bittersweet green apples, rejection, and the mediocre life of a human

Chapter 3

I kept processing and reprocessing what had happened, still unable to make any sense of it. Werewolves are never wrong about a mate, or so I'd heard, but I've never heard of a refusal either. Somehow, my human self had been lucky enough to be mated to someone, me! And also "lucky" enough to be the first person so pathetic they managed a rejection from their own mate. I was already going further than no loser had ever gone before; one step for me, one giant leap for loserkind. That meant that every poem I wrote would be the closest I'd ever get to finding true love, because true love didn't want me. I was just that... shitty.

I still couldn't make heads or tails of any of this, so I powered on my computer and went to work. I vaguely had an idea that I'd seen him on TV before, and googling for the Werewolf Football League on my hunch helped me find his name - Kyle Summers. Offensive Lineman for the New York Lunars. 23, going on 24, (sweet jesus he hadn't looked that young in person, I thought he was probably nearly thirty) six foot eleven, and three hundred and eighty five pounds. He was huge, even for an alpha werewolf - I guess that's why he plays in the WFL, though. Not like anyone wants to watch anything but the WFL, given the massively more impressive show they can manage. Human football doesn't hold a candle to that high speed insanity. A click later and I could spot nearly eight hundred thousand followers on twitter, and a horde of fangirls nationwide. He was just as handsome in the pictures as I remembered him being in person, and a couple more taps showed that even amongst alpha werewolf football stars he was still hot. Footballcrush.com had given him the heartthrob of the year award, and I almost wanted to write in and let them know about his personality. Digging a little deeper, away from the easy-to-find football stats, I found that he was next in line to be Alpha of the Summer pack, which was massive and owned an entire private preserve just a half an hour out of the city.

I really wished I had found love in a person closer to my league, to be honest. Not that he was unattractive - honestly, he was the kind of guy I would probably secretly fantasize about, but he just wasn't meant for someone like me, and I knew he felt it too. Unlike a lot of people, I had ideally desired more of an Omega werewolf than an Alpha - none of the fame or pack politics or constant attention, just someone who would share my sense of adventure and romance, and complete me the way a soulmate should. It's not like an Omega wouldn't be easy on the eyes anyway, any werewolf would, though I probably couldn't care less about appearances as long as I could find someone to validate my stupid, naive belief in love. I'd always not-so-secretly wanted to be part of a werewolf pack, not for the wealth like most, but just because the idea of having such a close bond with a big family made my lonely self long. My vision blurring, I choked back the crying so I could research one last thing.

There were no articles on rejection. A werewolf named Derek from California says that rejection doesn't exist on Yahoo! Answers. I really was so awful, I'd managed to be the first, but it wasn't exactly a record I wanted in Guinness.

I fell asleep sobbing harder than I ever had before.