“Wow, could you imagine if that really did happen?” I asked, horrified at the idea of it.
“Well, yeah, I know someone. Poor girl,” Ivy replied.
“Who?” I asked, curious to know.
Ivy hesitated, but then replied, “Oh, just a girl I went to high school with. We lost touch.”
“What happened to her?” I was dying to know the story now.
After a beat, Ivy replied, “Well, I had a friend named Katie growing up who had a pup with someone who wasn’t her mate, and the father left her after he found his true mate. Then, to rub salt in the wound,hertrue mate rejected her after he realized she’d had someone else’s pup. Things were a little more traditional twenty or so years ago.”
“What happened to Katie?” I asked.
“I tried to be there for her and support her while everyone else in the pack shunned her. But, after I started having my own pups, it was very difficult. She stayed about four or five years after her son was born, but it became very hard once the father of her son had a pup with his own mate, and she had to witness the two of them raise their pup all while ignoring her existence. Her parents found a new pack to accept them out in the Midwest, and they all moved there together. She wrote me a letter, not long after, to inform me that she told her new pack that her mate had died.”
“Did she ever find another mate?” This story was piquing my curiosity.
“Actually, I don’t know! We lost touch.” She looked pensive. “Maybe I should look her up on Facebook! Everything’s on the internet these days. Much harder to hide your past!”
After we finished our coffees, Lucy and I drove to my house so we could go for a run in our wolf forms to burn off some of the desserts. My house was on the outskirts of the pack, so my backyard was very forested. We walked a few yards in until we found a place to leave our clothes and shifted into our wolves.
Lucy’s wolf emulated her, with a tall, elegant build, thick, golden cream fur, and blue eyes. She only glanced my way for a moment before we made a break for it, savoring the freedom of running through nature, succumbing to our animal brains. My paws blissfully bounced off the dirt path as tall trees surrounded us, the shadows of their sun-dappled leaves and pines flickering along the ground. The wind whipped through our fur while we dodged roots and branches, hopping over fallen tree trunks. The scent of wet wood, moss, and skunk cabbage filled my nostrils, delighting me in this form—the great outdoors enveloping me in all its glory. After some time, we stopped at a brook to take a break. I lapped at the water heartily, parched from the run. Once Lucy and I were both satiated, we stood side by side, staring down at our reflections in the water. My wolf’s bright amber eyes stared back at me, surrounded by brown fur, tipped in black, especially at the ears. The brown, thick fur turned white as it disappeared into my underside. It wasn’t often I looked at myself in this form, and the image never failed to mesmerize me.
Lucy interrupted my observation with a mindlink.“Well, some good news is that I spoke with Luke on the phone last night, and he agrees with me that if we don’t find our mates within the next two years then we should become chosen mates.”
“Why two years? That seems a bit arbitrary,”I replied, finding myself annoyed by the topic of conversation she’d chosen. Lucy and I had spent a year discussing, ad nauseam, the notion of taking Luke as a chosen mate. She knew my stance on the matter—it was completely disrespectful to the Moon Goddess to reject a fated mate for a chosen one.
“Because we love each other, and we don’t want to wait any longer to be together. Plus, at twenty-one I’ll be old enough to drink at my own wedding. I tried to convince him that we should just go ahead and move in together as soon as he comes back, but he told me that we need to wait. I asked how long, and he originally said until I’m at least thirty, but I talked him down.”
A dull pain stirred within me, as if my inner wolf were aching, a feeling that had become familiar every time I conversed about Luke with Lucy. Although I hadn’t seen him in almost two years, I had a hard time forgetting him, and to this day held an unexpected longing for him.
I couldn’t even say for sure what it was about him that I coveted. Was it because he was the first man that I ever had a carnal attraction to? Was it how much we seemed to have in common? I knew my crush on him was silly bordering on crazy, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to push him from my mind. And it didn’t help that he was Lucy’s favorite topic of discussion.
“But what if you meet your true mate and realize you’re meant to be with them?”I asked, trying a different approach with Lucy, hoping she’d see how foolish she was being.
“I can’t imagine that happening. There’s just no way. The way I feel about him I will never feel about anyone else. The Moon Goddess made a huge mistake when she didn’t fate us to each other. Either way, it’s almost archaic, the whole idea of it—like an arranged marriage. We should be allowed to choose who we love. Why does some invisible person get to decide for us?”
“The Moon Goddess doesn’t make mistakes! There’s a reason she mated you to someone else.”I was quickly becoming exasperated by this conversation and my need to explain the obvious to Lucy.
“Look, I know you’re really religious but I’m not, and anyway, I can feel he’s meant to be my chosen mate. We love each other. Plus, he’s amazing in bed!”
I cringed internally at her statement, envisioning the two of them in the act with their perfect bodies, both of which I’d, unfortunately, seen in the buff, and was now able to conjure a full visual. I tried to wipe it from my mind as I blurted,“I hope you’re at least using protection! You just heard the story your mom told us about Katie.”
“Calm down, PJ! We’re using condoms. If this place wasn’t so backward and the clinic didn’t refuse to prescribe it, spouting nonsense about interfering with the Moon Goddess’s will, I’d go on birth control. I’ve thought about going to a human clinic to get it but, anyway, who cares if I get pregnant. We’re going to be chosen mates anyway. This would just speed things along.”
I started to feel nauseous imagining Lucy getting pregnant with Luke’s pup. Although they had been dating for almost four years now and were clearly in love, it felt wrong. It was wrong. She was fated to someone else. Luke was fated to someone else. Then, I thought something that I couldn’t even admit to myself that I thought—Luke could be fated to me. I instantly pushed the idea from my mind, not knowing where it came from.
But I did know where it came from. It was all because of that one day before he left, a month before my eighteenth birthday. After that one day, I suddenly didn’t want him to be with anyone else, as irrational as it all seemed. I realized, with horror, that I wanted him to be with me. But there was nothing I could do without being a terrible friend and, quite frankly, seeming crazy. Lucy had been with him for four years and he clearly loved her, not me. Out of every unmated male in the entire pack, I had to develop a crush on my best friend’s boyfriend. But, as much as I tried, I couldn’t forget the feeling I had as we sat next to each other that one fateful night—the overwhelming feeling that he should be mine.
I couldn’t bear to talk about Luke anymore and decided to change the subject.“So, what do you think of Blake?”
“I saw the two of you getting hot and heavy at the beach last week! Maybe you should hook up with him! It would be good for you!”
“Hook up with the future alpha!? First of all, I’m not hooking up with anyone until I meet my mate. And second of all, what makes you think the future alpha would want to hook up with me?”
“Because he’s an unmated man and you’re cute! He was clearly enjoying you all over his body at the beach. There’s nothing wrong with having a little fun before you settle down. Just don’t tell your parents.”She paused and appeared lost in thought for a moment, then continued,“Besides, this would be great! You and I are best friends and Luke is Blake’s future beta! We could go on double dates!”
“What? That’s ridiculous! Blake and I are not happening. Anyway, I’m pretty sure he’s not looking for a girlfriend right now.”