Chapter 9 - The Wrong Touch
1839 Words
Third-Person Limited – Kendra, then Dominic
By the next day, the Karina Disaster had spread through the school like a virus.
Every hallway Kendra walked down, she heard it.
“Did you smell her in Bio, bro?”
“It was like an axe and a dead raccoon.”
“Her face looked like someone baked a cake on it—”
Kendra kept her head down, lips pressed tightly together. She didn’t smile. Not even when a freshman muttered, “Eau de Locker Room” and nearly choked laughing.
She wasn’t stupid.
She knew people would connect the dots eventually. Joint Service. The milkshake. The glitter slime. Now Karina’s cursed cosmetics and swap-out gym outfit.
The only thing that surprised her was how long it took for Dominic to say something.
Lunchtime.
Kendra sat at the same table with her girls near the back of the cafeteria. The room buzzed with the usual mess of smells and sounds—pizza, fries, too many bodies, overlapping conversations. Trays clattered. Someone’s soda fizzed over at another table.
“Okay, but you have to see this angle,” Erica said, sliding her phone across the table. A blurry photo of Karina in the hot-pink “PRINCESS IN TRAINING” top, face twisted mid-yell, filled the screen.
Jeah wheezed. “She looks like one bootleg Barbie.”
“Guys,” Jennie said softly, “we should probably let it go now.”
“I let the slime go,” Kendra said, stabbing a fry. “This is balance.”
She was mid-chew when the noise in the cafeteria dipped.
Not all the way to silence—just lowered, like someone had turned down the volume.
Her shoulders tensed automatically.
She didn’t have to turn to know why.
Dominic and his pack were on the move.
She heard the shift in the crowd—chairs scraping, whispers starting, the faint sound of Karina’s perfume announcing her before she actually appeared.
“Don’t look,” Kendra muttered to her friends. “It’s like feeding pigeons. They’ll never leave.”
Of course, they all looked.
Of course, they all went quiet.
Dominic stopped at the end of their table, tray in hand, his friends fanned out behind him like a wall. Karina stood slightly to his right, arms crossed tightly, chin tipped up, her jaw still caked at the edges with slightly off-colored powder. She’d scrubbed, but not all of it was gone.
Kendra didn’t stand.
She took another slow bite of food instead.
“What?” she asked flatly, finally lifting her eyes to Dominic’s.
He looked down at her with a calm so controlled it made her uneasy.
“So, this is how it’s going to be?” he asked. “You humiliate my girlfriend, then sit here as if nothing happened?”
“Your girlfriend humiliated herself,” Kendra said. “I just added seasoning.”
A few people snorted.
Dominic’s jaw ticked. “Someone broke into her locker,” he said louder, pitching his voice so it carried. “Messed with her perfume, her makeup, her clothes.”
More faces turned toward them. Conversations quieted.
“Could’ve been anyone,” Kendra said, her heart beating a little faster now.
“Could’ve,” Dominic agreed. “Except not everyone just happened to get a mysterious bucket of pink slime dropped on them yesterday. Not everyone has lock-picking skills, as I suppose someone from a 3rd world country like yours would.”
His gaze sharpened. “But you do, right? Atchinson?”
A ripple went through the crowd.
Kendra’s blood ran cold for a second. He didn’t know for sure—he was guessing. But it landed too close.
She stared back, not blinking. “You got proof?” she asked. “Or just a big mouth?”
“Come on,” he said, gesturing around them. “Who else has a reason? You show up here, the first week you punch Antonio, slam Karina into a table, and suddenly her stuff starts acting cursed? You think people are stupid?”
Some heads nodded around them. Others stayed carefully neutral. No one spoke up against him.
Kendra could feel her friends stiffen at her sides.
Dominic stepped closer, past the edge of the table now.
“This isn’t Jamaica,” he said, and something about the way he said it made her want to break the tray over his head. “You don’t get to come here and treat this school like your personal war zone because you’ve got anger issues and nothing to lose.”
“That’s enough,” Jennie whispered. “Kendra, don’t—”
Kendra’s vision narrowed.
“Nothing to lose?” she repeated. “Because why—my dad doesn’t donate your tuition?”
Dominic’s eyes glinted. “Because you’re temporary,” he said softly, but still loud enough for everyone to hear. “You’re here for what—one year? Two? Then you go back. This place will still be ours. Karina will still be ours. You? You’re just a messy guest who doesn’t know how to behave.”
Heat climbed up Kendra’s neck.
If he had stopped there, maybe she could’ve swallowed it.
He didn’t.
He looked down at her tray, then back at her, and his lip curled.
“Try not to eat the whole buffet next time, Atchinson,” he added. “I know back home they starved you of good food, but damn.”
