Pulling up my class schedule, I groaned. First day back and I had archery practice. Damn. I hadn’t held a bow since last semester and doubted I could hit a target even from ten feet away. Hoping Coach would go easy on me, I changed into the tight-fitting long-sleeved shirts and long pants that was the PE uniform. Gods, the shirt barely made it over the bump. Way to emphasize I was pregnant.
I trundled over the grass and discovered everyone was already there. Coach gave me a look, but Phelan reached for me and kissed my brow. Some of the team awed, and I grinned.
But there was one guy glaring at me.
“Atticus.”
His upper lip curled, and he muttered something about Phelan being trapped.
“Not trapped but very happily mated,” Phelan hissed.
I was up first. Go me. I drew the bow and released. The shot landed in the center ring. Everyone clapped, whereas Atticus’s arrow drifted wide and missed the center by a clear margin. He cursed that I had an advantage because of the baby, and Coach yelled at him.
When I was up next, my arrow buried itself deep in the target, whereas Atticus frowned as his shot fell short. When the others retrieved their arrows, Atticus sidled up to me and hissed that he knew who my parents were.
That almost knocked me over because what did he know about my folks? Oh shoot, had he found out they were human and then jumped to the conclusion that I was too? No, if he had, he wouldn’t be keeping it a secret. And there was nothing about my folks online because I’d looked.
If Atticus wanted to come at me, I’d deal with it, but to attack my late parents was too much, and I glowered at him. He gasped and took a step back. Yikes, had I given him a hint of the hunter in me? I was almost as freaked out as he was.
Phelan shoved Atticus out of the way, told him to cut it out, and took my arm, but as we left the practice session, I looked up. Professor Shaw was striding toward Coach who was shading her eyes from the sun. The watch she wore glittered. He was staring at me. He joined Coach, and they huddled together, nodding and gesturing toward me.
“What’s that about?”
Phelan shrugged and said they’d gone to school together so they were good friends, and we kept walking toward Phoenix House. We passed the new sports center that was being built. Coach was overseeing the project, but it’d been stalled for a while, and the construction had only just restarted.
EIGHT
RAWLING
If someone had ever told me that living in an infirmary was going to be part of my future, or that I would be happy about it, I’d have thought they lost their mind. Infirmaries were for sick people, not dorm life. Why would I want to be there? But living here with Phelan felt safe, warm, and like home.
It was the only part of the campus that felt this way, and all of that was because of my mate. In many ways it was like I had Phelan and no one else had. I needed to change that.
I thought back to my early days on campus, the things that mattered, the things that made a difference back then, and it was the people. Of course it was. But for some reason, as I thought about those people, my mind kept wandering back to game night. And that was how I decided that was what I wanted to do, host our own one here.
There was plenty of room, and it wouldn’t be in the open where I’d feel uncomfortable, knowing that it wasn’t just the people I cared about surrounding me and my ever-growing belly, which was becoming a source of ridicule to many. It shouldn’t be. I was mated and having a baby, but still, people looked down on me. We kind of did things in the wrong order,but all the expected boxes were ticked. And even if they weren’t, so what? We weren’t living in the 1800s.
There were some people I really wanted to come. My relationship with Jack was strained, and I needed it not to be. Game night seemed like a good start. And Bardoul? I’d do anything to fix the situation with him.I also invited Penelope and Grey, Riley, Gio, Lila, and Asher, basically anyone and everyone I thought might say yes.
Bardoul, full on, said no. There was no thinking about it. He wasn’t even facing me when he declined, having already turned around and was walking the other way. It hurt. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t, but something about the entire situation felt off. It wasn’t like he was just mad at me or disappointed. It was more like something else was at play, and I didn't know what. I wasn't going to push. Just getting close enough to ask him to game night seemed like a feat in itself. Making things worse might make the entire relationship unsalvageable.
In the end, Jack, Penelope, Grey, and Asher were the only ones who came. But that was okay, it was a start.
We started with Scrabble. I didn’t quite get how it ended up winning the vote. Maybe because everybody could get lost in their own tiles if things got weird or awkward? Thankfully that didn’t happen. Well, the awkward part didn’t happen. The weird very much did.
The words some of us played were hilarious. We didn’t have the normal high-level vocabulary, so we could get all the high-points words. No, we had all the slang and far more ways to describe bodily functions than I thought possible. As each person laid down their tiles and called their points, we laughed harder and harder. Maybe it was the nervous atmosphere that added to the funny, but I was going to take it because it felt almost normal.
“What should we play next?” I asked as I put the board on top of the pieces and closed the lid.
“We should draw for a game,” Jack said, ripping a piece of paper and writing down all the different names. It was less of a suggestion and more of a “we’re doing this,” and I appreciated it.
She had Phelan reach in and grab a paper from the mug with all the folded bits. He pulled out Candy Land, which somehow got into the rotation last year. It was the perfect silly game we needed.
We had it set up when there was a knock at the door. I drew the first card, expecting the person knocking to be one of the people who hadn’t declined but hadn’t shown up yet. I thought wrong. Two seconds later, Atticus was barging in.
“Is this what we’re doing now?”
“It’s game night, Atticus,” I said, slapping on a smile. “Would you like to play Candy Land with us?”
