ALPHA: Heir Of The Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Notes: Ava-Rain's POV

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- 'This fire rising through my being, burning, I'm not used to seeing you. . .' -

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     I felt his hands on my shoulder and the warmth radiating off of his body once he positioned himself behind me. I stared at the house in front of me and could not recall one moment in time when I had actually felt that I truly belonged inside of it. I grew up in that house, slept and ate in that house, but I had certainly not been nurtured in that house. And it's awful to say-to chalk up fifteen years as just some uneventful experience and belittle every sacrifice that my grandmother made for me-but the truth was those fifteen years were hardly worth remembering, let alone worthy enough to be celebrated or cherished.

     The frowns had outweighed the smiles, the tears outnumbered the laughs, and the stormy days surpassed the amount of sunny days. There were more fights than agreements and more chaos than peace. But there were good days. Days when I did not have to hold my breath when entering a room. Days when I felt—even in the smallest of measurements—love, or something akin to it. They were rare but they had existed. The only problem was that those days and those memories I longed to forget the most because those days and memories hurt most of all. Those days and memories I would much rather have believed were mere figments of my imagination, that they were not real, because the scarce amount of good days and good memories only reinforced the fact that happiness was not infinite; it was not forever.

     I pulled my hands out of the pockets of the sweatshirt Caleb had lent me, and dropped them to my side. My heart, which had been racing, slowly but surely started to retreat to its normal pace thanks to Caleb's comforting touch.

     Caleb.

     I still, for the life of me, could not understand or put into terms as to why I could not let him go. Why I couldn't stop clinging to him. When I should have been fearing this stranger, I was, instead, too intrigued and determined to figure him out. Whenever he touched me, it set me on fire and I wanted nothing more than to be consumed by the flames. When he stayed true to his promise and held me all night, I had not once pulled away nor had I fought against his embrace. I melted into it. The kid was a freaking mystery and although I should have been running in the opposite direction, it was impossible to even entertain the thought of being anywhere away from him.

     At some point last night, he insisted that I stay at his condo. It came out of nowhere; I had been rambling on and on about some insignificant story, which I thought he had been attentively listening to, when he told me-not asked-that I was going to be staying with him. I was taken aback by it, heck, I was still thawing out from the stone cold shock. It had shut me up for ten minutes. Literally. He couldn't possibly have been serious. I mean, we may have treaded past the whole stranger-danger territory. . .sort of. . .but we still had not known each other and I just could not fathom why in the world he would want to help me out in that sort of way. Yet, there I had been, laying in his arms as I actually considered the idea.

     When I found my voice, I attempted to shoot down his command but then he reminded me that my best friend and her family were miles away, leaving me with no place to stay. I had thought about calling Jennifer but had quickly terminated the idea. It wasn't because I thought that maybe she would reject me because Jennifer was a good person and a good friend. Honestly, she was. But she was also annoyingly entitled. That, along with her self-preserving motives and tactical manipulations through the use of her skillfully wielded emotions, made her an enemy of my dark and brooding nation. If I were to turn to Jennifer, she would undoubtedly accept me but not without a list of ridiculous conditions and expectations.