The laugh that tore through the cafeteria this time was brutal.
Some people laughed like they didn’t want to, hands covering their mouths. Others didn’t bother hiding it.
Whale.
Buffet.
Starved.
Words she’d heard before, from strangers and family and herself on bad days. Words she usually turned into armor or weapons.
Right now, they felt like nails.
Her chest burned.
Her hands shook under the table.
“Kendra,” Erica hissed, “don’t. Please don’t.”
The worst part was that Karina was watching, her eyes bright, drinking it like water. Every flinch. Every breath.
She wanted Kendra to explode.
She wanted Kendra to swing.
She wanted another spectacle.
Kendra slowly set her fork down.
“If I stay here any longer,” she said quietly, “I’m going to catch a charge.”
She stood up.
She did not look at Dominic again.
She stepped away from the table, ignoring the lingering stares, forcing her feet to move toward the cafeteria doors and not toward his face.
“Hey,” his voice cut through the buzz. “I’m talking to you.”
“Good for you,” she snapped, not slowing, not looking back.
Her eyes were on the exit. On escape. On oxygen that didn’t smell like fries and humiliation.
She felt his hand close around her wrist.
It wasn’t the rough shove from before. It wasn’t a violent jerk. It was just a grip—firm, hot, fingers wrapping around her skin.
She spun, ready to unleash every filthy, painful word she had in her vocabulary—
—and everything stopped.
The cafeteria noise dropped to a muffled hum. The smells of food, sweat, and expensive body spray thinned under something sharper, warmer—like pine after rain and smoke on cold air.
He was close.
Closer than he’d ever been.
For one surreal second, all she saw were his eyes—dark, blown wide, as if he’d just seen a ghost. His fingers tightened just slightly around her wrist, as if something beyond him had grabbed on, too.
Kendra’s heart lurched.
Not in a romantic way.
More like," What the hell is happening? Why is the room tilting? Why do I feel like I just stepped into an elevator way?
“Let go,” she said, but it came out softer than she meant it to.
His lips parted. His voice didn’t sound like his when he spoke.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he whispered.
Kendra’s skin prickled.
She yanked her hand back.
The pressure broke. The noise of the cafeteria rushed back in—laughter, whispers, the clatter of trays. The weird heaviness in her chest loosened just enough for anger to rush in.
“What is wrong with you?” she hissed.
He didn’t answer.
He just stared at her as if she’d personally rewired his DNA.
She turned on her heel and walked out of the cafeteria without looking back.
Whatever that weird electric moment had been?
She shoved it into the same locked box she kept all her other feelings in.
Ignored it.
And, as far as she was concerned, she never thought about it again.
Same Moment – Dominic
When Dominic’s hand closed around her wrist, his world cracked.
He’d meant to stop her.
That was it.
He hadn’t even thought about what he was doing, not really. Just saw her walking away, felt the sting of her ignoring him, like he was no one, and reacted.
Then his fingers touched her skin.
And the bond snapped into place.
Her scent hit him first—no, not hit. Slammed into him. That faint warmth he’d been catching around her for weeks, suddenly magnified a hundred times over. Underneath cafeteria grease and shampoo and school air was something else entirely:
Warm sugar. Spice. Ocean wind. Home.
His wolf surged up so violently he almost staggered.
Mate.
The word wasn’t spoken out loud, but it rattled through his bones anyway.
The cafeteria faded. The fluorescent lights overhead, the scrape of chairs, the smell of fries—all of it bled out into nothing.
There was just his hand on her wrist, her pulse thudding against his fingers, and her eyes locked onto his—wide, angry, confused.
His pupils grew wide to drink in more of her.
Up close, he noticed stupid details. A tiny freckle near her temple. The faint scar on her lower lip that he’d never seen from far away. The shade of brown in her eyes wasn’t just brown; there were lighter flecks in them, like sun on molasses.
His chest squeezed, hard enough to hurt.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he breathed.
Kendra’s face flickered—from anger to something like surprise, to anger again.
She ripped her wrist out of his hold like his touch burned.
“What is wrong with you?” she snapped.
Everything, he thought numbly.
He couldn’t say it.
He couldn’t say anything.
He just watched her walk away; his wolf howling behind his ribs like someone had slammed a door in its face.
The cafeteria slammed back into focus.
Noise.
Smell.
Stares.
His pack, looming near him like a shield and a cage all at once.
“Yo,” Antonio said under his breath. “Dom. What was that?”
Dominic didn’t answer.
He couldn’t. His tongue felt useless. His brain had latched onto one single, horrible truth and was refusing to let go.
Kendra Atchinson—the loud, stubborn, infuriating Jamaican girl he’d been tripping, mocking, and punishing for weeks—
Was his mate.
- Writer
