Safe Word Lobo (Lunar River Series)

1.You Mean It?

ALEX

"How did I end up here?" I thought we were happy. I thought my mate would never treat me like that and yet, here we stand. Demetrius hasn't spoken to me and barely looks my way. He blew up on me a week ago, on Christmas day in fact. He refused to tell me anything and said that I should know what I did wrong. We welcomed the new year separately because of it. While everyone else counted down and drank singing songs with one another, I cried. I brought in the new year crying like I used to do so many times before. 

I dropped down on my bed, tired and lonely. I was finally getting used to having my mates warmth constantly around me but now, its gone. Then again, I should consider myself luckily to have experienced that warmth at all. My life had never been easy. Never did I find happiness and it all started when my mother left. I can't believe I never questioned my father. I had to find out the hard way.

Even though my father told me she died, I later found out she was alive and happily living somewhere else. She simply didn't want us. Well that's not true. She actually didn't want me and my father blamed me when she rejected him because of it. I was only two years old when it happened. How am I to blame? My dad then packed up our things and we left our country, Wilderness Den, ending up here in Lunar River roaming around for a few months before former Alpha Jude found us and took us in.

I am surprised my father was able to make the journey with me being so little. We could have been attacked by rogues or starved us to death really. He must have really been determined to get away from anything that reminded him of mother. No one takes kind to rogues roaming around with no where to go. Rogues are usually treated as a threat to a pack. So being lucky enough to meet Former Alpha Jude must have really been the key to our survival.  

My dad could never stand humans either, which I learned on my own through a few interactions when he would take me to school. So living among them would also have been off the table. 

I honestly don't remember any of the travel though since I was so young. So for me, my whole life started here. My father and I had our own small cottage close to the pack house too. I guess the clearest memories I could recall are around five years old with fragments here and there from before. However, one feeling I could remember as clear as day since I was three, and that is that I hated being alone with my father. 

The only happiness I've ever had began when Cassius was brought into the pack. We quickly became friends back then. I spent so much time playing with him just to avoid my father. But it also helped that he was one of the few I was closest in age with. Eventually, I developed a major crush on him. It's what confirmed for me that I was indeed gay. Yet another thing my dad would learn to hate me for.

Unfortunately, because of my dad, I lost all my trust in male figures with authority. At least I had until Atlas showed me how to trust again and so did Demetrius. Stupid Demetrius. I forgot I was thinking about that jerk.

I tossed in my bed in a huff, hating the cold that the lonely sheets provided. I missed his body heat next to me. I needed my mate and his touch. Being depressed and covered in self-hate was all too much of a comfortable state to stay in. Nothing made me feel worse than the dread and hopelessness that knotted in my throat. Being alone and in my thoughts meant being trapped within the walls I'd built around me. 

Tears pooled within my ears like wells that kept my sadness hidden from the world. These familiarities of having lived in fear my whole life crept back in like licked wounds. I didn't even tell him I loved him yet. Now I'm left alone. I truly don't know what I did to get Demetrius so mad that he'd storm off.