Chapter Two
1073 Words
Mira POV
I didn't tell anyone what happened in the cafeteria. Not my one almost friend, Della, who I quite ate lunch with, not in any way that counted. Not my mother, who would only worry more than she already did every single day. Definitely not my wolf, who had been insufferable about it for three straight days and showed no signs of letting up.
I'm telling you what I felt, she insisted again on Thursday morning, while I ran our usual loop through the woods before the sun was even up. That was a mate pull. I know what that feels like, even if you don't want to admit it.
"You don't know anything. You've never felt it before either."
I know it wasn't nothing. I felt it too, Mira. It went through both of us at the same time.
I pushed harder, faster, until my lungs burned too much to keep arguing with her. The trees blurred past, dark shapes rushing by in the gray light before dawn. Out there, with dirt under my boots and my heart pounding from something that wasn't fear, I didn't have to be small. I didn't have to shrink myself into a shape nobody noticed. Nobody was watching. Nobody was keeping score.
Out there, I was just fast. Just strong. Just mine, in a way that nothing else in my life ever felt like it belonged only to me.
By the time I got home to shower and change, the feeling from the cafeteria had mostly faded into something I could pretend I imagined. Almost, but not quite. It sat under my skin the whole walk to school, a low hum I couldn't shake no matter how hard I tried to focus on anything else.
School was the same as always. Bree found new ways to make me feel two inches tall, tripping me in the hallway between second and third period, "forgetting" to pass back my quiz until the bell had already rung so the teacher marked me late. I let her. I kept my head down through Combat Theory, through lunch, through the slow crawl of hours until the final bell rang and I could finally breathe again.
It was in the school parking lot, walking toward the bus with my bag heavy on my shoulder, that everything changed.
"Hey."
I turned, and my whole body locked up, because Ryder Blackwood was standing three feet away from me, looking at me like he was trying to solve a puzzle he hadn't asked to be given.
"Um. Hi?" It came out more like a question than I meant it to, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.
"You're Mira, right? Mira Hart."
The fact that he knew my name was somehow more shocking than if he hadn't. In four years of school, I don't think he had ever once looked in my direction long enough to learn it. "Yeah. That's me."
He didn't say anything else right away. He just looked at me, and I felt that same lurch in my chest from the cafeteria, stronger this time, like my whole body was leaning toward him without my permission, some invisible thread pulling taut between us. Up close his eyes were gold so pale they were almost silver, and there was something raw and confused in them, like he was fighting himself and losing badly.
"Ryder!" Bree's voice cut across the parking lot, sharp and territorial, carrying easily over the noise of buses pulling out. She jogged over with two of her friends trailing behind her, and the second she reached us her eyes flicked between me and Ryder like she was trying to do math that wasn't adding up right. "What's going on? Why are you talking to her?"
"Nothing." Ryder's voice went flat, careful, controlled in a way that felt deliberate. He took a step back from me, putting distance between us like it cost him something, and I felt that lurch in my chest turn into something that ached deep and sudden. "I was just asking her about an assignment. It's nothing. I'll see you around, Bree."
He walked off with her without looking back at me once, not even a glance over his shoulder.
I stood there in the parking lot for a long moment, my wolf whining low and confused in the back of my mind, pacing in tight, restless circles. I told myself, again, that it was nothing. That it meant nothing. That boys like Ryder Blackwood didn't notice girls like me for any reason that mattered.
But that night I couldn't sleep. I kept replaying the way his eyes found mine, the way my whole body seemed to recognize him before my brain even caught up to what was happening. I had heard the older wolves talk about the mate pull before, back when I still had a friend or two who would gossip with me about it, how it started small and grew stronger the closer the Ceremony got, how by the night of your eighteenth birthday it became undeniable, impossible to ignore.
My birthday was in six weeks.
You felt it too, my wolf said quietly, calmer now, more certain. I know you did.
"I felt something," I admitted into the dark of my room, staring up at the ceiling. "That doesn't mean it's real."
It's real. And Mira, if he's really ours, and he rejects us in front of the whole pack because of who we look like on paper instead of who we actually are, that is going to break something in us that might never heal all the way.
"He won't have a choice about how he feels. Nobody gets a choice about that part."
He'll have a choice about what he does with it. That part is always a choice, no matter what anyone tells themselves.
I didn't have an answer for that. I pulled my blanket up to my chin and stared at the ceiling until the sky outside started to turn gray, and somewhere in that gray, exhausted hour, a small, treacherous hope started building in my chest that I didn't know how to put out, no matter how many times I told myself I was being foolish.
Because for the first time in ten years, someone had looked at me like I was worth looking at.
And I was terrified of how much I liked it.
- Writer
