Soul-Mate (Immortal Love 1) (11 page)

Regarding the teenage hybrids, they were stronger and almost invulnerable, which was what made them respected and, most of the time, feared by other species. Even with the differences, all the students were accepted by their peers. For me, it was actually weird how well they all got along. It was clearly an open-minded community, and it was growing on me.

The principal, James Ward, was extremely nice to me, even while I was pretending not to understand his kind gestures as seduction. He was a charming man, but I was not falling for his twisted game. Maybe he was just like that all the time. He flirted with the other teachers, especially the good-looking ones. He was probably having sex with some of them, but he was not having any luck with me, that was for sure. I was with Shane, and I would be faithful to him. No matter what others would say about my panther side, I wasn’t going to be unfaithful to my boyfriend.
Yes, my boyfriend
! Because that’s what we were, in Shane’s words. I was his girlfriend, and it felt strangely nice to have a boyfriend as sweet and caring as Shane.

Let me clear up any confusion about feline shifters. They are known for being unfaithful to their mates. They mate for life like werewolves and vampires or other shifters, but they like to fool around. I was not like that, but I knew many that were. Jason was one of them. My cousin didn’t have a mate, because he was a hybrid, but he couldn’t be faithful to a girlfriend (not that he actually knew what the meaning of the word girlfriend was). He had a lot of girlfriends scattered around the country. I was sure that, even if he had a mate, he wouldn’t be true to her or him. But I had no intentions of being unfaithful to Shane while we were dating. Besides, I couldn’t care less about Mr. Ward or any other guy in town, for that matter.

Sometimes, I wondered if Shane was like Jason. But Shane only had eyes for me, and I was clever enough to realize that fact and be amazed by it. While Jason was always on the lookout for the next girl to seduce, sleep with, and dump, Shane was not. There were a lot of good-looking women in town, and he never seemed to be aware of them.

I was letting my guard down because Shane was unlike any other guy I’d dated before. Everybody loved him. They respected him. Even the girls I taught seemed to be jealous of me, because most of them had a crush on him. The ones who were werewolves seemed more jealous than the others, as if they knew something I didn’t. Sometimes, I would catch pieces of their conversation. Normally, it was about how Shane was gorgeous and sexy and how they couldn’t understand why he dated a human. Humans were weak, narrow-minded, and breakable. They weren’t good enough to be trusted, and Shane would eventually have his heart broken. And then they would argue about who would mend his bleeding heart after I left him.

I would roll my eyes, annoyed about my private love life being the subject of conversation at school, and even more annoyed by the fact that the werewolves thought that I could hurt Shane. As if I could really hurt him when they were the lucky ones who had a predestinated soul-mate! They all had a soul-mate. He had a soul-mate, too, whom he would eventually find.

Slowly, every day, that thought whispered darkly inside my mind, louder and louder, ruining my happiness and reminding me that my feelings were getting stronger for him as each day passed. Losing Shane to another woman was something I didn’t want to ever happen. Nothing could make Shane stay with me if he found his mate, though. It didn’t matter how she looked or how old she was: he was hers and she was his. They were part of one another, and I was the one who would get my heart broken, stepped on, and ground into dust. That was why I just dated hybrids or humans. Or, that is, until I met Shane and had my feet swept right out from under me.

ANNABEL HAD BEEN STRANGELY QUIET
since we arrived home. She had already been quiet in the car, but when we entered the house, the moment I began to kiss her, she gave me some lame excuse about how tired she was. Being tired was the pretext to not making love with me, at least not at that moment. But what was bothering me was not her lack of libido; it was that she was sad and pensive.

I offered to cook dinner, but she claimed that she was not hungry. I offered to massage her neck, but she declined. I almost went out of my mind, trying to understand what was wrong with her and how to fix it.

“What’s wrong with you tonight?” I knelt next to her and pressed her hands to my lips. She sat on the couch, staring at the TV with pensive eyes and a sad face.

“Nothing.”

“You are sad. Did I do anything to make you unhappy?” I wondered. One can never know.

