime the decay returns again.”
“Are they the things that hurt you?”
He chuckles.
“Why are you laughing?”
“The way that you said that just sounds funny. They didn’t hurt me; they injured me a little.”
I roll my eyes. “Okay, injured you and it’s not exactly a little, but sure.”
The ego on him.
“But yes, it was them. And really, I’m fine, I got out alive, but not everyone did.”
He trails off a little at the end, and I can hear the grief in his voice. It makes my chest ache.
“Someone passed away?” I ask him, as softly as possible.
“We found a dead shifter. I couldn’t believe it when I saw him. Not one of ours, but still. Awful. And if it happened to someone in our pack, I don’t think I’d ever be able to forgive myself.”
I catch a glimpse of his hardened expression through a gap next to the pillow. He’s staring angrily up at the ceiling, his face the most vulnerable I’ve ever seen it.
A sharp pulse passes through my chest.
“But it wasn’t your fault,” I say. “There’s nothing you could have done; you came as quickly as you could.”
“No,” he says. “But if anything happens to a shifter nearby, it’s partly my fault. I’m supposed to be protecting this land.”
“But you can’t control everything that happens.”
“It’s the responsibility I’ve signed up for,” he says. “I’m a leader. Everything ultimately rests on my shoulders.”
When he talks, he sounds so sure of himself, yet also so hurt. I’ve never heard him sound like this before.
I realize how much he cares about his pack and his fellow shifters.
I don’t know why, but I suppose I imagined he was just an Alpha for the perks of the role. Like the shifter version of royalty, and I guess he is, but technically, he’s a good one. He wants to take care of everyone.
Now, it makes a little more sense why he’d be so adamant about pursuing our fake relationship to protect his pack’s interests.
While I completely disagree with their prejudice toward witches and humans—no, a curse does not make all witches evil, nor does our outsider status make humans unsuitable to live among them.
I do agree, I guess, with him doing all he can to take care of those he rules over.
“Do you have any more questions?” He asks.
His voice is soft, not angry nor defensive like I might expect it to be.
“No more questions,” I respond. “We should probably try to get some sleep.”
“Yes, boss.”
I scoff. “Shut up.”
Why am I smiling so much?
“Hey, Tara?”
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for distracting me.”
I turn on my side and gaze out at the moon. “Yeah, no problem.”
***
Wait!
I open my eyes and catch my breath after it felt like I was falling.
Just a dream.
My eyes are weary, struggling to stay open beneath the bright yellow sunshine streaming in through the window.
What time is it?
Then, I realize something else.
Two large arms are wrapped around my waist. Two large arms connected to a large shirtless body.
At first, something inside me relaxes, as though I’ve finally returned ‘home’, or I’ve just stepped into a big, warm bath.
Why does this feel so good?
I turn my head ever so slightly to confirm that the large creature behind me is who I think it is.
Blond hair, long, thick eyelashes like butterfly legs dangling over closed eyes.
Yep.
This is not good.
I notice that the pillow that was once between us is somehow on the floor by my side of the bed.
I forgot about how toasty and unbelievably comfy it feels to be held by someone so much bigger than me.
Slowly, I begin to remove myself from beneath his arms.
But it’s like I’m a fly caught in a net. Lifting his forearms feels like lifting steel rods, and I tense my face as I struggle to escape.
Come on, Tara, you’re stronger than this.
I push again, attempting to raise at least one forearm so that I can slip beneath the other one, when suddenly he moves.
I don’t even realize what happened until Jasper’s hovering above me, my arms pinned above my head as he stares me down with his stormy eyes.
My chest rises and falls beneath him, and I begin to say something in my defense as my reflex tells me I’m about to be punished.
He doesn’t look angry, though. His expression says something else.
“I—” I murmur, gazing at his sun-lit chest. “Your injury, you shouldn’t... You’re going to get hurt.”
His eyes don’t leave mine, but they do flicker for a mini-second down to my rising chest. A spark shoots down my stomach.
“I’m better now,” he says.
Jasper is still staring, and my arms are still pinned down as though they’ve been chained.
A warmth seeps through between my legs.
That’s when I feel something else.
Pressing against my thigh is something both hard and long. Rock-hard, actually.
I swallow air. Then I gaze, involuntarily, at his peach-pink open lips.