Chapter 17 - Tessa
I’ve read the same paragraph four times, but I still haven’t retained anything from it.
The piece I’ve been drafting for a week requires more concentration than I can currently give, hence why it has taken me this long.
Normally, I can push everything else aside and switch into a different state of mind to get it done, but it isn’t working like it typically does.
With an irritated sigh, I adjust the laptop screen, reread my last paragraph, and try again.
Still, the bond is there in the background, existing as that warm pull that exists regardless of where I am in the house. As hard as I try, I can’t tune it out and have mostly stopped trying to.
What I can do is not look at it directly and pretend for the time being that I’m fine, even if I feel far from it. What I can do is keep my attention on my work as much as I can until the hours pass and the days get smaller.
I can hear Hunter moving around downstairs, more than familiar with the weight of his footsteps now, the typical kitchen sounds, and the doors opening and closing. I’ve been mapping these sounds without meaning to, building a catalog of how he moves through the house at different hours.
This is the bond doing what I assume it’s meant to, and those innate reflexes don’t care about my position on the matter.
I find it deeply annoying, but the thing I keep running into over and over again is that he’s trying.
Continuing to notice it doesn’t help my situation, since I’d rather he be enough of a monster to validate my resistance.
If he behaved badly enough to justify all the ways I’ve been avoiding him and this connection, then I wouldn’t be left with this sinking feeling in my stomach.
The guilt that comes with refusing to hear him out.
It would be easier that way. I know how to be angry and how to put space between myself and anyone who might threaten my fragile peace.
What I don’t know how to do is consolidate the confusion that comes with being bound to someone who makes me coffee without saying anything about it, makes sure I have enough to eat without forcing me, and has started being in the same space without trying to fill every silence.
It doesn’t fix the original wound, and that much I’m clear on. The ultimatum, the ceremony, and our past all happened. The fact that he’s being decent now doesn’t undo it.
I’m mid-paragraph when I hear the cars, and whatever’s left of my focus dissolves immediately.
Multiple vehicles approach the house, and I close the laptop before sitting still to determine whether this is something I need to be concerned about.
I don’t feel any alarm coming from Hunter through the bond, and I’m reading him better than I’d like to be able to, but I hear his footsteps moving toward the front door with the unhurried quality of someone expecting company a few seconds later.
He never told me anyone was coming over.
I stay upstairs until it becomes impossible to pretend I don’t hear the numerous voices as they collectively join on the main floor, and my curiosity gets the better of me.
Hunter’s voice warms into a register I haven’t heard from him before, more like his guard has come down with familiarity. Whoever they are, he wants them here.
I look at myself in the small mirror above the dresser and decide I look fine, so I head down, and when I reach the bottom of the steps, I freeze momentarily when I see numerous people in the living room alongside Hunter.
When he sees me come down, his expression shifts to an unguarded one, as it has been lately whenever I have a short absence. “Tessa, come meet my friends.”
Immediately, that thought is alarming. There are several guys who look just as big and intimidating as Hunter, each with a woman on their arm, save the last one. Still, a quiet voice in my head tells me to push forward. To not act as Tessa did before.
So I join them, regardless of how uncomfortable I feel.
“These are my friends from the military,” Hunter begins, gesturing to each couple and introducing them to me. Each pair carries themselves with the ease of mates that have accepted their bonds, and who look more than happy to stand next to one another.
“So this is the woman who has been keeping you busy,” Dominic, the one who’s alone, says with a faintly amused grin. He raises a brow toward Hunter, who looks vaguely unimpressed, then he returns his attention to me. “Hunter didn’t even tell us about you initially.”
“Oh?” I manage, not knowing what to say about that fact.
That doesn’t seem surprising, yet it makes me bristle on the inside anyway. Even if I’m trying to seem indifferent about that fact, my inner wolf reacts in the opposite way.
“I was waiting to let things settle,” Hunter says, to which the others scoff.
“We had to force it out of him,” Caleb murmurs, arms crossed.
