Piers and Court join us, glancing around at all of our serious expressions. “What’s going on?” Piers asks hesitantly.
“Just curious about why you didn’t bother to come to me when you found out I was sick. Why you waited until Heather Howle basically forced your hand with that stunt at the interview?”
“Why didn’t you tell us, bubbles?” Grieves asks. “You knew for a month. Didn’t say a goddamn thing, did you? Just suffered all that time without giving us the chance to make it right.”
I shrug. “You made your choice. You rejected me. I wasn’t going to put myself into the very fragile position of letting you do it again. Why would I?”
“We’re your mates, Pix.”
“Sometimes that’s not enough,” I mutter, staring at the table while I say it, knowing in my bones that it’s the truth.
“We’re here now,” Thayer says, sliding his hand across the table toward mine, like he might take it, but I’m quick to tuck both into my lap. “We want to figure this out with you.”
I snort. “Figure out what? How you can stash me away, safe and sound, waiting for you to grace me with your presence?”
“No, we want to figure out how we can be with you,cor mea.”
Figure it out.As if it’s a hard thing to consider. When really it’s as simple as making a choice. Choosing to be with me and not Isadora. But that’s never going to happen.
I nod. “Right. You want to be with me. I notice there’s been no statement released to the media regarding the status of your relationship with Isadora. That you haven’t said anything along the lines of ‘in light of recent developments, our betrothal to Isadora Aureline is dissolved.’ Is a statement like that coming anytime soon?”
The silence at the table is answer enough. Court’s lips part and I know whatever he says isn’t going to be an answer, but something more wheedling, more flirty, more fuckboy than I want to hear, so I hold up a hand and turn my attention to Grieves. “This is why I didn’t tell you when I was diagnosed, when I realized what we were to each other. I knew it wouldn’t make a fucking difference.”
There’s a squeak of noise to my right, drawing my attention to the barista standing there, holding a tray laden with drinks and pastries. “Sorry, I just… I’ll just…” She slides the entire tray onto the table and then hightails it back to the counter where she huddles with the other employees whispering and casting those all too familiar furtive glances in our direction.
“Sunshine,” Piers sighs.
“Is this where you tell me I’m being unreasonable?”
“No. Never. You’re more than entitled to your feelings, and I want to be clear that your distrust is entirely valid.” It's on the tip of my tongue to sarcastically thank him for validating my feelings, but this is Piers and I know he doesn’t mean anything by it. He’s really just trying to support me, while also supporting his pack. What an awful spot for him to be in when the two positions seem so diametrically opposed. “But at the same time, Ren, you can’t honestly think any of us will be okay leaving you here to suffer. Do you really think so little of us?”
“Do you really think I’ll be okay leaving my entire life behind to trot after you to Bravonne like a good little omega and let you hide me?” I all but snarl, not feeling an ounce of guilt, because I know that’s what they expect from me.
“I’ll be fine here,” I tell him, There isn’t any other option. I refuse to let them be my downfall, to be the reason I crumble.
“But you won’t be, Pixie,” Court says, ignoring all of the warning signs I’m blaring and reaching for me, brushing his knuckle over my flushed cheek. “You’re going to be sick if weleave you. I get that you want to be strong, and you want to be okay without us, but, love, the simple fact is that’s not the way your body works anymore.”
I stare at him feeling unaccountably vulnerable and fragile and weak. He’s right. It's not the way my body—this body that I love, that has supported me in my best times and my worst, the one that has never failed me, even when a near feral alpha damaged it—works anymore. I was able to recover from Frederick Bell’s attack. Not fully. But I can walk. I can dance, even if not professionally.
But this isn’t something I can will my body through.
There are medications that can help with the worst of the symptoms, things I can do to help with the rest of them—like avoid unbonded alphas that aren’t my mate—but my doctor warned me that none of these were considered long term solutions. Mostly because people with RMD don’t live all that long if they don’t reunite with their mates.
She said that the longest anyone has been recorded living with RMD is fifteen years. If that holds for me, I’ll die before my fortieth birthday, childless and alone. And I’ll have to endure forty-five to fifty untended heats before then. Painful ones that will make me want to rip my uterus out with my bare fingers just to escape the pain.
I’d asked about getting a hysterectomy, to see if that would help with just about anything, my life span, the heats, the pain. And the doctor told me ‘no.’ I’d still be sick, my body would still turn on itself, which just seems fucked up.
If fate is going to punish anyone in this stupid situation, it should be the person or people who do the rejecting, whoever it is that turns their back on the gift fate gave them. Not the one who gets rejected. That just seems like kicking when they’re already down and rubbing salt into a wound and countless other idioms like that. Likeyou’ve already been rejected byyour perfect counterpart, let me add nausea, body aches, unmanageable heats, and early death to the emotional pain you’re already under.
What the fuck is that?
But then again the world is a fucked up place and very rarely fair.
I just don’t understand why I was picked to suffer like this, why it was deemed necessary.
I could have gone my whole life and never met this pack. I would have eventually gotten over my fear of alphas—I’m stubborn enough to know that would have been the case—and I would have met a nice pack and fallen in love with them and bonded them and had their babies. But instead I get this.
Five fated mates that refuse to pick me.
