Page 21 of Bullied Pretend Mate (Silverville Firefighter Wolves #3)
I wake up to a notification from my bank, which is normally the kind of thing that gives me heart palpitations.
Last year, I was hacked and spent months trying to get everything sorted out.
Add to that the inconsistent pattern of partnership payments, and notifications from my bank are not usually a good thing.
Pulling down at the top of my screen, I read the notification.
Your account has received a deposit.
It’s strange, because I’ve been so busy working on the samples that I haven’t done a sponsored post in a few weeks. I blink away the exhaustion, tapping around on my phone until I find the bank app and open it.
The number that sits on the screen is so big, it takes me a moment to fully process it. I blink, and when none of the zeros disappear, I sit up so fast, Felix’s arm falls from me, and he lets out a low, sleepy noise.
“Maeve?”
But I can barely hear him. My hands have started to shake. Frantically, I click through to the transactions page and find a huge deposit.
Fogue Law Associates TRANSFER OF ESTATE.
“Oh my gods.”
“Is everything okay?” Felix is sitting up fully now, his hand on my shoulder. The touch that’s normally so electric to me feels grounding now, bringing me back down to earth. My hands steady, and I set the phone on the nightstand, turning around and throwing my arms around him.
“Oh, gods !” I say into the crook of his neck. “I got the money! Felix, I got the money!”
“Holy shit!” He sits up, pushing the blankets off and rising up on his knees to match my posture. We stare at each other, on our knees in the middle of the bed, for a long moment.
I let my eyes track over him. The pink hair on his head, softer now, more like cotton candy than the bright pink it was the day he came home with it. Of course, it looked good on him. Everything looks good on him.
His sharp jaw. The dimples on either side of his smiling lips. The stubble on his cheeks that he’ll shave away this morning. I reach out and run my thumb over the line of it, wondering how something can be so soft and so strong at the same time.
Finally, Felix whispers, his talking moving my hand, “That’s great, Maeve. That’s really great.”
I let out a giggle and fall back on the bed, laughing and grabbing a pillow, throwing it across the room in my excitement. I kick my feet like a little girl, and Felix falls gamely on the pillow next to me.
When I look over at him, I know that every day could be like this with him. That we’d be one of those couples who never really got old. That we’d never let the weight of life get us down, even to the end.
But I can’t think about that.
Instead, I think about yesterday.
“I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with you .”
For some stupid reason, I thought that he could see into my head. It’d made my heart stop, the idea that he saw what I wanted and gave it to me without me even admitting to myself that it’s what I wanted.
But, of course, he’d seen Mr. Stone. That line was part of the act. Part of the agreement we made to pretend this thing.
I roll over so I’m not looking right at him and stare up at the ceiling, letting out a terse, adrenaline-filled breath. The number in my bank account flashes at me again and again.
“I’ll order the new machines today,” I say breathlessly, closing my eyes and lifting my hands up, painting the image of the future in the air above me.
“Order the fabrics—if I reach out now, maybe I can hire a couple of seamstresses to help me with the sewing. I have a few friends back in Los Angeles working in costuming. Maybe if they’re between movies—”
When I open my eyes, Felix is sitting up, his arms around his knees, staring down at me with a strange expression.
“I wouldn’t leave until after the wedding,” I add, sitting up and tucking some of the hair behind my ear, my heart beating hard and fast in my chest. Surely, Felix can hear it. “Of course.”
“Yeah,” he says roughly, looking away from me. “Right—yeah. I mean, it would suck to go without you.”
He means it would suck for his parents to be angry with him. For them to try setting him up with someone else.
“Hey,” I say, reaching out and tugging on his sleeve. “I hope you know me better than that—I would never leave you hanging like that.”
“Yeah, I do.”
We sit quietly for a second, and I grapple with the feeling that I’ve done something wrong. Before I know what I’m doing, I ask, “Have you ever thought about leaving Silverville?”
Felix presses his lips together and looks away from me, like he’s ashamed of the answer.
“I mean—a lot of people talked about it in high school. I kind of felt like it was how I was supposed to feel. Lachlan sometimes talked about moving back to New Jersey. And Xeran actually left after, though that was because of all the stuff with his dad. I’d thought about it, but I think the truth is that I like it here. ”
“That’s fair,” I say, thinking but not bringing up the fact that he’s always belonged here, and how that probably makes him a lot more interested in staying behind than others might be. “I get that. It feels like home to you.”
He reaches out, knocking his foot against my calf, reminding me of that moment in the elevator. The place where all this seemed to start again. The moment I was trapped with Felix Rana—again.
Just like that day in the hall.
My stomach sours when I think about high school again. Every little comment. Every jab. All the laughing at me in the halls.
Phina, Valerie, and I have talked about our experiences with the guys in high school quite a lot.
It ties into everything that happened—our shared emotional turbulence contributing to what made that day so chaotic.
Xeran publicly rejected Phina after the fire.
Back then, even I could have told you that he could never accept a Winward as his mate, even if they were fated. But after the fire? It was laughable.
Valerie was seeing Lachlan in secret, though they hadn’t gone as far as Xeran and Phina. And when she told Lachlan she loved him, he left her at the ridge, then she ran through the woods, lost and alone.
My embarrassment wasn’t quite as acute. I can’t point to a single day that stings the most. But I remember the kiss, the way Felix’s hands felt on me.
And I remember the first day that next week, on Monday, when I overheard a girl in my chemistry class calling me delusional.
Fat bitch , I was used to. Pig, cow , any number of animal-related insults—those made sense. Delusional felt out there.
But as the day went on, the whispers grew louder and more insistent. People refused to move out of the way in the hallways, so I banged into lockers and cracked my knee on a heating element.
Eventually, I realized that Felix was telling everyone I had a crush on him. And that I had come onto him.
The kiss I’d been thinking about all weekend, that had been fueling a thousand daydreams and light feelings—not only had it meant nothing, but he twisted it around. So the entire school was talking about me, laughing at the thought of me coming onto him.
Laughing at the thought of the fat girl thinking she could get with a fit, handsome guy at the top of the class. A guy who played sports and was friends with the incoming supreme.
I’m sure Phina and Valerie suffered. But there was something particularly awful about the slow, creeping nature of what I went through.
So that night, when I arrived at the ridge to join them, it wasn’t on the heels of something quick and explosive but a slow build to boiling, a pressure that I couldn’t find another way to relieve.
“Yeah,” Felix says, drawing me out of my thoughts and reminding me of our conversation about him staying in Silverville. “It does.”
I’m just here for the inheritance , the voice in my head urges. And after that, it goes on to list all the reasons why the feelings stacking up inside me are silly. This is an arrangement. Felix could never like me like that. I’m not taking a mate.
I’m going back to Los Angeles, and he’s staying here.
As much fun as this has been, our lives were never going to intertwine forever. Maybe I should just be grateful that I’ve gotten as much of him as I have. I can take that back with me to Los Angeles and revisit a little bit of it each time another romantic partner leaves me wanting more.
For now, that’s going to have to be enough.