“That is, after he almost lost it on a group call the other day,” Dominic adds, looking too pleased at the opportunity to bother his friend, apparently. “Once we were onto him, there was no denying it.”
Hunter sighs, unable to come up with a suitable excuse, and the others chuckle.
I stand in the middle of Hunter’s living room with people I don’t know looking at me with varying degrees of interest, and every square inch of the spotlight he’s put me in since this started feels tenfold.
These are his people, and the world he came from before becoming alpha. They’re the men he worked with, and they’ve come to look at who Hunter has taken as a mate. They’ve come to assess, even if they don’t put it that way.
I don’t have proper context for any of them, no established place, and nothing to anchor me in this room except the bond and the awareness of Hunter slightly behind my left shoulder. They all seem so comfortable around each other, and I don’t know what to do with that.
Lila solves the problem by simply talking, and I’m surprisingly grateful for it.
She moves to the kitchen counter and finds the glassware. She glances at me with an open expression.
“Tessa, do you know if he has decent wine or is this a whiskey-only house?”
The question is so normal, and so cheerfully assuming that I’ve had any say in what drinks have entered the house, and I answer it before I’ve decided to.
“There’s wine… second cabinet, left of the sink.”
“Good,” she says to Hunter, then she aims at me, “he gives the impression of someone who wouldn’t bother with wine.”
“He gave me that impression too,” I say before I can stop myself, realizing just how interpersonal that sounds.
Lila looks at me with the bright pleasure of someone who has found an ally, and something in the room shifts enough for me to loosen my shoulders.
***
An hour later, I’m sitting on the far end of the couch with a glass of wine and a vaguely disoriented feeling. In all honesty, it feels like I’ve arrived at a party I wasn’t meant to stumble upon, but Hunter’s friends aren’t what I prepared for.
They’re loud in the way most people get when they’re comfortable without having anything to prove to each other, and it’s obvious they’ve experienced a lot together.
Dominic and Zane argue about something that happened during an operation neither of them will name, while Hunter seems prepared to set any false records straight.
Sera has migrated to my end of the couch with her wine and has been talking to me about her little one back home, and surprisingly, she talks to me like I’ve always been a part of this. It feels odd.
But more importantly, none of them has mentioned my parents.
This is so profoundly different from every social experience I’ve had in this pack that it keeps catching me off guard every time I realize it.
They don’t know the story of what happened that night, or if they do, they haven’t decided it’s the most relevant thing about me. I’m not used to that, but I certainly wouldn’t mind more of this feeling.
I’ve been watching Hunter in the middle of all this without meaning to, keeping track of the way he stands with them, and how the looseness in his shoulders now isn’t there at pack meetings or around the territory.
He laughs easily when Dominic says something to him, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard him laugh like that before. It’s genuine and unguarded, and not at all like the forced mocking kind from when we were young.
Before I can correct myself, Hunter glances over and finds me watching. For a moment, we’re just looking at each other through the noise and the warm light coming in. Without meaning to, the bond shifts in my chest, feeling warmer and almost tender.
Under the pressure of it, I look away.
Across from me, Caleb and Lila sit close in the way that seems like their default, and his hand finds hers without either of them looking down.
She leans in slightly, and he adjusts to accommodate it without a word.
The whole exchange takes about two seconds, and neither of them seems aware they’ve done it, yet it weighs on me anyway.
The other couples look incredibly comfortable as if they’ve always been this way, and I watch all of it with a subtle yet irritating sinking feeling in my stomach.
I’ve never known what that feels like, and while I’m technically just as claimed as they are, it feels like something that’s still just out of reach.
Throughout the time I’ve been here, Hunter has been trying to at least make sure that I’m comfortable. I can’t discredit him for that. But regardless of us initiating the bond in its most complete form, everything from the past is still in the way. It’s keeping that genuine warmth from creeping in.
Given how stagnant things have been between us, I can’t help but doubt we could ever get to that place, or even remotely look as connected as the others do.
Worse, I wonder if it’s exactly what I want.