“No.”

“Was it at school? Did something go wrong? Did something strange happen, or did someone say something that made you feel sad?”

“No. School is just fine.”

“Are you homesick?”

“Homesick?” She looked at me differently in some way. My heart clenched inside my chest. “I don’t have a home to be homesick for.” Her words bruised my heart, because she seemed really unhappy, and I would’ve done anything to make her feel better. Besides, I was hoping that her home would be with me. My home was with her, no doubt about it. She had become my whole world.

“You could have a home,” I said gently. I hadn’t talked to her about moving in since the Sunday night I’d almost blown it all with my impatience and had made her think I was a psychopath. Nevertheless, we spent all our free time together, and we just had to get all her stuff from the motel. She already slept there at night and had a lot of stuff hanging around. I loved smelling her in my place and seeing her books, clothes, and beauty products scattered around.

“I think―” She paused and sighed. “All this is a huge mistake.”

I stopped breathing and then gasped as I got up. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought everything was fine, more than fine even. I was head over heels for her. If she intended to kill me with pain, she just had to say that she didn’t want me anymore and that would be it. Living without her wasn’t an option. Not when I’d spent two hundred years waiting to meet her, and I’d almost lost my faith in finding her or believing she existed. My mate had only existed for twenty-three years. She was a human and didn’t understand what a mate was. She couldn’t recognize me as hers and only hers for life.
Maybe it was about time that I explained to her that we were meant to be and tell her that whatever was bothering her, we could talk about and fix.

“What’s a mistake?”

“Us,” she whispered, as if she was afraid to say it out loud. She avoided my eyes and moved uncomfortably on the couch. My heart by then had stopped beating.

“Why?”

“It’s getting too intense,” she explained, making me stare at her, eyes wide open.

“And why is that a problem?”

She was so complicated! I could almost see all her walls become reinforced with concrete or maybe adamantium. Yes, I was a
Wolverine
fan. Not important right now. What
was
important was that it was hard to make Anna trust me and open up. It was hard to understand what she felt for me. Her words were killing me. Was she already sick and tired of me? Was I not letting her breathe, not giving her the space she needed to feel happy? I knew she was reluctant about letting someone in her life, but I couldn’t help but be hopelessly romantic around her.
She was mine!

I could feel my wolf howl from pain inside my head!
Please let me listen to what she’s saying.

“We should just―break up,” she said with a serious face, no trace of feelings for my alarm. She didn’t answer my question; she simply confessed what was crossing her mind.

I could not find anything else to say for a moment. I was panicking at her words, and I only wanted to hold her until she would promise to never leave me. I had to tell her how I felt and understand why she thought we should break up. I had to, before my wolf went all mad and got self-destructive
. We loved her.

“I don’t want that. I love you!” I almost felt my voice disappearing. Being rejected by my mate was excruciatingly painful.

“
What
?” she almost screamed, seeming terrified by my confession. “
What
?” Now she was actually screaming, and I woke up from my numb state of her rejection.

Damn
! It
was
too soon to say it. I could tell by the panic in her eyes, by how she began to tremble and hold her hands together really tight.
But isn’t that what a woman normally wants to hear from a man?
I couldn’t let her leave me. If she was feeling insecure all of a sudden about my feelings, I had to fix that. But I didn’t expect her to react in panic to my confession. I really couldn’t understand what was crossing her mind that would make her want to break up with me. We were happy. I made her happy. I was sure of that.
So why did she want to leave me?

“You heard me. I love you,” I repeated. The harm was done. I’d wanted to tell her every time we made love. Every time she’d smiled at me.

“That’s not funny,” she said in a serious tone and got up like she was offended.

“Annabel, I’m not kidding!” I matched her serious tone with a bit of annoyance. I should’ve been the one feeling offended for being rejected.

“
Shit
!”

I opened my mouth with surprise. Okay, that wasn’t the kind of expression I expected to hear from her in reaction to “I love you.” I was upset now. “I say I love you and all you have to say is shit?”

