He Growled At Me

So here is what a normal person would do if they walked into biology and locked eyes with their fated mate. I don't know actually. Smile? Say hi? Have a single normal human reaction? Here is what Dxxon Cole did. He growled at me. In the middle of class. In front of everyone. This low rumbling sound that I felt in my chest more than heard, and his hands were gripping the edge of his desk so hard I genuinely thought the desk might break, and he was looking at me like I had ruined his entire life just by existing in his doorway. And then he got up, grabbed his bag, said "I'm leaving" to the teacher in a voice that did not invite discussion, and walked straight past me out of the room. He had to pass really close to get through the door. For one second we were like a foot apart and I swear the air between us did something, it kind of crackled, and I felt this PULL, this actual physical pull toward him like my whole body had decided something without asking me first. Then he was gone, and the door slammed, and I was standing there bright red while twenty werewolves in Advanced Bio stared at me with their mouths open. The teacher cleared her throat. "Take any open seat, dear." I sat down next to a boy who scooted his chair away from me like I was radioactive. Lunch was worse. Obviously lunch was worse. I found Briar and she basically dragged me to a table in the corner, and she was talking really fast and her eyes were huge. "Skylar. SKYLAR. The whole school is talking about it. Is it true? Did Dxxon Cole's eyes glow when he saw you?" "I don't want to talk about it," I said. "That means yes!!" Briar grabbed my arm. "Skylar, do you understand what that means? Glowing eyes. That's — that's the mate bond. That's not a crush, that's not a maybe, that's the Moon Goddess literally pointing at the two of you and going THOSE ONES. And it happened to the ALPHA. The future alpha of our whole pack just got mate-bonded to the new girl on her first day. This is the biggest thing to happen at this school since the gym flooded." "He growled at me," I said. "He growled at me and walked out. That doesn't seem like a fairytale, Briar. That seems like a guy who hates me." And Briar got quiet, which was scary, because Briar was never quiet. "He doesn't hate you," she said finally. "He can't. That's not how it works, you literally cannot hate your mate, the bond doesn't allow it. But Skylar..." She bit her lip. "Dxxon's whole thing, his whole sad rich boy thing, is that he doesn't WANT to be alpha. Everyone knows it. His dad's been grooming him his whole life and Dxxon's spent years acting like he doesn't care about anything so nobody can use anything against him. And a mate? A mate is the biggest thing you can care about. A mate is a weakness. A mate is the one thing he can't pretend not to feel." I looked across the cafeteria. Dxxon hadn't left school after all. He was sitting at his table, the alpha's table, the one Briar told me to stay away from, completely alone, and he was not eating, and he was not talking, and he was staring down at the table like it had answers on it. And then, like he felt me looking — and he probably did, that's the awful thing about a bond, you can FEEL it — he looked up. Right at me. All the way across the cafeteria. He didn't growl this time. He didn't glare. For just a second his face did something completely different, something open and scared and young, like the real Dxxon Cole had come up to the surface just for a second to look at me. Then he shut it down. I watched him do it. I watched him put the bored cold mask back on like a door closing. He picked up his bag and left the cafeteria, and the pull in my chest followed him the whole way out, and I knew, sitting there with my untouched cafeteria meatloaf, that surviving senior year just got a million times more complicated.