“Ah, you found your mate.”
“What?” Great. Now my face was burning red. My ears were on fire. How did he look at me and know that I’d had sex? Please don’t let him ask any more questions. And why was he calling sex mating as if it were just some animalistic thing and not a connection between two people.
Only it had been exactly that. Gods, I wanted to hide in a hole. Stevenson needed to be done with his trash duties already.
“I see,” he said. “So, is he the one?”
I hadn’t verbally confirmed a thing and needed to remind myself of that. Was this the way he got information out of Stevenson? Asking him questions as if he knew things in order to get a denial or an affirmation? If so, that was fine for them. I wasn’t playing along. He might hold the purse strings, but he had no rightto information about my sex life. How eww that he was even bringing it up.
“Can we maybe not have this conversation? I promise you I’m not wasting your money by hooking up with people.”
“We can talk about the funding later.” That didn't sound ominous or anything.
Stevenson came back in, saying the garbage was taken care of. While I wanted to ask Uncle Frank what he meant about the funding, I was glad to have some more time to think about possible scenarios, so I could be prepared. My gut said he was thinking of cutting them, and I refused to let that happen without a fight.
“Well, I’ll give you back to your friend,” Uncle Frank said.
“Sorry about that,” Stevenson said once he had the phone back. “He gets weird about weird things, and three papers on the floor and a small tear in a plastic bag is today's."
I wish that was the weirdest thing I’d experienced with the man today.
“Yeah, you’re telling me.”
“Wait, did he say anything rude to you?”
“No, I’m just… I mean, he was trying to relate to me like ‘the youth.’ You know how that can be.” That was my best guess as to why he’d brought it up, but I wasn’t ever going to ask him. That’d be a big old nope for me.
Whatever the case was, I was glad for it to be over.
By the time I was done talking to Stevenson, I felt better, but not great. I still missed Asher. I still wished I knew what I did wrong or where he went so I could try to fix it, as pathetic as that was.
In a way, I wished I’d never met him, because now that I had, I didn’t see a way of erasing him from my mind. At one point Stevenson had said that I should enjoy the night for what it was, and while that was probably true, I couldn’t help the longing for it to be more.
11
ASHER
I stood outside Weston's door for five minutes, rehearsing what I was going to say.
I'm sorry I left. You marked me, and I didn't know how to handle it.
No, that would lead to questions I couldn't answer yet. The topic of marking couldn’t come up, until he knew who I was and how I felt about him.
Okay, I had to try again.
I needed space to think. What happened between us was intense.
That was better, but it still wasn’t quite right.
I'm a polar bear shifter and you're my fated mate, and I've been lying to you since the moment we met.
Nope, definitely not that one.
My bear didn't understand why we were hesitating.
Our mate is on the other side of the door. We should be talking to him and making things right.
I wondered what was the best way to explain why I’d vanished without mentioning the mark. And would I have run off if he hadn’t bitten me? I couldn’t say for certain but probably not.
