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So, we kissed.

We kissed and kissed and I let him take off my clothes and I let him stroke me between my thighs and use his mouth to make my nipples stiff. I let him tease me and tease me until I was slick and wanting, and I reached for him, and he was soft.

Which was insane, because it had always been so easy for him to get aroused for me.

And I wanted to get him aroused.

Until I realized I was crazy to want that. The image of him in the backseat with her swam in my mind. His bare back, the curves of his bare ass, his head tucked down against her neck. I thought about him licking her again and again, about the way he’d pushed her into the wall to get at his bite.

I pushed him away. “You should go.”

“Please, don’t send me away.” He was heartbroken.

So, he stayed.

But in the morning, my father found out he was there and he wasn’t pleased. He shouted a lot at Damian, and Damian just took it, his head bowed. He said he was sorry, that he was so sorry, that he wished it had never happened.

But my dad didn’t melt for him like I did. My dad made him leave.

I remember that day that I sat out on our porch and I watched the sunrise. It was a beautiful sunrise, which seemed to add insult to injury to everything. Not that I thought that the whole world was supposed to stop because my world had come to a screeching halt. But it hurt that it hadn’t.

All the reminders of how everything else was progressing normally reminded me of how nothing was normal for me, how it felt like simply breathing scratched at my soul.

I remember that I could hear sounds I never heard before, that it was very loud outside. Birds calling to each other as they flew in flocks overhead, the wind rustling the trees, the sounds of cars on the distant road, all things I knew had always been happening but that I had never paid attention to. I was paying attention to them now because everything was blank.

Typically, I’d be spending my time thinking about the day ahead, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to face the day ahead, or any of the days after it.

It was autumn.

It was my senior year of high school.

Damian had graduated the year before, but he was taking a year off and working full time so that we could go to college together. Maybe if Damian’d had parents who were alive, they would have told him not to do that, not to build his life around a girl, even if that girl was his scent match.

And maybe if he’d gone off to college, this would have happened anyway, but it would have felt different, because it would have been a slow drift apart, not this shock to the system.

And not with my best friend.

When I could think, all I could think about was how my whole life had been derailed. I had been supposed to marry him, to be the cwen of the pack, to have his children, to be part of this community. I had looked forward and it had all been set and planned and safe.

Now, when I looked into the future, I couldn’t see anything at all.

It was entirely blank.

So, I watched the sunrise and I watched the birds fly overhead, going south for the winter, and I huddled into an old sweatshirt that used to belong to Damian, and I existed from moment to moment until the bond sickness hit for the first time.

I remember that I was getting ready to go to school. Everyone said that I shouldn’t. Everyone said that I needed time. It was only two days after it had happened, after all.

But one day sitting outside watching the leaves fall off the trees and contemplating the blankness of my future was enough for me. I was going to lose my mind. I needed to do something. I didn’t want to move on, but I needed a break from the pain of it all, something to take my mind off the agony.

I was pouring cereal into a bowl for my breakfast when the first cramp cut into me. Honestly, those first ones felt like menstrual cramps, and maybe it was all controlled by the same mechanism, I wasn’t sure. But it quickly progressed to waves and waves of pain that went all the way through me, and nausea.

I never threw up from bond sickness, but I tried. I would retch over the toilet, trying to bring something up, sure that I’d feel better if I just vomited. But I couldn’t throw up and the nausea lingered.

At first, Damian made the bond sickness better.

When my dad found me in a ball on the floor, cereal scattered everywhere, my hair still wet from the shower, moaning Damian’s name, my dad called Damian, and Damian was there right away.

Damian gathered me up and took me back to my bedroom, and I curled into him, and he wrapped himself around me, and it was better.