“Yes. The world is all messed up!”

“Care to explain that?”

“Since when do men say I love you without being threatened or forced to by a woman? And you tell me that out of the blue? As if I needed
that
burden on my shoulders!”

“Burden? My love is a burden to you? So, we can have sex, but I can’t love you? Is that the fucked-up idea you have of a relationship?” I was extremely mad. Mad and feeling used, like I might die at any moment because of her lack of feelings for me. My heart seemed to want to burst out of my chest or just explode.
How could my soul-mate say something like that to me? Didn’t she feel anything for me? Was I just a hobby?

“Of course not,” she replied with a sad voice and shining eyes. She was holding back tears, to my surprise. I sat on the couch, my rage gone, because she seemed miserable. “It’s just that―I realized something and I don’t―I didn’t―I never thought you could say that to me. And even if you say it,” she continued, wiping the tears from her eyes and facing me, “we cannot be together.”

“Why not, Anna?” I was trying to understand what would make her say something like that.

“Shane…” She sounded desperate. “This is just a hobby for you, us as a couple. You don’t really think we have a future together. I’ve had a good time with you, but I have to put a stop to this before I get hurt.”

“I would never hurt you. I love you, Annabel.”

“Stop saying that!”

It was like my sweet tone and new confession had made her mad. It was like I was being evil to her and not sweet, just opening my heart. Like my words had hurt her. That made no sense at all.
Was she just crazy? Just my damn luck, finding another crazy woman in my life!

“I love you!” And I felt like cursing by adding a “fucking” in the middle of the words “I” and “love.” I was trying not to be mad, but I was trembling, I was losing it.
Why in the hell wouldn’t she believe me
? It was not like I was going around telling every woman I saw that I loved her. I had never said that to anyone before. Only my mate would receive those words. And it felt so good to finally say them! But she just got angrier.

“You don’t even know me! You don’t even understand half of me! You don’t know anything of my life, of my pain, fears, and wishes! So don’t you dare tell me you love me!”

“I don’t need to know anything about your past to love you. And you are not inside my head, so you don’t know what I know about you, what I feel about you. Don’t you dare tell me I don’t know you! I know you. I care for you! I listen to everything you say to me about yourself, anything you think is safe to tell me. I hold you tight when you sleep to make your bad dreams go away. I love you,
this
Annabel, who you are to me, and even if you have any other side of you, I would love that, too. I even love the crazy one you are showing me right now. I don’t understand what you are so afraid of, what makes you want to push me away, but I will not let you go without fighting to make you stay! Do I make myself clear?”

I was breathless when I was done talking, so I breathed deep several times. My words came out angrier than I’d wished them to. I think they had some kind of effect, because she became quiet, her eyes wide open, attentive to everything I was saying. I think she was holding her breath. All I could think was that she had the most adorable red mouth, and I wanted to bring her close and kiss her. I guess madness was a mutual characteristic.

I waited for her to speak. She seemed to be processing my words or trying to find something to say. And when she said abruptly, “I know you are a werewolf,” it was my turn to be astonished.

IT WAS MY TURN
to sit down and stare at her for a long time without opening my mouth. She didn’t say anything else. She just stared back at me with some kind of guilt in her eyes. My mind was blank, even as I was intrigued by that affirmation—confession—accusation.
What was it? How did she know, or how did she find out that I was a werewolf? And how long did she know that?
They were all good questions.

“Are you rejecting me because you found out I’m a werewolf? Who told you that, and why aren’t you freaking out?” I tried to be rational.

“I already knew it from the first time I saw you.”

My mouth opened wide. "That’s why you said I was not your type,” I mumbled, while a light turned on inside my head, and my wolf tried to take over my thoughts. I made him shut up. I didn’t want to feel cheated, but there was only one way for her to know what I was and for me not to know what she was. “You are a hybrid!” I didn’t extrapolate the rest of what I was thinking, that she was a sexy, breathtaking, deceitful hybrid. I felt like growling.
Why hide it?